The miniessay is a single paragraph “essay” limited to the 2200 characters (including spaces) allowable in an Instagram caption. Just enough space to share an experience, make a point, or weave a spell. 

A word cloud generated from the metadata of one’s blog is a pretty fascinating thing. The software scales the size of each word based on how often it has been used as a tag to describe a blog post. And, so, one can get a pretty accurate snapshot of what things have been on one’s mind (provided one was faithful in applying tags). As much as I would love to be more of a writer, it looks like photography gets the most of my attention, though poetry is well represented. This may be so because in our time photography is just a lot easier to do. It takes some gumption to write a poem. This particular word cloud is a bit of a misrepresentation, though, because for many years I rarely posted on here, having shifted my creative output to Instagram and Facebook. That output, too, was mostly comprised of photos and haiku, though I did add what I call “miniessays” to my output, they also requiring a shorter time commitment. I was very pleased with these and have collected them here, and I hope to continue to write them, with perhaps the occasional lengthier essay, too. There are other stories that this word cloud of tags and their relative sizes tells as well: autumn/fall > winter > spring > summer; forest park > tower grove park. And “dusk,” “night photography,” “rain,” “snow,”; there is rather a theme of dimness it seems. And what’s it with “matt’s lomo preset”? That, too, is a moody aesthetic which captured my attention for many years. OK, ok, enough with the talking about metadata, enough with the introspection, and back to the living and seeing of life.