Fire, in this case, is passion. If you want to be a successful blogger, find your fire.
The advice comes from The Art of Blogging. I wish I’d read that before launching Views from the Edge years ago. But, hey, it’s never too late, right?
Thanks to fellow-blogger Marilyn Armstrong for the photo. I’m musing on the lily pad!
So, what, I’m asking myself, is my passion? What’s the fire in my belly? The thing that makes me tick? The thing that makes me come alive? It’s a simple question. A clarifying question. But the answer’s not so simple. Not so clear.
Writing that last incomplete sentence led me to my fire, my life passion: To see more clearly!
Life is strange. Truth is almost always strange, sometimes stranger than fiction (Lord Byron). Searching for what’s real — cutting through the appearances, illusions, shams, and socially acceptable convictions and beliefs — has always been my fire. I am naturally skeptical of things that seem normal and claims that call for my allegiance.
garden fish pond
Since the day I plunged to the bottom of Dickie Tinsley’s fish pond after Mrs. Thomas told our Vacation Bible School kindergarten class that Peter could walk on water because he had faith, my fire has been a quest to get to what is real — to see more clearly.
I used to be a preacher man. Now I’m a blogger. According to The Art of Blogging, anyone who wants to be a successful blogger needs to pay as much attention to a post’s ending as to its beginning. I need to end not with a preacher’s declaration but with a philosopher’s query that invites readers to engage and respond from their own experience. So here’s the question that invites your response:
What’s your fire? What’s your passion?
- Gordon, Chaska, MN, September 30, 2018.
Views from the Edge 
Classical music, and reading certain types of classics (Austen, Dickens, Wilkie Collins) and British mysteries of the more or less non-gory type (Sayers, Marsh, Tey, and in this century, Louise Penny). Nothing particularly useful — or, more honestly, unqualified: nothing useful.
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I love what I see in the world around me and capturing it in photographs. I also love digging in the dirt, planting seeds and growing a garden, connecting physically with Mother Earth. I often think of it as “what gives my life meaning?” And then there is time with the grandchildren. What a gift!
Gordon, thank you for your writing it “lights my thinking fire!”
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Good Morning, Maria! You’ve found your passion. I have thought recently that appreciation of nature has become a passion for me. I’m peaceful at the cabin by the wetland. More at home with the trumpeter swans, sandhill cranes, mergansers and loons than with the rude shouting of public life.
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Good Question.. indeed….?
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Finding your passion, Karin, is like discovering your deepest gift, a cause for self-respect and the love of self that opens the heart to the love of the other.
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I just like writing. Before the current political horrors, I wrote about other things. To be fair, I write because I am a writer. I can’t even imagine NOT writing.
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I understand. It’s in your DNA.
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