A Quick Note Before We Begin...

When Erin said, "It's the connection to a 1,700-year-old tradition that attracts people to those services," I knew what this blog needed to be about. Deciding the blog's subject had bothered me from the moment a new friend, and web developer, persuaded me that blogging wasn't just for political junkies and public-diary-keeping fifteen-year-olds. But what would I write about? Posting random thoughts and funny clips seemed unsustainable and uninteresting. Focusing on a single subject, like food or the Middle East, would be limiting and likely produce the moronic babble that I associate with the word blog. I'm not an expert on anything; I don't obsess about pop culture or the grit of local politics; I'm a journalist who would like to be paid for his well-crafted, agonized-over words. What do I write about?

Then Erin, my sister, and I veered into a common conversation: the allure of tradition. This bout started with our frustration that so much of American Christianity is based on an ahistoric, untraditional concept of the faith that stops at the resurrection and restarts with Jesus boxing-out John Hancock to sign the Declaration of Independence. Erin and her husband, Ryan, both raised as evangelicals, began attending a Lutheran church in Hungary that, because of them, started an English service. The tradition of the liturgy, a youngster at 500, attracts Erin and she knows why many Americans, raised in mainline Protestant or evangelical churches, are turning to the ancient services performed by the Orthodox Church. They join a one-and-a-half-millennium long lineage of believers led by priests who say the same words and perform the same motions as they did in the fourth century. It's a sense of rootedness that the modern fundamentalist church doesn't posses and largely belittles. When we finished our talk, that idea – rootedness – sunk into my thoughts.

Now, the artist in me winces at explicitly describing what this blog will cover (especially because it will evolve) but my rational-self keeps molding the idea, trying for some definition. Because my analytic-self is violent and mean it punched artsy in the kidneys and sent him to the bathroom – which is a long way of saying I'm going to co-opt your interpretive faculty and explain this blog. At its heart is rootedness in all its esoteric guises: connections, bonds, history, heritage, community, legacy, shackles, provincialism, obligations, limitations, steadfastness, tradition. Without realizing it, my work has explored these words for years. Whether I wrote about an Indian village facing a new round of modernity, a farmer maintaining a 100-year-0ld legacy, soccer players reconciling their dual nationality while changing the color of their team, or an inter-faith service wrestling with the nature of worship and the limits of tolerance the idea of rootedness asserted itself. Much of my draw to it flows from the same impulse that carries me to cultures and societies outside my own: it's alien. I grew up as a migrant-American, able to pull up and replant every few years, and concepts like hometowns and place-as-identity don't fit into my experience. I don't identify with a specific place or group as much as I relate, tenuously, to a broad region and a few half-thought ideas. This is an increasingly common condition in America and much of the world, taking the blame for alienation, dissolved societies, extremism, ennui, and whatever psycho-social reason everything sucks these days compared to some great past. I’m unsure it deserves this.

And I’m unsure how roots or a lack of them affect us. I’m as interested in how a farmer relates to a specific plot of ground and to well-loved though long-dead ancestors as I am to how migrant-Americans replace or replicate those traditional roots (if they are even traditional). Formation of subcultures is a well known example of this, though I believe the search for roots touches something simpler.

Take food as an example: More and more people buy their produce and meat directly from farmers and ranchers. Partly because the quality is better, partly because they know what went into their food, they trust it was done right, they trust an individual more than a long, knotted chain of production. I believe a large part is also a desire to make connections – to the farmer, to the animal, the land, the process, maybe even to history and tradition. That's not a new idea, but why was that impulse there anyway? Put another way, why is it so much more satisfying to drink a beer brewed down the street than a better one from Belgium?

That line of questions can run thin fast and go in circles. Even worse: It could get boring. The beauty of something as vague as rootedness for my subject is that it lets me write about whatever I want. I’ll cover cooking, sports and religion, family, farming, music and metal working, travel, moving, reading and couches, dogs, and, I hope in a few months, zucchini flowers. If anyone has a suggestion for a topic, let me know.

My artistic-self isn’t a total wuss and it will demand equal time on the posts, which will keep my explicit views of the subjects down in exchange for a nuanced, narrative take on whatever I'm writing about. I hope that posts like this (rambling, here's-what-I-think slog) will appear rarely. Most will be essays or articles. No diary entries. I hope to include profiles when they come along.

For this week an explanation will do.