Intro

The Moon has just passed being full, but it continues to toss me awake these past two nights. Maybe it’s just some phase of being Cancer, but I’ve got too many ideas bumbling about in my head to be contained. The idea of blogging intrigues me, but let me be clear that I worry that it’s an ego-centric business, an off-shoot of the post-capitalist era.

Some years ago I stopped saving my “Sent Messages” on my email account. This was before you could have 1 Gb or more of space and I found the extra messages bulky. When email accounts all over the net bumped-up their memory capacity, I considered re-instating the “Save Sent Messages” function, but made the conscience decision not to; I had lived quite peacefully for some time without them and they were indeed unnecessary baggage. After all, what kind of egotist would I be to think that my words are so important that every little blurb or advice or description or comment that I had sent out to friends and family over the years is worth saving for all time? Let my sent messages be sent, a cyber-version of a Buddhist mandala made in sand and washed clean in water, out in the universe, but never again to be seen.

So, when the blogging craze began, I considered it akin to saving your sent messages, only now they can be public and anyone can read them and I thought, “We really are becoming very ego-centric.” I avoided it, but still the possibility was out there. People told me that I ought to have a blog, that it would be interesting to read about a pescatarian, bi-racial Chinese-U.S. American lesbian who left the corporate-government world to live abroad in Southern Chile with her partner and their gay Chilean friends, trying to live a more artistic and human existence on the coastal countryside where a river meets the sea. But hey, that’s just life. Breaking myself down into categories and then publicly touting my life story as interesting, that’s marketing. And I abhor marketing. Everyone’s story is interesting if you sell it right; I mean, I read somewhere that over 50% of U.S. Americans consider their lives worthy of a book and if that’s not ego-centricism, I don’t know what is. Do I really want to be a part of that?

Then I decided to go out and read some blogs, to see for myself what is really going on there in cyberspace. And I found that there’s opportunity here to do more than glorify yourself and your life experiences. There’s the possibility of adding to the voices, sharing another unique perspective, giving your political views a little added weight. A friend once told me that the modern-day equivalent to oral tradition is the internet, and although I only agree with that in some senses (oral tradition is an art captured in the moment, an expression dependent on the telling… like implying that a recording of a live concert can replicate the real experience), I’d be a terrible lover of culture if I didn’t do my part to participate. After all, the internet provides power to the individual to just be the many diverse beings that each of us are in a world where more and more often cultures, places, and ideas are becoming mono-chromatic and, at best, binary.

So here goes… misgivings aside, trying to keep the ego in check, and to share a little love from the Chilean coast, or at least until the Moon let’s me sleep again at night. Enjoy.