Kindling, at its core, is my blog. And I f*cking hate that.
Since it started, I’ve been calling it a “media company,” or an “online magazine”, or even a “catalog of humanity’s evolution.” Anything so I don’t have to call it a blog! Anything so I don’t have to think of myself as a blogger.
I have all sorts of baggage around being a “blogger.” When I think of a blogger, I think of someone scribbling away at their computer in the middle of the night with some misguided belief that they’re saving the world or that they’ve revealed some great truth that no one has yet discovered. There’s a self-absorption to it that I find uncomfortable. There’s somehow more dignity in being a journalist, a short-story author, or an essayist. Even the sounds of the word “blogger” feel somehow degrading.
Yet, here I am, with a blog. I feel like it’s time to own it.
When I really think about it, it scares me. That’s where my judgments about it come from. I have ideas and possibilities that I want to get out, but I have no clue whether they are actually of value to the world. They just offer another opportunity for the world to reject me, another way for me to spin the story I’m not good enough.
But Joseph Campbell once wrote “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” So more and more, when I feel fear, I follow.
So here I go, into the cave. From here on out, I’ll be writing (roughly) every day with very short snippets of my thinking and experience. My hope is that in doing so, I might help reveal possibility for a better world and the beauty of our current world, when many of us feel despair.