Sum­mer vis­i­ta­tions got an ear­ly start last month when the North­east US “Quak­er blogroll”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/Quaker_places.php con­verged in my back yard with no agen­da to fol­low and no epis­tle to write.Front row: “James”:http://curiouspenn.blogspot.com/, “Jeffrey”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000588.php and vis­i­ta­tion ring­leader “Amanda”:http://ofthebest.blogspot.com/. Back: “Ryan”:http://snorkelinglight.blogspot.com/, “Rob”:http://consider-the-lilies.blogspot.com/, “Me”:/martink, “Theo”:/theo and poor blog­less Christina.

Well since Kwak­er­saur is inau­gu­rat­ing the “I don’t have any­thing to post”:http://kwakersaur.blogspot.com/2005/06/i‑dont-have-anything-to-say.html meme, I’ll chime in that I don’t either. Actu­al­ly I’ve writ­ten two and half essays but real­ized they’re both real­ly for myself. This is how it hap­pens some­times. I’ve long noticed this phe­nom­e­non in fully-formed ver­bal min­istry that I know I’m not sup­posed to deliv­er and it feels as if such restraint is some­times healthy on the blog. The mes­sage will reap­pear in oth­er forums I’m sure, most like­ly next mon­th’s “Gath­er­ing workshop”:www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/strangers with Zachary Moon.
In the mean­time, there’s been fresh talk about plain lan­guage and dress this week by “Johan Maurer”:http://maurers.home.mindspring.com/2005/06/plain-language.htm, “Claire Reddy”:http://Quakerspeak.blogspot.com/2005/06/simplicity-unfocused-thought-blurt.html and the “Live­jour­nal Quakers”:http://www.livejournal.com/community/Quakers/105292.html. Russ Nel­son’s start­ed a “Plan­et Quaker”:http://planet.Quaker.org/ blog aggre­ga­tor (which includes Quak­er Ranter: thanks!). LizOpp talked about “field testing”:http://thegoodraisedup.blogspot.com/2005/05/after-annual-sessions.html her upcom­ing “Quak­er iden­ti­ty Gath­er­ing workshop”:http://www.fgcquaker.org/gathering/workshops/work36.php at North­ern Year­ly Meet­ing ses­sions and Kiara’s talked about “being field test­ed by Liz at this year’s NYM sessions”:http://wordspinning.blogspot.com/2005/05/northern-yearly-meeting.html (how cool is that?!).
I’ve been geek­ing out on “Del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/martin_kelley, the “social book­mark­ing” sys­tem and on the eso­teric con­cepts of “tags”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags, the “seman­tic web”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web and “folksonomies”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy. Two weeks ago I would have laughed at these neol­o­gisms but I’m begin­ning to see that there’s some­thing in all this. The only out­ward form the reg­u­lars will see is a more accu­rate “Relat­ed Entries” selec­tion at the bot­tom of posts (thanks to “Adam Kalsey”:http://kalsey.com/blog/2003/05/related_entries_revisited/) and bet­ter vis­i­bil­i­ty in “select­ed Tech­no­rati entries”:http://www.technorati.com/tag/Quaker (which will get less me-centric as I fin­ish tag­ging my own back posts).
And of course we’re till­ing the field, plant­i­ng a gar­den, putting up laun­dry lines and oth­er­wise thor­ough­ly enjoy­ing the first Spring in our new house. It’s bed­time, off to read the rad­i­cal­ly folk­so­nom­ic adven­tures of Sam and “My Car”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060560452 (it’s pure tags: “My name is Sam.” “This is my car.” “I love my car.” I’d wor­ry that not-so-baby Theo is get­ting too excit­ed by com­bu­sion engines if he weren’t even more excit­ed by “dia-di-calschht” aka the “bicy­cle” Papa rides off to work on.)