Birthday road

"Blogging block" wrote Jessica Miller-Merrill  today, she a guru of blogging and making a living with it in Oklahoma.

I haven't had so much block, though perhaps it is so, as I have just not wanted to sit down and write, at the end of the year after an emotionally exhausting fall, and a Capricorn birthday to start the new one off.

But my blogging friend Ronald Rabenold from Pennsylvania (Cultured Carbon County... http://culturedcarboncounty.blogspot.com )asked last night on Facebook if there might be a painting to go with the day. I hadn't stirred there either, but at least he got me out of the chair reading the many great congratulatory and sarcastic remarks from my friends, family, ex-students, and journalists who weighed in to wish me well. His is one of three blogs I check eagerly. Blog friend K. Lawson Gilbert--also from Pennsylvania, and her blog Old Mossy Moon most recently wrote about my watercolor card to her...High Lonesome. http://oldmossymoon.com. And there's Alan Bates of Tulsa, a fellow sojourner from New Mexico, an oil and gas guy, who writes Yogi's Den, http://crustygasguy.blogspot.com/

They put pressure on me just because they're so good. So up I got last night and painted something from within- It ain't great, but it's something, just like this post.

As I wrote yesterday, it's easy to feel marginal in this world at this age, especially in business or higher ed--as Larry McMurtry wrote in The Rhino Ranch, the concluding novel of five that started decades ago in The Last Picture show. http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-mcmurtry-larry.asp. After all, when you think about it, yesterday was just the completion of my insiginficant 67th
 
The pressure is on too, because I start teaching a class on blogging next Tuesday. I don't believe you should teach something if you can't do it, if you aren't doing it--the bane of many academics who have never done anything else and can't.

So here is "Birthday Road," a traveler heading toward sunrise or sunset (you choose), because the past is behind him/her. We all travel that road alone, but with help from those we've met and known. Facebook has become a friend for this, with so many comments from friends, family, ex-students (also friends), students, bloggers, et. al. as I've completed another circumnavigation of the sun.

More coming soon, on the pages--so much poetry--of 1010, and the start of 2011, from a traveler on the birthday road.