Photo courtesy of Justin Behan. 

A Valentine for my Readers….

“I can’t find the Negroni filter on my iPhone camera app,” Justin texts,  “It must be specific to your smart phone.”

I’m pretty sure it was just one Negroni.  Bob’s into them right now.  He convinced me to try one on music night last Sunday.  I was really enjoying it, so Mom asked if she could try it.  Then she finished it.  So Bob made me another one.  And then I think I lost that one somewhere in the house, so I’m still not certain I’ve had a complete drink yet. 

But it didn’t stop it from having an effect, as this video attests.

It’s not that I couldn’t operate the camera to record this video.  It’s that I was too busy trying to dance and film at the same time. 

If I were still on social media, I might have posted the video there, but I’ve now officially crossed the one year mark since my exodus.  I just post in the newsletter and on the blog.

The farm and cafe business didn’t seem to suffer at all from dropping Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.  But it might be considered potential suicide for a writer to make this decision.  

I can’t submit a book proposal to a publisher without giving an accounting of my “following” on each platform. My choice to walk away from social media represents one more in a line of choices where I’ve been picky about what publicity opportunities I would pursue, and which ones I’d abandon in favor of cooking supper, running a cafe, processing Thanksgiving turkeys, or disappearing into the woods.

And as I age, I have to ask myself if that means I’ve squandered my gift; failed to successfully distribute the lessons I’ve learned from my research and experiences.   Can a writer be a legitimate writer, living in obscurity, pushing out words for a tiny audience, then retreating into the fabric of life?

Conventional wisdom would say NO.

But I have learned the opposite.  

Even without participating in social media, this digital age has enabled me to enjoy the power of a tiny audience.  I haven’t amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who want to know what I eat for breakfast.  Instead, I have been gifted a community of thoughtful readers and patrons who engage directly with me and my work.  Together we make sense of life’s lessons, and find joy on our path.  And then each of us  take the lessons and joys, fold them into our own  experience, and share the fresh insight with creativity, originality and intelligence in our own circles. If a writer is supposed to be a celebrity, I have failed.  If a writer is supposed to employ the written world to help us experience the world more deeply, then I think I’m doing just fine.

Thank you for being the reader that makes me get up at 3am and write.  Thank you for teaching me that this is possible.  As a special Valentine, you get to enjoy the video made with the special Negroni filter that apparently only exists on my iPhone.