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.

My guest blog at Stoneboat - Writing at the End of the World

I was invited by writing colleagues to contribute a post to the blog of the literary journal, Stoneboat.

The post is entitled, Writing at the End of the World, a theme you have seen often here. Hope you'll give it a read.

This morning, I took my cup of coffee down to the Lake Michigan shore to watch the sunrise. The air was crisp and cold, a winter haze settled over downtown and a bank of clouds out in the distance over the lake.The water was so, so still. I could tell the slow motion of swells rising and falling not by the water itself, but rather by the movement of the clouds' reflection in the clear ice covering the water, back and forth, back and forth. Could make you dizzy. Much of the surface had a thin layer of ice that made crinkling sounds as the sheets bumped gently into one another. Out in the small spaces of open water, geese and ducks flocked. Every now and then I could hear the clear sounds of wings sloshing in the water as they moved about.

It was magic, always magic, this world we are ruining... How is it possible we are ruining this world?

What does it mean to be a writer (speaker, too) in such a time?

Meanwhile, this was posted on Upworthy today, which is how I discovered it. Give yourself a gift. Take 20 minutes to watch this, then sit for a moment and feel the change, let it come, speak it, even if you are alone. Don't let the moment just pass; dont get up right away and do something else. Sit with it. Feel what changes within you.

How can we go on like this - knowing what we know?