Loss, and growth

Since mid-November, I have been writing every day for hours — it's the most disciplined I've ever been with writing — with anything,  actually — in my entire life. I have been writing and sending out a newsletter about daily actions anyone can do to strengthen democracy, a free press, a healthy environment, and people's civil rights and liberties.

It has not seemed relevant to this blog so I haven't been posting in this blog. I don't think I want it in this blog. But it leaves this blog neglected.

This blog has morphed over time as well; it started out being largely about my search for a more responsive education system that supports and respects teachers and students. When I observed the wedges being driven between various education stakeholders in Chicago and across the country by the privatization movement, I created an education idea-exchange, H.e.a.r. Chicago Talk, and this blog became a companion for that. As my freelance and my personal work changed, my interest in nature-based formal education changed to a love and fascination with local greenspace more generally.

I have considered letting the blog morph again into an instrument of civic participation and activism. I don't think that's the right fit for this blog. You can receive my daily five-minute actions by going to tinyletter.com/fiveminutes (click on the red link to see an archive, and yikes please excuse the massive typo in the first sentence of today's letter). You can also find me occasionally guest blogging about activism on elainesir.com, a lively space for unique interviews with fascinating people and examinations of work, life, family, and society.

This blog may morph again; actually, it might be bound to. I think I need to embrace my tendency to wholeheartedly explore many things — all kinds of things, interlocking things and very different things, things that do not meld into one cohesive Big Picture — as a feature rather than a bug.

I have been thinking about this tendency, and this blog, and my work, and my interests, and my way of going through the world, and I do perceive a thread. What I want to do in all these things is facilitate equitable access to things that make life free and worth living — access to nature for all people, access to a good and respectful education, access to the resources needed to do one's job right, access to civil rights and liberties.

In my consulting work, I do an array of things — line editing, curriculum development, content architecture, nonprofit program development. I have been advised to narrow my focus or it'll never all work. But I have accepted, I think, that I can't; or rather, that narrowing my focus means doing a wide array of consulting with one thread in common: helping people and organizations with a mission to better help their clients access their content.

Meanwhile, while Resistence is Necessary and Not Futile, I sorely miss my forays into the urban wilds. I hope to continue to explore nature in and around Chicago and elsewhere, and I hope to explore this thread of access more; and I hope my newfound writing discipline will actually benefit, not continue to silence, this blog!

Thanks for your support while I sort out these new priorities for this new era.