Moving to Wordpress

I am moving to http://ellipsesbysandra.wordpress.com. Here is my introductory post explaining my new blog and the move. I haven't decided the fate of this blog or the name "SandiesSofties" yet ~ tbd. 

Ellipses …

Life is a tangle of themes, strings twisting chaotically around each other and me until I am wrapped up in a thousand ongoing storylines. From the middle of the mess I try to trace the lines and find some broken and frayed from lack of conclusion, but most others thinning out in places then filling out again in turn throughout the jumble of this beautiful mess. The longer my fingers follow the strings the more textured and vividly detailed they become, stretching into all the Tomorrows; the continuity of these twisting lines makes every day make a little more sense.

Laying out these lines on paper, translating them into the stories they tell, I repeatedly find that so few end decisively. One disappears for a moment behind another; a question left hanging from years ago resurfaces to find an answer in a new territory of the tangle. Events, like beads on twine, decorate portions of these life-lines, bringing an otherwise ordinary theme into distinction. The beaded patterns change as places and people come and go, but the threads go on. The storylines of life continue to twist and turn – changing, growing, fading – and by tracing them out I begin to understand what has been and who I am becoming.

These lines, in translation, rarely end with a period. The complex, messy, interwoven life-lines end more often with an unfinished thought, a hesitation, a trailing off … to be picked up again … and again … interrupted by confrontation with new worlds or contemplation of current spheres of existence and thought … and continue on, swirling around my head and heart.

And so this blog is born – to be the translation of these thousand life-lines that end with an ellipse. …

… because I’m in the middle of this beautiful, messy work of art

where there are few conclusions

and continual explorations

of the meaning, substance, and joy of life …

And so this blog will be a collection of contemplations – some new, some carried over from my previous blog which got lost in its own maze of conflicting agendas, some revived poetry and papers brought back from the depths of my hard drive and storage boxes. And if it changes direction again, it will be a reflection of the tangle of themes that run through life. And I will write a new preface.

…

Journaling

thoughts on thinking ...

Sometimes journaling is like reaching into the whirlwind of your mind and pulling out some debris, pinning it to paper, then going back in for more. But as you force hand to paper, slowly the whirlwind calms down and the pieces of swirling thought coalesce into something scrapped together, sometimes in a gratifyingly coherent structure, or more often in some unnatural, otherworldy jumble. But either way, you've tamed the wild storm and connected more fragments, slowly constructing your glass castle through which to view the world. (not sure what I mean by that last part ... i'll try writing about it more to figure it out ...)

Sometimes journaling is a truth-puking exercise.

But it is cathartic somehow to write. I process thoughts much better through writing than talking or thinking. Even thinking, the kind of thinking where you lose the world around you as you disappear into the abyss of your mind, doesn't move understanding or acceptance forward like writing does. Thoughts exist in varying levels of embodiment; the initial intangible feelings make their way slowly to the level of unframed anxieties or daydreams, which, if fed enough, grow into fleshed out alternate-realities, but still, even in this level, they oscillate between the conscious level where words define thought and the subconscious level where thoughts/feelings/dream-worlds are intimately, viscerally felt and understood. To force yourself to write is to push all of that to its ultimate embodiment, drawing shapeless thoughts out from the depths of your mind across the barrier of consciousness where only thoughts that can be formed into, or matched with, words can exist. Much can be lost in translation, but the more faithful you are to keep moving the pen across paper, the more the thoughts charge forward to be defined, embodied, and finished. The freedom of journaling comes in this "finishing," this closure to the endless cycle of thought-processing. Once thoughts have made it into written words, they can be left to rot or revisited at will; the cycle is complete. Written words are victorious proof that thoughts went somewhere, and we can be free then to develop, share, or burn them.