growing a garden

Gardening is my great past time.

I often tell people that if growing a garden was like buying furniture I wouldn’t be sitting on a bean bag but a sofa that I grew from a little seed. I am terror-stricken by the sight of bare ground, it looks forlorn and lacking the embrace of a good firm root or two… or three.

If you think of words as the seeds of your thoughts and the blog as the garden it becomes obvious that the qualities required to maintain a luscious garden are not far removed from those of a vibrant blog. Duh, it may have been obvious to most, but it came as a surprise to me.

So here are some similarities that jumped to greet this thought:

• Young things need more care. When starting a blog it needs your care and attention more than at any other time. I read a tweet from a colleague that he hadn’t posted in almost a year and only now was beginning to lose readers. This was of course, as he hastened to add,  due to his 200,000 archived words.
• Things sometimes crop up in your garden that you didn’t plan to plant. It may be tempting to pull them out as weeds but given time you may find that they grow into the focal point of your garden. I often find that my posts morph into something other than what my initial intention was. Their spontaneity makes for a more fluid style of writing that I yearn for in my more considered pieces.
• Weeds are bad. Remove them quick or they will sap valuable nutrients from your more deserving plants. This is a yogic contradiction, “One man’s weed is another man’s high”. The easiest translation to this conundrum is that ideas can get stale after a while. If you get stuck in a rut, don’t be afraid to uproot and start again.
• A healthy indigenous garden will encourage an ecosystem all of it’s own. By being aware of your local audience (in the blogosphere this is not necessarily a geographical local but a mindspace one) you can create an arena where like minded people converge and feed you and themselves with new and even more varied slants of thought. The thing to remember is that this sort of growth is organic in all senses of the word, be patient and enjoy the ride.
• Variety will create a more harmonious environment than a mono-cultural monotony. Keep your ideas varied, and exciting… most exciting of all for yourself the gardener. I’m not sure how well this last bit of advice pans out. I’m still new to this game and I notice that most people specialise a lot more than I do.

Just like you will often hear somebody bemoan their lack of green fingers, the lack of nurture or focus on one’s blog leads to the abrupt end of many a potential narrative. Full of the enthusiasm, surge of ideas and promise of a spirit killed before it’s time, abondoned blogs roam the interwebs like ghosts in a haunted house.

listening to readings

Reading, what a pleasure. . . The way a book can transport, mesmerise, have you groggy-eyed at morning from an all-night feast. Books are a real sanctuary. I’m even in a book club!!  You may laugh at this last assertion, but when I revealed this to a friend the other day, her tweet came back as “You teach yoga, you’re in a book club, you’re so bohemian! Or gay…?” I get this a lot, good thing I didn’t tell her about my sewing classes, I would have been sunk!!

I’m also really into Audio books. I get them from the Listener’s Library. I’ve often been accused of being somehow at fault or of cheating, but traffic has never been the same. Sometimes I’m even late to work because I’m sitting in the car park listening to some riveting part of the story that can’t wait until the trip back home. I think it’s unfair to feel guilty for listening to your favourite stories, after all, the first stories we ever heard were from mouth to ear and for most of us indigenous Africans, that is still how we learnt the most powerful of our childhood stories.  You could even argue, that first came the word and it’s reverberations permeate reality to this day. There is power in the oral story telling tradition. For me it has revealed the flow of sentences and the imagery that follows in their wake.

So today, when I was spending another distracted day at the office looking for widgets for the blog, I thought I must find a “What am I reading” widget. I failed to find one. If you have any suggestions please tell me. In thinking about the widget, I decided to be true to what I really do. I had to do a bit of HTML coding but you will now find not only the “What am I reading” section, but also “What am I listening to”.

Don’t judge me now. Think of it as the upliftment of the other senses. Modern society is so dominated by the two receptors at the front of our heads, let’s give a chance to the others.

10 things to obsess about your new blog

Since starting this blog, I find myself consumed. It is in my nature and how I learn. If any of you have ever watched a chicken scratch and pick in the same place you may understand. The only time I was so petrified and ecstatic all at the same time was when I moved here from the farm. These are probably very common obsessions but I thought I’d share mine.

1. Stats! Stats! Stats! How many hits have I got this past half hour? This day? My F5 key is getting worn out.
2. Where do they come from? Since I got ClustrMaps, I love looking at my map to see where the next little red dot is going to come from.
3. Who is referring me? I still haven’t link-loved to any great degree but there are aggregators and search engine referrals. It was obvious that with this particular blog title I would get some unsavoury referrals, porn is the underbelly of the interweb.
4. Which aggregators are relevant? trendy? They of course come with their own stats counters, communication tools and community. South African aggregators include ‘blogs’ that are collections of blogs. If you suffer from the mildest sense of competition once you are part of any community you will  look around and see what the ‘competition’ are doing. You may feel it’s unfair this group blog thing.
5. What’s my ranking? This is the obvious result of the need to contextualise the numbers that you are obsessing about.
6. How can I drive more traffic to my blog? I laughed when I found myself googling this. Wasn’t my reason for this to improve my writing skills? Then, like wavering meditation,  I find myself wondering how much I can abuse my twitterfeed to get hits?
7. What gadgets can I add to my blog? I did a bit of research before choosing this WordPress platform over its arch rival Blogger and one of the selling points was the plugins. This does not apply to wordpress.com, the blog hosting website but rather the web publishing platform that you download from wordpress.org and configure on your own dedicated site. On the site you get what are called widgets. They are limited in their functionality but there are enough toys to play with.
8. Am I spending too long on my blog? Am I spending too little time on my blog? These somewhat contradictory feelings come like day and night. I suppose in time I will settle down to an anxiety- less rhythm.
9. What can I write about today? I’ve noticed that some blogs are a line followed by a picture or link or any other eye-candy. Somehow that feels like cheating but I’ve already laughed at my alpha male behaviour. Can you blame me? I live in a house where I am the only male, even the cats are female. There is the human man who feeds me but he doesn’t count. The positive thing about this obsession is that it makes me focus in my day – the texture, the conversation, the observations.  All this makes me more immersed in writing, which is the ultimate aim of this blog.
10. Will anyone even care what you are writing? This is that feeling of being a lone light in a Johannesburg summer storm. If I remember why I’m doing this, when the rumbling, torrents and thunder subside, I’ll be able to bask in the warmth of light and hope of new beginnings.