Writing and the need to imagine a different world - urgently

Well, so much for my once a month promise to this blog. Missed November - a dreary, dreary month 'round these parts. Too reflective of my mood, especially as a writer. I don't know how to write of and to these times. The pace of tumultuous change is picking up speed. I take in a day's worth of shocking news and events, and then, just as I try to absorb them, reflect on them, process my own thoughts and feelings, open to whatever emerges - more shocking news and events come storming in.

Storming - too often quite literally these days. Unprecedented weather events are almost daily fare now, disrupting lives, bringing personal tragedies to thousands of families, and billions of dollars worth of destruction - and that's just in this country. But, have you noticed the culture changing its priorities at all because of these things? Do those not affected "feel" these events as part of their lives?

Do our words protect us from what we need to see?

Some of our spiritual sages, philosophers, psychologists, poets, and artists will tell us that the minute we use words here in the West, we go right into our heads. We start "thinking," we start analyzing, we start breaking experience down into pieces of what we can handle, what we can get our heads around.

What that can also do is protect us, a way to step back from what we need to hear in other ways - with our bodies, our spirits, the living communities of beings around us who do not speak our language, who do not speak "words," but communicate in sounds and resonances and energies that humans were once more capable of "hearing," or better, "sensing." Part of that was survival instinct, knowing which sounds - rustling noises in the tall grasses and woods, for example - might indicate an approaching predator, or the first low sounds of a coming storm, a shift in the wind or the air pressure that says, seek cover.

Reinventing myself as a writer - it's time

A new look. A new lens. Looking out on a collapsing, tumultuous world. This writer needed to make some changes.

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Reinventing myself as a writer after nearly two years of a kind of despair. Well, that may not be exactly right. More like a period of getting lost - lost in the magnitude of the tumultuous changes underway in our world, and picking up speed. These are changes I knew were coming - in my head, I knew. It has been my work for about 12 years now - following the ecological tragedy swiftly unfolding, the unravelings, the collapses of most of the pillars on which our culture and history have been constructed.

But knowing that in the head is different from knowing it in the heart, or in the gut, which changes everything. Makes for clear seeing, which in these days is a harsh view of things.

Girl's gotta write

So, it's the first Sunday of February 2018 and the beginning of the second year of the administration of the Orange Man - and despite all my assurances to myself last year about getting back to more creative writing, it just didn't happen. Like a lot of people, I have struggled with where my writing goes next, what projects to complete, or to alter before submitting, how to really hear this moment in the culture, to penetrate it with all I know from my own life story and the wisdom simmering inside it all.

What is it I want or need to write now? Poetry abandoned me. While that is not my primary mode of writing, I found joy in it. The more I wrote poems, and then the more the poems started showing up, the more I felt poetry-writing to get a hold of me. Whether or not I am a decent poet, writing poems have made me a better writer.