Words take time:

My sister Lauren shared the following quote recently on her blog:

A culture that is rooted more in images than in words will find it increasingly difficult to sustain any broad commitment to any truth, since truth is an abstraction requiring language. -- Kenneth Myers

It explains, far better than anything I could come up with, the radio silence that's been beaming loud (heh heh) and clear from my corner of the internet.

I am a big fan of images, and one of the reasons I love the internet so much is that it gives me access to this massive treasure trove of gloriousness from all around the globe (my reblogging tumblr account is basically a collection of everything I find pretty pretty, lovely, wondrous, or cool). Plus, in my own sometimes pathetic way, I get to contribute to the treasure trove. I can add to the discussion with snippets of my life, and pictures are so easy to capture and share that it can happen in just a few moments. All of this is good and lovely. But I've been realising lately that "snippets" were never the original intent for my blog. Originally, the guiding principle that my blog bounced from was Socrates' idea that 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' I think pictures enhance life and capture life, but -- for me, at least -- to really examine life requires words, and words take time.

So that's why it's been a bit echoey in here. I sort of told myself I wouldn't post again until I had something worth saying -- no, not worth saying, because that's far too great a burden to bear. Who among us would say anything at all if we were forced to weigh our words in the balance every thing throughout history that has been most worth saying? Let us just say, instead, that my goal is to post when I have something worth thinking about. And that doesn't necessarily mean something grave or heavy; no, just something that requires a little space to stop and pause.

I rush to add that in a war between words and images, there is no winner. We need them all, and no single form of artistry is greater than another. That's why I'll still be sharing pictures here, but as accompaniment to my words, not in place of them. For the other little snippets of daily life, there's my tumblr. (Oh, and I finally got around to creating an "about" page -- which goes a long way to destroying everything I've written here about finding things worth saying. Never mind...)