Friday, November 18, 2016

What an adventure!

Do you know that if you blog for ten years or so, then walk off and ignore not just your blog(s) but everyone else's for a couple of years, you come back to find some really interesting stuff?

For one thing, I found My Writing Spot -- or My Writing Nook, depending on where you look -- and rediscovered things I had written, or started to write, a long time ago. I clicked on various titles in my list and discovered, among other things, some haiku -- so I quickly (before I had time to think too hard about it) submitted three of them to Haiku Universe. Maybe one of these days I'll open my email and find one of my own haikus staring back at me.

And that, boys and girls, is how you jump in
with both feet.

Watch this space.










Photo: Google Images

Saturday, November 12, 2016

Psst...

I don't look like this anymore. That look is so last year. I have hair again. Not only that - I have a life again. I sing with three choirs, I'm active in my church, I'm meeting with my writing group every week. I'm trying to get my lazy body moving -- at least for a near-daily walk.

I've also developed an interest in my family history. My younger sister and I spent hours last month poring over Ancestry.com records. We found that our favourite uncle, who disappeared from our lives decades ago, has been dead for over twenty years.  That was hard -- but we also found parts of our history that were a complete surprise to us. I'm sure that anyone who was orphaned young goes through something similar when exploring his or her ancestry. Now we're going to check out our DNA -- more surprises to come, I hope. I love surprises.

So I'm coming back to life, little by little. No. Not little by little. In great leaps and bounds, followed by extended periods of exhaustion, followed by great leaps and bounds. Welcome to survivorship.

Has blogging gone out of style while I languished in Cancerland? I must have a look at the blogs I used to follow faithfully, to see whether the blogging life has gone on without me. I suspect (and hope) that it has, and that I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Last week, I went hunting through old posts on Amazing Voyages of the Turtle in search of a particular poem, one I wrote in 2009. I did find it, eventually, but I also discovered poems there that I'd completely forgotten. In a couple of cases, I had to scroll up and down to make sure that I had actually written them. They didn't even look familiar. I hardly ever write poems anymore. No, that's not right. I never write poems anymore.


It's not that my new life is devoid of creative outlets. It's just that I've let some things -- like poetry -- fall by the wayside, and it's been so long, I've come to doubt my ability to produce a poem, to write a blog... So this, the new blog, is by way of a renaissance -- at least, I hope it is. I hope that I can, in fact, go home again.