The Blog as Jar in Tennessee

I feel embarrassed about this inner life blog, because I don't like navel-gazing blogs....I went and found a whole bunch of blogs by people my age and they were so boring--sort of the "I had a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich in the garden today and the roses looked nice" variety. But I wanted a place where I could talk (I have maybe one conversation with another person per week) and also to let some people close to me know that I am emerging from the tiny dark place I was being sucked further into. And focus on the inner work I have been doing since November that is really changing me.

I am also afraid of the conflation of religiousness with spirituality--I am surrounded in this town (not in this house) by people who go to church at least twice a week. By BAs (born-agains). I am neither organized religion nor pious, but am afraid of that labeling. Just like the hairdresser will not cut my hair short because she says people here will think I am gay. Scares me because I am sooo not gay. But being surrounded with such folks, and not being in a cosmopolitan world but in a labelers' world, does mess up one's head. Anyhow, at my age, being who I am should problem-free--never was before, but then being an expat was so liberating!

So it turns out to be a blog for me mostly. And it is marvelous---it works in my head sort of like Wallace Stevens' jar in Tennessee:

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.