Looking back over 1,737 blog posts

I spent part of this weekend looking back, over 1,737 Beth Kephart Books blog posts, an effort much akin to opening the pages of a diary.  I began this blog in October 2007.  I've posted poems, interviews with bloggers, conversations with writers, reflections on books read and people met, photographs, celebrations, gratitudes.  I have yearned.  I was, perhaps, most surprised by the number of work-in-progress excerpts I have posted, by how willing I have been to test things here, in a public fashion, to be so very much less than perfect. 

What does it all mean?  What is it good for?  There have been those who have urged me to spend my time doing "better" things.  I am glad, in this case, that I listened to my own heart pulse, that I kept blogging.  For as raw as some of this is, as unfinished, as sometimes redundant, as at times too frail or too skimpy or too soft, it exists, and because it does some part of a world that would have otherwise drifted remains—the weather I lived, the moonscapes I saw, the flowers I walked past, the people and books I have loved.  You, too, exist.  In your comments and in your goodness toward this strange and still enterprise.