This blog is undergoing a transformation -- sort of like my life -- so be patient with me. I'm playing around with the header and redoing some of the categories, contemplating ditching blogger all together (thoughts?).
In the midst of a crazy summer, this blog quietly had a two year anniversary. So I took stock and discovered that I've posted about 50 times in those two years (which is not a lot for a blog, but more than I thought), and inspired only a handful of comments, mostly about Quaker stuff and mostly recently (for which I credit QuakerQuaker).
I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about what makes a good blog, what this particular blog is about, and how personal to be. Most of the good blogs I read have unifying themes, even if they're loose: Quaker ministry/rants, feminism and labor, living in capitalism, knitting, knitting and thriftiness, unschooling and art, etc.
I don't so much have a unifying theme - more like a concept: To stand at the intersections of traditional boundaries of life -- where religion meets culture, where consumption meets media, where agriculture meets resistance, where the domestic meets the academic -- and speak to what I see.
Or at least that's the idea. The thing is though, I'm pretty sure the compartmentalization of people, their lives and their varied modes of interacting with the world is false. Exists only because people who have been fragmented -- told that certain parts of their life don't fit together when we ourselves are evidence of that unity -- are easier to control and easier to sell things too. So that's part of the witness here too: writing from the false fissures, writing across them, and writing in defiance of them.
But on a general day to day basis, that means that I write about anything and everything: how I'm angsty about the class aspects of buying local and organic food, how my soil has lead in it, Hillary Clinton and feminism, gentrification and West Philly, etc. And occasionally I post nice photos.
So I guess the surface unifying theme is that this little blog, Not Afraid of Thunder, hosted by the awkward Blogger, is an outlet for my work. And my work often, but not always, deals with fragmentation, syncretism, and unity. So I get to play Adrienne Rich or Terri Gross (sans interviews for now), and dabble smartly (I hope) in a little bit of everything, ideally without succumbing to bloggy narcissism.
I hope that sounds like a compelling ride to you. Tickets are free and its wild, but there really are no guarantees.
