3,000

 This is my 3,000^th Blogpost. 10 years writing, with 227 followers and 477,654 all time pages read and 1288 comments (statistics courtesy of Blogspot— I’m not keeping track!). 

In terms of pages written, that puts me numerically up there with Tolstoy and Victor Hugo and yes, "War and Peace" and some “The Miserables” have flowed through this Nile River of shared experience. But also much joy, wonder, astonishment, gratitude amidst my small complaints and large outrages. 

 

To mark the occasion, I thought I should try to capture the essence of it all. Reduce the endless “blah-blah-blah” x 3,000 to a single blah or two. What’s the point here? Why am I doing this and what do I hope to communicate?

 

There’s the story of the sage who told the disciple:

 

“I have both God and the Devil inside of me.” 

 

“Which one is stronger?” asked the disciple?

 

“Whichever one I feed.”

 

As good a metaphor as any for this work. From the inside, I’m struggling like all of us as I daily choose which one deserves my attention and try to organize my life around that diet. From the outside, there are the forces fighting for my attention, trying to stoke my fear and anxiety for their own profit or political purpose and part of the drama is my ability to distinguish the true from the hype, to see through the used-car salesmen, to refuse their offer.  And then there’s the question—especially as a teacher—of what I feed in others.

 

As the title implies and the 3,000 posts testify, I have been blessed—with the help of Carl Orff, jazz and my own intuition— to have found a way to create an instant community of divine souls through the simple vehicles of playing, singing and dancing together. I have the power to help re-awaken dormant inner children hungry to play and explore again after being locked in the closet by the demands of adulthood. And equally the power to invite the evolving adult to step up to the responsibility of moving toward being a life-sustaining elder and eventual ancestor. I’ve lived a life of awakening Spirit in a church without dogma, blind faith or required belief. My hope and aim is—and always has been—to feed the God in each child and adult I have the good fortune to teach. 

 

Of course, that God is not that bearded white guy with his capricious moods and his vindictive punishments deciding who shall smite and who shall be smitten, but that un-nameable Spirit that lies behind, within, throughout all sentient beings. And the Devil is not a horned red creature making deals and threatening eternal hellfire— goodness knows we have enough of those walking in the halls of Congress—but it is us when we make the wrong mistakes, get into the wrong kind of trouble, make the cowardly choices when we don’t step up to our own promise. And then try to blame others for our own failure.

 

So in this decade of sharing my triumphs and tribulations, my faith and my doubts, my affirmations and my outrages, there it all is stretched out behind me, a long, long litany of trying to write the world into some sort of coherent shape and meaning, a place to take the wild horses stampeding in my head and let them loose to run for others to witness. I often wonder whether on some long rainy day—and it would take at least a Noah’s flood of 40 days and nights—I might read through them all again and see what they have to say to me.  Not likely, but it could be interesting. 

So thanks to all you faithful readers who have stuck with me, my hopes that they’ve brought you some comfort, affirmation, intriguing new ideas, entertainment and/or inspiration and tomorrow, I imagine I’ll just forge ahead with 3,001.