Writing is like, so totally zen.

I've decided to start blogging daily. Not every day will bring mammoth amounts of words or depth -- some days I may only post a picture -- but I've come to realize that much, much too much of my life is slipping through my fingers because of my mental carelessness. In failing to record my life, I'm essentially discarding parts of it. And it's not only the forgetting of events that I'm concerned about, but the forgetting of thoughts and growth and feelings.

For some reason, when I'm not writing (be it any sort of writing: journaling, blogging, fiction, poetry, etc) my life makes no sense to me. Everything gets all jumbled and disorganized, and I have trouble pinpointing what I'm learning, who I've become, or what is Truth. My mind gets lethargic when I don't write. My vocabulary dwindles. I get twitchy.

Blogging is a discipline that keeps me writing, and that is my main motivation for doing it. That's right, "to keep everyone informed of my life" is no longer the motivation or the purpose statement of this blog. In fact, I don't really like to keep people informed. My life is my own. I very often feel invaded when I blog and would sometimes rather pretend that nobody anywhere reads what I write.

Other times I feel disgruntled when no one comments and I sulk because I don't have many followers.

Ah, self-contradiction.

So yes, I'm going to blog daily, even if it's just a sentence or two. I may switch platforms from Blogger to Wordpress at some point in the future, but I'll let you all know of the change in url address if that happens. Soon (tomorrow?) I'll share some pictures and stories from my cousin Stacey's visit last week.

For today, here are a couple of pictures from the Kauai County Fair this weekend. I intended to take lots of pictures, but I left my Nikon in the car since it was raining when we got there. I did snap a couple pics with my iPhone in the agriculture tent of the Bonsai trees and orchids (...and a baby on a swing.)

I've put "grow a Bonsai tree" on my bucket list. It may seem like a strange or mundane goal, but there is something mystical and hypnotic about them. This picture is of a Bonsai tree wrapped around some sort of stone that looks like black lava rock. The photo hardly does the display justice (couldn't get a good angle; some green-thumb old ladies were obstructing my view by ooo-ing and ahhh-ing over it), but it looked like a landscape from Middle Earth or some fantasy tale. I see all sorts of owls and squirrels and hobbits and woodland creatures scampering through the crevices of rock and tree. I would love to have something like this in my living room someday. Something about it is so zen.

I like zen lately. I need zen lately.
Perhaps I'll purchase a zen garden...