Hearty congratulations to Beth of The Cassandra Pages, who has been blogging for ten years as of today. I know it’s not easy to keep blogging for that long, even though I sometimes just toss up a link to a news story when I don’t have anything of interest to say (or don’t have the time to do it justice); Beth keeps putting up thoughtful posts full of art and life, and as she says in her latest post, it is “the body of artistic work accomplished in my lifetime which most closely represents me”:
For as much as I sometimes have wished to be otherwise, I am not first and foremost a novelist or a painter, a writer of non-fiction books or a photographer or printmaker. I’m a reader, and observer, and an integrator, whose chosen form is the informal essay, illustrated with my own photographs or artwork, and whose perfect medium of expression is the blog. Being a blogger became an intrinsic part of my identity: like someone who works in watercolors or oils, I see the world and my daily life through an intimacy with this medium. It used to feel a bit weird, like constant translating; now it’s so normal I don’t even think about it, even though I’ve become a lot more choosy about what to base my posts upon.
I wish her and her blog many more years!
Thanks so much! The same to you. I feel a special kinship with a few early blogger-friends like yourself who’ve just kept at it, not complaining much about social media or internet trends. Must be we’re doing it because we actually love it. (LH readers can find his remarks about my blog over there, tomorrow, with a few early links.)