Dear Friends: Many of you will recall that in the first entry on this blog, I spoke of Tolkien’s idea about roads: that the same path which leads through Mirkwood and to the Lonely Mountain itself is the one that passes just outside the front doorstep of our hobbit holes; it’s all connected. The journey to far-off lands begins by stepping out through our own front doors.
Some of you have followed this blog since April 23, 2008. Others of you (as occurs in all great stories) have joined us along the way. We’ve marched through 140 posts and 3,598 comments!
And now we have come to a great Transition.
Students of classical mythology will recognize the name of Janus, the Roman god for whom January is named. Janus (also called Janus Bifrons) was the god of beginnings, openings, entrances, doorways, and endings. [January begins the new year but marks the end of the former.] In Roman myth, the place of Janus is secondary only to the place of Jupiter (Zeus).
- Janus, the god of beginnings, endings, and doorways
In images, Janus is usually depicted as having two faces: one looking forward into the future, one peering backward into the past.
We are crossing the swinging rope bridge from WordPress to my all-new, active web site, the new home of the blog. I’ve made efforts to make the new place feel like home to loyal readers. A few things will need ironing out, such as the issue of blog avatars (our snowflakes and quilt squares, to which many of us have become attached). I’m not sure exactly how this will work, but I am inquiring into how our accustomed avatars may be preserved.
This is a brave and beautiful new land. Giving me a web site is like giving a teenager a car. As one friend, speaking of me, put it: “You bleed web content.”
I encourage you to do what it says: sign up to follow my blog. In the future, I’m going to write posts here, and they won’t show up over on WordPress. Slowly, we’re going to phase the old blog out, and this new site will be my headquarters on the Web. It’s sad to leave the old digs where we’ve been for the length of a Presidency, but the new place allows for a lot more. And we all signed on for adventure, right?
I’m glad you made it here! The transition won’t happen all at once, but it’s time to start pulling up the tent stakes. Enjoy the new web site. Explore it. Follow its links. It’s a lot of fun. Try commenting here in the new blog location, and we’ll see what happens. And I will try to keep you updated on the transfer of blog avatars!
“The road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the road has gone,
And I must follow if I can!”
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