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Like Stale Yesterdays | 2320 - thejaymo...

"It is a choice to carry stale yesterdays into tomorrow."

Mandy celebrates 15 years of blogging with an eloquent post. She describes what I feel about my blog in such beautiful terms:

the experience of having this place is so ingrained I can no longer find the edges of it

After such a long time a blog becomes part of you, has become part of me. It is part of my very being and identity. It sounds a bit odd yet so much my life and ideas and dreams are held within these posts. The look may change, the colours, even the topics and fascinations it covers, but that reflects my own propensity to change over time and as I age, different clothes and hair styles, different interests and responsibilities.

Whether this practice survives another fifteen years or not, I am here and part of me can never leave, not completely.

Truth!

I've taken my fair share of breaks but, as I always say, blogging is the one thing I'm always drawn back to. I can't not and she sums this up wonderfully as follows:

But if there's anything I know about practicing it's that it isn't about rules or consistency or scarcity or god forbid optimizing: it's about coming back. A practice is built on the movement of return.

Her talk of distraction and drought mirrors my experience. There are times when I've not been able to write a single word. Other times I've not even wanted to write a single word, when I've wanted to get as far away as I possibly could. When I've wanted to hide away, be just an anonymous face in the crowd or, better still, avoid the crowd altogether.

But then something shifts within me and I have to come back. That could take days, months or even years but the shift has (so far) always happened. I hope it keeps happening. Things have realigned and the urge returned to post, to share, to send thoughts and ideas out into the world. I don't pretend to know why.

Mandy says that new doesn't replace old, it layers like sediment – how evocative. This sediment can be extremely fertile, like literary alluvium, creating an ideal environment for new seeds to take root. Not every seed becomes established, some wither or are washed away. Some seeds grow into the equivalent of weeds, invasive, strangling, but others make everything worth it when they bloom.

Maybe that's what brings me back, the promise of momentary beauty amongst the weeds.