The Blog's Tomorrow and Link-Sharing!

Spring. Travel. De-cluttering. It's got me thinking about where this blog is headed to - and if it has run its course. Should I start something completely new? Or not? I am increasingly using Instagram as that space to muse or ramble and I feel that a lot of what I post here simply seems to be an extension of my Insta-thoughts.

As I ponder further about the blog's tomorrow, I would like to jump on the link-sharing post bandwagon that I have seen on several blogs that I follow. I am mostly on Twitter to check out the interesting links and be privy to multiple conversations so it's easy to lose track of what you discover and more importantly, what you would really like to share...so thought I would present my list of what caught my fancy in the last few weeks.

*I can't remember when I first started reading Gretchen Rubin's blog but it's always been an useful and thought-provoking resource, encouraging me to think about about how introducing seemingly minimal changes into my routine and lifestyle can contribute to a happier bigger picture. I have yet to read any of her books but I have been following her blog for years. She's going to launch a book about cultivating habits tomorrow and she had been interviewing a personality each week to learn more about their habits in the run up towards the book's release. While I enjoyed reading and learning more about the author, Hannah Nordhaus's habits, what I was even more intrigued by was the book she's recently written, American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest. Ghost, gender, desert, memoir, travelogue: this is exactly my sort of book!

*Having written nothing but poetry for the first ten years of my writing life, I abandoned it for fiction and then, subsequently, non-fiction and journalism. I have started to write poetry in fits and spurts again and even though the results are far from what I would be satisfied with, it's nonetheless giving me pleasure. I thought this was a beautiful piece about an ecologist mother turning to poetry to provide succor to her troubled teenage daughter.

*I so want to visit Spiti Valley after reading this!

*I fell in love with Chinki Sinha's stunningly written essay about the travails of love in the time of internet. Just take the opening paragraph for instance: "And then, there were no lilies. Although when she stops by the florist sometimes, she tries to imagine what a thousand of them would look like. Then, she hurries to the grocery store, and never buys lilies. The promise of lilies remained suspended. In time, and in anticipation, and later in memory."

*I have bit of an issue with the notion of a day called Women's Day! For me, it amounts to tokenism, simply singling out a day for half of the world's population to recognise, revere, and respect their innate strength and dignity...when it instead should be a constant, continuous process to be performed every single day, rather than just one. Nevertheless, when National Geographic asked seven of their women photographers to share a powerful image of the women they have photographed over the years in honor of Women's Day, they came up with these moving photo-stories...and which I found hugely inspirational.

PS My first post without pictures! Well, that's a first for this blog...