blog writing

The Reality of What It Is

/ lovizmytrio / 1 Comment

Someone is cyber-stalking me.

I wish I could brag that I’ve been getting a lot of hits on my blog, but I’m not stupid. I’ve had this thing long enough to know the reality of what it is.

The reality of what it is: a release. A pounding of pen twenty-first-century style, my mighty words fighting the demons in my heart, the everyday worries that bog us all down and yet we are afraid to admit, the essence of who I am.

The reality of what it is: a few followers, five or so hits on an average day, and enough likes to perk up my early mornings and late nights, my tired eyes that never seem too tired to read or write.

So when my numbers spike for a day or five, I know something’s up. Someone is trying to find something out about me, something undefinable. I read back over the poems and I think of those moments when they were written, and the words singe with emotion, ache with the longing I felt then, anger over mistreatment, the loss, the desire… more than anything, I look back over my words and I know just exactly what, why, or who I was writing about on that day, even if the emotive distance between then and now has faded.

The words bring me back. They remind me of why I wrote them down. Why I can read over them now and feel the rainbow of emotions that courses through every human’s veins but so few are able to wholly recognize without the God-like touch of art that graces our presence on this Earth.

Someone is cyber-stalking me. Trying to discover what I was really thinking that day on Arapahoe Road. Who those shards of glass were cut for. Why they weren’t on the Brownie List. How I could see beauty in an animal jumping over a fence, a piece of chocolate, or a monosyllabic word.

But the reality of what it is: they will never know my words as intimately as I do. And isn’t that what writing, what art, is all about?

Almost a Thousand

/ lovizmytrio / 2 Comments

A thousand posts in three years. I’m almost there. So funny; I started this blog after seeing that Julie and Julia movie. Probably a hundred other people did too. I always wanted to be a writer. Things weren’t looking good in my school district. I thought, perhaps… but now it seems ridiculous. For one thing, unlike the girl in the movie, I couldn’t think of a consistent theme. I didn’t want to write every post about my primary passions: parenting, cycling, baking, education, or travel. I didn’t want to limit myself, and so I just wrote about my day, as I always have, from the time when I was young and kept a journal. The blog became more to me than just a way to possibly make a living someday–you know, all those crazy stories you read about someone making it big in seven months, their site filled with advertisements and their schedule filling up with book tours and talk show appearances.

But I realized, quite a while back, that none of those things would be me anyway. I want to write what I want to write–not geared specifically towards a mother, a teacher, a lover. And I don’t want ads, publishers, or talk show hosts to influence that choice. That would defeat the entire purpose of this blog for me, which is therapy.

Sometimes people ask me how I have time every day to write a post. It’s quite simple, really. I make it a priority in my life, and it becomes as routine as brushing my teeth, kissing my girls goodnight, or heading to work. It is so easy to say, “I don’t have to do that.” On the other hand, it is just as easy to say, “I can do that, and I will.”

Yes, my philosophy of life can pretty much be summed up by The Little Engine that Could. Why not? Those simple children’s stories that we all love and remember really have the key to success for most any society anywhere.

So here I am, almost at the end of year three, and almost at a thousand posts. I certainly never thought, when I decided to start this blog, that I would be writing my thousandth post across the sea, in a small Spanish town along the Mediterranean, where I hear the heavily emphasized tongue of Castellano more often than my own. But dreams have a way of making their way into your life, just like a daily blog post.

All you have to do is think you can. And you will. 🙂