I’ve enjoyed doing my BlogCasts over this past year. As I came to a close with the funky audiobook multimedia posts, I wondered what I might do next, if anything. I let “if anything” sit for a few weeks because I wanted to stay open to see if I might be ready to move on to something else. (The recent BlogCasts were prerecorded by a month or so.) What happened was, I missed composing them; I missed thinking about the audio and how I currently felt and finding a song or more on the subject. I missed all of it.
I’ve never known such loneliness as I have experienced this last year and I would have thought not 10 years ago the cure for this would be easy enough and it would be found in mingling with my fellow humans and being “about” socially in the world and sharing my new found interests. A lot can happen in 10 years. Some of those things that happened were self-imposed by isolating myself in a retirement orbit and focusing on writing my manifesto; then my personal health issues, the pandemic and now a world a little more socially brittle...all this, while my own personal empowerment grew.
Suddenly being “about” socially in the world means something much different. All the furniture in the world room has been slightly rearranged to accommodate the times, a new youth, sustainability, technologies both advantageous and intrusive, and new ideals have arrived. It is no longer about what suits my taste, it is now about what the world needs to address and what it desires to come into being.
I am in an exile of aging. This is not an entirely unhappy part of the solitude. There are reasons old people don’t want you on their lawn. Some of us are weary as fuck of people and our own choices; decades of our responses to the demands of social constructs. Still, we are human and need a way to connect to others. I’m no exception in this. I still want to be the best and most loving human I can be even as I’m shuttled to the peripheries of the action.
For reasons beyond me, this BlogCasting activity helps me feel connected to the world, I realized this week, I would forego most of the screaming, hot distractions of technology that is consumed as “content” in general to modern humanity. I would, I decided, develop the discipline of reading a short bit of poetry and share in a contemplation of it at night before gliding into the slipstream of unconscious dreaming and mingling with the stars. In the morning, we shall see if I return with anything. I will make it up as I go; I will cobble together what I need with what is available.
In this period of my waiting for inspiration, my grandchildren have been busy. Madeline wrote a poem that their mother shared and I would like to read it to everyone who will listen. Maddie is 12 years old and on the cusp of their own coming into being in the world. A world today none of us imagined at their birth and we cannot fathom for them a decade from now. Here is Maddie’s poem, Where I'm From :
And...in Madeline's own voice:
My grandchild, Arianna Cook, has been busy, too, learning stop motion animation and they put together the following film. Arianna is very much the warrior goddess of the family who shows us here their skills and that they will suffer no ogres!
Both of these examples of art reflect the very individualistic and unique aspects of each of these children. Thank you, Maddie and Arianna, for being creative and brave and bringing the best of yourselves forward. You are of my heart in so many ways. Thank you, too, to their parents, Hunter and Meredith, for seeing they have everything they need to make their creativity and enthusiasm for life happen.
I will continue season three of my BlogCasts in the near future by reading to the world bits of poetry from the great, Persian, lyric poet Hafiz’ book, The Gift translated from Farsi by Daniel Landinsky. I anticipate I will do a multimedia jazz rift of my own about the poems, or not. This is where I have decided to start to maintain my relationship with the world and try to stay connected...that is, until I get a better idea.
To the gift of life, I say, Yes, please.
...and to you, Thank you for following along and listening.