Directional Shifts and Renewal of Purpose

Having grown up part of a couple of clans that were filled with real doozie of personalities, I came to see families as imperfect, or terribly messed-up, you take your choice. As I live, my feelings of being a part of something that I have to overcome have been replaced by an acceptance of my family as-is. That has been a long journey and I am very often at war with my own feelings, even today.

Family, even the distant ends of it, has a strong pull on me. As I sit here and write this, just behind me, spread out over the bed that is in this room, are hundreds of pictures of family from as far back as 80 years. I love looking at them, naming all the poeple in the pictures, and relating to anyone willing to listen the qualities and relationship to me of the persons pictured.

I inherited this group of pictures from my deceased parents. Nobody else really wanted them. There are many in there that I really love and cherish. I have been looking at some of them off and on most of my life. Many are of me and my brothers when we were small children. A really special one is me sitting at the feet of my mother, who is standing; just me and mom, wow.

We are much more than our history. We are what we do today and the plans and preperations that we make for tomorrow. We are the kind word we give to a stranger and we are the promise that we remake to our spouse to love him or her till death do us part. We are the vision that we act upon when we vote, when we give to charity, and when we help build community institutions.

And yet, I sit in the midst of history that I have collected. I catalogue it and I sort out that worth keeping and that not worth another viewing, reading, or hearing. Thanks to digital cameras and recorders, and digital storage, my storehouse of that history now runs into the tens of thousands of pictures, hundreds of short movies, thousands of songs, and thousands of pages of written history.

And so, last year I set out on a project. I will not leave this mountain without some story that it tells the willing listener or reader. I will make some sense of it all and that is who I will be today and tomorrow, the person who gives some form to all of this that people to come might learn from it, or simply entertain themselves by listening and reading.

Thus, this blog, which I am using as a sorter, a gauge, and a chance to see some things in print so that I might know what is worth the keeping and what is not. I have taken off some time from the blog to evaluate what I have written and decide the direction that I want to go. I have some idea of what is worth my time and what is not, and if you follow the blog, then you will begin to see the changes that I intend to make.

While I have toned down the political, I will always have comment to make on issues that I consider too important to overlook, or where I feel that I have a worthwhile perspective. But, I have lost much of the political passion that I had only a few years ago. At most levels of government now, the people there are the people that I supported, so I have little to complain about, and I am willing to trust my instincts and wait on good results.

My travel is being diminished because of the economy and Sarah's physical problems. That is fine, we have traveled most of this country and much of Canada, and I have few feelings of need to go see places that I have not seen. I love the road, but I do not have to have the road.

My efforts will turn more to stories of people, many times family, and those stories will probably have a running theme of acceptance of the things that I can not change, and would not change just to fit my narrow view of what is good and what is bad.
And, while this blog will continue to be used as a lab, I will co-ordinate with others to tell stories using other mediums. It is my hope that in the not too distant future, those efforts will yield fruits. That has to be seen.

And those stories will be stories of my family members, largely. Accepting them as they were, I find that much of their lives are very compelling, and I want anyone willing to read this blog to get a chance to know the folks that I called cousin, aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, brother, mom, dad, or somehow connected to all those people.