NPM: Day 23: Happy Blog Birthday to Me!

Today I've been blogging 13 years. When I started blogging I had already read somewhere that blogs were "over," and certainly now people say that, but I continue to find my little corner of the internet to be a place where I bloom and grow.

During this NPM, I've been posting from my open tabs on my desktop, and I've started in these three weeks to see that as a wonderful cross-pollination. When I sheepishly confessed that I had had three open tabs from Irene Latham's blog, plus one of her poems from someone else's blog, Irene commented: "Dear Ruth - this post makes me blush and fills me with gratitude and love for you, and for the internet, actually. :) So many times I marvel at this community! I'm honored and humbled to know something I've written may have been an open tab on your computer. Your words and life have been that for me as well, so many times." (You can read that post here.) Wow! What a thought! It hadn't occurred to me that tabs from my site might be open on other desktops.

And then Linda posted that a Pablo Neruda poem I'd shared had gotten her thinking in a creative direction, and Heidi reposted an Ada Limón poem I'd shared, and then I thought back to last May when Margaret organized an exchange. She matched participants up with someone who lived somewhere else in the world, and we sent each other photos, and then wrote poems about each others' photos. Heidi wrote this about mine and I wrote this about hers, and what fun! There's the Progressive Poem every year, and there are poetry swaps in the winter and the summer, and then there are encouraging comments left on posts by people who come to feel like friends even though we've never met. (I have met some of them, too!)

I have a real-life writing group, where we sit in a room together and share what we're working on, and that is life-giving and nourishing. I have my students, and I write with them all the time (not that I count on their responses for any kind of encouragement, but they teach me in other ways). I share writing with family and friends a lot, too. But there's just something about my online writing community. I've mostly talked about Poetry Friday people, but it's not just those folks; some readers tell me straight up they aren't interested in my poetry posts, but just my Haiti ones, or just my Reading Updates. I've got my Spiritual Journey First Thursday buds, my Facebook friends, my online moms' group. They're part of my online community too. (Some posts I'm not sure anybody reads, except for me, but I go back and remember what I was thinking at a certain point, and what books I was reading.)

I'm very glad I started blogging 13 years ago, and stepped it up after the earthquake when I needed a place to mourn, and then gradually became more and more active in different directions of writing. At first blogging didn't feel like real writing, but now it does, and I'm so grateful for my little adolescent blog where I can sing softly to myself, "Happy Birthday to me!" Thank you, readers! Here's to more years of sharing and cross-pollination!

Today's line for the Progressive Poem is here.