>

bon anniversaire!

On Tuesday last week my little blog became one year old. I was too busy to notice.

Like many of you who also blog, I have wondered at times why I do this and if I want to keep going. For now I do. Sometimes I worry about being too personal, or that my interests are too far afield of other’s. Sometimes I feel a sense of obligation to blog, especially when it’s been a few days since my last post. I don’t know where this obligation comes from.

If you have kept up with PilgrimAkimbo you know that it is primarily a personal blog that has, more or less, a focus on cinema and the arts. This was intentional for two reasons: 1) I didn’t want to write a personal blog that became a kind of diary of my life. Others do those kinds of blogs very well, but I just didn’t want to got there. So, PilgrimAkimbo is personal but with some limited constrictions. 2) I have had a long standing love of cinema and the arts, but in the past few years life has conspired to keep me from them more than I like. This blog is a way for me to reconnect to something I love, however small that reconnection might be for the time being.

One of the greatest joys of writing a blog is the people one meets. This has become the big payoffs of having a blog and visiting other blogs. Blogging is something new; it’s like letter writing, or journaling, it’s like sharing pictures or recipes, it’s a kind of desktop publishing, it also something like a personal barometer. But it is new and is changing the landscape. I find this exciting.

Which brings me to a thought: If you are a blogger like me, then you find comments on your posts like little nuggets of gold. I get an email notification for each new comment, and I tend to drop everything so I can read the comment. I also try to respond to every comment. I am guilty of lurking, that is, frequenting blogs and not commenting. That is a common practice. Often we are too busy to comment, or we just don’t feel like or don’t have anything to say. But I want to comment more, and I want others to comment on my blog more.

The essence of my thought is this: there is something MORE going on here than just “blogging.” There might be a kind of distance between us created by the medium, but there is also a connecting, a communing that is going on. The technology involved is merely a tool, like pen and paper, like a car, like a kitchen, that we can use as we create lasting and meaningful bonds between us. The meeting of minds is one of the great gifts we discover in life. Know this, your comments on PilgrimAkimbo are welcome.

Here’s to another year of PilgrimAkimbo!