Pondering One's Calling

Some of you remember that I renounced the notion of calling entirely a while back. I decided that popular culture had reached a saturation point and it was time to shrug off the fantasy of *A* gleaming *ready-made and personalized* DESTINY.

But the reality is that this blog has continued to ponder its own shape. the shape of my life. the shape of my communities life.

Figuring out a sense of vocation is one way of dealing with the questions:

What does it MEAN that I'm doing this? Where is the MEANING that stitches together my work and play and friends and family and hopes and dreams and past and self?

And these questions Press us mostly:

- when we have extra time to think about them
- dislike the thing that we are doing
- and the thing we dislike is not demanding our whole attention
- or when that thing has exhausted us so thorougly that we ignore it and try to re-examine

what in the world got us to here anyway? is this road leading somewhere?

So as I come near the end of this blog, I'm thinking about: thinking about calling.

And I realize that such questions emerge either from:

Great Luxury (which has often been the case for me)

or

Great Disatisfaction (which, unfortunately has sometimes also been the case for me)

so what?

I guess I'm thinking that I need to be keenly aware whenever I'm suddenly caught in the whirl of --

why am I here? where am I going? how can I disembark this merrygoround? --

I should either:

1. ) Figure out whence comes the luxury that affords me the time and energy to consider (and then devote some of my *plan-for-the-future* to honoring those who gave me these resource...)

or

2.) Try to re-understand my dissatisfaction(s) as a kind of wealth instead of a kind of poverty, and think about how *that* changes the shape of things...

The End of this World

...is just around the corner.

I've decided to shut down the back burner. I've loved the experience. And occasionally not loved it.

But I've recently been keenly aware that my original intent with this blog --

to simmer back burner ideas to fruition....

(particularly, back in those days I was thinking of a microcinema)

-- has given way entirely to (best case) keeping in touch with long distance (by geography or time) family and friends and (worst case) to providing a constant "flow" of content to a nebulous audience of hits, loads, servers, operating systems and geographic regions...

It's an odd sociological experience to have an expression of yourself floating in cyberspace available to friends, family, strangers & acquaintances. If you like to manage face (and I, unfortunately do), you begin to feel panicked whenever your cyborg self has been frozen in some maniacal grin or snide critique for more than a day.

There was a month where I went to my friend Brian's blog every day and he said, "things are getting better."

and part of me knew that he just wasn't blogging anything new, but another part thought: Geez! How good can it get for him!

But of course, its better to be frozen in a happy, bounding upward motion than in the swirl of downward feelings that so many bloggers end up disappearing into

And this pressure of expressing something which is more NOW and therefore more AUTHENTIC is sometimes exhausting. But, more than anything, I'm keenly aware of the fact that I'm not doing enough of the writing projects that I *really* want to, and sometimes I'm hiding from that fact by writing toward the more immediately gratifying blogosphere....

So I'll miss this avenue of communicating with you -- but I hope we'll find other ways to keep in touch?

Shut down date is scheduled for the 17th. That's two years after the earliest archived entry. Which seems like a nice whole and complete way to bring closure. Thanks for reading. Its been a great boon to see the hits of friends and family and I know that eyes that return to any place on the web are either a compliment or a sign of great friendship. Whichever yours are, I thank you.

peace~