How does one start a blog if not tentatively?

First two months to choose a title. (Who am I kidding? I changed it again yesterday. Then again today).  Then another month to find a picture for the front page. Then another month to stare at that page for a while, then get up and do all the big and little things that need to be done, over and over again.

It’s summer. The middle of July. Surprisingly, not sweltering and close and heavy with smog, but deep blue skies dotted with clouds, bright sun and cool breezes. More like September than July, my neighbour commented over the fence, possibly more than once this week. But the raspberry bushes are drooping with fruit, the peas need to be pulled up, the garlic leaves are browning at the tips. Doing the work of picking and preserving, tending, cooking, starting knitting projects, reading out loud to my children, reading silently to myself; this is what brings me back to the earth. For several years I’ve been feeling like I’m about to fly away, restless; or that I’m already flying, darting back and forth, wildly swooping and changing direction, like the arial feeders I so admire (all of them – swallows, dragonflies, bats), trying to catch something that is always moving away from me. I only wish I could be so graceful.  

I chase ideas, I chase new skills, I chase some answer to my questions about my place in the world. I know I should love the questions (“like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue”). Really I do. I’ve read and reread that passage from Rilke so many times.  

But tonight I’m sad. Sadness that I’m not going to ascribe a story to but just feel. Because the world tonight is beautiful, and my tentative, unsure, but maybe grounded place in it is beautiful too.  So I’ll start right here.