Deep Cleaning My Internet Life

It was inevitable. All this soulful deep cleaning, minimalism, simplicity, beautifying. I am going to take everything out of the "internet area of my life" and see what really needs to be put back in to live a whole, organic, natural, family-oriented life.

Currently, that is meaning that I have deleted all other blogs I started (most of you, Dear Readers, don't even know what I am talking about, because I didn't have the time and energy to grow them, so I hadn't publicized them -- but the next few posts will be stuff I had been keeping there). I want this blog to be more wholistic -- I can't divide up and sterilize the bits of me and my life any more than I can do it with academic subjects, and I don't need to try to. This blog is now everything. Hope you like all of me, because all of me is going to be in one place :)) I am going to pour all of me into this one place -- pictures, reflections on life and self, updates/snapshots of my family's life, information and inspiration I may come across. This place is going to be geared toward connecting with friends and family I am already in touch with, and for meeting new ones.

It is also meaning that I am not going to follow the blogs of strangers anymore. They are beautiful, often inspiring. So is my life, and I have been missing it. For every thing I read on someone else's blog, I could be spending that time with my children or my home or my animals, or finding that in myself and for myself. I need living my life to be where my center of gravity is (thank you, Kristin, for that befitting analogy). This means I will be following the blogs of people I already know and love, to stay connected with them. However, I am not going to get them sent to my email box or read them through Google Reader -- I am going to visit them every night, because I find that I am less likely to respond and REALLY connect if it means I have to take extra steps to do so (I'm so sensitive to barriers).

I am going to use Facebook for only 2 reasons: to share my latest blog post and to read select friends' and familys' statuses and see pictures, to stay connected and continue to cultivate connections already in place (especially if they don't have a blog I can follow). Everything I have been doing there I will be doing here now (sharing pics and details of our life).

I am going to unsubscribe to everything that comes to my mailbox (except updates on local groups I am a part of), because there isn't a thing they can offer me that is worth the time it takes to read about it instead of spending time with my family and living it.

I realized that I use the internet for 3 basic reasons: I am insatiably lonely, I don't trust myself, and I escape the anxieties that come from living. Big surprise -- the internet is not long-term fixing any of these things.

Even the amazing connections I have made via internet leaves me with a hole in my heart because I want to share a backyard with you, and all of you are spread across the country which makes sharing a backyard even closer to impossible (unless everyone wants to uproot their lives and come live on the land I want to buy to start a Tribe -- I WILL do this one day in the not too distant future).

Continuing to search out and listen to the voices of others when I have a question or think I am interested in something is not cultivating self-trust, and skipping from step 2 (hmmm, I think I might want to handle this differently) to step 8 (this is how you do it) doesn't feel like living from the inside out -- it's taking so long to put this stuff into practice because I missed all the steps in the middle because I didn't live it all. I have just replaced all the "shoulds" in my life from more mainstream ones to more alternative ones -- but there are still voices dictating how I should interact with my children, with other people, with the earth, with my home. I need to quiet the other voices so I can hear my own.

Anxieties. So much stuff from my history bubbles to the surface during the day -- boredom, frustration, helplessness... So, I grab the closest screen. I want to sit with it, feel it, think about it, follow it, wonder about it and see if it flavors anything else in life. Inside out. Shoving anxiety down doesn't make it go away, and neither does ignoring it.

I need to figure a lot out. This blog will end up being the conduit between my life and the expression of it. I am an innately expressive being. So, here I am. And I'm off to live life now....