Back to blogging

It's been a little over four years since I last posted on this blog, and I've decided I want to start writing here again.

I miss regularly publishing on here. I think I stopped because the motivating forces behind my writing dissipated. I used this space to blog my way through a journey out of the closet and out of the LDS Church, but once I landed on my feet in Chicago away from the LDS community and interacting with people who had never known my closeted self, I didn't know what to write about. So I just stopped.

Well, I stopped writing here, at least. I've done a lot of journaling in notebooks, written a fair amount of poetry, tried my hand at fiction, and kept regular logs of stray thoughts that occur to me from time to time, but I haven't given any of them formal expression in a public way.

I've wanted to, though. I've tried to start a few different blogs, but it never goes anywhere. Eventually I've realized I don't need to start a new blog when I already have one that I'm not using. The themes and subjects may change, but there's something appealing about maintaining the public record I've already started.

After all, my purpose for blogging isn't to persuade, to inform, or to educate on a particular set of topics: it's to become. My philosophy of writing, in part, is this: that the practice of passing thoughts through the sieve of language refines, edifies, and elaborates who we are. It gives concrete form to the otherwise nebulous parts of ourselves that pass unformed through the open sky of the mind. Written expression forces such concentration that its practice causes discoveries we could never otherwise make in the distracted, flitting freedom of open contemplation. Writing is an anchor to the soul. I guess the practice of writing has itself become my deepest faith, really.

And of course, the hope implicit in a blog isn't just to write to me for myself: it's to engage with the thoughts of others. So I hope whatever I come up with in these pages ends up of interest and use to whoever stumbles on it.