Good to hear from you!

I wish I had more time to blog. I love writing. I write a lot in my job and enjoy developing teaching material. I would love to be a writer one day. I love my journal and enjoy writing rather than typing.

When I blog I write in a rush, I should work on that!

I blog, because I want to be a writer.

Take care,

VOX is a safe zone where I’ve met new friends and found new insights.

The first is to get my ideas and writings out. I’m a naturally shy person, so telling people my thoughts is difficult. The irony is that instead of sharing it with someone I know, I’m sharing what I think with potentially millions of people… that’s kind of freaky.

The second is for conversation. After my thoughts are exposed, I like to get other’s opinions on them. To develop my ideas and beliefs with others in online community. I love to ask questions and search for answers. It just works better with people in a public forum.

I love the freedom of communication involved with the whole Weblog experience, above all it has given me the chance to “speak” my mind freely and without hesitation.

I can’t ever go back.

London’s aright too!

When are you and Joe going to visit the UK?! I told Joe in May that you’d both be very welcome to visit us here in sunny Sheffield if you ever come. (Ok, it’s not normally sunny here…we’re just in a heat wave right now…happens every 20 years or so!)

One of the things that I have come to notice as a result of blogging (voxing!) is that my interactions with friends (who often I’ve never met) on VOX are more frequent than with many of my friends within the UK, and even Sheffield. And in that sense it really is like a neighbourhood. In days gone by, neighbours were part of our everyday lives. VOX seems to bring that aspect of life back in a whole new way.

I love the diversity of people that I bump into walking around VOX too. I keep track of all the visitors to my VOX and people from something like 20 different nations have stopped by. I love that.

I love too that friendships haven’t been limited to the world of virtual reality. Meeting Dean, Tina, and Jason in London in January was the first of these virtual to physical relationships. Then Alex - also in London - in April. Then Steve and Deana coming to stay with us in Newport Coast. And then more than I have time to list when we turned up in LA in May. And ahead into the future, Steve and Deana will be coming to stay with us in Sheffield in September and then in January 2008 we are hoping to hook up with Hermann and Adel in Johannesburg. It’s amazing to think that just a few years ago, these relationships would never have happened. Virtual reality has created a whole new world of physical reality.

I think for me, I’ve just found the virtual world of blogging, and VOX in particular, to be a real enrichment to my physical, “real world” life. I feel like I’ve been encouraged to engage more deeply with the physical world around me rather than it being some kind of escapism from the real world, as some people worry about. I engage with VOX because I feel my life is richer for the diversity of people I connect with. I enjoy friendships that previously have never been possible. And, I definitely don’t blog because of any ambitions to be a wannabe journalist!

I started because I was moving to Chicago over the summer to do a church internship. A friend who was already a blogger encouraged me to start. She said it would be easier for my friends to look at my blog than for me to try emailing everyone separately, but that it was more interactive than a mass email and so felt more personal. She was right.

So why did I keep it up after I got back? Well, about that time my friends started to graduate from college and move away. Turns out the friends who read it the most while I was in Chicago, wound up far from Cincinnati: Florida. Washington D.C. Etc.

Is that still my reason for blogging– to keep in touch with friends in the “real world?” It was. Until my Aunt Lori introduced me to this blog called Into the Mystic. Huh. Here was a guy from California, posting stories about something he called the Mystic. And these stories sounded so familiar that I thought maybe I had read them before. Or even written them in a past life. So I kept reading. And then I started weighing in on a few conversations.

And then one day everything changed: this Alex guy invited me to Vox. Both the noun and the verb. And once I moved my web log to Voxtropolis, I gradually found that the people who were reading and posting on my Vox were not just friends from the “real” world. Increasingly they lived in other parts of the country and world. Increasingly they were very different from me. And increasingly I had never met them face to face. But they still felt like neighbors, and we were still able to have meaningful dialogues.

I can’t remember now how I found Parke from Texas or Sam from Sheffield or Deana from Colorado. But they’re friends and neighbors nevertheless. I care about their stories. And I care to tell them mine. So that’s why I vox. I feel connected. Like the story I’m telling is the same story everyone else is telling; a collective story. That’s why I include songs from popular culture and news articles about other countries. The whole earth is part of one big basket under the big blue sky that is still being woven togther. My Vox is my little piece of the basket.