rethinking the blog

No, you’ve not accidently logged onto www.worldscutestcats.com or whatever. Still me. Still here.

This is Charley (on the left) and Lily, our two cats. Karen took this shot a month or so ago. Cute, aren’t they? The cool thing is that this isn’t posed. Rather, it’s very representative of what they are like normally. You’ll find them curled up together somewhere at almost any time of the day, just enjoying life.

Lately I’ve been rethinking the whole blog idea. Mostly since Karen has started a blog of her own, called createworklive.com. In her own words, it’s “a blog about how artists can survive and thrive in the creative economy.” It’s a cool place to visit. Karen writes well and she is very enthusiastic about her blog.

So I’m thinking, shouldn’t my blog be about something, rather than just a place that has my name on it? There are certainly all sorts of things to write about, even in a narrow field such as guitar playing and teaching.

The problem lies in my own perception. Personally, I find the Internet both a fascinating and frustrating place. There is information to be had, people to meet, a world of discovery available at the click of a maus. But so much of the information isn’t really meant as information but rather as self-glorification. Or a seeking of self-esteem and self-worth. “Conversations” on the Internet, usually in various forums or chatrooms, seem to be less conversations with actual “listening” and give-and-take going on and more orations of self-revelation.

Of course, this is all a grand overstatement, which certainly doesn’t apply to everything. But it is how I feel. So where do I go with that?

And that’s where Charley and Lily come in. If you know their story already, my apologies for boring you with it again. We got these two cats from Animal D.R.E.A.M.S, a local organization that works with feral cats in Berkshire County. Long story short: Both Charley and Lily were rescued from the wild, treated and then found a home with us. Charley, owing to his behaviour, is believed to have been an abandoned pet while Lily was born feral. They caught her when she was about three months old and that is kind of the “borderline” time for cats born in the wild. It’s hard for cats to adapt to living with people after a certain age.

Fortunately, Lily met up with Charley at one of the shelters and they immediately bonded together. So even though she is still rather feral in nature (skittish to the extreme around people), she loves being with Charley. So we took them both. And I can’t thank Yvonne Borsody, the founder of Animal D.R.E.A.M.S. for bringing these cats into our lives.   

Mostly because cats are great because they remind us that most of life is not about us, but about enjoying life. Being centered like that is important and something that finally came to me after close to forty years of not being able to figure it out. 

And maybe that’s how I should treat the blog, too. There are all sorts of wonderful and interesting things going on in this wide, wild world. As Bill Waterson said in his very last panel of Calvin and Hobbes, “Let’s go exploring…”

Peace