An Attempt at Blogging...Here Goes!

I’m not good at blogging. I’m good at story telling, but that implies you’re around my dining table, or perhaps on my porch. We’re rambling and ranting, telling of the old days, the glory days, or the days yet to come. Blogging though, well it feel like talking to a wall. They say there is value in it though, especially if you’re as good of a story teller as I am. Especially if you have the wide range of experience and friends and contacts and lives lived, like I have. Perhaps that sounds cocky, but it isn’t, it is the result of a life well lived. My greatest strength in life is a fearless spirit that always wants to roam. I crave experience, connection, and conversation. I do not crave the monotony of the day to day, the laborious life does not appeal to me in a way I wish to share. I believe in a strenuous life, but one that is lived humbly in one’s own garden with one’s nose to the ground. I believe in tending one’s garden first, for how else will you have the fruit of the spirit necessary in which to live.

I have never been good at blogging. It is hard for me to feel like I have stories worth sharing here, it is hard for me to believe that anyone will read what I have to say, but I am told I should write anyways. So I will.

For a very long time I have had extreme burnout, crippling burnout. The year before the tornado I saw myself finally come out of that, only to go right back in as I navigated reconstruction, repairs, and the stress that came with that. I wasn’t feeling very inspired. In reality I was just depressed, and it felt like a slingshot after the amazing year I had had before. Loneliness crept in on top of it all, and in the two years since I truly felt like I had nothing worth saying. However I kept living, I kept exploring, and I kept documenting the journey. I knew eventually I would return to life and to my passions of story telling. Perhaps I might even develop a new found love of blogging.

I did write and photograph a book during those two years. A task that I shouldn’t put lightly. It was a great undertaking. A task that forced me to muster all my confidence both for my words and my ability to use a camera. I had pages to fill. The result was a beautiful book, one that I am very proud of, and one I hope you own. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I simply didn’t have the confidence in myself to create it without great delay.

Now life has settled down. Construction is almost complete. Most days I do feel like getting out of bed, even if today was a day I did not feel like it, even though I did. I sit here at my window desk, a country Carrie Bradshaw if you will. I ponder out the window, the leaves continue to fall down. Life has returned to the farm. Bon Ive plays over the speakers in the other rooms. A candle burns, a candle I poured myself, after learning how to make candles a few moons ago. I sit here pondering the future, pondering the past, and wondering what will I have to say…