The fifth, or maybe sixth, times the charm. I can’t document it due to old email accounts lost in cyberspace, but I would guess that this is the fifth blog I’ve created. In fact, when I created this one, I learned that I already had one on this host. I never posted anything, never started anything. So here I am again.
Why write a blog? I’ve read a lot of blogs that smell of “my life is so interesting everyone else should know about it” or “my opinions are so novel everyone should know about them.” My life is neither that interesting nor are my opinions novel. My opinions, even about important things, are all over the place, some would say incoherent, and I would hesitate to make them public today as they might change tomorrow. My life is truly unremarkable, at least to me. The most interesting about me, without a doubt, is that I live a a rural Alaskan village on Kodiak Island. But my life there is quite mundane. I don’t hunt, and I’m a spectacularly poor fisherman, though I gladly welcome gifts of salmon, halibut, cod, crab, and venison from others. I’m a teacher at a small school — not even 30 students K-12. Two of those are my daughters Claire, age 11, and Ruby, age 8. Penelope, age 4, goes to preschool. When she’s not at preschool, she hangs out with my wife, Amber, at her office. She works for the Alutiiq Tribe of Old Harbor as a women’s wellness advocate. We’ve been here for a year and plan to be hear for about one more. Stay tuned to see where we go next.
But why write a blog? To put it briefly, I think that someone out there, somewhere, might share my struggles, particularly my struggles with faith, the cultural faith I inherited by birth into the Bible belt, the faith I embraced personally as a teenager, and the faith I have struggled with even as I embrace it now. If you haven’t shared these struggles, you know someone who has, even if you don’t know it, and maybe my story will help you understand that those of us who struggle still have something to contribute. I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see.
Shapes and Stories 