This is not a list of New Year’s Resolutions or a bitch session about 2010, the year of crap.

No, I’m just one guy trying to sort out a few of the more prominent events from my life.

I happened to have liked 2010. Here’s my poem for 2010:

change, change, routine
change, routine, change

That about sums it up for me. I recently finished a digital story that deals with this cryptic message as it relates to last month’s National Writing Project (NWP) Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL.

(if it doesn’t load, try reloading the page; if you can’t see the whole screen, click on the video anywhere and that should take you to youtube to view it)

Before that, I made a shorter digital story that tries to get at one session at the Annual Meeting called NWP Makes.
2010NWPMakes
By the way, we made the projects from oral directions; after we created them, we wrote out directions for the whole process (and the actual creation of the project helped us with the writing immensely).

Before that, I finished reading Sherman Alexie’s book, Reservation Blues. I was struck by the myriad ways it connected with my life: the central symbol of the story is a guitar that seemed to have supernatural powers and I’ve been learning to the play the guitar this year (with more success than I had thought possible); the Catholic Church is portrayed as both a positive and negative influence on the reservation and it had similar affects on my life; a minor, though important, character in the book is a Black blues singer, named Robert Johnson, and I had just recently been thinking about how you don’t see many Blacks on Indian Reservations; the main character, Thomas-Builds-the-Fire, writes poems/lyrics and so do I; any many of the life situations of Indian people on the Spokane Indian Reservation in the story remind me of Lakota friends and their plight/joy existence on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Alexie speaks to me in the same way that Barbara Kingsolver is easy to read and makes so much sense. I want to read everything they both write. This story made me laugh and think, wonder and cry.

Before that, my son, Aaron, came back home after a two and a half month camping trip by himself across the West. I created a google map to try to get a handle on his trip and my previous post (below) was written from his perspective. And before that, my daughter, Rachel, moved to Seattle.

I remember some routine days in 2010, but flux was the norm.

This coming year, NWP will be in Chicago, which feels more like home. I plan to visit Rachel, though Aaron’s journey is still an evolving mystery. One thing I do plan to make more time for is writing; I need to re-introduce daily, sacred writing time into my life (and classroom) to help process this crazy, wonderful roller coaster called life.