Sadness and other bits and pieces

I am feeling a bit sad that Aristotle's Feminist Subject and The Wombman's Bible have now gone offline. Grief is perhaps a bit overstated but I'm sad not to be able to hang out there anymore and I secretly hope that their author JK Gayle might have second thoughts. Blogging can become an obsession that takes you away from the rest of your life and sometimes rather than going for the quick blog it's important to set yourself the target of putting your writing skills to more focused use. I shall miss the broadening of my horizons and the feminist and linguistic reading lists from JK's blogs. Life and blogging move on and I shall have to cope with my sadness but not before wishing him well with all his future projects.
I suppose for me blogging is a bit about pulling together a few bits of the ephemera of my life. The perfect activity for my over-active magpie mind. There's an awful lot that never makes it into written form. Thinking about the bits and pieces of my life, about the desperately difficult and ordinarily difficult times that some friends, colleagues and aquaintances are living through at the moment, makes me realise that blogging is also my way of remembrance. A way of remembering the forgotten pieces even if they don't make it into written form. It gives me much to be thankful for and many to pray for.
Tonight my thoughts are (among other places) with a friend in Zimbabwe, a colleague in Malaysia, a friend working on interreligious dialogue in Indonesia, a friend trying to get pregnant another trying to adopt, another whose mother has cancer, a colleague who is grieving ... and many, many other places and many other people.
Perhaps evening time blogging is my own way of practising the Ignatian Examen or saying compline:

Save us, O Lord, while waking,
and guard us while sleeping,
that awake we may watch with Christ
and asleep may rest in peace.