As always, this is awkward.

It's time for another of my "gosh, I haven't posted anything new in a while, boy do I feel like a schmuck" postings.

Until this morning I wasn't even sure when the last time I posted here was, but I see that it was over a year. I didn't even have anything new for all over 2007! In the back of my mind over this past year, I remembered Feather Weather and knew that I would have to come back sometime. It rankled that I was leaving it unattended and forlorn, and yet I never felt overly compelled to write anything new. As is often the case when I leave the blog, it's not because I have nothing to write about (although there are sometimes 1-2 week spans where I delve into other interests that have little to do with birds and therefore I feel there's nothing to offer in the short term), but because I go through phases where I convince myself that my next blog post ideas are too perfunctory to merit the attention needed to make them interesting. Even if I have other more interesting ideas in the pipeline, sometimes I think the blog has little or nothing to offer me, in lieu of what I'm actually doing or preparing away from the computer. What do I mean by that? I think I mean that if I don't really have a readership (and I realize that a readership comes about only through regularity of posting, and that regularity of posting for me comes through readership), I lose the kind of motivation I usually require to post some of those more perfunctory items, before I get to the other more interesting stuff that doesn't require as much of a kick in the pants for me.

In any case, the past year was plenty full of bird watching, and bird learning. I just didn't write about it. But it was there. And now the pendulum is swinging back again, and I'm feeling the necessity of articulating and recording, because some different and very interesting things are starting to happen now.

If I can just get over the perfectionist streak that often prevents me from posting anything that I don't consider artful or illuminating, I think I can post a lot more often. Perfectionism isn't always bad, but it is often the impediment to progress. As Voltaire once said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
tags: