Why Toward Bethlehem?

In the last ten years, I changed from a highly-focused, well-organized person to a “multi-tasker.” I became the person I promised myself I wouldn’t become: the one-handed driving/cell phone talking/coffee drinking/mind-racing person who scurried from the present into the future unable to stop—the person who didn’t see the nuances, the depth and colors of her own blessed life. I don’t know why I became that person, but I suspect my appetite for more is the engine that drives me into the chaos of too much.

William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" is a pessimistic meditation on chaos and collapse. Written in the aftermath of the First World War, it opens with the image of a falcon unable to hear the falconer. The raptor circles “in the widening gyre” until all form and pattern are lost and bedlam breaks free: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The final stanza refers to the Second Coming, the Christ Reincarnate as a “rough beast” which is “…moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.” It’s bleak and ugly, but fiercely honest. Europe was teetering toward terror then, as is our entire world now. Yeats must have felt hopeless and horrified when he wrote the words: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

I don't presume to put myself in the company of Yeats, or Joan Didion whose book of essays, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, described the 1960's--another time of war and social upheaval. But I can confidently say I am living in an era as turbulent and unstable as the early Twentieth century and the 1960’s.

The political unrest and chaos of everyday life in this Twenty-First Century echo in my own disorganized, frenzied life. The hope that I might be writing in the direction of a mythical or symbolic Bethlehem is the reason I chose this name for my blog. The “Bethlehem” I am writing toward is my own—and maybe a hoped-for “Bethlehem” in the world. My Bethlehem is the symbolic place where quiet and contemplation live, a place where I can come to make order and sense of my overly-full days and thoughts.

Writing is the process of slowing down, of moving past the surface and into the visceral and universal. It's Christmas Eve—the time when my mind settles, finds optimism and serenity and makes peace with the present. I have the pleasure of participating in the richness and texture of a singular experience, thought or moment. In writing, I make order, select what is significant and fight against the madness that my insatiability for experience produces in my life.

Blog, to me, sounds thick and dull, like clog or slog (the words Spell-Checker gives me when I write Blog.) I’d rather be dancing or skating toward Bethlehem. But I fear I’m living more like Yeats’s “rough beast” in an arid wasteland produced by overwhelming plenty. So I am “slouching toward Bethlehem,” my Bethlehem, dying to be reborn into tranquility, harmony and just enough.