I promised some occasional looks into the archive of this blog, partly for my own purposes, and partly to bookmark what I’ve been thinking about and writing about in the last almost-decade of this blog. I decided to do this entry today, though, because it’s likely that in the next 24 hours I’ll reach 60,000 all-time views, and in the next 36 hours I’ll cross the 18,000 views in a single year milestone (might make 20,000 views this year). On the one hand it’s just numbers, and on the other hand, it’s an indicator that I’ve been in this “writing on the Internet” game for a long time. A long time. And so here’s a sample of what I’ve been doing on October 9th through some of the last 10 years.
- Today, of course, the Moon was in the tenth Mansion (seeattached image of the Mane of Leo, and various recurring efforts to recreate this particular sign’s image).
The Mane of Leo - Back in 2009, I was discovering what a hand-built Labyrinth could teach students about oral tradition.
- In 2008, I was musing about the potential power of the Fourth Screen.
- In 2006, I was writing poetry about the changes I saw in the natural world in October. It was not only Nones, but also a Full Moon. There was also a debate for the Senate race here in Connecticut that year, and I heard a candidate push for Ned Lamont as senator.
- In 2004, there’s a rare Summative Post that shows I was deep in the poetry scene, worrying about a mock Bush-Kerry debate at my school, and running a roleplaying game.
There’s a bunch of stuff to take away from this. In 2006, before I ever became a druid, I was much more deeply enmeshed in the natural world than I am now. In 2004, I was more of a political creature than I am now (although I still care deeply about what goes on in Washington DC, I’m less enamored of the political scene than I was when I could still remember working there). In 2008, I was entranced by the educational possibilities of technology; four years on from that, I’m using a medieval list of thematic pictures to teach memory and visualization arts to sixth and seventh graders. In 2009, I was already thinking about the potential of physical structures to encode memory, as opposed to digital structures to reorganize data. And today, I’m more likely to call myself an artist than I ever was at any time in the last ten years.
There’s a progression here. There’s a person undergoing transformation here, however slowly, however unusually.
I’m less enamored of politics or technology than I used to be. I’m more inclined to use drawings than words to persuade; more inclined to use both words and drawings to explain or uncover truth. I’m more interested in nature than I used to be, but often find I have less time for it than I want. I have fewer opportunities to be a poet, but I care more about quality words than I used to.
I’m older. That much is certain.
