Green Oasis

I try to scan the spam comments that Akismet catches once a week just in case some ham snuck in (yes, I said “snuck”). I’ve recently been inundated from one or two IP addresses so I am now blocking them from using the comment form. If you experience any wonkiness, let me know.

My little experiment in reclaiming my time and focus got me thinking about the time I spend reading blogs. I’ve been a lot more productive in my non-blog life now that I’ve ignored 168 Mormon-related items in my feed reader in the last two weeks. I’m now also reconsidering many of the other blogs that I read.

To be fair, I also wondered what value I’m providing to the literally dozens of you who read my blog. I’m not sure my own blog would make the cut on my team anymore. It’s losing the focus that brought many of you here in the first place. This change in focus mirrors my own, so I won’t do anything to prevent that. C’est la vie.

I would also like the freedom to litter my blog with random thoughts and miscellany that would certainly be of little interest to you. I hesitate to decrease the signal-to-noise ratio because I respect you and your time. You should be doing better things with your life than wading through my stupid random thoughts.

So I’ve created a “Signal” feed which will only include the stuff that I’ve put time and thought into, stuff that I suspect might enrich your life. You can safely ignore the rest.

It’s funny the things you get famous for. More people have linked to my blog for this image of Bob from the movie Black Hole than anything else that I’ve done. I checked it out and (at least for me) my image was the first result for an image search for “bob black hole”.

Well, I’ve been blathering on for a year now. Happy First Blogiversary to me! I wonder if I should start celebrating unblogiversaries.

I’m not in much of a retrospective mood (which gets me off the hook of reading back over 212 posts), but in reading my very first post I ask myself whether I made the right decision a year ago. Did I do the right thing in leaving the church?

We lay aside the expectation of a particular result,
and do the right thing because it is right.
We do our duty, we stand and fight.
We do not do so without profound compassion for others.
(Krishna to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita)

Without question, the past year has seen a lot of growth for me. I believe that I’m a better person for having made the choice that I did. I only regret any turmoil and suffering my actions caused and secondly that I didn’t see my way to do it sooner. C’est la vie. Forgiveness is letting go of the hope of a better past.

I echo this sentiment again:

Others may say that I allowed myself to be seduced by falsehoods. It feels more like I was seduced by the truth. Letting go of the bogeymen in my head led me to greater peace, greater clarity, more happiness, and more power to do good. This change of heart is delicious to me.

Instead of looking back over my shoulder, I’d much rather look prospectively. I hope the future will see me continue to gradually wean myself of concerns about Mormonism and religion. I love to learn things. I would like to move on to subjects that I have neglected because of the time and effort I have put into religion in my life. I know enough about religion to satisfy me for a while. Let me devote more of my time to other things. Yet I have a desire to show others what I have found, especially my children. Maybe I need to set down my thoughts on the subject and close the case for a while.

Let’s see what the future brings.

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, just never got around to it. I see a primary audience for this blog to be my posterity. It’s an online journal for the thoughts that I hope to share with them. This will often lead me to knowingly do things that are probably not the best to attract readers. Things like erratic posting styles and subjects, long dissertations on Mormon apologetics, making many updates to a post causing some feed readers to list multiple small revisions, etc. I realize that these might be annoying, but I’m trying to serve two masters. I enjoy the thoughts that others share here which help to enrich the offering. Just know that you’re not the only ones I’m talking to, and please forgive the annoyances.