Losing focus - then trying to get it back

I imagine this is the plague of many a writer whose work addresses the times in which we live. I imagine it is also impact of the rapidity of change in our world right now, the intensity of events, and the intense connectivity and exchange of information with which most of us engage on a daily basis now as we try to understand our human predicament.

I've struggled as a writer this year - not because of who is in the White House (though that adds a measure to it) - but because of how clear it has become that we are facing a mixture of crises that are unfolding rapidly and which we humans do not seem to have the capacity to address, at least not in a way commensurate with the scale of the crises.

I've been working around themes of ecology, spirituality, and culture for some years now. But clearly they are not differentiated "themes" anymore. They are a nexus, a point of connection at which the true nature of the crisis is revealed -

Noon in Manhattan

That's the time as I begin a long-overdue post on my writers blog. I'm staring out at the brick walls across a narrow street in Tribeca, a neighborhood of old factories near the Holland Tunnel entrance that is being rapidly gentrified and becoming some of the most expensive real estate on the island. From the corner windows, I can see down to the Hudson River, where I will walk soon and long on a lovely spring day in Manhattan.

 I've loved this city for a long time. Its buzz is seductive, intense. It's a cultural mecca, and it is also the history of immigrant America, once wild and lawless, always a bit out of control, an entryway for so many of our ancestors. Mine, on both sides of the family, passed through its port to set foot in "America" before heading west where the jobs existed, where a world could still be created out of hard labor and a whole lot of suffering and loss.

Manhattan has also become a city for the rich, and maybe also the very poor who are still rent stabilized and able to access needed services. For the rest of us, it's a great place to visit, but impossible to stay.

As the old order collapses, what's a writer to do?

Jack Frost left me a note one morning

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the scale of the changes swirling around us. For a time, a brief few generations, a certain kind of stability enshrouded much of our society here, along with the emergence of the American Dream, this mythical overhang that clouds our view, always with a bit of a mystical edge to it, that our "standard of living" was on the rise - and always will be forever.

The U.S. emerged from World War II with quite a grandiose sense of itself - that we had somehow saved the world, as if the world that was saved was the only one that existed, and we had done that all on our own. Listen to the debates in Washington and you hear those voices of the old world order having a hard time letting this go, this sense that we are the center of the world and that we can always and forever determine the course of history (Romney said that pretty explicitly during his campaign).

Look around the world right now, in former Soviet Republics, in the Middle East and Northern Africa, in Kashmir and along the India/Pakistan border... An "order" patched together by various forms of western imperialist powers, especially from the days of colonialism, is coming apart after one brutal repressive government after another collapses