Urf.
My "old heathen blog" self-destructed without warning. The blogsite now has a message saying sorry, they can't afford to keep up any longer, and everything is lost.
It's a little tough - that journal had half-a-year's worth of my New York city journey, some of the best writing I have ever done in my life, and some very precious stories. I guess I could have saved my writing more often in a Word document or something...it's so strange. One of my entries was a finalist in this year's Diarist awards...about a very strange and precious experience I had with myself and my past and the ocean.
I feel a little bereft, and wonder why. Everything on that blog came from me, from within myself. It was full of things that I experienced, people that I experienced, and thoughts that I had, all written in words that I thought up myself. So what have I really lost?
Detachment is so hard. Both things and people are so easy to get attached to. I rejected Zen because it seemed to me that attachment is an ordered part of life - that it is simply a matter of what degree of attachment becomes spiritually harmful.
The answer seems to me to be this:
All things, and all people, point towards the Divine. When our attachment to a thing or person threatens to cloud our view rather than focus it, it's time to back off.
Today in meeting, terrified of the spiritual pride that I know I can fall into so easily, in the face of all the gifts I have been given, I prayed, truly and earnestly, knowing exactly what I was doing, "God, humble me..." It is a terrible prayer, because it is sure to be answered.
Am I saying God zapped "SocialJournal.com" to help zap my pride? Nah. But it helps anyway. I'm feeling pretty humble in the face of easy-come-easy-go and how easy it is to take things (like the longevity of the Internet) for granted.
I have been reading Harold Bloom's Where Shall Wisdom be Found? which has an incredible reading of the poetry of the Book of Job.
Am I saying that losing my blog makes me like Job? Nah. But the spiritual lessons in Job can apply to our petty lives as much as to the Grand Scheme of Things, which I am beginning to think is the whole point of scripture.
I can't get out what I'm trying to say.
RIP, Salivating Circuits.
Of The Best Stuff, but Cracked
6 comments:
Thanks so much for the sympathy! I think I will...
Ta, Jeff.
Now that the blogosphere is one blog less, will thee begin?
:)
Old web sites sometimes hang around on "cache" even after they're officially gone. I don't know exactly where cache lives - some server somewhere I guess. But there are sometimes ways to find cached websites. What was the URL of your "heathen" blog? And by the way was it really heathen?
- - Rich
I am apparently not alone in being sorry to see "circuits" go..........
Having separate outlets where the diverse aspects of a complex personality can express themselves as an ascendancy is healthy I think.
Or maybe I'd simply come to the conclusion that the only thing better than an Amandablog is two Amandablogs......
I was delighted to find this one.............I'm sorry to see the other one go.
Merry Christmas.........
Ammaaaannda. Were you hiding another blog from us. Even heathen ones can be kind of fun. I might even have it in my cache if I had known about it. Luckily, I'm a geek and know where to look. It looks like Google has a lot of it archived. Get if fast before they realize SocialJournal is down and dump their archive. Here's the link, click on the "Cache" pages and cut and paste. And next time, let us all know about it, it is fun to see different aspects of people's lives...
Hi guys!
First, no, it wasn't secret! There was a link to it...(hmm. still is...) right on this page! Also, it was heathen only in that it was the last six months of my life leading up to my convincement. More squeamish religious people might not have wanted to read some of the stuff in the old blog, (no, nothing THAT scandalous, just a lot more blue language, experimentation, and boy-stuff), and many of my old blog readers might have grown very wearied by the increasing amounts of religious thought filling it up, though that had always been a big part of it. As I said in the first post of this blog, I wanted a fresh, more focused start, though not to compartmentalize my life...so I put links on each blog to the other one.
Many thanks to those who have sent me what they found cached. I had a bit of it, even when to the old "Way Back Machine" (http://www.archive.org) and salvaged what I could. (Achive.org had nothing) However, I've just gotten an e-mail from the site owner, who I e-mailed in desolate despairation when it went *bang* and he says it may be possible to retrieve it in the coming weeks. So we'll see.
Much love and thanks, guys. I'll let you know if I find more of it!
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