Stepping back a little

I have been feeling like I have to use this blog to keep the enormity of what has gone on a little more visible, to try to keep the world from getting used to it, insofar as I can. I don't harbor illusions of grandeur, but maybe the collective weight and voice of hundreds of blogs like this, not the Daily Kos blogs, but the blogs normally about birdwatching or our dogs or our gardens or our friends or memories of our past, will have some effect.

But at a certain point I feel like I need to return to what I really write about, which is some of the things above, the personal more than the political. And yet I don't feel like I can go back to writing just about memories of trips to Central America with my family, or reflections on Zen in everyday life. I feel like I need to make those things one with the political somehow, as a way of making the tragedy real, because the reality of tragedy is always personal. Because we've been brought up on science, and especially because sane people have to defend science against yahoos, we forget that the tragedy here is not the quantifiable stuff, like the number of dead, but that with each person who dies a world dies too (I forget what writer said that, but it's true, I think.) The personal and the anecdotal (how trivial the word anecdotal sounds) are the stuff of life.

And the intersection of the political and people's real, personal, this-is-my-whole-world existence being upended and destroyed is where we are and why I am writing, and ideally at least, is where I write from. That's probably the case with most of the bloggers I read.

So I have had to stop myself, and will probably fail to stop myself, from letting my horror at these events be--in a way--trivialized by my own desire to do something about it, where I search the daily news for lies I can expose, and then shout about it--look! Look at what these people are up to! Wake up, everyone! But I think events wake people up more than my blog can.

I may be shouting tomorrow, but I hope to write better, and less, in the coming days.

It takes longer to write anything that is real and human--actually whether what I write is any good or not has gotten to be beside the point for me--so I will probably write slowly in the coming days (or I will be exposed as a person who can't very well predict my own future actions--also very possible). More stuff about crows and creeks and memories, and maybe even slower than I usually write, in that I now feel some need to make it relevant to this tragedy.

Tragedy can make loud words, my loud words at least, seem trivial, but maybe I can in small measure de-trivialize my own corner of the blogosphere, by reminding readers that local stuff, crows, and egrets, and family and friends, the world right outside my house, and inside yours--the world I prefer to write about--is the same world that the victims have, for the moment at least, been wrenched away from.

Crow is not pleased