I kinda like this picture. I’m not sure why and it’s probably not one that should be blog-worthy, but then again, perhaps that’s the very thing that makes it blog-worthy: I like it.

And since when did “blog-worthy” become a thing?

I’ve been sputtering around here, wondering if blogging is still something that ought to have a space in my life. I keep finding my way back, which makes me think I should stop wondering about it and just embrace it.

If I’m going to embrace it, then I’m going to embrace all that I love and believe about blogging. The way blogs are today aren’t the way they started. I didn’t start blogging for stats. I didn’t worry about whether my title had enough key words to show up at the top of a search page. I didn’t care if I could get retweets and shares. Comment numbers didn’t make a post respectable.

Blogging wasn’t systematic. It wasn’t a sales funnel. It wasn’t about giving “free content” in order to get sales.

Blogging was about the writing. I started blogging to develop my craft as a writer. If I wanted to be a writer, then I needed to write. That’s one reason I started blogging.

Blogging was about sharing. It was connecting to others and sharing ideas, being touched by stories, and recognizing you weren’t alone in the world.

Blogging was raw and real. It wasn’t refined. It was an adventure and you could discover it as you wrote. Blogging was about finding others who were sharing their stories and you could follow along on their adventures, too.

Blogging was ordinary. It was red shoes and morning tea, lost keys and bike rides. Somehow, in a way that I can only attribute to the magic of stories, all of the ordinary things became extraordinary. They became the things that mattered most.

I started blogging when Sam was crawling…maybe before that. Now he’s a teenager who makes wild faces in pictures. He makes me laugh and, more importantly, he makes me believe that Story saves.

Maybe the magic is not blogging, maybe the magic is Story. Between the time I started blogging and the Mojave Desert wild-faced picture was taken, our family grew and grew and grew. We adopted three older children from foster care. Our lives turned upside down and parenting became hard. There have been many years of hard.

In those years, online lives changed.
Blogs changed.
The places people collect stories changed.

I changed, but my roots had grown deep. Perhaps that’s why I keep returning to blogging, a form that some would call antiquated.

My roots are here.