The Sunday Salon: Or, the torpor spreads...

As I poked around in the blogosphere this morning, procrastinating from doing the hours of grading and lesson planning that I really should get to in a few more minutes, I noted how many of us seem to feel less-than-enthusiastic right now about writing.   Oh, we're still reading - perhaps less than usual, what with the extra demands of the season - but we just can't seem to get up the ganas to blog about it in these dark days.

And then I thought:  Well, perhaps that's natural.  Literally. 

As daylight shortens and so much of the plant kingdom goes dormant, perhaps we too are meant to rest rather than to generate.  So why question?  Why not simply do what comes naturally?

When I asked readers last week to offer suggestions about how to re-light my blogging fire, you offered heartening and wise advice, and I'll be taking it.   But I'm just now realizing that one of the few areas in my life that's entirely under my control, allowing me to work with the ebb and flow of my own natural rhythms and desires, is this blogging endeavor.  So shouldn't I - and perhaps we - treat it as the rare gift it is:  The opportunity to share ourselves with the world when we wish, as we wish?  And shouldn't I - as many of you advised - cultivate that? 

I think yes.

MFB,
L

I did finish a book this week: The Secret River by Kate Greenville.  I appreciated this award-winning novel offering one man's journey from England to Australia during the early days of colonization.  Perhaps I'll write a brief review of this one later, but suffice to say for now that I recommend it, and every single member of our book group found it a worthy read too.  That's rare, of course, and pretty high praise.

I'm in the middle of The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman, and although the first hundred pages or so didn't capture me the way her typical light fictions do, I'm glad that I stuck with it as the story's blossoming and deepening now into what feels like a lastingly memorable historical fiction set in 70 C.E. on Mount Masada in the Judean desert.  It's a period in history that I know little about, and I find myself looking forward to my hour-a-day reading time to return there to the lives of the four women around whom this story revolves.