"skip to the final chapter of the book"

I write periodically for a spirituality journal. It's something that a friend of mine and her partner started years ago.

In this month's issue, my friend, JS, wrote this: "I've been thinking a lot about how life is like a book. That may sound simple enough and maybe even when elucidated have some profundities about it, but it's about where we begin reading the book that's curious to me. I think we think of our lives as a book that begins with the first chapter or maybe an introduction. Mine began in 1944. However, I think it might be more accurate to think about the beginning of our life as beginning in somewhere in the middle. We aren't really the beginning of anything. We come into the world story that has been going on far before humans could record it and we hope will go on long after we have left this planet. We begin in the middle of a long and ongoing book."

This idea fits perfectly into an idea I've been having about this blog...and writing, in general. I've thought about telling the story of who I am, but I am reluctant to do so (mostly it's that I'm afraid that my life is so incredibly mediocre that no one would be interested...which is probably really about my fear that I am a boring person). But still I thought about what I would write, and I realized that so much of who I am is tied up in stories about where and who I come from. My story is so deeply rooted in the stories of these other peoples, and the land in which they and I come from, that I could not conceive of an autobiography that would just be about me.

So I think that I will try, in the coming weeks, to post some stuff about these stories that I have come to have. Many of them are probably more family folklore than truth of any kind...but aren't our stories almost always more myth than truth anyway? But I think I also want to tell a little bit about the history of the state I grew up in, too...or the stuff I know anyway...especially about the native people and what happened when the wasichu (Dakota for "ghosts") came - because my ancestors and theirs are buried in the same land.

This isn't going to mean a radical change in my blog...I just imagine that I will try to post something once or twice a week that I've worked on a little more. It'll hopefully be fun, and will get me to focus a little bit on writing more.