Reflections About Blogging

Halcyon Days

The Halcyon is a legendary bird said to have a peaceful, calming influence on the sea. Modern usage is associated with happiness and tranquility.

Today is my 200th post since I opened this blog with my first post -- on February 11, 2012. My goodness, that amazes even me, that I have written  "almost" every day for the past eight months.

Thinking back, I can truly say I have enjoyed each and every day of my blogging life. When I began, I was spending 11 hours each day getting ready for work, commuting to work and putting in an 8-hour day at an office. I don't know how I found enough time to continue at the pace I did, until I retired on June 22.

But blogging was never, and is not now, a chore or a must-do thing on my agenda. I looked, and still look, forward to my time preparing it each day.

As you know from the variety of my posts, I am interested in a great many things, so my blog is difficult to categorize. Some blogs I enjoy are about cooking, fashion, gardening, art and a great many other topics. This one, Halcyon Days, is about wherever my brain is on any particular day. Books, poems, food, nature, pets, trips, photography just for the fun of it, stories about people from the past -- you name it. But always, hopefully, presented in an uplifting manner. Calm, peaceful Halcyon Days: not always achieved but always striving for.

Halcyon, a word rarely used today outside the expression “halcyon days,” means calm, tranquil, happy or carefree.

The term evokes images of an earlier time, remembered as
idyllic, whether accurately or not. Current use tends to be nostalgic and recalling the seemingly endless sunny days of youth.

While our busy lives don't always allow us Halcyon Days, we
can carve out time each day to slow down, enjoy the small things life has to offer and appreciate the beauty that’s
always there -- if only we open our eyes and hearts to it.

Thank you for visiting my blog. Together we can seek out the beauty and the meaningful on our daily journey through life.

For those who occasionally visit and read the posts, I thank you. To those who regularly visit and take the time to leave a comment, I REALLY thank you. To be able to have a two-way conversation with those of you both nearby and on the other side of the globe, well, that's really special and one of the great joys of blogging.

I believe we bloggers sometimes get caught up with wondering, "hello, is anyone out there?" But in the end, it has to be about the one who sits down to write it: a way of sorting out our thoughts, of making sense of our surroundings, of our past, our present and our future and connecting with others.

Another advantage of writing a blog has been becoming more aware of my surroundings, of paying better attention, of focusing on the small things. After all, hardly a day passes that my brain is not jogged into thinking, "hey, that's something I want to blog about."

Will the newness of it all wear off? After all, eight months is a short amount of time. Perhaps. But for now I am as enthusiastic about it as I was when I began.

And I always welcome your feedback. It's amazing how many blog ideas I have gotten from fellow bloggers or from readers.

Wishing you a great week!