Has anyone besides me decided to repurpose her blog?

This is a cross post from my Build Peace blog.  I'm "repurposing" what has been my pretty far to the left blog, Build Peace, to be more about me and building peace at many levels including internally through acceptance, intention, attitude, simplification and other profoundly sound and sometimes seemingly trendy concepts. <!--break--> It came about due to a six month hiatus in posting to it due to illness and depression.  I thought, what the heck, I might as well share the perspective as I know others go through similar things all the time.  

So, here goes:  

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Repurposing This Blog: Build Peace

Over the last six months I have given a tremendous amount of thought
to starting a new blog that better reflects my current take on "life,
the universe and everything" than my build peace blog.   Everytime I
would find the perfect domain name for a new venture  and begin to
build a new whirling mass of me-ness in cyberspace I'd find that I
missed this blog into which I had put so much energy for so many years.
  Please allow me to be a bit self-reflective here and a bit
self-reflexive too as I deconstruct my thought processes about writing
and blogging about inner peace, world peace, paths to peace, tools of
peace, tools for peace, and... well you get the idea. 

I have to admit I heaved a huge sigh of relief the evening of the
election, Tuesday November 4th, when I gathered with a couple thousand
other Tucsonans to watch the returns come in at the University
Marriott.  I will never forget standing next to a long retired
colleague of my husband who came to the U of A after being booted from
the California University system during the highly political days of
the free speach civil rights era turbulence of the early 1960s and who
helped establish ACLU to this Old West enclave.  As McCain was
conceeding defeat I happened to see this man's face as complete and
utter joy washed over it.  

At that time I decided that I was going to take a couple days off for R
& R.  I ended up taking off six months.   Long story, short
version:  I had continuing pain after a bout with the stomach flu and
ended up finding out I have Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver between
Thanksgiving and Christmas.  After my esteemed scientifically-gifted
genius research professor husband (he might read this, lol) looked at
the literature, we think that the combination of anti-depressants I've
been on for many years could have contributed to the development of
this condition as well as my being significantly overweight.   It could
relate to the invasive and often toxic medical tests and treatments I
underwent as a child.  I never had hepatitis nor am I an alcoholic.

I don't do well with being ill.   It makes me depressed.  I have been
working on, and off -- a lot of off, some on -- on a book about my
childhood experience on the receiving end of my mother's instability
that I have come to realize falls into the range of behavior that has
been termed Munchause Syndrome by Proxy.  At least partially due to
being "sickly" and kept out of school and shuttled from doctor to
doctor when I was little so that it was not uncommon for me to miss up
to 100 school days a year during my primary education. 

My journals during the teen years are painful to read but allowed me as
a middle-aged adult to see that my isolation during my childhood
coupled with being thrust into the socially topsy-turvy, psychedelic
and sexually liberated world of the 1970s as a totally naive, socially
incompetent, pathologically shy human being were the primary factors
that contributed to multiple rapes, exploitation, and emotionally
abusive relationships, and less than wise choices that pretty much
characterized my teens and young adult life.  

Writing helped save my life time and again when the blank page or
screen was the only tool through which I could communicate - even if
that communication was basically just me talking to myself.   I became
fairly good at this apparently, and the winning of a state-wide writing
competition in High School allowed me to win scholarships that made it
possible for me to attend college.   Writing continued to be my main
communication channel with the world as I wrote essays, exams, reports
and post-graduate research reports and theses. 

Then the internet evolved into the web and I reached out through words
and found that while I was a social mutant (and mutations can be a very
good thing that allow the process of evolution to happen) I was also
thinking things and making observations that other people found
interesting and sometimes even amusing when I wrote about them.  I was
blogging long before a thing called a web log existed.  

Then CODEPINK and I found each other.   This blog, Build Peace, has
been the most consistent and meaningful body of my writing to date.  
It allowed me to enter the BlogHer community of women's online voices. 

A few days ago I was talking to a Second Life friend about my dilemma
of attempting  to shift my peace activism and writing from a broader
and more tempered perspective than I had in Build Peace.  She said,
"Repurpose the blog."  Initially I thought, "Ugh,  corporate speak.
Yuck.  Ptooey."  But then, trying to live the  peace and be the peace I
write about, I decided that I can continue writing/blogging about info
that helps me build my own peace and share that with others that is the
only way peace in our world will ever be built - person to person, one
word at a time.... and with my bias showing I will further state that a
sustainable peace must be built by women talking to each other and
creating the world we want for our children.  

-------------

Words like emergence, energy work, calmness, spiritual, belief,
attraction and the like will be far more common here than in the past. 
I will talk about my struggle to lose weight, the challenge of shifting
to an empty nest at home, and about healing.  Politics will undoubtedly
creep in... I've been political since I was about 10, but I will try to
mediate my outrage and use  words like Fascist and F**k far less often
and perhaps not at all from this time forward.  Maybe I can even get
the Huffington Post to end their ban on links to my site in their
comments.   Purportedly this is because of profanity.   We'll see.  

Anyway, consider Build Peace blog repurposed.  The appearance will change dramatically.  The content may too.    Peace to you all.

Nancy