Hello again, world.

Everything changes. Lianhua is no different. I am no different. No one is immune to it. Sometimes it happens when you least expect it, as many of you probably didn’t when you refreshed your RSS feed reader or clicked on the link that brought you to this page. And sometimes it happens with every expectation; I’ve known for a while that things had to change around here.

Sorry, I’m getting a little deep here… In the past few months (or maybe even longer) Lianhua has been stagnating. I haven’t felt like writing in it, mostly because I haven’t had any idea of what to write. Suddenly, I realized two things: a) I had to focus on something in my blog (other than the random things I did that no one really cared about and I didn’t find important enough to share) and b) I had to clear the slate, turn over a new leaf.

And so here we are. The slate is clean. The leaf is turned.

The old archives exist. I can’t get rid of them, they’re a huge part of who I am. But, coming up on five years with this blog, I’m realizing that they’re not who I am at all, actually.

I don’t think that really makes any sense.

Everything that has happened since I started this blog (July 2006, although my archives span back to December 2005 thru another blog) has made me who I am. That is undeniable. But I am not the person I was throughout any of it, really. Every day brings new changes, and roundabouts 1700 days brought an astronomical amount of change. So while those entries and years are a huge part of who I am, they’re not me at all.

So, like I said, here we are.

I’ve decided to focus what I write about a little more. There will always be little snippets of my daily life, of course, but rather than having no value to readers outside of their concern for my well-being, I am going to try to use my experiences and day-to-day happenings to explore two very important aspects of my life: gluten-freedom and Buddhism.

Back in June, I went gluten-free, after discovering my non-celiac gluten intolerance/sensitivity. And back in 2004, maybe even earlier, I began following Buddhism and adopting its philosophies into my daily life. Lately, I’ve been thinking about both of these things and how important they are to me, and I’ve come to the realization that I’m not nearly serious enough about either of them.

So I’m on a mission to change that.