May is National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo. The challenge is to post every single day for the entire month. I signed up to participate, mostly because I want to get better at this, but also because I've been feeling uninspired this year. My posting has become infrequent and somewhat erratic. I'm hoping this challenge will help me rediscover my voice and improve this blog for those of you who continue to read it. But, here it is May 2 already and I'm a day behind. Such is life.
The topic for the month is Nourishment. I think this is fitting, not only because I blog about food, but also because this blog is a hobby - one of my favorite hobbies (even if I get discouraged sometimes). So as I embark on this challenge, I am thinking about nourishment in the context not just of food, but of how we live. And this hobby of mine is a good example.
We are all busy people with work and family and housekeeping and whatnot that adds up to an endless to-do list of chores and obligations. And this is where cultivating a hobby can enrich life. Carving off time to explore a particular skill or craft allows us to reconnect with that child-brain, the part of the brain that wants to build, to create, to make something or discover something or figure something out just for the sake of knowing it. When we step out of the deadlines and the traffic and the schedules into this space, we are deliberately choosing to feed this child-brain, to feed it and nourish it. And when we nourish this other consciousness, the things we see and do and learn can carry over into the rest of our lives.
That's what this blog has done for me. It has given me a venue to improve my writing, to express my thoughts on something other than my chosen profession, to improve my photography, and to learn more about cooking and food and nutrition. This improves the work I do at my job in terms of my communication skills, my ability to express myself, and my problem-solving skills. When periods of ennui creep in, I feel a little blind. When I don't engage in this blog regularly, I do feel as if something is missing. And, if the dry spell continues for too long, a malaise starts to creep into my life.
And without active cultivation of this hobby, something is definitely missing. So for the next month I will be posting. A lot. I will be reconnecting with my child-brain and giving her a platform to write about nourishment. And when the month is over, I hope to once again feel inspired. And nourished.