1,000th Post

So I made it. One thousand posts. More words written in this one place than maybe two or three books combined. Some days I thought I would close down this blog and go quietly away. I felt revealed. I felt shy. Some days I felt the weight of all the words here, all the life that tumbled through them for good and ill, and I wanted to just start anew. But I kept on going, you kept me going, this gathering of souls that feels like home, whose aches I wish fervently away, whose words astound, inspire, provoke and ransack my heart, and whose brilliance makes my eyes water.

In five years of writing this blog, I have often glimpsed the absurdity of private catharsis on this most public of stages, and yet still I continued to write what I had not yet shared with my own kin, in part because I could not untangle the threads until I wrote them here. Sometimes, it felt as if I was holding myself together with those unspooling lines of black type. I also wrote about my son and my daughter, wanting to create a record for them, wanting to hold the moments captured in photograps, in their eyes, remembering the long-ago psychic who told me they would know me better than I could imagine. I wanted that to be true. I told myself that strangers who happened by would not care. I had no idea that in time those strangers would become friends who could not be more real to me if I wrapped them in my arms and never let them go.

There is a word, seven rows up in the center column of that list. Thankful. I have had the occasion to use that word quite often of late. I am thankful for my family. I am thankful for my community of souls. I am thankful for you. I am thankful.