I read your “Write to Feel” section; “It’s when words start to move me that I know I’m onto something. Listen to yourself and trust how you feel. Oh, and if it doesn’t move someone else, it might still be your best work because it made you feel something.” and the light bulb went off.

I’m a digital artist, rather than a writer, but I get so caught up in wondering why people might love the work I banged out in no time flat, but ache when no one seems to care about the image that took blood, sweat and tears to come to fruition. Thanks for the reminder that so long as it moves me, it’s good, maybe great, work too.

Re cookbooks/recipes – I’m ruthless about just tearing recipes out of magazines instead of saving the whole ‘zine. And this past holiday season when I had time off I went through some of my more marginal cookbooks and just tore out the recipes I’d used or that I’d tagged. I organized/store these in photo albums with sleeves. I have one set up as “to try”, and several for keepers. An advantage I found with dedicating a block of time to this is that I had multiple new recipes for specific dishes, so I could weed down to the one I wanted to keep. I’ve been working on a more permanent cookbook using one of the sites that lets you create your own & they print & send you the pages all nicely formatted, but it’s a slow process since proofreading is a bear.

One of the questions I am asking myself lately is, why I am online as much as I am? Your thoughtful post here has lead me to challenge myself. I’m taking a completely dark week April 3-9 and challenging my blog readers to do the same. No cell phone, no Internet and no television.

Much thanks for this one, Courtney

You may have done this already, but I wonder whether one of your blogs might comment on how ‘stuff’ is inextricably linked to consumerism, the environment etc. and dig a little deeper into what that all means. I think a lot of people would benefit from this. You have probably seen ‘The Story of Stuff’, a 25 minute video that can be accessed for free online. It’s probably a bit full on for some people (my Mum couldn’t get through it), and it has been criticised by some, but perhaps your blog could approach it in a more tempered way. I guess what we can take from it is that all this stuff comes from somewhere and that it is not impact-free!

Many people don’t put much thought into what they are buying, what goes into it, what impacts it has had socially and environmentally and there’s so many ways we can reduce our consumerism, which leads to the accumulation of all this stuff in the first place. If we didn’t consume so much we wouldn’t have so much of a clutter problem!

Kind regards