I was asked why I like to blog... why I don't write something more "substantial". It was a good question... a valid question that deserves an honest answer. After I emailed the answer back to the inquiring mind, I opted to post my response here. After all, it's not a bad thing to let everyone know why I feel drawn to blog.... So, below is my (only mildly altered to remove personal tid-bits) response:
Let's see… usually when I write – as much as you don't like blogging – it's a blog. Blogging provides an option to write small, random stuff that rattles around in my head until I have a chance to get it out (then it doesn't seem to consume my mind anymore). It's an outlet. To write something more meaningful [length] I'd have to have ideas that I currently lack – things that are full stories built in my head. I do 2 blogs now… one is a personal blog where I just blather on about whatever I feel like doing while the other is primarily for the TWRA/TWRF. That's the one they have the ability utilize at their discretion where I write about things they are involved in (in one fashion or another). For example, this Friday I'm leaving for a weekend-long "BOW (Outdoors Woman) Extreme" event that is hosted by the TWRA… I'll show up at a trailhead and then take a horse a mile or so in to a rustic lodge and the weekend is full of hiking, horses, kayaking, fishing, and archery. I bring my notebook and a pen and write about the enjoyment and comraderie that surrounds sharing my weekend with a bunch of fellow outdoors-loving women in the woods.
As far as why I write: On good days I get to write about things like… how the Apps don't get their due credit because they were once the most colossal mountains on our planet and how they turned from a prize heavy weight champ to a little old man in a wheelchair. I speak about how, if you give him [the Apps] some time, he has some of the best stories to tell. I get to write about leaning against a tree that was present when settlers were first taming the land that became the State of Tennessee and how easy it is to dream of the years that tree witnessed. I get to write about how, if you sit still enough in a tree stand, the Northern Flickers will harass you in an effort to make you reveal that you're not part of a tree. I get to write about the serenity that you experience when you sit next to a mountain stream on a moss-covered rock and listen to the stream whisper with murmured trickles and the hushed secrets the wind shares with the trees. These are the moments I live for, everything in between those moments is just mundane ol' life. I dream... to be the Joyce Kilmer or Aldo Leopold of our age… to write words that would make a city-girl ache to know this world, to make a poet cry while I simply retell the wonders that my eyes behold, that my body takes respite in, and that my soul longs to be part of.…
Yes... that is why I blog. To share those moments I often spend alone with people who may not get to be there; to get them to see, in their minds' eye, and spur in them a desire to go and be a part of our world.