Mission Statement
I don’t know what I’m doing. Let me confess that, freely and openly, right now. I intended this to be a place for humanists to talk, but like any tool, it will become whatever our clever little monkey-hands need it to be. That’s what we do. That’s what’s amazing about us.
“You never know, when you leave the house,
You might come home by a different route.
A different road than the one you planned,
It could get completely outta hand.
If you let it slide, if you let it slip
You could wonder how it came to this
In the neighbourhood, in the quiet night
Out beside the road, in the flashing lights.”
-“Comfortable,” James McMurtry
Yeah. Like that. Exactly like that. We’re going for a walk here, and even I can’t tell you where we’re going or where we’ll end up. I have this imagine that my life has meaning. I have this intention that I’ll make it have meaning. Same for this place, here. You can’t build utility. You can build function, and then people will use it for what they need, whether you want them to or not. If you need a hammer, and I’m building screwdrivers, I shouldn’t be alarmed or surprised when I find you diligently slamming nails with the handle; it’s what you needed at the time. We build. If it works, we use it. That’s what humans do.
I’m no different. I’m an ordinary Joe or Jane, you pass me on the subway all the time. I write, I sew, I dream, I garden and go to night school. I’ve written two books, one of which is wonderful and one of which is awful, and I’m doing the plain dull work of rewriting the awful one. It’s work and I don’t always like it. I’ve got a day job I love because I love work and need money, and because I believe everyone should have a job that makes them ordinary.
We get hung up on the extraordinary life. Life IS extraordinary. Life is wild. Even in the trenches of the most ordinary, everyday adventure, there are sudden flashes of light and unbelievable fascination. You can’t get away from it, and you can’t predict it, and I won’t try to predict that here. Being a rock star won’t help. Even rock stars have to work, or they fall apart.
The point is, I do stuff. Not necessarily rock star stuff, but stuff. There’s things in my head that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and they need a place to live in real life. So I build that, because it’s my job. It’s your job, too, by the way. As a humanist, I treasure what’s in your head, because I recognise that you’re a whole separate world with things in your head no one can imagine or see. If you can get those out into the world, that’s the biggest thing you can do for all of us, the one thing no one else can do. If you see something on the horizon that none of the rest can, it’s your job to chase it, hunt it, drag it back alive. No one else can. Don’t let it kill you.
We have had enough Sylvia Plaths, Van Goghs, people whose light and darkness killed them. Bring it back alive, and come home as whole as you can. And if you think this doesn’t apply to you because you’re ordinary, you’re wrong. Even the most ordinary of us can do something functional and useful. Your day job matters. Your invention matters. If you can find a way to get paid for it, great. If you can’t, do it anyway. And don’t just ditch the day job, because in the end, we do owe a little bit to one another.
Why trees? What have trees got to do with this work, or with humanism, or my inability to predict funtion?
A tree is the record of days and years of work. It’s constant, slow, powerful growth, the slow and serious real kind. It’s not about moments of transformation- there are some, but most of it is about slow ordinary everyday growth. You look at a tree and you’re watching slow growth. They do it. Every day, they work at being a tree. Finding water, finding light, breathing air. The slow ordinary life of a tree might get used for things- we use wood everywhere. But it’s still tree. It became that way by being tree.
That’s what this blog is for. The Tao says that it doesn’t matter if we build the house out of clay, rock, wood, or words; it’s the space inside the house that you’re going to use, and you’ll use it as you like. You’ll use it as you can. A cup can be made of anything, but the empty space is what’s valuable. I’m carving out a space. This is how it works. In the end, no matter what, it will be the tree, grown as it had to grow. You’ll use it as you need- shade, fruit, wood, whatever.
I want to look at life with a minimum of actual navel-gazing, if I can manage it. I want to look at how we deal with the incredible challenge of getting through our lives. I really believe that being a humanist means grappling with the practical questions of how to get our lives better, and how to talk about the things that matter to us so we can get more of the tools we need. To focus on the practical side of humanism; it’s great to ask who we are and what we’re doing, but in the end, it all comes down to the question of questions… What are we going to do now?
What will we do?
It’s not just about what’s in your head; it’s about what’s in your hands. Your job is to get it from your head to your hands. If this place helps, finding you ways to actually use what you’ve been talking about, that’s wonderful, but I can’t promise that it will.
That’s all this is. A blog and a set of forums. That’s all anything is, really- a life and the place that it intersects other lives.
Then again, maybe Thomas Carlyle said it best, in Book 2 IX, The Everlasting Yea, of his Sartor Resartus:
“I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God`s name! `Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.”
This is a work in progress, just like us. What it becomes is tree.