About

I think of my blog as a publicly available journal, a place to explore ideas and aesthetic activities. Since it is public, this necessarily includes exploring these ideas and activities within and in response to community. I consider that my ideas are part of larger discussions and explorations of the communities to which I belong. I don't expect to change people's minds, but I do expect that I might have modest influence as someone participating in the conversation.

When I first started blogging at the end of February 2009, I expected that I would be occasionally read by a handful of members of my Unitarian Universalist congregation. Over the course of that time, that has shifted. Depending on the topic of my blog post, I expect UU readers of my specifically UU-related posts from across the US, Canada, and Mexico, and am aware of occasional hits from the UK and from Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár), Romania. Since I publish poetry on the same blog, I expect those posts may be read both by UUs who follow the UUpdates link and by participants in various poetry groups who follow my links posted on the group sites. Those posts are typically viewed by people across North America, Europe, Turkey, India, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.

I never intentionally divulge information that is not mine to divulge. I do not use a pseudonym on this blog but do allow anonymous comments. If I know the identity of a pseudonymous commenter, I occasionally will respond to them using their first name but never their full name.

My e-mail is not listed on the blog - only on my profile - so I don't get much e-mail responding to blog material. When I have, though, I have responded to each one in a response e-mail. If a comment calls for further discussion, I respond in a comment. I do not feel like every comment needs a direct response, though. I decide on a case by case basis.

When people respond either in the comments or on their own blogs, it feels like I am actually participating in a conversation. Other than that, though, I guess I evaluate my blog by occasionally going back to previous posts and deciding that, no, I did not embarrass myself by expressing myself in a public forum.

Sometimes I think it might have been better to have separate blogs for UU stuff and non-UU aesthetic stuff. I did start a separate blog for a particular spiritual practice that I expected that most of my readers here would have less interest in. But for the most part, I am satisfied with the results of leaving both UU and non-UU stuff together in the same blog. Occasionally I am pleasantly surprised to receive feedback on a UU topic from people who enter the blog from a poetry group. The possibilities for cross-fertilization are interesting.

I am torn on how to handle labels. On the one hand, I admire the people who have five or six labels, categories into which everything they write on gets grouped. On the other hand, I like to use labels to locate specific posts that I remember seeing but do not remember when or any key words to use a search to find. Five categories look neater in the sidebar, but more precisely meaningful labels are more useful - so long as the list is not interminable. So, while I have reservations about some things, I am mostly satisfied with the decisions I've made for this blog.