I turned thirty-four last week and this is my 338th blog entry. I started posting here on at least a monthly basis when I was eighteen. So my little blog is older than some of my students.

I took a careful break from writing here a couple years ago, but then I came back before my prescribed sixth months were up. I returned not because I had more to say, or because anybody was clamoring for my words, but because this blog reminds me of so many of my former selves. This chronicle has been a resting place for the eighteen-year-old girl in a pencil skirt and sparkly shoes crouched at a desk in a dorm room, the wide-eyed twenty-two-year-old first-year teacher, fearful and stubborn with hope, the twenty-four-year-old who took a break from her personal journal because life had become too painful, but could not stop telling the truth in these public entries, the twenty-seven-year-old full of the bounty of a fresh place, of friends and deep green images, and even the wary, observant thirty-year-old, longing (like all of her former selves) for home. 

This has not been an easy space for me to write in for the last handful of years, but I assumed my dogged commitment to it was a dogged commitment to the practice of writing. Yet I am coming to understand that, in actuality, my attachment to this place (because this blog is a place to me) has been in honor of all those aforementioned young women who needed it, who flourished in it, who danced here when they knew how to dance nowhere else, who learned that, even sitting alone at a laptop, each could grab fistfuls of words from an abundant store and weave fierce threads of connection with souls on the other side of a screen.

And while I am still fully capable of writing about myself (probably at great length, if we’re honest) I no longer find that endeavor comfortable or satisfying. The things at the forefront of my mind nowadays are different. I am different. I am more guarded—which I mourn—but also, I hope, wiser. So this blog is due for retirement, like a beast of labor who has worked long and well.

My life still contains frequent joy, and quite likely I’ll still post on occasion—after a lovely bit of travel or for an end-of-year retrospective. But most of my writing will take place offline. I’ll still be writing, though—I’ve been drafting a novella in the last few months, and I’d like to see if there is more poetry swirling around in my gut or in my fingertips. But to know for sure, I’ll have to be quiet, to shut my mouth, to wait and to listen. So here I go, further up and further in, where the still, small voice abides.