February 25, 2007
Sunday

When I went online with this journal-that-wasn’t-a-blog-but-now-it-is-because-that’s-the-term-that-has-caught-on, I named it “The Silken Tent” after Robert Frost’s elegant one-sentence sonnet. As I explained in an early post, I’d been introduced to the poem in my undergraduate days. The metaphor of a woman as a graceful silken shape tied to many concerns spoke to me of the way I saw myself.

I initially tried to extend the metaphor to the structure of my site. I had “cords,” different sections for different concerns. I kept pieces about my weight loss efforts and those about spiritual development separate from the “general” section. From time to time I would drop and then take up again one of those sections. I started a “book blog” because all the cool wannabe writers have one, but didn’t do much with it.

When the WordPress tangle happened last week, I began the reconstruction of all the posts and all the links. And something cracked open in me. And maybe that’s the wrong metaphor. Maybe something came together.  Suddenly, I didn’t want all those disparate cords, I didn’t want to split myself. I wanted the “wholeness and redemption” I’d written about in 1999 and alluded to in my “journalversary” piece. So I started putting everything together.

And yet there remain three sections (Google searches still turn up pages tagged “three journals in one!”). There’s this one, Markings, probably the last time I’ll ever change the name and the controlling metaphor of my daily (sort of) writing, and The Silken Tent – A History, all the stuff from before 1999 through 2005 (still incomplete, but accessible as I continue with the transfers).

And my commonplace, The Open Page. I did some work over there today, putting up the passages I’ve copied out over the last two months while I read Stacey D’Erasmo’s A Seahorse Year. (Why did it take me two months to read a 300 page book?) I almost took that section off, but I didn’t, because it honors someone I still care for, someone who left neither son nor lover to mourn, only his commonplaces, the compilation of the lights that he lived by.

The storm I wrote about yesterday seems to have passed us by with only a light dusting of snow that has made the vista I’ll see tomorrow when I set to my reading and writing exceedingly beautiful. The upheaval in my broken blog designs seemed resolved, at least for now, and I can get back to creative work here instead of technical troubleshooting that causes more problems than it solves.

Thanks for reading. And do click on over to The Open Page, not so much to see what tidbits of reading grab my attention, but to read about Leslie Dean Taylor, another of the many who have believed in me and encouraged me.