Previous blogs
Writing is a way of thinking for me. More specifically, a way of finding out things about myself that I haven’t previously brought to conscious articulation.
I began journaling as a college freshman in 1968 . Much of what I’ve written is the sort of self-discovery I’ve just described. Mostly not for the public. Perhaps not even worth saving privately, though I’ve recently started browsing through these journals.
One surprise now is how thoughtfully I was writing even then. A better surprise is how deeply I was looking into myself. Even though I had no notion at the time that this is what I was doing. The habit just started itself.
Walhydra’s Porch: Curmudgeonly musings from an old Virgo (2006-2017)
I began writing for others in the mid-1990s on the Crone Thread, an email listserv of mostly pagan, mostly women elders, folk who understand, revere and emulate the Crone.
The Crone is a feminine aspect of the Divine in the form of a woman past childbearing age. Crone strives to learn about and teach the terrors and blessings of mortality. She does this by facing those experiences honestly, walking through them with eyes open, breathing deeply, and returning to tell the tale.
In the process I discovered my first storytelling alter-ego, Walhydra. Walhydra is a solitaire or hedge witch, a witch who works alone without a coven. The crux of most Walhydra stories is that I’m still coming out as an adult. Usually grouching and flailing about or, in my most Walhydra-ish phases, clinging to the underside of the bed frame as Goddess pulls on my legs.
BTW, don’t be confused by the gender-fluidity in these stories. Walhydra is a female witch stuck for this incarnation in an aging, gay, male would-be writer. She’s not too happy with this, so she refers to the physical me as merely her amanuensis.
Walhydra went public as a blogger in 2006 with “In which Walhydra reluctantly joins the blogosphere: or, Telepathy is more genteel, but nobody listens anymore.” This move was as part of a class exercise during a day-long “Social Software in the Libraries” staff training.
In another context, this might have been a safely interesting “professional development” exercise. However, scant hours earlier the vet had confirmed by cell phone that her familiar Miso the Cat had died quietly during the night after sixteen remarkably healthy years (80+ in cat years). So the first blog was also a lament for someone dear who had crossed over.
The Surly Librarian: Being professionally nice to people as a karmic lesson (2008-2017)
Eight years in as an adult reference librarian for a county-wide public library system, I started this second blog. The subtitle for this blog is not a joke.
Surly Librarian is another storytelling persona like Walhydra. I’m one of those introverted people best suited for solitary intellectual and creative pursuits, or for creative collaboration with a few close colleagues.
So…. Having to be nice to anyone who walks up to the reference service desk requires assembling a courteous, helpful—did I say subservient?—persona. Hence the subtitle.
From 2000 through 2016, I held various librarianship roles from neighborhood branch and then main library reference to supervising call center and remote email/chat reference services to coordinating staff training for all 21 branches.
I started Surly Librarian as a challenge to myself and—I hoped—as a humorous gift to my colleagues:
Can I turn my private grouchiness into essays for library professionals, essays that might actually be encouraging?
See “Customer Service for curmudgeons” as an exemplar of my attempts.
Some of these posts were discouraging recession era “news reportage” about budget cuts, but more of them are meant as genuine cheer-leading for library folk—though, granted, out of left field (I am left-handed).
I take a couple of themes very seriously:
First, the quality of human interactions between library professionals and their clients is far more important than collections or technology.
Second, the primary mandate of public libraries is to ensure free access to essential information, together with instruction on how to use it effectively, to those who cannot otherwise get or afford it (see “Poor Richard Redux: A Manifesto“).
These selected rants—and the whole blog, for that matter—are meant to get at the heart of genuine librarianship, which I believe requires authenticity, integrity and compassion.
And a sardonic sense of humor.…
The Empty path: Nonaligned faith and practice in the present (2007-2024)
The present Substack blog, Walking the empty path, is an more targeted, public-facing extension of my third blog. Here is how I introduced it to my readers:
“Nonaligned” faith and practice?
In a brief piece I wrote for Friends Journal in 2014, I wrote:
I have come to understand that Quakerism is neither a theology nor a political philosophy, but rather a spiritual discipline. It is grounded in the Christian tradition yet doesn’t require Christian confession. It aspires to ever greater objectivity about the intersection of the spiritual and the material in human consciousness and action.
I have never understood the drive of many to compel others to “right belief.” To me, belief points to the implicit, irreducible core of how one survives interaction with the present moment.
Belief represents what I tell myself are my deepest motives and goals for all my choices, conscious or reflexive.
The less my declared belief coincides with my actual motives and goals—those which lie beneath or beyond consciousness—the less I am able to act with integrity, effectiveness and compassion.
My perspective is that all religious or ideological statements, all sacred stories and creeds and rituals, are descriptions of how we human beings experience our interrelationship with the Real, not descriptions of the Real itself or of its “will” for us.
As the Zen admonition says, they are fingers pointing at the moon.
The discipline which I am assigning myself on this empty path is to consider with respect those pointing fingers, yet always to seek truer knowledge of the moon.
And so it is.
Blesséd Be,
Michael Austin Shell