Because I’m feeling playful, and also because I just feel like sharing, yesterday’s blog post and your comments reminded me of a poem I’d originally written over at my Recover Your Joy blog.
Now before I post my poem, I have a question for everyone. I wrote on Recover Your Joy for 4 and a half years before I started writing here — and I’m curious. Where do old blogs go when they become unwritten? How do you let an old blog die?
RYJ is built on the Blogger platform. When I started A Year… I moved over to WordPress as my website is constructed on this platform and it just made sense (somehow — I’m no techie but having my blog and website on the same platform pleased me). At first, I wrote on both blogs each day — and not the same post. RYJ has evolved to be broader than its original theme of ‘making a difference every day’, and so, I’ve let RYJ lay dormant.
But, what happens to all those thoughts and ideas and words? What happens to my creative output if I do nothing with it? Is it just filling up space, taking up room like wrecked cars in a junkyard, rusting away, growing rot, decomposing to become fodder for the grist of the muses wheels at another time, or… does it serve another purpose in the universe? Does it have an after-life, after I’ve stopped filling its space with the muses outpouring?
What would you do with an old blog? Do I euthanize it? Do I blow it up? Do I simply delete and forget? Or, do I leave it as it is, a memorial to my past thinking, a marker for future voyageurs who wander into its halls to decipher the mind and ramblings of a blogger from the past? Do I become a blogging archetype in its slipping into the mists of time?
As I ponder these oh so serious questions, I share with you my tribute to Twitter and FB and SM that I originally wrote on Recover Your Joy inspired by a poetry prompt shared by my friend, Glynn Young at Faith. Fiction. Friends.
And, a note to self — you haven’t posted on your poetry blog for awhile Louise. Maybe it’s time to get to it!
Namaste. May your day be filled with wonder, joy and Love. May you experience your most amazing day yet!
Tweeting Juliet
©2011 Louise Gallagher
Romeo, Romeo
come thee hither
I’ve got news that’ll drive you all a twitter
Desdemona, the tart, has run off with a Moor
Now she’s banned from entering her father’s door.
Oh Romeo, Romeo
come here my sweet
I’ve got something I just gotta tweet
’bout a mid-summer’s dream of love gone astray
and a donkey-headed man with a real foul bray.
Romeo, Romeo
Quick! Come here now
I’ve got some juicy gossip for your RSS feed crowd
Ophelia’s been told to get off to a nunnery
and Hamlet is spouting mad-minded comment’ry.
Romeo, Romeo
come and look
This story deserves a big Like in my Book
It’s a comedy of errors about two lost sons
and the search to reunite them by their father Egeon.
Oh Romeo, Romeo
What a mess
I must post the news in 140 characters or less
but all this twittering has put my mind in such a fog
These characters deserve a full post on my blog.
Dare Boldly 
Great poem- love it! Love the play /character references. What fun.
sure have to wonder what Shakespeare would think of tweeting!
This poem is great for teaching!
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thanks Lisa — and thank you for the comment re using it for teaching. I am going to be teaching story-telling with immigrant teens in the fall — great idea to use it! 🙂
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I have often wondered about old blogs, just as I have to old notebooks and even scraps of paper covered in the thoughts and feelings I had at times long passed… Some I have thrown away, deleted and lost, later (sometimes) regretting that I don’t have those words still to remind me and help me learn from a time gone by. I recently took a trip back in time (also a dissertation distraction) to the blog I started writing as an assignment during my first term as an undergraduate over 6 years ago. That blog then evolved with me to be the way I told my stories of Kenya and let people know I was still alive while in my remote village. It also was the springboard for another blog that helped me fundraise over £2000 for Christmas gifts for those who needed them near by my home and a little further afield, that now lies dormant too after I posted pictures of the grateful recipients of the chickens, school shoes, lamps and football kits.
I’ve come to think that those pages are not ‘taking up space’ after all, how big is the internet and how small is my little corner. But just like the scraps of paper I wrote on as a teenager struggling with the darkness inside me, they tell little snipits of my story that otherwise might be lost. So I keep them, and when the time is right, go back to read them and remember how much and how little has changed over the years. I am glad that you kept your other blog because otherwise I would never have come across you here. It was your TEDx volunteering talk that directed me there and then to here.
My current ‘incarnation’ over at On The Way… began just as a way for me to honestly be able to express some of the most difficult things that were on my mind and to start working through some of the struggles I’ve had over the years. A secret, anonymous space, where I could say what I felt with no fear of upsetting anyone. It is now much more than that to me and part of the journey I am making towards finding my own place in the world I’ve wanted to leave for so long.
Thank you for the prompt to have a think about this, I hope my rambling here is okay. x
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Your ‘rambling’ as you call it Laura, is as beautiful and honest and loving as you are.
Thank you for sharing your light — in your illumination I see more clearly into mine.
Hugs. XX
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There is something called the “Wayback Machine” (I mentioned it at some point in a Saturday Sharing, I think) that can take us back to Web content on platforms or in code no longer used. Eventually, whatever we’re using now will be surpassed by some technological advance, rendering what we use now obsolete and making access via the Wayback Machine our only solution to finding what we’ve “lost”. Virtual words and other data apparently can live forever, and be forever immortalized, though, alas, we humans cannot.
The Web couldn’t be the Web if we weren’t able to find all our old stuff.
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Oh wow — I’ve got to go and discover this machine — makes sense. — The Web couldn’t be the Web if we weren’t able to find all our old stuff.
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Loved, loved, loved the poem!
AND!!!!
I loved this subject.
I had a blog on Sugar. It is still there actually. It is a weird feeling going back and looking at some of my things I wrote back in “the day”! Almost reminds me of an old friendship you have put on the back burner for a number of different reasons…. For me that blog was not user friendly. People had trouble pulling it up. And so someone told me about WordPress and here I sit with pretty big parts of me still sitting in a blog no one ever goes to except me at times when I want to reflect like finding an old journal. As writers we have a gift in a way a photographer must feel when they find an old box of photographs. We can be snapped right back there like a RUBBERBAND to the place we once sat a while and wrote the pieces of our heart we left behind!
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Thanks Diane — I re-read my posts on RYJ yesterday from our trip to California last year — and was transported! Such a lovely feeling.
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What a fun post, Louise! So yea…what do we do with old blogs and in my case, Old Message Boards? I don’t tweet or read tweets; I don’t Facebook but sometimes sneak peaks at other people’s Facebook pages.
It’s a gift that we can track our writings over the years. Life moves on and we do too and oftentimes we forget what we were thinking, feeling and doing a decade prior. Poking around the archives reminds us that indeed, we HAVE learned and grown and gained wisdom.
I thoroughly enjoyed “tweeting juliet”. ha!
Love
CZ
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Your wisdom from ‘back then’ was integral to my finding my wisdom ‘back then’. What a journey we shared CZ — I am so grateful your words, and humour, were there to light my way.
And I thoroughly enjoyed writing ‘Tweeting juliet” — it was fun and frivolous! 🙂
Love to you too my friend.
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I also have found it interesting to track back early followers and have seen that so many of them have stopped writing. It is almost like there lives just stopped and I wonder, where have they gone? what are they doing now?
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I have those wonderings too Elizabeth. I always think there should be some sort of accountability app that could let people know why, or what has caused someone to stop writing on their blog! 🙂
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ahhh! so clever, friend:)
your way with words is juicy light:)
i’ve wondered the same….do those words we write
and leave in space get flung into the universe as little
particles of light? It’s how i like to imagine.
like pieces of a star.
big love to you and all your pieces,
Jennifer
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What a lovely picture of grace you paint with your words Jennifer! Thank you. Big love to you and all your pieces too!.
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