Admittedly, this is not something I ever thought I’d do. Beyond the time commitment, the vulnerability, I simply did not see the point of a blog. I have a journal, instead. A nice, black Moleskin that sits at my desk next to trinkets and findings that mean everything to me and very little to anyone else – a brass fish paperweight from grandfather’s desk, two dolphin vertebrae found on a spit at low tide, rocks shot through with granite from Portsoy, a small town set rigid against the Moray Firth. Like these little, frittering things, my opinions mean little to anyone else. My dear, dear family, friends, and husband can only take so much of my conjecturing, and even the foxhound sometimes turns tail and climbs into my (her) chair when she’s had enough of my voice. And so, of course, I write it all in the journal until my hand cramps and I feel satisfactorily empty inside. That good empty, the one where you can sleep at night without thinking of every ill in the world. Or almost.
But very rarely is the journal legible. When I die, I think I’ll have them all burned so as to save the embarrassment of having someone watch me, in quite real time, work through hard thoughts. It’s like having someone watch you pass a kidney stone. Really horrible stuff.
I also have a sort of curse. Not a really bad one or anything, not like the curse of the Kelpie on St. Vigeans (good story, look it up), but one perhaps equally as unnerving and frustrating: I convince no one when I speak. I convince not even myself. It’s always been this way, and as with so much, it’s only getting worse with age. Passing my thirtieth birthday, I regress more into my own becoming, and I find that I am not as quick on my feet when told to expound upon myself or my opinions. There is, of course, an expectation for a damn good argument, as I am someone with strong convictions and interests (for better, for worse). But I am so often silent. The world is in my head, not out there.
Photo: Jewel Green of the Moray Firth, (Lower Largo, Film).
It’s not until much later, often in the shower, that I think of a clever response and am able to fully flush out why I feel a certain way. Sometimes these arguments are more like dissertations and hover around topics like Medieval art or Scottish folklore (hence the St. Vigeans Kelpie), both of which mean very much to me but are of little consequence in the grand scheme of the turning earth. More often, I am trying to explain how I think we are on the precipice of so much: a dying Earth, a literacy crisis, an unknowing of ourselves as a species. And how to explain to someone something that has owned your thought-space for so long and has paid very little rent.
And so the blog. This little nothing.
This is to say, I expect no one to be interested in this little blip on the vast expanse of the internet. This is purely for my own enjoyment, for my own peace of mind, for my own ability to explain the many whys of my many thoughts.
Perhaps my words will be a sort of balm, a calm, despite their heaviness. So much of what I believe in boils down to the sheer fact that this world is turning too fast and it is up to us writers, us artists, to make sense of it. If anything, I hope you can enjoy the pictures, the poems, the sense that the world is so much deeper and more beautiful than ever we imagined, if only we give it our attention and grace.
This is all to say, welcome. This is a strange little part of myself and is, simultaneously, a very big part of myself. I am a writer, and I am a lover of the world. And if I do nothing great with my one and precious life, at least I’ll have said my peace.
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