Trust

Last week sometime there was an accident. It closed a road and was all over the traffic reports as I drove home. I later discovered it had been closed for hours. A cyclist had been knocked off and critically injured. It was touch and go for a time but they got over the worst and now face a long and slow recovery.

I don't know the cyclist.

I have never met them.

I do however know someone who knows them very well.

It is like that down here. Sometimes it seems that everyone knows everyone else. I had only lived down here a couple of years when I met F but before long we discovered that we knew about ten people in common. Everybody knows everybody else. If you sit down with a stranger for long enough you will discover a connection, even if it is a little tenuous. For F he sometimes discovers the stranger is a relative, several generations removed.

I went to one of F's work do's and discovered his new colleague was an old college friend.

I have a job going door to door promoting stuff and I meet F's first ever boss and an old family friend who clearly remembers him as a baby.

I work somewhere with confidential records that I have to sort and get to see more than I ever wanted to about an old neighbour, an old colleague of F's and the daughter of a near neighbour. Not in a bad way, just in a sad way...

These are just some connections. It happens all the time down here. I sit in the office at work and listen to people discover that such and such a friend of someone is suspected of having an affair with someone else's Mother. That the person who was stabbed was someone's relative. That the killers went to school with so and so. That someone knows my future brother-in-law.

Maybe in this context my unwillingness to put in my blog anything that could identify me to easily makes sense. I don't want my faith, my views and my feelings to be something people have a bit of gossip about. They are my private me, not my public me. They are not things I wish to discuss with the future m-i-l over Sunday lunch. I don't want to be that witch who lives on such and such a road because then people have expectations and chances are I won't want to meet them.

That is not to say that I am shy and don't want any of you to know who I am. A number of you know my real name and email me. A number of you have my address for art swaps and things. It is the random people who come by blogs or find them in searches, who leave nasty comments (not that I have had any but we all read blogs that have had this I expect) that I don't want to know who I am.

I have to say that generally people I know do not have the address of my blog. F does and Red. My Mum knows about it and I wouldn't have a problem with her reading it. If she read it though, the rest of my family would know to. The thought of telling my recently baptized (by their choice) niece and nephew what a witch is doesn't sound like fun. The thought of my Dad having to read about my feelings would make both of us uncomfortable. F only reads my blog now when he wants to get another take on how I am doing, the last time I know of was when big Dog died.

So what has brought all this on? I have a new follower. A very, very talented photographer (Hello Simon!). His blog is full of places I know. I know the names of some of the un-named and seemingly obscure places shown in photos. I suspect we live in roughly the same area.

In blogland, you slowly find and become associated with other blogs with similar focuses to yours. You can become associated with several different communities. I am part of a witchy / spiritual b-community, art journaling b-community, art postcard b-community and now I have made my first link into the Cornish b-community. This is a really big thing for me....

I think I am going to continue being cagey on my blog about my identity and the identities of those I know. I think I am going to open my arms wide to the Cornish b-community and trust that those that come to find my blog through this new link won't try and play detective and piece together any of the clues. Trust that I won't suffer from the negativity that others have and if I do that it will be contained within the e-verse and not spill into my life here in Cornwall.

So hello and be welcome here Simon..... and anyone who wants to see some really good photo's of this beautiful part of the world that I am lucky enough to live in, head on over to his blog....