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.

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

When words seem to fail...reflections on darkness and light

Winter solstice. We mark the longest darkness here in the north. But the promise of emergent sunlight heralds not yet warmth but rather the beginning, the deepening of the long cold of winter.

My  neighborhood...

How often here in Wisconsin that brilliant returning sunlight of January is accompanied by the coldest temperatures of the year. They go together.

Like today. I live along  Lake Michigan so we didn't get hit by the big snows here, mostly a lot of rain. Under the clouds all week long, our temps have hovered much above normal. The lake is unusually warm for this time of year, which is why we are having trouble turning precipitation into snow. When the sun reappeared just now, as if making a grand entrance on the stage of the solstice, I realized how long its been since we've seen it. And it comes on the tail end of the storm, on the howling winds of a night cast into cold, darkness, and silence as the power went out.