Leonard Cohen once said “please understand, I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter.” I suspect the man was being disingenuous. If anybody<\/i> has a secret chart, Leonard Cohen does.<\/p>\n
Today I went back through about the last year or so of my blog, and I realized that I have been compiling my own secret chart. Behind every post — — and every sequence of posts — there is a deeper story, one that is not explicitly revealed on the page. I suppose this is the case for all writers.<\/p>\n
In my own case, I can recognize the stretches of time when I was feeling joy or excitement, restlessness or despair. Some posts are painful to read now because they bring me back to a moment in my life when I was dealing with something quite difficult, and others are a delight to read because they take me back to a time when things were flowing, and everything felt deeply right.<\/p>\n
In some ways a blog and a journal are precisely opposite forms. In a blog you say only what you are prepared to be heard by the entire world. In a journal you pour out everything that you wish to be heard by your own heart.<\/p>\n
Yet in both cases, there is a chart, drawn by your words, tracing out the changing contours of your inner life. There is, most definitely, a chart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leonard Cohen once said “please understand, I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter.” I suspect the man was being disingenuous. If anybody has a secret chart, Leonard Cohen does. Today I went back through about the last year or so of my blog, and … Continue reading “A secret chart”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8084"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8084"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8085,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8084\/revisions\/8085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}