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.

Writing from what you know

I mean, is there anything more toxic within the culture these days than all those people who speak from what they don't know? Watch Sean Hannity for a great example. Of course, a lot of TV news and punditry is just personalities reading scripts on a teleprompter written for them.

They are saying things they do not know.

Or listen to those Sunday morning political shows (I don't anymore, can't, my soul finally rebelled). My Ayn Rand Sen. Ron Johnson is a great example, too. I can still be stunned by someone who apparently has no real understanding of economics trying to yell down a Pulitzer Prize winning economist like Paul Krugman. You don't have to agree with Krugman all the time in order to appreciate how smart he is, but if you are going to engage him in debate, at least know your stuff, right?

Yup, few things more toxic than listening to people speak like confident, strident, experts on things about which they know so little. Wayne LaPierre of the NRA is another great example. Sometimes I gasp at the factually errant things he declares with such practiced righteous anger. What's worse: that he does this, or that the political culture takes his point of view seriously, as part of the "balance" in the debate?

Climate change - don't even get me started on that one.

With that in mind, I was intrigued by this article in the NY Times yesterday: Outside the Citadel, Social Practice Art Is Intended to Nurture. It's about a rising expression in the art world in which art is deeply engaged in the world - not just art for the sake of art, but art embedded in the struggles of humans for dignity, expression, social change, and social transformation, often at a fiercely local level (though with potential repercussions far beyond).

"Known primarily as social practice, its practitioners freely blur the lines among object making, performance, political activism, community organizing, environmentalism and investigative journalism, creating a deeply participatory art that often flourishes outside the gallery and museum system. And in so doing, they push an old question — 'Why is it art?' — as close to the breaking point as contemporary art ever has."

Part of the answer to that question, why is it art, is simple - it is art because it is art: that's the answer. It emerges from the human experience like food from organic gardening, like dreams in the night that simply appear, like air in our lungs or blood in our veins. It is something we need to do to live.