When you are a child, you babble away and no one listens. You talk in the kitchen and ask a thousand questions about your new world when it’s only as tall as the height of the lowest cabinet door.
When you are an adult, you have a need to do the same and there are even fewer people who listen. I mean really listen.
As we grow older, some of our questions turn to answers. And we have new questions to ask. The old river of common friends separate into distributaries that hardly ever meet while the water swells threatening to burst the whole valley. There is so much of it.
It was on such a night last year on the 14th of May, 2013 that I sat at the computer exploring WordPress.
It is the irony of life that the moment you think that you are on the verge of creating something new which you think is going to be special, something unique to be cherished, that you come face to face with the banality of it all.
Perhaps that is the real story of creation.
Bottledworder’s birth was not easy.
I wanted to choose Phoenix, the magical bird, as my blog’s name.
No. Already taken. Not by the bird but by the city.
Phoenixrisingfromtheashes?
Already risen.
So had Phoenixrisingfromtheashes1, Phoenixrisingfromtheashes001, Phoenixrisingfromtheashes_2012.
Apparently, magic was everywhere.
My magic was nothing special. Already.
I don’t know where the word bottledworder came into my head then but it did.
Perhaps my creative desire ran to take shelter in something that sounded like the opposite of magical. It wanted refuge in that which was the ordinary, the everyday, the literal, the banal.
No one read my first post.
As soon as I set this post out into the world, I knew I had created something.
This creative impulse felt different.
It was the twin of the much coveted and forceful impulse that strives to be pathbreaking, to be new, to be unique, to be famous, to be powerful. This more homely creative experience was the kind that sustains, that nourishes, that is simply about the exuberance of being alive.
My blog tells me that it’s enough to live, to exist, to experience, to swim with others, to talk, to listen, to take pleasure in the broad flow of life.
That’s what this blog feels like now after a year. Something alive to come home to every few days.
A friend.
Happy Birthday Bottledworder!
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