I am a gardener, a teacher, a scholar, a story-teller and a poet.
I am a scholar.
For quite some time, I tried to find a way to use a blog to think out loud. If I were asked to describe myself in two words, it would be “pathologically curious.” I am driven to ask questions, and my hope is to be able to ask and explore good questions.
With the traditional blog format, I felt trapped by its sound bite, daily journal nature. There is a trajectory to my thinking – the question emerges, I try to make sure it is a good question, I have some thoughts, and then I want to synthesize these into something that feels whole to me. And, I love words. If I wrote all I was thinking about a particular question, I would greatly exceed the appropriate length of a blog post.
Then I found the Suburbia theme, which let me post questions, without feeling trapped by the journaling format. I could use graphics to mark posts visually as to theme (usually, I am pursuing three of four different questions at the same time).
Once I felt I had come to a place where I had more than one thought to express on a particular question or theme, I could write an essay (synthesizing the relevant posts) and save it on a separate page. Without this option, it didn’t feel “safe” to expose my thought fragments through blog posts.