A little place.

When I started Growing Versions, I had a head full of steam, I was a creatively starved office worker, looking for a place to pour my ideas.

I was ready to finally buckle down and start writing.

In the beginning,thoughts and ideas came flooding out in a torrent, tumbling out. For months, I posted almost every morning before I got the kids up to start their day.

As time passed, the posts came further and further apart. And I do mean came.   I rarely go searching for them. I sit  or go for a walk and an idea comes seeping in.

I came to see my blog as a little house that I can enter whenever I choose.  Some days I leave the door open all day, with the sun streaming in. Others I don't venture near it, but know it is there if I need or want it.

The blog is something I built in a flurry, during an intense time when I was both starting a business and raising little kids. I also was a volunteer doula, often staying up all night with a labouring mother. As fast and frantically as it was built, it was built with care.  I had certain criteria that applied to each post that in my own way was constructing something, something that I came to understand was meant to shelter me on bad days and launch me on great days.

Once it was built, it became a refuge for me. It became a place for me to house my ideas and thoughts and memories during a time when I could barely string a sentence together in real life.

I still creep,although not as frequently, into that tiny cabin set in a clearing. I can go whenever I wish and sit ensconced in a room decorated purely to my taste. There is no laundry hanging up to dry in that room, but there is a clothesline tacked up outside. There is no clutter. The floors are swept bare and the doors of it open up onto a beach. No image hangs in it that I haven't put there myself. Sometimes it is but a lean to, filtering out the hot sun and the water is still like glass, others it is a fortress and the waves are whipped up and slamming against the front door.

The little house under the trees is where I can be alone with my thoughts, I can stare out the windows or I can burrow deeper into  the cosy blankets.

When people ask me if/how they should start a blog, I say, think through why you want to do it and state your intent right up front.  This place is for you.  Make it a place you want to visit.