Women's Legacy Project

Our Lives Change The World

women's writing

Synchronicity Behind Life by the Cup

Blogging & Writing

Several weeks ago I read a book review by Helene Cohen Bludman on her Books is Wonderful blog.  I responded  to the post by saying that Life by the Cup would be such a perfect read for me and that I wanted to read it and that I was going to “win” the giveaway she was offering.  I needed inspirational reading while I am on my travel/escape from 100 degrees and 100% humidity that plagues my wonderful Tucson during the intensity of the monsoon season.

book buzz
A screen capture from Helene’s blog.

This was the comment exchange.  I was serious in my praise, it was not flattery.  It was a great interview and I would have purchased a copy had I not won one:

Nancy Hill (@Nerthus)on June 6, 2014 at 6:15 pm said:  Great review/interview! I would rush right out and buy a copy, but I’m going to win the copy you are giving away…

I will definitely have a copy with me on vacation this year. It has all the elements of life with which I am currently obsessed: women in business, fair trade, memoir, and positive framing.

Thank you for turning me on to this!

I just received the book from the publisher via a publicist in the mail today! I’m excited.
I now will have this book with me at #BlogHer14 as well as while my hubby and I drive across the country and back, right after the conference.
I do not believe in a bearded man up in the sky orchestrating the smallest of details of the lives of going on 7 billion people as well as the lives of all the other thousands of billions of other living creatures on Earth.  But I do believe in synergy and synchronicity. I do not try to explain coincidence, but I am happy and grateful when it happens.
I know this book will generate a few posts.  It is about a woman entrepreneur but also about purpose-filled living and how women do things.  This is important for so many reasons, at so many levels. For now that is all I am saying about it.  But there will be more!
Without being given a copy of this book I might not have credited BlogHer with creating the network of individual writers, not just bloggers, I count as writerly friends of a certain age had I not received this little reminder that most of the women from whom I draw inspiration today I have met in the 8 years I have been attending BlogHer conferences.
Had I received the copy of the book within a week after Helene’s review, I might not have seen this little unexpected gift from the cosmos as BlogHer related.  But snafu after snafu snagged and snarled the getting of the book to me so that it arrived right now of when I am trying to write  a veritable explosion of posts about the wonderful things that have come into the world because of BlogHer. My having this book, having a group of eloquent, informed, and generous women bloggers of a certain age to read, chat with on women’s blogging groups, and count as friends is a treasure beyond measure.
We are changing the world just by having our cohort’s voices out there, but we are also amplifying the change through the collective and rather cohesive voice with which many of us speak.

BlogHer and Me

Blogging & Writing

BlogHer Logo 2010
The BlogHer logo that went live in 2010

Over the next two weeks, I mainly will be posting about All Things BLOGHER.  I may post about a couple other events and or topics, but… throughout the rest of July, I will be posting about my experience at the BlogHer events and how interaction with this network and through this network have influenced me over the years.  

I did not know about the 2005 conferencealthoughIhad been blogging for several years at that time.  I tried to attend in 2006, but my husband and I were not getting along well at all at that time, and we had a huge fight about spending the money for me to go.  I ended up bowing out of the podcasting that I had volunteered to do at the conference, and did not attend.The firstBlogHer conference I attended was at the end of July 2007.  Things looked a bit different back then.

468x60_BH07_banner
The conference banner from 2007 showing the colorful logo as it was way back when.

My very first BlogHer conference post went upon JULY 27, 2007

I’M HERE!

I’m atBlogHer 07. Arrived last night quite late and have been busy every moment since then. Amazing women per media, politics, technology, business…. The over-layer of corporate gloss conceals a significant network of progressive women.

originally posted on:  buildpeace.blogspot.com

What is not said in these first posts about BlogHer is at least as important as what was said. The conference was in Chicago.  My mother had passed away, at age 92, a month before the conference.

I had taken care of her in her home in Northern Indiana for four months prior to her passing.  Though I missed my husband and daughter in Tucson terribly, I was still based in Northern Indiana while closing up Mom’s house and going through my Mother’s decades upon decades of collected stuff as my brother executed the estate in the most bass-ackwards estate settling process ever known to humanity.
I needed BlogHer ’07 more than I knew at the time.  I needed to get away from the total dysfunction that was anything and everything related to my family of origin.  Blogging gave me a way to direct my writings, which up until that point had been scattershot and outside myself, on politics and peace activism.
I have always been a writer; I sold my first story 17 years before attending this blogging  conference, and I was first been published over thirty years prior to the conference, but up until I attended this fortuitously located conference, I had not connected the ubiquitous overlap of world of women and the world of writing.
To me, though I did not realize it at the time, I was able to merge myself with my writing and comfortably envelop this writing identity within a women’s culture network, within a nebulous concept called “BlogHer.”
BlogHer had given me a frame. Dame Fortuna presented one of her rare gifts in sardonic disguise.  In February of 2007 I was called to Indiana to care for my mother as a daughter, a woman in her 40s, and the mother of a daughter in High School.  I left Indiana in the Summer of ’07 and found myself to be 50, orphaned, and an empty nester.
Three major life events snuck up on me, announced themselves, somewhat out of sequence, and shifted every frame of reference in my life.  Suddenly I needed progressive lenses to see anything clearly.  Nothing was the same.  Everything looked different.  I was stumbling into a new world for which I had not prepared, but I clutched my laptop to my breast and headed off into the next phase of my life.