Here we are in June—one whole month into the new coffeemonk.com. I’m happy that I managed to get out a new post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10am. It wasn’t originally a goal for the site, but I decided a few days prior to launch that it might be good to make it an unofficial one. Aside from some last minute post-writing in the last week, it’s been a very comfortable experience, all told. Not sure how long I can keep it up, so we’ll just have to see.

Anyway, I wanted to take a moment, now that we’re a month old, to look back on the past month and see what we made of it.

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A friend commented on my Facebook link to the last post Why I Can’t Be Buddhist, saying that pretty much everyone could benefit from a bit of “mindfulness” in their daily lives.

I’m going to write more about the idea of mindfulness later, both generally, and specifically as something to be cultivated through a meditative practice, but I was struck by something a little while ago as I was reading a magazine article, that I’d like to share. Think of it as a little introductory nugget for you to ruminate on.

Mindfulness is essentially self-awareness, and specifically self-awareness within the present moment. As I was reading the article, initially I was fully involved with it, digesting the words and meaning as is kind of the whole point of reading. I didn’t realize, however, that at some point, I had stopped paying attention–my eyes were still scanning the page, seeing the words, but my mind was wandering, thinking along some tangential path the text had sent it down. Suddenly, I noticed that I wasn’t paying attention, and my focus snapped back to the words on the page while my brain re-routed itself back to the present moment.

It was in that moment, those few seconds when my brain yanked back on its own chain, that I was experiencing mindfulness–a non-judgmental self-awareness of myself as a thinking being. That kind of mindfulness, of course, is fleeting, and it evaporated as soon as I’d labeled it and moved on to thinking about writing this post.

So, there’s a shallow taste of what it means to be mindful. Perhaps you’ll catch yourself in several such moments today as well.

Things are looking a might different ’round here, ya might say.

Well, it’s all part of the grand re-tooling of a few of my dormant online projects. I’ve been laying the mental groundwork for this for a few years now, and it all finally congealed in the last six months or so.

I’ve already talked about this so-called identity crisis at some length on my other blog (that would be the venerable bipolar), so I’ll not retread that ground here.

I also should pay homage to the history of this particular site, but I have already covered that on the “about” page. If you’re interested, the old coffeemonk.com site has been moved aside—gone, but not forgotten.

So all that remains here is today, and today coffeemonk.com has become my own personal creative outlet. Discovering exactly what this means will be an integral part of its creation.

In some ways, this site will—at least initially—serve as a catch-all for those things I’d like to share that don’t necessarily fit in with the bipolar shtick, or that require a larger or more open venue than facebook. As I said, the edges will be found in time.

I do have to say that I am very excited about this, and I hope that you are as well.