Fresca, such a cool essay for me! Thank you. I like the image of mud bricks, and yes, this whole blogging process is a lesson in seeing reality and my place in it a bit better. What do humans do when given such a fast, yet limited medium for interaction. I like the reminder (never can hear it too often) of utilizing it in the task of loving one another.

I’m playing my flute tonight, by the way, at a Maundy Thursday service where they’re incorporating an abbreviated Seder meal, and I think that’ll be quite interesting.

I love your musings, and you know I love writers writing about writing–why DO we do it? And in what form?

I’m only in my 2nd year of blogging, so I’m not fatigued with it, or not usually, but I do go through down times when it feels stupid and worthless–I’ve been off-kilter with it, as you say.
I remember an old blogging pal told me that at those times one should just post New York Times links!
(He’s blogged every day for years, and I think he sees is as something like a spiritual practice–something you do no matter how you feel.)

Do I recognize that desire you write about for instant and frequent feedback on my posts! And, maybe especially for deep engagement. I feel deflated sometimes when it doesn’t come on a regular basis. But since it doesn’t, oddly enough, blogging is helping me cut loose, withdraw from needing it like a drug–probably what you mean by saying you learned your words weren’t sought-after gold.
I think written words are more like mud, which we use to build some humble vessel or dwelling.
So we, I, keep going on faith. Faith that … well here, I found this quote on the blog “Thinkery”:
“You have a duty and an obligation to write, not because you have ‘the truth’ and must share it with others, but because we need to discover truths and we need all the help we can get, yours included. You write because you have an obligation to do so (123).”

– James E. Porter, “Audience and Rhetoric: An Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community” Prentice Hall, 1992.

As you point out, the question maybe isn’t whether to write, but where to put it, where do these mud bricks serve best? It’s great you’ve found a couple excellent places.
I so enjoy your blog, I hope you do keep it up, but the writer needs to find the right audience, or they to find her, which happens, eventually …if everybody’s lucky.

Just yesterday I got an e-mail out of the blue from a friend of a friend, whom I don’t know–I’m glad I didn’t delete it as spam! She wrote to say that she’s an avid reader of my blog but never comments so was writing to let me know my blog has made her laugh by day and brought comfort at night when she feels “bumps and lumps.”
This message was like the voice of god saying, Keep working that mud!
In whatever form, whatever place, you find to work and that works for you.

I hope and trust that in some way, telling our stories is one way of meeting–trying to meet–the mandate Jesus gave on at the meal we who follow the Western Christian calendar celebrate today, Maundy Thursday, some couple thousand years ago:
Love one another.

[Hmm...maybe I should post this on my own blog today! But I wrote it for/to you, Deanna. Your blog friendship has been one of the good connections that have come from blogging for me.
Can't stop the Serenity!]

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”
~Voltaire