The first quiet morning in so long.  The kind of morning when I love to write.  I sit in bed and think and read and pray until an idea blows up inside me like a balloon.  I realize I can either carry around the balloon and let it deflate with neglect and business.  Or I can get myself to a keyboard or pen and paper and let go of the passageway that holds everything in.  My idea dances randomly about in such a gratifying way until it lies spent and happy.

This morning's topic?  I feel the need to explain, to no one in particular, why I've not been posting lately.  Not that anyone has asked.  Not that anyone has really noticed.  Maybe I need to hear (or write) my own explanation so that I understand.

{The children have descended from their beds into the nearby kitchen and have begun their breakfast battle of the wills with their dad.  I'm not sure how much longer the writing window will stay open.}

I write every day.  But I write in different places for different reasons.  This blog is my place to take myself seriously.  It is the place where I hope.  Where I pretend what it would feel like to be an actual writer.  This is where I put the stuff that I suspect someone might actually want to read.  I have no real expectations, which is intentional in order to avoid disappointment.  But, when I get a comment, it is such a rush!

The container where most of my writing is dumped is the trusty old journal.  I counted the other day.  Twenty-six volumes, ranging back to age 11. (This does not account for the countless scraps of paper tucked here and there because there was not an actual journal close by.)  Journaling is my habit, addiction, obsession, compulsion.  It is the easiest, cheapest and most enjoyable high I allow myself.  As much as I love journaling, I feel cramped by the boundaries of the genre.  It is mainly therapy.  I am ready to write more outward things.

I'm so superfluous!  I said all that as way more background than necessary to say this:

Due to the challenges that the current season has brought to me, I've retreated back into the therapy space of my journals.  The thoughts flowing out of me like blood are personal, vulnerable, sad, angry and introspective.  That stuff does not belong here.  Not because I want privacy, in fact I'd love to shout much of it from the rooftops.  I guess in a way I'm protecting the reader rather than myself.   You might feel like you walked in on something private, and  grimace and shut the door quickly.  No writer wants to make a reader feel awkward like that.  This blog is for opening doors, not shutting them.

It has taken great strength for me to protect this site from my blathering memoirs and conversations with myself.  Occasionally, I've let some editorial slip in.  I love to editorialize and I think I'm decent at the craft, but I've learned that you have to seem significant first in the eye of a reader before they care what you think about any cultural phenomenon or life experience.

Oh, there was another rabbit trail and the window is quickly closing.

When you hear my voice again here in this place, I anticipate it will be because I'm taking myself seriously again.  Because I am creating more for others than for myself.  Because I have hope that someone will be broadened,  resonate, enjoy, comment, correct, respond or enjoy.