I’m in a strange place with this blog, and all the other forums where talking is required.
Everyday I stare at this blog banner and think to myself, “Something healing this way came.” Whatever I started here feels finished to me, so I wonder what to write, what more can possibly be said.

I’ve had this situation with a blog before. Some of you remember way back in 2003-2005 when I had a totally different blog, when I wrote about my kids and faith and spirituality and even (gasp!) church. I wrote that blog until all those topics started to make me slightly crazy, so I quit and not only stopped blogging but also took all my archives down. It was Google suicide, but I didn’t care. I knew I wanted to be a part of a very different conversation and it felt good to make a clean break.

I spent the next year being a housewife, trying for the tenth time to save my marriage, trying to be domestic, trying to do ordinary things. I have to say all of those things made me very happy even though I was hardly successful at any of them. I spent that year with a little spiral notebook and a box of watercolor paints and I painted and painted until my soul started to heal a little, even if everything else was mostly the same.

At the end of the year, I went to Blogher, thanks to my sister, who was launching a business and thought it would do both of us some good to be there. I spent the entire time chatting with people who I did not know would eventually become soulsisters and dear friends. I had no idea at the time how those friendships would shape and change my life.

By fall, with my family settled in a new place and my little urban family well on its way, I decided I was ready to be a part of a new conversation–about art and creativity–and this blog was born. This blog carried me through all kinds of twists and turns. I learned how to take risks. I faced rejection. I asked for help. I found a new way to be a part of a community. I got my heart cracked open in a really serious way and had more than one major dream come true.

Now, one year later after being in Rwanda, I’m aware that my whole life is very different than when I first started. My relationships have totally shifted and changed. My focus has moved from art to activism. My desire is to be quiet and have things unfold more than shake and move to make things happen. I’m much more serious now about what’s important to me, and I’m more focused on using my energy to see real world changes unfold on a global scale. I’m not as uptight or as easygoing as I used to be and in many other ways I am much more tender and tough.

All this puts this blog in a strange place. How do you blog when you mostly want to be quiet? What do you say when you mostly want to listen? How do you share when your stories get stranger and stranger by the second? How do you explain how thankful you are that this blog and this community brought you to this spot in the first place? How do you say how much you wish you could keep giving because you’ve been given so much?

I don’t have the answers to any of that, and I’m not about to take all my archives down and disappear again, but I am aware that a change is coming. I wish I knew how to thank you for being in this with me for so long. I wish it were the kind of change that could be negotiated in person, but that’s the problem with blogs. The screen will have to do.