My head is full of cold. The weather is singularly uncooperative – raining, sleeting and snowing by turns. Nevertheless, I will follow through with my new year’s resolution to restart and rethink my blog. My initial idea for this blog was to discuss the way that technology and tradition intersect in modern libraries, whether in good or bad ways. I don’t plan to jettison the theme completely, but it occurred to me that my thoughts have not been primarily on that topic. Rather, they have been focused on my own attitude toward both my professional and my personal life.
I have lately felt as though I’ve failed to push myself to discover who I really am and want to be. Lest this sound to “airy-fairy,” I mean to explore how I wish to live my life and pursue my career more fully. What can I bring to the life around me of myself, and how can I grow and learn as an individual and as part of a community? I want to explore these questions more fully.
Also, this blog will also become a forum for my ongoing attempts to “come to terms” with living as a stranger in a strange land. I’ve always felt out of place, even in my native Tennessee, but the feeling is sometimes more acute here in the Inland Northwest. It’s not that I don’t like it, but I don’t always feel like I do.
I also want to record my attempts to grow more familiar with the rhythms of the year, how the seasons come and go, how forgotten histories sometimes become exposed through the wearing of dust storms and rivers. I want to journal my successes and failures as I plant and grow my garden, as I become more skilled as a householder, as I learn (or attempt to learn) more about what it really means to be human in what seems to me to be an increasingly “in-human” world.
I fear that none of this is clear, but it is how I see it at the moment. Hopefully, it will become clearer to me and to anyone reading this as time marches on this year.
Notes of interest for January 4th
According to Chamber’s Book of Days, January 4th, 1785 was the birthday of Jacob Grimm of Brothers Grimm fame, noting that Jacob saw his collection of folklore and myth as part of a larger project to more fully love Germany and its heritage. His works were often in collaboration with his brother William, largely because of a “brotherly community of goods,” including money and books.
Also on January 4th, 1641-2 was a pivotal event leading to the English Civil War – Charles I’s attempted arrest of the five members of the House of Commons who most defied him. The five escaped, and Charles found himself humiliated and unable to bring Parliament to heel. Chambers declares: “Charles raised the issue, the Commons accepted it, and so began our Great Civil War.”
