New Creative Directions

My blogging has been more sporadic of late, the main reason being that with the passing of my mom it has been hard to motivate to keep writing. 

I know that many of you come and visit regularly and it means a lot to me that you do....yet some part of me was writing because I knew how much my mom enjoyed keeping up on our adventures. 

Life goes on though, and ultimately we have to live for ourselves even when the reasons for living are harder to discern, or when one very big reason for living changes or goes away. 

We have to find new reasons, not forgetting the ones that nourished us before but finding some way to access them even in their new and perhaps unrecognizable form. 

So last week, I started a new part-time job doing climate change communications for a government agency. My repertoire of writing topics will expand from ear discharge, Turkey & Duck snacks, and dandruff, to the necessity for human populations to adapt to a radically changed world and to mitigate what impacts are still in our power to alter. I am hoping that it will be a satisfying outlet for my desire to write things, especially things that may have some positive reverberations in the world.

And the evening of my first day on the job, I went to a drum circle and played Middle Eastern rhythms in seven and danced like an eighteen-year-old tree-hugging sarong-wearing hippie, my Business Casual neatly folded in my bedroom and long forgotten like it belonged to a distant lifetime. 

And as it was the night before Halloween, we took a moment to remember the dead. 

My Mom wasn't there in the flesh, but it's probably a good thing she wasn't. She would have been infuriated by a bunch of New Age idiots going on about connection and community and spiritual claptrap. 

I wish I could call her and tell her all about it, and again feel bathed in her uniquely disparaging and humorous form of love.  Instead, I am practicing keeping that love alive all around me.

Maybe someday I'll get used to the fact that she exists only in the night sky, in the flowers and trees, and in my heart.