Michael Field's Blog

  Holiday Greetings from Michael and Lenora to start your 2025! Happy New Year!   Dear Beloveds,   Nobody likes holiday letters that are thinly veiled excuses for parents to brag on their kids. And, unless the trip turned out worse than Planes, Trains and Automobiles , narratives about trips are boring. So, you are really not going to like this holiday letter as it has both! Some years, though, just leave no other alternative. You will see why in a moment. You figured it couldn’t be that bad and kept reading? Good, as 2024 was, in many ways, ‘same old’ for us this year. The things that brought us satisfaction in 2023 continued to do so in 2024 and no offense will arise from touching on a few. Music brings joy to our lives, and we experienced music in various ways throughout the year. We both sing with the SATB choir at our Unitarian Universalist congregation. And we both are in auditioned choruses in the larger community. Michael sings with the Oak City Sound ...

 

  Harris-Field Holiday Letter 2023   Greetings to our extended family, our dear friends and those close to us both physically and in our hearts. As usual, our holiday letter is getting distributed in early 2024 as the end of 2023 was hectic but that is a good thing. 2023 was a rewarding year in so many ways and having all of you in our lives was no small part of that. We want 2024 to continue the best of 2023 and look forward to sharing it with you. The good things about 2023 started on December 29, 2022, when our son, Evan, got engaged to the wonderful Taylor Short at the Big Sky ski area in Montana. That event created a glow which infused the entire year despite the fact that Evan and Taylor put an information embargo on wedding plans until the middle of the year. We now know they will be married next December in Montana. We also gained another granddog, a Bernedoodle not coincidentally named Montana. Montana was born in Utah on the day they were engaged, and Elizabeth...

  Christmas Reflection 2023 Michael Field   Each December, I ask myself the same question; and, each December, I come up with a different answer. The question seems simple but has intriguing layers like the reds, purples, and yellows of the sedimentary rock cliffs in the Southwest deserts. Their colors make them stand out from the monotonic beige of the barren, arid landscape surrounding them; colors that were formed from teeming marine life in the primordial seas that covered them before these towering structures were pushed up from ancient ocean floors. The question is: Why do UUs celebrate Christmas, the holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus? The Jesus commonly said to be the son of God, part of the holy Trinity. The Jesus controversially said to be the Messiah. That Jesus, not the Honduran asylum seeker at the southern border named after him. After all, the first U in UU stands for Unitarian which a quick reference to a dictionary reveals as meaning a belief sy...

  Poetry Is . . . Anti-Poem by Michael Field   Poetry is florid prose stuttered, poetry is lurid lines uttered! Poetry is words the muse muttered in my ear that long, lonely night when I couldn’t sleep.  

  And Write Your Way Home   And write your way home Everybody spends their life trying to find their way home. I have been searching all my life for what home should have been, but wasn’t. And now I am trying to write my way home. And write your way home I write to hear my own voice – not in a narcissistic way, but rather in a search for my authentic voice, the personal in the stories I write which resonates with the universal. It is Home I am searching for, not my home. And write your way home What is home anyway? The Old White Farmhouse I grew up in is such a character in my stories that I capitalize it like a proper name. But, in the end, it is just a collection of wood and stone that has been remodeled by the new owners to be unrecognizable to me. The home I search for is a sense of belonging, not a place. And write your way home Thus, writing my way home is my path to being human. I seek to trap in my words universal truths - not to possess them but to s...