Mixed Up Files, or "On Not Three Blogs"

When Bekah was in third or fourth grade and a voracious reader, there was a book around whose title I loved--From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It's about a girl who drafts her little brother to run away with her to Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where they dupe the security guards and hide in the restroom until the museum is closed for the night, and, of course, they get embroiled in solving a mystery.

I don't remember if I ever actually read the book, but its title has always stayed with me. I suppose I often think of my journal or perhaps even more so my blogging as something akin to mixed-up files. Maybe the subtitle of my blog could be: From the seriously mixed-up files of the somewhat mixed-up mind of a relatively sane woman. 


Or something like that. Because that's really what this seems to be--it's sometimes a blog about painting, and sometimes a blog about leaving the priesthood and starting over to find a new path in life, and sometimes about what it was like to have been an Episcopal priest, and sometimes it's about my childhood, and sometimes it's about . . . well, being alive, being human, being myself. (I know, that last phrase sounds a bit egocentric, but I don't really know what it's like to be anyone else.)

This blog is, for better or worse, all of those things, and in no particular order. Believe me, I spend lots of time (usually in those gaps between blog posts) debating the merits of having a blog that's only about my art or only about leaving the priesthood or only about--you get the idea. For a while I even had two blogs  at the same time, but they blurred and overlapped, and I wasted a lot of energy trying decide when I was writing for which. So I gave up on that track and retreated back to one blog.

I've even thought about starting a money blog, because dealing with money and finances and how to make a living having left the one profession I was trained for does occupy my thoughts quite a bit. And I've learned a lot about myself and money (and about money in general) in the last couple of years, and I have a few funny and hair-raising stories to tell. (Talk about seriously mixed-up files!)

I have a feeling the time is near when I may actually start an art-only blog for posting images of paintings and maybe even of drawings. That one seems relatively straight-forward, and it doesn't mean I can't blog about painting in my mixed-up files blog.

But I'm not quite there yet.

I've even composed in my head a blog post titled "On Not Three Blogs," which is kind of an in-joke for students of Christian theology who might remember Gregory of Nyssa's essay "On Not Three Gods" about the doctrine of the Trinity. OK. I had to Google "On Not Three Gods" to remember who wrote it--which one of those so-called Church Fathers. But writing this has made me realize perhaps that's the title of this post.

So for the time being I will keep going in this blog, thinking of it as my "mixed-up files" blog. Or more precisely, From the seriously mixed-up files of the somewhat mixed-up mind of a relatively sane woman.