Note: I’ve tried to get the blog explanation (next article) up to this position, but can’t figure out how. If you want to know how my blog is structured and what it’s about, make certain you read the NEXT posting as well. THIS posting is more of a “Why/how I was inspired!” piece!
Inspired by President Obama’s Inauguration Speech, I recognized it was my time (after half a century) to start writing. Tell me what you think. (I’m feeling very uninspired tonight!)(PS: Please make certain you read the next entry, below, to understand HOW my blog is set up… this is mostly about the “Why”).
But now it is morning — and I feel more inspired. In brief, two things happened during the Inauguration that inspired me. One was very simple: As the Poet read her work after President Obama’s speech, I listened, and thought to myself: “My work is just as good.”
More importantly, though, is what happened to me as the inauguration took place. I was thinking about all my African-American, Native American, Hispanic, Gay Rights friends, soldiers who’d “fought the fight”, who must have been estactic with the events of January 20th, 2009.
And I felt very ashamed. These were people who’d LIVED with segregation, who’d been the “first to”, who’d stood shoulder to shoulder with the oppressed, who’d been oppressed themselves. And me? What had I done? Certainly nothing revolutionary like they had done.
Then I thought of my life, and the very different path it took, in one way, on the outside, a path of ease and comfort, but in another way, a path very different than I had anticipated, an uncomfortable path personally, a path of coaching soccer and baseball, of youth groups, of planting gardens, of doing service projects. And I realized that, in a small, personal way, I’d also been a revolutionary and that, because of President Obama’s remarks, and the examples of thousands before, I was able to come out about it, to shout from the rooftops that there are things I feel passionately about, things that matter, and although in the history of this nation, and in the minds of many, those things don’t matter as much as what my friends went through — they matter to me.
This blog contains my revolutionary statements.
At the same time, I experienced a personal “coming out” of the romantic writer. That writer had always been there, hiding, ashamed, not willing to believe that he was “any good”, assuming that people reading his romanticism, his rhyme schemes and free verse and prose, would giggle and say “Romance is stupid” or “You sound like Dr. Seuss / writing about the love of a Moose!” or “I don’t get it.”
Thanks to several friends — old AND new — and thanks to the belief that today IS a new day, I’ve decided to start writing, and posting my writings, along with my experiences as both a Romantic Poet and a Revolutionary Writer. Maybe it’s not right that I self-proclaim that I’m either — or both — of those things. But who is to say that I am, or I’m not?
