Reinventing myself as a writer - it's time

A new look. A new lens. Looking out on a collapsing, tumultuous world. This writer needed to make some changes.

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Reinventing myself as a writer after nearly two years of a kind of despair. Well, that may not be exactly right. More like a period of getting lost - lost in the magnitude of the tumultuous changes underway in our world, and picking up speed. These are changes I knew were coming - in my head, I knew. It has been my work for about 12 years now - following the ecological tragedy swiftly unfolding, the unravelings, the collapses of most of the pillars on which our culture and history have been constructed.

But knowing that in the head is different from knowing it in the heart, or in the gut, which changes everything. Makes for clear seeing, which in these days is a harsh view of things.

We have some things to talk about, yes?

February - my last post on this blog was in February.

A writers blog means a writer is writing about writing. So, where did it go?

Being a writer means there are times when you back off, get some distance, when you feel changes to which you need to pay attention. It's not that I'm not writing, it's that something about the writing, about being a writer, is changing.

The unraveling of the culture is having an impact. The outcome of years of this nation's glaring incapacity to SEE, much less ponder, discuss, reflect on the massive changes underway in our world is now clearly visible in this stunning political year. We see it now, this clinging to an old way of, of what? of feeling what it is to be a U.S. American, clinging to cultural identities that largely don't exist anymore.

Mortality

Well, my Medicare card arrived in the mail over the weekend. I can tell you that, besides being dumbfounded at the passage of time, it sure does focus the mind - and the heart. It is NOT crazy to start pondering the limits of the years that are left and what one wants to do with them. Thousands of things that seemed so important recede from the list of, you know, what's important. And that, my friends, can be quite liberating.

What do I want to give back to this world for the life I've been given? What do I most feel urgent about passing on from the narrative of my own life's journey?