Saturday, January 18, 2014

I gotta be me



Hello. My name is Reya and I am a blogger. I've been a blogger for ages, since way before blogging, since before the internet. By blogger what I mean is that I'm the kind of artist who relishes free, public displays of creative expression.

As a kid, I painted murals on the walls of my bedroom, out in the garage, on the sidewalks (with chalk, not paint). Later I bought small squares of advertising space in weekly rags in which I either wrote something or drew something. I loved the unedited, uncurated space. I paid for it, I could put anything I wanted there. Once I left it completely blank. I was so avant garde!

When the first street artists, like Keith Haring and Jean Basquiat, came into the mainstream, I immediately fell in love with that form. About ten years ago when I learned about blogging from my niece, I was all over it immediately. I had been writing and emailing essays to my friends and family for awhile, a practice that now seems forced, more like spamming than blogging. Blogs are not required reading, not ever. I love that.

In the blog world, I flourished. I met people from all over the world, many of whom have become "real life" friends. At the height of the DC blog scene, I attended blog happy hours as often as I could. That was a golden era that came to an end - as all things must. It was glorious while it lasted.

I closed my old blog at the end of 2013. It was well past its expiration date and I was posting less and less frequently. You might wonder what has inspired me to create this new blog. My answer is: I am Reya and I am a blogger. The practice of writing, of publishing as an offering, does me a world of good. I've missed the practice and so I am back.

It will take me awhile to figure out how I want this new blog to look. I'm eager to connect with other bloggers again, to come fully back into this lovely, quirky community. It's good to be back, it surely is.

Shalom.

12 comments:

  1. EXCELLENT! So glad to see this blog, Ms. Reya! Looking forward to reading you every day, as I have done for the past ..long time...LOVE!

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  2. Looking forward to continued reading

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  3. Love it. Glad you are back in a more voluble form than FB :)

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  4. Hello! more blogging, though for me it means sharing what I've discovered in my intertnet travels. And I absolutely love the notion of buying ad space to say publicly whatever you wanted. WAAAAY ahead of the blogging curve.

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  5. Still lots of pictures? Please?

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  6. Of course! And always pictures on Facebook.

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