More Blogging about Blogging

Alex writes about the perils of blogging: "I started to keep track of how often I was thinking about blogging. It was a little worrisome. I would think about things before I did them, in the context of writing about them. I was scripting my life as the Alex Show."

And I feel a bit like old Rostov, when Natasha implored him to dump all his Moscow furniture and fill his wagons with wounded soldiers instead. Yes, these are in fact the values we've been trying to instill in the young, but... we don't want them coming back at us quite so directly as all that. As St Augustine said, "Lord, take away my sins... but not yet!"

But I think on this one I'll take the tantric route (make the tantric excuse? You pays your money and you takes your choice) -- instead of going around the swamp, wading right into it and kissing the leeches. I've been learning an awful lot by this round of exposure. For one thing I've identified what I'm now thinking of as my single basic obscuration, which seems to roll through my life in cycles: a building of loneliness, and then a lunge toward intimacy involving some exposure; following that a period of anxious observation to see how that exposure's received. There follows a short quiet period of withdrawal... and then I'm back at the begining of the cycle again.

But, as I wrote to Alex, what I can't afford to do, is let blogging -- or anything else -- consume the time and energy I need to devote to meditation. I need to hoard that jealously, and defend it like the wrathful Vajrapani, wrapped in fire, three eyes bulging, vajra in hand.