Still writing. Honestly. I'm still writing.

Wow, has it really been 3 months? Time to renew my commitment to this blog about writing, about my writing, about the journey that is the writing part of my life.

I would like to blame the bitter cold winter and above normal snowfall. I would like to blame being overwhelmed with life changes, with too many commitments, with the need to pay my rent, which writing doesn't do (yet - one can always hope). But when I think about all that, I realize it is only more material for writing.

Lake Michigan holds winter in place...

I haven't stopped, of course. I finally offered the book I've been working on for a couple of years to my siblings for feedback - the book that opens a lens on this moment in the culture through the multi-generational story of my family, from ancestors in the old country, pioneers, farmers and miners, to my parents and the struggles of the generational clashes of the last century. They turned out to be wonderful readers and I am finishing up the revisions that came from their feedback.

Transition - as a theme in a writer's life

This whole autumn has felt like a transition.

So, I went on that 2-week journey to Alberta in September, the Athabasca River Pilgrimage, with 5 Canadians, a trip into "the heart of a wounded planet" (one of the titles I have given to my presentations). You can go to my last post, astonishingly TWO  months ago (who knows where the time goes, indeed), to read about it and what I learned there.

The transition is this: that journey shifted my direction, altered my path, created new themes and insights to explore in my writing, as well as creating a kind of urgency over getting enough financial support for my 501(c)(3) that I can keep on paying my rent (that annoying challenge for many a writer).

The urgency conflicts with my desire to write - also to speak, to present, to share, to open dialogue on all the disturbing things I learned on the journey - and still to write, to try to write something, every day.

Who knows where the time goes...?

I always loved that song. Now, looking at when I last posted - okay, yes, where did it go?

For those of you who follow both my Spirituality and Ecological Hope project as well as this blog, you can probably guess what happened. With a big adventure coming up in September - a 2-week pilgrimage with 5 Canadian colleagues along Alberta's Athabasca River from the Rocky Mountains to the oil sands industrial site - well, I got a bit distracted.

Not from writing, just from writing about writing...

We created a blog for the pilgrimage and I do hope you might still give it a visit [http://riverpilgrims.net/]. Some nice writing happened there and attracted a bit of a following for a while. I think it was a wonderful use of the blogging technology to allow writing, as it emerged from a powerful experience like this, to have an immediacy that moved many people who supported us on this journey. And then it was also about one of the most crucial realities of our times, one in which the course of human life on this planet is at stake.