[A goodbye to Beautiful rubbish, hello to new blog attempt, Take Two. I published my new website on Friday, only to have to recreate it in Wordpress. So sorry for the confusion, friends. It's with readiness and sadness I leave you with my last BR post. Thank you for joining me for different legs of this journey. I hope to see you as I continue new paths.]
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In the last few months, I found myself in a space where I no longer wanted to write. Not for "a season," or a break; I didn't want to write at all. I considered walking away from blogging and book writing to pursue forms of art that got me out of my head. But I gradually came to see that my aversion to writing was not so much to writing as a whole, but to the toll writing the chronic-pain-in-process stories had begun taking on my mental and emotional health.
I'd grown weary of vulnerability. Vulnerability of the depth and extent I'd grown into as a writer and storyteller. Since starting Beautiful Rubbish in 2010, I'd told numerous stories of grief in different forms. Death of a loved one. Injury. Depression. Relational heartache. Environmental and climate changes. Spiritual trauma. A complete shift of faith and beliefs. I told these stories within a search for beauty in the messiness of life; it felt beautiful for awhile. But within those stories, I'd reached a place where there was more I felt I needed to keep quiet than I felt free to voice. Writing eventually became another area of my life that silenced my voice, rather than unleashed it.
I finally admitted to myself that I've lived in crisis for the past four years. That I'm bone tired, soul tired, of writing a story that I live daily as unresolved, told in metaphors because it's not ready to be shared. The problem was, I knew now what depths and extent of courageous vulnerability I was capable of going to in my writing. Anything less than that felt like playing it safe.
Thankfully, I remembered that on this journey of learning to love myself, really truly love myself as I would another person, there had to be another way of understanding my reaction to writing. If I only listened, looked a little deeper, with no judgment. I ended up rewriting my personal definition of "playing it safe" to mean extending myself compassion. Self care. Kindness. I didn't need to stop writing: I needed to tell the stories that fed my soul and gave my voice an outlet.
And I knew that those stories were my observations, encounters and relationships with the natural world. With my wild neighbors, my wild family. I needed writing to be a place where I could focus my passion for conservation and hopefully meet like-minded souls along the way. I needed a new home for my stories.
Enter, my new blog.
Old readers will find a few familiar remnants of Beautiful rubbish here. These reflect the parts of me that are static: A deep appreciation of the natural world. A love of lyrical writing. Drawing metaphors from the world around me. Diving deep into the stuff of life. And just as I have changed drastically from the person who began blogging in 2010, much of what is expressed here in this new space is dynamic, like me. I'm mostly fluid, still transforming. And this is my fresh canvas.
New readers will see less of my personal life and more of my observations and interpretations of the world around me. I'm not completely shying away from vulnerable topics; not hardly. You'll likely find them woven in more gently against the background of nature. I've learned that who I am and what I'm about is best understood in this context.
Welcome to My wild family, where the human and nonhuman worlds collide, intersect, and inform each other in foreign languages that must be studied and learned over a lifetime. I hope you'll come back to visit, make yourself at home, engage as you feel so inclined.
Care to join me there? (click here for new site)
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