Emerging Narratives

I have already added 5 of the six paramitas as separate blog entries, as well as a photo I took and an accompanying poetic narrative which reflects key themes. For some reason, as I was configuring the 5 entries, a narrative structure seemed to spontaneously emerge between them: something about the seasons in particular, and how one needs to travel the four seasons to see that they are really faces of the same world. I wonder: why would the mind naturally impose a kind of narrative onto these 6 concepts? Perhaps there is a comfort in fathoming that this is about a journey of discovery.

I also notice that format plays a big part in determining the story I am going to tell on this blog. Yesterday, I was able to play around with gadgets on the blog, so that I was able to place the six paramitas on separate pages, while keeping the blog for my daily technology journal. I found that doing so gives me two different voices. One voice is the one that tries to present a coherent or artistic vision of the Six Paramitas (my official ‘subject matter’ for the blog). One could call this my “Pages” voice. The other voice is this diary voice, where I can more informally and honestly share some of the challenges I am encountering while creating this blog.

I managed to change the format of my blog to a design called “watermark”, and also changed the background color from dark brown to a light shade of blue. I found this particular background to have a Zen Buddhist feel to it: minimal, not too busy in appearance, and reflective of a theme of ‘navigation’ using maps in the background of the main screen. I have a sense that with Buddhist themed blogs, less is better, and conveying too much may sometimes weaken the sense of a single mind that is able to pick and choose what is needed rather than being overwhelmed by too many sensory details. Could one of my visions be to transform digital media from a ‘hot’ to a ‘cool’ one?

One more thing I wanted to mention: I had tried to design another blog on Wordpress featuring the same basic content as with blogger.com. However, I find that for some reason, I don’t have as much affinity with WordPress as I do with blogger.com. I am not too sure what the reason is, but I have a sense that WordPress templates are more oriented toward marketing, and so they come across as quite large and intimidating. The fonts in blogger.com, on the contrary, seem crisper and thinner to me, thus leaving more room to explore and manipulate content. The balance between style and content is hard to sustain, but I find that I want to lean toward quality content rather than bombarding my viewers with the latest layout styles.