A sailing captain waits for invisible gusts of air to move a ship where it needs to go. A paddler seeks an emergent liquid swirl to call the canoe into water. A new blogger wonders when to get out of trial mode and into the weeds of email lists and building a relationship with readers.
Motion toward a destination depends on the mysterious. There is no way to know when the flow of time and events will announce that it is time to move
- away from the calm,
- into the flow,
- out of the rut.
The mariner, the voyageur, the blogger can only wait for the moment, be ready to leap when it comes
- into the ocean gyre,
- through the white water,
- down the rabbit hole of the World Wide Web.
As the poet said in another context, “Lord, it is time.” Time to let the long waiting go, throw off the hesitant shadows, and let come what will. All of which is to say that Mailchimp beckons. My theme is optimized for it, and it seems the simplest solution, tried and true by many bloggers.
If your ambition is to forge a personal brand to launch products, ConvertKit is apparently the tool of choice for heavy-duty marketing, but that isn’t the purpose here at anselmsquest.com. If your quest is without direction, I want to reach you. Perhaps it is still latent and unrecognized. You may be years or generations away from religious faith. You may not know what holy lives can teach. Your heart and mind may be pulling in opposite directions, instead of together.
If you wonder why this matters to me, the answer is simple. The quest is almost by definition a struggle, and striving teaches hard lessons. If what I write can open other avenues of thought or help you on your quest, then I need to make it freely available. Perhaps others will feel called to share what they’ve learned as well.
For now I’ll get acquainted with Mailchimp, and do a few test runs with those readers who have stumbled on Anselm’s Quest for one reason or another. This is a big step for a technophobe, and one I admit to avoiding for some months now. But the mysterious has arrived to nudge me firmly toward this next step, so pray for me as I do for you.