Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 9

Where does Inspiration Come From?

But it is the same story, over and over in many ways, you know. I’m always obsessed with the same things, and I think that most writers are. You get a couple of themes and if you’re lucky, you can keep on turning it and shining different light on it, but it’s always that forgiveness […]

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WE WANT PEACE!

I did not vote for our current president, and I take exception to his ideas and his manner in too many ways to count.  But occasionally, out of his barrage of verbiage, the man says something that I find myself sitting up and listening to.  Something that gives me a scrap of exceedingly cautious hope. […]

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Finding What I Need to Say

I’m happy to be working on something that feels personally important. I think that’s really the best there is in writing, yes? Finding what I need to say, and then the way to say it. It’s so much easier than I imagined all those years ago when I started writing. And it is so much harder. […]

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A Dream, a Hope, a Demand for the New Year

It isn’t so much my dream for the New Year, or even my hope.  It’s more a demand.  But sometimes it feels as though I might as well demand that the Earth stop its spin. I want peace.  Meaningful peace.  Peace in which the richest and most powerful nation in the world stops—actually stops—spreading armaments […]

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Love

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling, not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth… For this reason, […]

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The Longest Night, the Sweetest Sound!

I couldn’t have imagined a sweeter or more fulfilling way to draw my extended 80th birthday celebration to a close. I began celebrating in October by taking my daughter and daughter-in-law to Vermont to revisit my old teaching home at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In November, my actual birth month, my daughter gave me […]

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The Opposite of Spare Time

The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living. An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But […]

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Write On!

My daughter, Beth-Alison, posts my blogs and quotes for me, and she calls me faithfully when I’ve failed to deliver what she needs according to the schedule we have agreed upon.  An interesting reversal of roles that is, no doubt, only the beginning of a much more substantial reversal that I prefer not to spend […]

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Fixing the World

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It […]

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This Blink of Time

Today is my birthday.  My 80th, would you believe?  I add “would you believe?” because I don’t quite believe it myself.  That’s despite the fact that I’ve been trying out the number for months, mostly inside my head, sometimes out loud.  “Hey!  You’re 80!” I’ve been saying it when I do a full Pilates hang, […]

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