Yeah, hi, I’m still around. Just not posting much lately. It’s funny, it’s not like there probably isn’t plenty of things upon which I could comment re: my current surroundings, I just don’t have blogbrain on so much. Which is probably because I’m writing, mostly, and so my creative energy (and patience for sitting at the keyboard, and time) is being concentrated over there on that end. My days have pretty much found their routine: work at home or go to some coffee shop to work, if concentration’s not happening at home, max out and go running in the forest (most days) or run errands or something, come home, have a little downtime, then go socialize. It’s a good life, as lives go. I used to love this framework of a day when I was a freelance writer–very very similar. It will be a bit difficult to go back to school at the end of the summer and return to the land where my time and decisions about how to spend it are not just mine alone. Ah, well. To all good things, or something like that.
The great thing about being here is that there’s so much pretty. This weekend included camping up at a place called Deception Pass, lots of big beyootiful trees and clear clear lakes and winding trails. Yum.
This is what I’m reading right now: $elling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. I found it at the university bookstore. It’s awesome, even or especially since it was written by these Marxists with a tendency to rant. I appreciate a lot of what they’re saying, even though there are pages and pages of self-righeteous commie blather* that make me scream at the book, “You’re about to make a good point, now please go make it!” In a nutshell, they’re talking about how the means-nothing word of “spirituality” has been privatized, so that it’s only telling a story about individual rather than collective experience (as religion traditionally has), and corporatized, so that it’s used conveniently to suppliment rather than combat the current ultra-capitalist paradigm, promoting quick easy fixes to your life problems rather than over-arching cultural transformation. This is a quote from Erich Fromm that they use, I think, to good effect:
Religion has become an empty shell; it has been transformed into a self-help device for increasing one’s powers of success. God becomes a partner in business.
And on that cheery note, think I’ll leave you all to go have a day. May the force be with you and more soon.
*Commies, for the record, can be great, lots of fun at parties. Commie blather, on the other hand, tries my patience much more quickly.