Why I Blog – and Where its Going

OK, I am just now entering my one year anniversary of blogging. That’s got me to taking a look at why I am blogging and what I’m blogging… and where this is going.
This assessment is currently underway but a couple of quotes have come into my life that have something to do with these questions. The first is by James Baldwin. I discovered it at Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Social Policy.

“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world…The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way…people look at reality, then you can change it.”

Well that is certainly in accord with where I set out to go on this blog, quality writing with provocative and inspirational thinking. Take this excerpt from an early post, Wild Resiliency Assertions:

Our ability to identify, reflect and dialog on our own foundational assumptions is critical as we discover our path into the future. These are the world-view ‘beliefs,’ memes, mental models and attitudes that inform and direct, at the level of percept-ability, the world we live within. They are inclusive of and dictate: our national terrorism policies, whether we attend a church, temple, mosque or forest glade for worship, the structure of our educational and health care systems, and the capacity to shapeshift the ‘negative’ events of our days and lives into beauty. Our present struggle to hold in mutual respect the diversity of our foundational assumptions is reflective of the fragmentation, fragility and descent into decay our social systems are now in.

Such a decay is inevitable and necessary in order that we may dream a new world into being. The only question becomes, “What kind of world am I dreaming into being?”…

I’ll humbly not address the literary value of the writing but the theme and question are certainly as relevant now as when Rome was burning. Speaking of which, fiery times like our are good times for having friends and being deeply networked. Such diversity and depth of connectivity are one vital strategy for thriving through turbulent times, for increasing our response-ability, for nurturing our wild resilience.
And my childhood pattern of being something of a lone wolf no longer serves the thrive-ability of the adult body my spirit now inhabits. Like Barbara Max Hubbard says, in this quote I discovered at the Evolutionary Nexus site:

“We are now entering a cycle of conscious collective-ism—wherein human collective life will be/is individuals living their spiritual practices entering collective manifestations of life force as they are consciously aware of spirit moving them. Collective life in this case, arises from individuals living in harmonic resonance with ALL that is.

Now that’s not particularly literary reading either but the idea of “conscious collective-ism” pretty well says it all. The Spiral Dynamics model of human evolution envisions humanity moving through repetitive and alternating developmental phases of ‘us’ and ‘me’ worldviews. Each new iteration arises out of the failures of the current one, and importantly too, those failures arise out of the successes of the current one. Take the way the proliferation of the automobile in an era of ‘cheap energy’ altered human society as it was, promoted the era of individualism, and now challenges us to discover and rediscover alternative technologies and revisioned worldviews: mental models of identity represented by words like us and we and community and conscious collective-ism
I’ve heard it said that the communities of the future will be those organized primarily through alliances of consciousness, rather than by social or economic or racial or ethnic or sexual status. Seems like we’re entering that future pretty fast from where I’m spinning. So I guess I’m blogging in order to support the emergence and coalescence of a particular community of consciousness.
This is the community of individuals that aspire to live, as Ms Hubbard says, “in harmonic resonance with ALL that is.” I’m discovering that we are a larger tribe than I and we have perhaps suspected.

Meanwhile, I do have to ask myself if blogging is the best use of my life force within this tribe, for the world I would dream into being. The occasional comment, such as this one in response to the Dimensions of Resilience post, “This is brilliant. Thanks for the inspiration,” help me ‘believe in the writing. And I admit my ego inflated to the comment, “Gosh you can write,” at the post Understanding the Power of Worldviews.
But as a writer, and an aspiring author, I now know that if I am to continue writing, unlike Baldwin, I can no long write to “change the world.” No. I write to change my self, or at the least, to better know who this self is. Whatever power any of us possess for changing the world… is rooted in our own powers for self-transformation.
Future directions sensed — If I am to keep blogging:

• Create and maintain an index of the posts, even if for my own referencing. I’m not achieving maximum benefit and reward for the reflection and time… spent in the creative pursuit of this community building. And stuff too easily becomes lost in the nether-lands of the Archives
• Read other’s blogs more… and leave more comments. My narcissism loves having readers and I appreciate receiving thoughtful comments; and if Relationships are the Language of Life, as I assert, reciprocity is the chorus in its song line.
• Be focused in my online reading… and allow space for delightful synchronistic discovery.
• Utilize the forum to promote the blog and events and ideas and products… of others.
• Decide whether I continue with the almost unconscious flow of thematic writing… or if I might choose to become more deliberate in the focus of writing… i.e. ought I to use it to help structure manifest ‘the book:’ Wild Resiliency!