"What have we learned so far?"

Hello, this is Ann.

By trade, I am considered an artisan, meaning I make my living by bringing ideas into some sort of tangible manifestation. My relationship to the things I create is that I just facilitate their existence, that when I'm making things, I don't necessarily know what is going to happen. Such is my relationship to chaos.

For this past week, I've been waiting to see how this blog will manifest itself. In my mind, a blog can't be all self-indulgent navel-gazing, it has to have a reason for existence, an impetus to push it along. All art says something, otherwise we are just proverbial monkeys throwing typewriters at the wall.

Over the weekend, I thought that the underlying fuel under this blog was going to be anger, because what was compelling me to write was fury, or frustration, or just plain bitching.

The more I considered it, the more I realized that this wasn't really the underlying motivation. It is not anger that compels people to blog, it is passion. What saddens me, what makes me angry, are abuses against things that I am passionate about. To reveal these passions is quite an intimate thing to share with unseen strangers.

My intent is ask for awareness. If people could only see the art and beauty that surrounds them, if they just would just fucking pay attention, they wouldn't need to gobble everything up looking for the next thing to consume when they feel hollow. They would savor these small silent exquisite moments in life and cherish them.

Are blogs shouting into the wind? I don't know. I never allowed myself to shout into the wind before. It is both frightening and thrilling to do this, hopefully I can justify your bandwidth.