We need new stories...

Last night I was sitting on the cushion at my sangha meditating there for the first time since the beginning of August. In the past few weeks, life put in front of me a rich platter overfull with travels to the East, with insights, experiences, input, output (i.e., work) relationships (some new, some decades old), reunions, homecomings, and the raw vulnerability of accompanying a family member intensely dear to me through a profound medical challenge.

In the background was Gaza, and ISIS, and the Ukraine, and Ebola, and climate change tipping points, and Ferguson, and visceral racism, and on and on. When I came home, it was back into this nasty political culture that is my poor State of Wisconsin in an election year with huge stakes and money corrupting the whole process.

Whew! And I think I appreciate more than ever that the work of culture

Art is Not Optional

By Carolyn Raffensperger

The first time I realized the impact of the arts on my life as an activist was after a big loss in the Illinois legislature over public lands on Lake Michigan. At the time I was the State Field Representative for the Sierra Club. I had worked hard lobbying to oppose the sale of 26+ acres of Lake bed and shoreline to Loyola University. The legislature sold it out from under the public. I, along with others, had done everything we could to save that land for future generations and prevent the University from building a sports stadium on a landfill in the Lake. We lost big time. That night I went to hear Tom Paxton at the Old Town School of Folk Music. His beautiful familiar music washed over me, taking the anger and sorrow enough so I could get up the next day and go on. During an intermission he wandered among us and I told him what that night of music meant to me. I told him that I knew I was not alone in the struggle. He hugged me.

When you just can't write...

Sometimes the world overwhelms. Sometimes life becomes that thing that happens while you're making other plans. Sometimes available hours to write just don't appear. 

Sometimes you wonder why we live in a culture that does not support culture and the arts so that that time would be available...

It's especially hard when you are in the middle of a project you love, that is coming from deep within you, that wants to be written, that is even important, and that you know is some of the best writing you've ever done.

And life unfolds...

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?

April Is No Fool

A lesson in clinging: the winter that is so reluctant to let go. Every now and then we get a teaser, a day when it actually feels like spring. It lasts a day or two, then - well, today, for example. Back in the 30s and a winter weather advisory for the overnight.

A lesson in clinging. If you want something new, you gotta let go - mostly of expectations. Winter and spring are in this intense dance this year, more intense than in many years, and it is exhilarating to be in it, to watch the wrestling match, knowing that the cycle does ultimately tell us which one will finally relent.