Eighth of an Acre Bounty

I was trolling erm…surfing (damn this new interweb lingo) around yesterday visiting my regular-read blogs and came to Homesteading Hickory Hills and a rather surprising post. It seems the writer of this particular blog is fed up with the numerous visitors and lack of comments and had decided to stop posting. Of course I am paraphrasing, and he said it better himself (you can read it here). Aside from generally saddening me that I won’t be living his adventure vicariously any longer, it really got me thinking about this whole blogthang and the expectations/commitments that come with it.

First off, I have to admit that I am one of the people Ron wrote about in his last post. The people who visit regularly and never utter a peep in a comment and go along their merry way. Until only recently, I had never even commented on someone else’s blog. I suppose this is to some extent a privilege of the internet age – being able to peep and pry and research without ever really being seen. But the ultimate reason I never post comments is because in the majority of of what I read – these people, they know so much more than I. I gather wisdom, experience and daydream material from the blogs I read. And I often have very little useful or substantive to add because they are already doing it so much better than I (at least in my perspective). On top of that to post a comment saying “Hi” or “Good Job” or “My name is Maya” with nothing to contribute seems odd and groupie-ish and a bit too trite. I suppose I am still learning the social rules around this new form of communication (or is it communication when it is all one-sided?).

Now that I actually have a blog of my own I can relate to Ron’s desire for feedback and some acknowledgment of thoughts sent out to such a broad ocean. It is a bit of a strange feeling composing your thoughts, compiling and listing your activities, fixations and obsessions and then clicking on that publish button. Knowing that it (theoretically) is accessible to all but largely unreceived.

But the other part of me says butch-up.

Everyone who goes into the undertaking of writing on such a public platform knows that they will most likely be lost in a sea of words. There is (hopefully) always some personal motivation that doesn’t depend on others reception of our thoughts. For me blogging is a useful tool to record the silly stories and daily goings on of my little life. I have always been horrible at keeping a journal or diary and the blog functions as something I can revisit when I want to know exactly how I prepared a dish, or when I planted the beets. It allows me to write without the heavy weight of sitting down to WRITE like the self-obsessed and unhappy teenager I once was. I have a good life, and good people (and critters) in my life. Being able to record the minutiae of the daily goings on around here is enough. If someone happens to come across my mind’s wanderings here and finds something they like, finds something they want to cook or grow, thinks about adopting a critter of their very own or even more generally starts to think about local food and our connection to what we eat – then that is a bonus. If that person leaves a note saying something resonated with them, or offering an idea – I would be absolutely thrilled (and I would probably blush, right here at my desk). But even if they don’t, this is enough.

So my resolution is to try and comment a bit more, just to let others out there know that their words and lives and stories are finding a home in my head – and that I appreciate the sharing of knowledge, anecdotes and lunacy.