{"id":130,"date":"2007-02-25T21:10:45","date_gmt":"2007-02-26T02:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=130"},"modified":"2008-01-15T17:42:06","modified_gmt":"2008-01-15T22:42:06","slug":"braiding-the-cords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=130","title":{"rendered":"Braiding the Cords"},"content":{"rendered":"

February 25, 2007
\nSunday<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>, I’d been introduced to the poem in my undergraduate days. The metaphor of a woman as a graceful silken\u00c2\u00a0shape tied to many concerns spoke to me of the way I saw myself.<\/p>\n

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”\u00c2\u00a0because all the cool wannabe writers have one,\u00c2\u00a0but didn’t do much with it.<\/p>\n

When the WordPress tangle<\/a> 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. \u00c2\u00a0Suddenly, 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<\/a>. So I started putting everything together.<\/p>\n

And yet there remain three sections (Google searches still turn up pages tagged “three journals in one!”). There’s this one, Markings<\/em>, probably the last time I’ll ever change the name and the controlling metaphor of my daily (sort of) writing, and The Silken Tent \u00e2\u20ac\u201c A History<\/a><\/em>, all the stuff from before 1999 through 2005 (still incomplete, but accessible as I continue with the transfers).<\/p>\n

And my commonplace, The Open Page<\/a><\/em>. 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<\/em>. (Why did\u00c2\u00a0it take\u00c2\u00a0me 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\u00c2\u00a0compilation of the lights that he lived by.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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