A writer confronting these tumultuous times

As you can see from the date of my last post, I've had a little trouble finding the inner space to write about writing as I, like so many culture workers these days, grapple with the tumult of our cultural moment. I am not surprised by it. I've been writing and speaking of "The Great Unraveling," as some call it, for quite a while now. But to see it actually unfold...and so fast...

The great Buddhist scholar and deep ecologist, Joanna Macy, speaks of this decisive moment when how we humans choose to proceed has existential consequences unlike any we have faced before as a species. That is not a comfortable place to find ourselves. And this decisive moment comes just as the culture of this nation in which I live has gone into steep decline. Even if our former paradigm of constitutional order based on capitalist western democracy was still dominant, we would have (and have had) grave cultural challenges in addressing this time of crisis, but even that paradigm itself is now unraveling.

And then emerging from the darkness...

Yeah, remember me? I last posted in October on the theme of "Writing in Darkness," and then I went dark - like the winter sun over our cold northern Great Lakes.

Steam rises off open water of Lake Michigan

I've been writing in the darkness - of early morning, of frigid cloudy days, of the late afternoon darkness that is so tough for a lot of us who live in the North. It's part of what makes us who we are, living through these cycles. It gives way to tremendous creative ferment, if one is not afraid of it, not afraid of the darkness - both without and within.

I again commit to keeping up with this blog. We'll try again.

It's not that I have stopped writing. Stoneboat, a literary journal based in Sheboygan, published one of my poems in their fall edition, "2070." It's one of my ecological poems, one of my apocalyptic poems. A lot of art these days is full of this foreboding, poetry included, or even especially. Also Hollywood films. We know what's coming. Whether conscious, deliberately unconscious, pushed back from our attention because it is too terrifying and the changes in our lives required to keep the worst from happening too unwanted - we all know...

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?