Just for the Joy

I suppose it's no coincidence that I started blogging again just a few a days before my blogging anniversary, which is today.  However, it has more to do with the season than the day.  It's fall* again, and the magic is at work that hits me every year at this time.  A bursting of creativity that I sense all around me.  A nostalgia for a home deep within me, and in that nostalgia a return to it.

I got away from blogging for many reasons, and most of them are good, but the one that irks me, and that, in truth, is a primary one, is Facebook.  It became so much easier to just scroll endlessly, skimming and posting snippets, than making the effort to read and comment on actual blog posts, let alone write one myself.

There was sort of this exodus to Facebook, way back in whatever year that was.  Many of the people who were blogging regularly during the years when I was migrated over there at the same time as me and more or less abandoned their blogs.

It was fun for a while, I guess, but I'm just so over Facebook these days.  I still use it, but in a more moderate way than I have at times.  And I'm hungry to blog again, to be posting regularly, to be reading other people's posts, getting back into conversations that are far more meaty and satisfying than those that generally happen on Facebook.

For me, Facebook is kind of like a town square where everyone's talking at once, selling something, whereas blogging is like an intimate group of friends meeting in a quiet cafe.

That whole thing of selling is another issue that drove me away from blogging.  When I first started this blog, it was purely because I wanted to be writing and connecting with people through my writing.  As time went on, I ventured into other blogs that were more about "generating traffic" to a website, whether it was my own or a client's.  I started thinking about stuff like keywords and SEO.  Blech.  It took all the joy out of blogging and put it into an entirely different paradigm.

What I love and have missed about the blogs I used to read was how the people were writing and posting just for the joy of it, just to be setting down and sharing their experiences, just to be playing with words and ideas.  This is where I want to be again.  It feels like home.

The photo from my very first blog post, in honor of my "blogiversary"

* I realize that fall has not technically begun yet, but in my world, seasons start on the first day of whatever month they officially start in.