Out of the Darkness

This is the time of Halloween, of Día de los Muertos, of All Saints and All Souls Days, the time the Pagans call Samhain. I blogged last year on Darkness in my post of 11/1/08--in it I talked about 'death, disorder, and decay', and entropy. Another aspect of darkness is fertility: the deep, dark earth where seeds germinate and the darkness of the womb where life is nurtured. Darkness allows us to see things (the lights of candles, holiday lights, and especially the stars) that we can't see during the day.

In that spirit, I want to talk about my month off from blogging. As I said in my post of 9/22/09, after five months of intensive posting every three days, I wanted some time off to do other things. So I didn't post anything during October.

Unfortunately, one of the main things I did during the month of October was to work on the second issue of my Zine, which was originally supposed to have come out at the autumn equinox. It is now at the printers and should be out next week. (The zine is called Bodhisattva Revolutionaries and Social Alchemists and issue is entitled 'What I Believe'--it is basically a republishing of my posts from last fall with a little new material. Check the link for more information.)

But I didn't spend all my time working on the zine. I helped work on a house in Boston (the JPGreenHouse) that is being rehabbed to be very low energy use (I will blog on this at some point); watched Michael Moore's Capitalism with my housemates and The Greening of Southie at the Somerville Library; took little classes on energy use, wormbins, seed saving, and insight meditation; and helped out with the Massachusetts Relocatization Conference and the Boston Under Water Festival that took place on October 24 as part of the International Day of Climate Change. Don't think that I was doing exciting things, however. I did cleaning and taking nails out of boards at the JPGreenHouse, sat at the registration table at the Relocalization Conference, and taped up some sagging signs and helped with the clean up at the Boston Under Water Festival. But I think the important thing is to support people who are doing things that move us in a more progressive direction.

And, as I said in my post of 9/22/09, my goal for the next little while is to do what most people do in their blogs--to post irregularly, on whatever strikes my fancy. I will probably pick another theme and explore it at some point (hopefully the series on education that I have been promising since the early days of this blog) but for now I want to focus on my own learning and doing. Winter is coming, a good time to turn inward, and I intend to spend it nuturing myself and my work on community building. Hopefully, the darkness of winter will be nourishing and spring will see me working on many things--among them, my garden, this blog, and building a community. And, of course, I will continue to try to support social change efforts in whatever little way that I can.


Quote of the Day: "... perhaps it is up to us all ... to reach into the dark and reshape it into a clear night sky where we can walk without fear, into a well of healing from which we can all drink, into the velvet skin of life, the newly fertile ground." - Starhawk