What happened?

8-4-16

So much has happened in the six years since I began this blog. It isn't necessary to catalog the details except to say that my journey has taken some twists and turns, like life for all of us. More importantly, what has happened to cause this blog to resurface is a realization that I needed to learn more about the technology of communication in the 21st Century. I am of a geezer age and instinctively inhibited when it comes to accepting change. Of course, I favor progress and have only lately come to understand how change is part of progress. Changing hearts and minds is a very difficult challenge and not always obvious but I am of the mind that progress is being made all the time. How do we notice it? Can it even be measured? Where is progress taking us?

I am reviving this blog at a time in our lives when so much is uncertain about the seaworthiness of our ship of State and the direction in which she is headed. I don't plan to advocate for any partisan causes here except for the causes that brought very different individuals together several hundred years ago to create the ship on which all of us are now passengers. As we are all passengers on this mighty ship of State, so are all people around the world passengers on this ship Earth. My intention is to advocate for all of us in a way that is relatively comfortable for me, as I am not by nature an "activist". All of us are activists in small ways that we might not notice. We are activists if we are members of a family and recognize the need to share a common lineage. We are activists if we buy organic produce and are willing to pay a slightly higher price for the safety it offers in this age of chemically treated mono-culture crops. We are activists if we volunteer for a local food bank or blood donation drive. We are activists in an almost infinite number of ways because activism implies an intention to engage one another for the good of all.

In addition, community and its varied iterations has come to represent a model for bringing diversity and tolerance into our lives when we are faced with troublesome dualities of us/them, black/white, for/against, good/evil, when we know deep inside ourselves that what brings us together as fellow human beings is greater than what separates us. Blogs, properly and respectfully constituted, serve to strengthen one's sense of community. Blogs are a forum for conversations among those who might otherwise disagree with one another. Ideally, a blog would gather together ideas about many truths and about beauty. It would be a pathway and not a destination. It would be a place where trust could be tested.

Perhaps my notion of what a blog is and can do is naive. I am willing to be taught and willing to be vulnerable, two aspects of my life that were not always prominent. Perhaps aging has had the effect of making my ego more pliable and permeable. I only hope so. In the spirit of community and sharing resources, I welcome your contributions to this conversation. In any case, I will periodically and in a more timely way add to this blog as ideas come to me or I am moved to share something with my community of readers.