Anything New Under the Sun?

A friend of mine is reading the Harry Potter series. Each time she launches into a new book, I ask, "Is this the one where ...?" I know the story very well, but can't remember exactly who was the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, which characters were involved in which part of the story.

I was thinking that, in a way, J.K. Rowling wrote the same book over and over. Maybe that's one reason I loved the series so much. Of course it was a linear story involving the same characters, so - it's easy enough to excuse my tendency to mix the storylines.

But, I also get my Kurasawa movie plots a little bit mixed up (except for the ones I've seen at least twenty times). And Margaret Atwood's books, all of which I've read - well - her stories tend to bleed one into the next.

What about painters? Do they paint the same thing over and over? Mark Rothko certainly did. Didn't Martha Graham perform different versions of the same dance over and over again? And what about John Coltrane's improvisations? Different, and yet all of them recognizable, so in a sense, the same.

The spiral is a shape that repeats itself throughout all of nature, as is the circle, the cross. The tree shape with its extending branches is the same shape as a river with its tributaries, the branches of our veins and arteries, or bronchial tubes, the flow of lava down the side of a volcano, etc.

What is my point?

I'm wondering how the The Gold Puppy will differ from The Gold Poppy, (now deceased). Is The Gold Puppy a second "book" of my blog, or is it a completely different entity? I guess the only way to find out is to allow it to unfold.

It was so wonderful to take a big break from blogging. You can't believe how many things I learned, how much I was able to accomplish with all that freed-up energy. And, too, it's great to be back in the saddle, at least so far.

Once a blogger, always a blogger, but is it the same blog? You tell me.