Well, hello there, it's been a while hasn't it?
I have been thinking about this post for a while now - what to say about my almost year long disappearance from my blog - thinking that maybe I could just do a summary post of the major events that have happened over the past year and then just try and get on with the business of blogging. I think, though, that the best thing to do is just to pick up the story from here knowing that the things that have happened that I can talk about will be described in due time.
And so - what I've been thinking about the most recently is the idea of connections and how we get from one path from another via complicated, and sometimes remarkably uncomplicated series of connections.
The name of my blog, Concateknit, is a play on the word 'concatenate', a verb meaning to link together in a series (you'd be amused to know how many people have assumed my name was Cate, though). It was meant, initially, as a clever title for a knitting blog, since that is what we knitters do, isn't it? Create a series of linking loops out of yarn? But my little play on the word 'concatenate' also describes an integral aspect of my own character - someone who spends a great deal of time thinking about connections, and who seeks to identify and then understand the genesis of those connections.
So maybe that's all I really need to say about the last year. I've been searching for connections, and the meanings within them. I've been looking to understand the beginning of things, starting with the present and tracing series of movements back to some kind of first. And in searching, I've been looking for meaning - meaning in my own life, meaning in my surroundings, meaning in my country, meaning in the world as it looks to me right now. It's become clear to me that at some point I stopped trying to understand why things were happening in the world the way that they were. That my worldview was too narrow, too one-sided, and that I had become disconnected from my worldview and had lost my ability to either defend my worldview or cogently understand the other side's presumptions and assumptions.
I am trying to re-educate myself now, and it can be difficult in the midst of a nation and news media that speaks in nothing but platitudes and circular reasoning. I'm struggling to find information that is just that - information, and not either a sales pitch or political agenda. It's difficult, sometimes disheartening, and sometimes exhilarating.
I've always felt that before I could understand or speak to the world around me, I had to understand myself and my own motivations. My series of "working it out" posts stand as an example of that mindset. I'm beginning to understand, though, that my attitude has essentially always given me a pass for not having a stronger opinion or a better grasp of current events and what spawned them. I've revoked my own pass. As a citizen of this country since my birth 35 years ago, it is my obligation to have informed opinions about the state of this country, and the likely bi-product of those opinions will be a clearer understanding of the things about myself I've been trying to unravel for decades now.
So that's where I am right now. Struggling to wrap my head around issues that seem to defy clarity, while continuing to move forward in my life, making new connections, strengthening some old connections, and severing others. I write this on a dreary Sunday afternoon, surrounded by three (yes, three) sleeping doggies whom I will soon have to disturb in order to run a few errands before the week's craziness descends upon me, relieved to finally have broken my blog silence and eager to begin participating in a new dialog.
