Welcome to Kaleidoscope Living

Today is the first day of NaBloPoMo and the first entry in my brand new blog. I have kept a live journal for a few years and I continue to use it to stay in touch with people I know and to record my life. Lately I have wanted a venue for writing less personal and more polished/completed works.

This seemed like a good time and this seemed like a good place. My hope is that this blog will inspire me to improve my writing in the way that flickr.com has encouraged me to refine my photography skills. My plan for the first few entries is to introduce myself, explain the title of my journal, and introduce the themes I expect to emerge in my writings.

For today, I’ll start with the basic demographic details of the person behind these pages. During NaBloPoMo, I’ll celebrate my 41^st birthday and a couple of weeks before that reach a milestone in my life where my life is longer than my mothers was; she died about two weeks shy of her 41^st birthday. One of the things that has influenced my life was her death when I was 6. Over the years being a motherless daughter has played less and less of a role in my life but for approximately three decades that was a defining element of how I defined myself.

My nearly 41 years of life on the glorious planet have taken me from rural, northwest Oklahoma, to a brief stay at the home of the Sooners, to graduate school in Baton Rouge, to Mickey Mouse land in Florida, to the shadow of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, and finally, just over a year ago, to the southern shores of Lake Michigan and a place that feels like home. To say the least it has been quite a journey.

I currently live alone as a happily (most of the time at least) single gal with a lease that forbids pets and a life path that has not included children (I have mixed feelings about that one) though it did include a now ex husband for a few years. Professionally, I spend my days teaching, doing research, and spending way too much time in meetings at a small university campus. There will be much more interesting tidbits about who I am in the coming days.

For today, I leave you with and invitation that is also the foundation of my developing personal mission statement. These words are borrowed from Rob Brezsny’s book Pronoia (which I cannot recommend highly enough).

Welcome to the moments, magic, and mirabilia* of my journey to become a “wildly disciplined, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, scrupulously curious, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lyrically logical, lustfully compassionate master of rowdy bliss.”

__________

* mirabilia is defined on p. 175 of Pronoia as a noun that refers to “modest astonishments, friendly shocks, sweet anomalies.”