Returning to Base to Find a New Door

This month the Dragonspit Apothecary blog turns 3. I had visions of a celebration of this milestone. It represented thousands of words, thoughts, compelling ideas and personal perspective. It represented me. I should feel proud of this accomplishment and all that it has evolved to be. Yet that wasn’t how it felt when I started to plan January and what will become the 2021 blog strategy. It wasn’t fanfare or recognition that crossed my mind but rather a deep need of my own that was becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

Three years ago I set out to share all I was learning about using essential oils and natural products in my home and life. It was a tale of my experience sprinkled with recipes, DIYs and admission of things not to try again. I quickly saw readership climb as this seemed to be something many people were interested in for their own life needs or just random entertainment. I was new to blogging at a time when people were telling me the written word was dead. No one reads blogs anymore as it’s all in video and podcasting these days. I persisted on though sharing my corny tales and growing wisdom on this topic of natural living. It was a journal in many respects to my own need to write and share what was going on in my life.

In year two I did add some vlogs and started a YouTube channel, finally catching on that maybe I could still write but add in some of the techniques that was trending. My writing also matured into more reflection and personal insight to what it meant and felt like to live natural. I was no longer just talking about how I used the oils but what doing so was doing in me and my home. By this time I had passed the need to just share my latest recipe and go deeper into what living like this was doing to me from the inside. I felt at peace and thought I was on to something that spoke to many, who like me were searching for a better way to live.

Sitting at the entryway of 2021, I feel another change coming to me through this blog. I feel like I’m entering a new area of this living natural topic based on where I again find myself. See, I naively thought at the beginning it truly was just about using some oils, getting rid of chemical products and poof my health would improve. I realized after that excitement of discovery it was also hitting my heart of what this represents and the connection we have to Mother Nature on a much larger scale. Now I feel great white space filling my thoughts of what’s next? Is there truly nothing more to say about what is perhaps the most misunderstood, underused and underappreciated way of living? Is there really just a finite set of lessons that teaches us how to do it well?

For weeks, I wrestled with this challenge. I wrote blog posts and trashed them. I outlined vlogs and actually recorded them only to hit the delete button. Nothing seemed to be tapping into the deep need I knew was there but I lacked the navigation to reach it. There was more to living natural than a few household recipes to make your own cleaning products. There was more to feeling your best than diffusing oils to clear your thoughts. There was more but I couldn’t touch the words to bring them to the front. Instead, I sat looking at my planner for 2021 with white space. Searching for ideas I returned to the basics of where I started, thinking I may have missed something important in my journey. I looked back at my trusty old notebook full of ideas and revisited each to see if I had thoroughly explored them. I wrote down new ideas including a nicely threaded year long theme with individual topics but nothing was hitting home. The entire notebook ended up in the trashcan, pulled out and trashed again.

Maybe blogging truly is dead and I’m without anything else to share on this topic of natural living. I considered calling it quits to the blog and focusing on other things like maybe quicky videos of me living daily life showing you my messy hair and how disorganized but incredibly calming my home is. I considered following what others were doing and seeing them be wildly successful from things that didn’t seem like me but what was the in thing on social media. Maybe that truly is the way to reach people and let them into my world. I wanted to cry about it. Maybe I was wrong all this time and had just wasted my time the past 3 years pur