"Where Has He Been?"

With writers there is a question, always of “Writers’ Block.”  Everyone knows about that.  But there’s another, related, question:  What does the writer write about?  In order to write, a writer has to first experience—unless s/he’s going to simply write about the inability to write.

I admit it:  I’ve just been busy these last few months.  For some reason, starting in April, everything seemed to be happening for me all at once:  My day job, the writing club, my family—one thing after another.

What I can’t quite figure out, looking back, is how I ever managed things ten years ago.  At that point, I was facilitating four different groups:  South Bay Writers, Amnesty International Group 35, the South Bay Poly discussion group, and South Bay Circles (the local pagan ritual group).  How on earth did I ever manage to come up with agendas, recruit people to help out, and simply stay sane with all that activity?  I can remember earlier times when I also served on Unitarian church committees in Virginia or here in California; when I helped out with CUUPS (the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans), when I was a regional coordinator for Amnesty.  How did I ever sort everything out?  And I continue to be a legal minister/priest for the Covenant of the Goddess (although I’m not responsible for facilitating any meetings).

At this point I’m down to running the poly group—which involves just one meeting a month—and South Bay Writers.  But in two days—on July 1^st—my term as president of South Bay Writers ends.  And presumably I will have more time to…write?

But my point is, a writer shouldn’t really just sit around writing.  A writer should be doing something worth writing about.   A writer ought to be involved.  True, a writer can sit by her/himself all the time and write about the world around him/her—but is that interesting enough to be worthwhile?

I’m glad I’ve been involved in social groups.  I’m also glad to be reaching the point where I don’t feel obligated to run them all myself.  I’m looking forward to thinking a little more about…my writing.

Another Thanksgiving, Taken Personally

So now we in the United States end another Thanksgiving weekend, in the odd way we have recently evolved for doing this. 

First of all, Thanksgiving itself has a convoluted history.  We’re taught that it all goes back to the Pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts in the early 1600s, how they gathered with the natives to give thanks for the food they all had (some Virginians claim the first event of this nature actually happened at Jamestown some years ahead of the event at Plymouth).  Later, of course, the European colonists expanded west decimating the native peoples and cultures.  

The official national celebration, however, originated with Abraham Lincoln in the aftermath of the great Civil War battle of Gettysburg, which cost so many lives, halted the Confederate invasion of the north, and inspired Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  Thanksgiving Day did not achieve a settled date until the twentieth century.

In the course of the twentieth century, the day’s celebrations came to include college football games and parades with huge floats in several east coast cities.

In recent years, commercial interests have caught up with Thanksgiving.  The day after Thanksgiving, “Black Friday,” is the traditional start of the Christmas Shopping Season.  This is when retailers are desperate to make lots of sales, because so much of their success and survival depends upon sales during the Christmas season.

For me—a Unitarian Pagan—it is difficult to associate with the Pilgrims (although Unitarians do have a connection to those Massachusetts Puritans, and I am thankful for what I have).  My focus is not on shopping.  Even if I may give or receive presents at Christmas time, it is not my priority (although I very much value my time with friends and family at this time of year).

On top of that (and this may seem trivial to some of you), I don’t particularly like turkey!  I don’t care that much for potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauces—all those traditional foods that Americans feel they “must” eat at Thanksgiving.

Indeed, my entire connection to these traditions is a bit conflicted—I’ll be talking about this more by and by.  Even on Veterans Day, and Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July, I feel a little different than most Americans.

I grew up among the military, but not military.  I grew up a civilian among the military (my father worked for the American Red Cross, with the military).  I didn’t live in one settled place until I was twenty-six.  When I entered the College of William and Mary, as a Junior, at age twenty, I had lived on U. S. military bases for a total of ten years—half my life.  An additional two years, I had lived just a few blocks outside an Air Force Base.  Twelve years connected with the military by the time I was twenty!  And of that, five years I lived outside the U.S.

This is just one factor that colors my attitudes towards Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving.  I can’t give a vanilla American perspective on Thanksgiving.  I do know that many people share my misgivings about “Black Friday” and even football.  But I can only speak for myself, out of my own rather unusual perspective.  More of this, perhaps, to come.

The Ride Awaits Us!

I was at a local theater recently, watching an HD documentary about the Metropolitan Opera’s latest production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

Surprisingly (for me), one of the Met’s executives talked about how the Met had fallen two decades behind in its staging technology, until they attempted this Ring.  How can that be? I thought.  I remember when the Met moved to Lincoln Center; the technology was state-of-the-art.  But of course that was 1966!

We lose track of time.  I once worked in Youth Programming at a Unitarian summer institute.  I decided I’d dazzle the teenagers with stories of Jack Kerouac and the Beat poets.  But this was 1980.  I was old, so old:  Twenty-nine!  My source-books lay unused in my dorm room; the teenagers had disappeared to who knows where.  They didn’t care about the rebellions of earlier times.  We all lose track.

That film about the Met give me a visceral “punch” in several ways.  First, sheer physical amazement:  Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatic-stand-ins ascending an eighty-degree wall that resembled Yosemite’s Half-Dome, at the end of the first Ring opera; and the soprano Brunnhilde hanging upside down from a similar precipice at the end of the second.

But equally visceral was the mental punch delivered by that executive who declared (I’m paraphrasing) that “art cannot stand still.  It has to change and move forward, always.  If it stops changing, it becomes irrelevant and dies.”

It’s good to remember that.  And I ask myself, not without misgivings:  Will you climb on the Bus of the Future?  Will you buy into the Age of Change? 

It’s always hard to break with our habits.  But the ride awaits us—the journey into the Future.  Come aboard and let’s embark!