Maintaining this blog is a growth-promoting process for me. I previously maintained my own Web domain, the former paulcreeden.com, where I published my stories, novels, cartoons over a five-year period (1999-2004). I took paulcreeden.com off the Web when I discovered it was being used illegally as a cover by a pornographer in South Carolina, who had hacked into my domain's server while I was preoccupied with fighting cancer. As an outspoken gay man, I did not want to give the modern-day, fundamentalist-inspired Thought Police any excuse to accuse me of committing some hideous sex crime involving the non-consenting. So, paulcreeden.com, ironically and indirectly, fell victim to the sex industry, which I would otherwise defend as having a valid place in consensual, adult society.
Currently, I am actively involved in several fronts of major change in my life. Thanks to a productive writers' group of which I am a member, I have begun the process of submitting my fiction for on line publication on literary sites. Through this blog, I have become involved with Harvard Humanist Association in a small way. I am considering giving more time and support to the growing humanist movement, as exemplified by that group. And, since I will reach the traditional retirement age in 5 years, I am trying to wrap my head around how best to plan financially for an old age which no sane person who have expected me to have until recently.
I see great fortune in my life. The greatest fortune is being awake, consciously alive and able to still learn and change.
Buddha's Pillow has been an important part of my practice. Through it, I have learned to stretch my awareness of political and social issues. Frankly, it helped me get through the dark Bush years with my sanity. It also represents a personal transition in my life. While I have been an atheist since my adolescence, This blog has helped me to integrate the several serious encounters I have had with organized metaphysical thought. Buddhism was one of those. Parapsychology was another. New Age-ism another. And so on. These roads all taken after leaving the initial path of traditional Western Judeo-Christianity.
As I assess the various changes ahead of me, I am considering the end of Buddha's Pillow and the beginning of a new form of encouraging daily humanist practice in myself and any others, who wish to read and communicate about it. This process of making decisions is, for me, the refinement of practice, since I see humanist practice as operating on two levels: The Present and The Ongoing. In The Present of practice, I am trying in every living moment to train my brain to the path of light, kindness, compassion and mindful truth. In The Ongoing of practice I am bringing all my baggage of life-history, financial circumstances, mundane skills to bear on the bread-and-butter issues of daily life, not only today's, but also tomorrow's. Since I do not believe in magic or miracles, I must strive to integrate The Present with the Ongoing, by doing what I must do in a materialistic, commercial and somewhat indifferent society to have a roof over my head and food on my table.
I share this process as an attempt to show that my humanist practice is not based in some armchair ideology. It is a challenge, I realize, to those who live in far greater materialistic comfort to understand how crucial the balance of these factors in my decision-making is to my own practice and my life. Yet, I also know how fragile all comfort is. And, I offer this blog to all with the knowledge that we all face reversal, sickness, aging and eventual death, no matter what our current comfort level is. We are all equal in these things.
