Slow Blogging – A Labor Of Love

By Olfactoria We have all heard about the ideas behind the Slow Food movement. Back to fresh, unprocessed food, ingredients you know and can pronounce, knowing where your food comes from and knowing it earns a decent wage for the people producing it. The focus is on quality, on ingredients, preparation, provenance and love for the subject in preparation as well as consumption. Putting something healthy and pure inside your body, taking care of yourself and nature, as was intended by nature. I am pretty sure trans-fatty acids came as a surprise even to Mother Nature. A few weeks back, Marina and I were talking about blogging and its pitfalls, when the phrase Slow Blogging came up. I used it as a metaphor for blogging with your heart, rather than acting like a news paper. Slow blogging is the art of infusing what you write with emotion. Writing with your heart in it makes for a different quality than reporting. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with reporting, and I am not comparing news blogging to fast food in any way, the last thing I intend here, is to anger anybody. My point is merely to make a case for Slow Blogging as a distinct discipline of blogging, one where the love for what you write about shines through. Where the unique voice and personality of the blogger is as important as the subject he/she writes about. I love Slow Blogging and I love to read blogs written that way. You quickly get a sense of the style, the purpose and the objective behind a post. If it feels like PR copy, I move on. In the early stages there was only Slow Blogging, just as there was only slow food to be had. No McDonalds, no Burger King, but a kitchen, a cook, ingredients and a certain amount of time between the craving for a burger and its consumption. In between lay a labor of love or at least of skill. With this post I want to celebrate the labor of love that is blogging. No body pays you to do it, nobody even asks you to. In the beginning nobody cares, aside from your spouse or friends, maybe. But you persist. You do it because you love it. Because you feel the compulsion to do it, to share what you know, or what you feel. To find others who share your feelings and thoughts. Eventually you find kindred souls, like-minded people you learn to appreciate for their knowledge, respect for their skills and begin to love for their personalities. They become friends. Slow Blogging, the art of blogging with your heart, is more than a new medium (but don’t forget its power too!), it is a way to forge friendships, to broaden your horizon in the subject you are passionate about, as well as in the social dimension of it all. The world gets smaller through thousands of friendships that start over a shared passion, thousands of random acts of kindness that keep the community going, be it an encouraging email, a shared sample or even a meeting in real life of complete strangers, who feel like they have known each other forever. When I am hungry and pressed for time, I have been known to go to a fast food restaurant and even enjoy what I get there. But it is not what I would want to sustain myself with every day. I love a good home cooked meal (especially when someone else cooks it, I am no genius in the kitchen, but I try). The difference is enormous. Similarly if I am looking for something specific, I quickly google it, take the fact wherever I find it and be done with it. But when I want to enjoy reading, when I want to feel enriched, enlightened or entertained, I go to my favorite blogs, written by people who care for what they do and know what they are talking about. This combination is irresistible. I am so glad that there is a wealth of such blogs out there, many different voices expressing their unique points of view, their personal takes, but nonetheless manage to sing like a perfectly trained choir about the thing we all love so much – perfume. Image source: bg.wikipedia.org