At breakfast one morning, on a silent retreat in Nanaimo, my friend Marc was looking out the window at a lawn sprinkler when he glimpsed a tiny detail he would later write about.  

The sprinkler was the ratchet kind, the sort that goes “chh-chh-chh-chh” as it rotates and shoots water, then winds itself back up and does it again. At one particular position in its arc, one particular “chh,” he saw a little rainbow flash across the spray and disappear.

Presumably I was elsewhere in that same room at this time, no rainbows in sight, contemplating my boiled egg and muffin.

He wrote a blog post about the momentary rainbow, describing it as a perfect example of something contemplatives call dependent arising—the idea that every phenomenon emerges from the vast sea of causes and conditions that came before it.

A few weeks ago someone commented on my new post, saying they had just stumbled across my blog, and that it was “very old school.”

I took that as a compliment, and got to reminiscing about what old school blogging really felt like, compared to today. Something’s definitely gone missing—some quality that made it vivid and exciting, and I want it back.

When I started in 2009, and for years afterward, I just wrote stuff, having absolutely no idea if anyone would relate. I wrote as well as I could, but there was a wonderful off-the-cuff feel to the process. If it was interesting to me, it might be to someone else. So I would write something about it. The incomparable joy of campfires. The rich history of a particular dent in my car.