Mind on Fire, the vlog, is back after a long hiatus and a facelift. That is, this site has a look more in keeping with 2016. As I return, I find myself asking myself some questions that maybe you can help me with:
What I love to do is to go on walks in this remarkable place I live, take video and photographs and then weave those into short nature videos with music. Sometimes I like to add poetry.
Is that enough, or is it repetitious and boring?
Should I be working harder on these, and if so, in what ways?
For example, this video of Chuckle Springs to me reveals the most sacred and astonishing place in the forest. If I were to add information about the springs or science-y information, I feel attention would be taken away from the magic of the visuals.
I can’t even write poetry about this place without sounding trite, but I’ll admit I didn’t even try.
My other questions-to-self are about blogging itself. The blogs I follow that I appreciate the most (Alan Levine, Steven Pressfield, Bryan Alexander, Don Hynes -where are the women?) are by people who take the blog as an art form meant to reveal the soul, the inner life of the writer–vulnerabilities, experiments, the evolution of lines of thought. As I bring my focus back to art, writing, and photography, I am pulled to go deeper, to try harder to articulate what it means to be a “mind on fire.”
My other wonder is about having separate blogs for video (Mind on Fire), art (Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal), and book reviews (A Book is a Dream). Should they all be collapsed into one? As I ask that question, I am reminded of Marie Kondo in her book Spark Joy–she would say if the sites give me joy, I should continue to use them and deactivate the ones that don’t.
That is wisdom I can use to guide myself through the currently somewhat tangled underbrush of my concerns right now. Whatever the concern is, give it a heart hug and ask if it brings me joy.
So this video of a truly profound place far up in the headwaters of the Willamette River gives me joy. It is my wish that t give you the same.