Starting something new

So my book came out in February of 2009 and it has been an agonizingly slow process to choose another project. Of course, writing the book was agonizingly slow too. So many things I want to do. So many things to distract me from a new research and writing project.

Because research and writing are hard and it's so much easier to let the demands of daily living eat up your time. I knew one thing for sure, though, I was NOT going to write about religion. I was fed up with it. It had, in the process of studying it, become foreign to me. I was puzzled by how narrow and exclusionary it seemed. How rigid. (And I was studying liberals.)

One thing I was sure of--I wanted to write a book for which I only read books I wanted to read and that was not about religion. I decided I would write a book about recreational vehicles and the culture of the road--since I have a fascination with little houses on wheels and can spend hours on the internet looking a pictures of them. I even taught one of my classes on road culture.

But it didn't feel right. And because scholarship is as much about intuition as anything, I kept thinking about it and asking myself what I really wanted to do. If I were reading the books I wanted to read, what would that mean? You probably know what's coming.

When I thought about it, I realized was reading a lot about Buddhism, a lot about nature and landscape, and a lot about road culture, with some New Agey stuff tossed in for good measure. Then I had an epiphany of sorts when I realized that many of the ideas and books that interested me originated in the years after 1965 and as a result of the influence of Asian spirituality. And all of a sudden I knew I wanted to know how that happened--even if it does mean more religion.

So, that's what I'm doing. I've got a big question I'm working on (make that huge) and my job is to turn that into a doable project over the next couple of months.

This project engages me in two ways. First, there's the historical stuff: What happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? And why is it important? I like those questions. I think they are interesting. It's what I do for a living (asking and answering those questions). But this topic also engages me on a personal level. I find the ideas fascinating--dharma, sangha, buddha nature. I find myself engaging those ideas in a way that is more personal than historical, and I'm hoping this blog will give me a place to write about those ideas from that perspective.

And I'm going to learn to write shorter posts...with pictures.

Why cultural history?

Why study it? Why blog about it? Why bother? Well, I read somewhere that you should blog about your passion and cultural history is mine. It's hard to explain. I know, particularly in these difficult political times when so much is at stake, that cultural history can seem frivolous and too much like nostalgia. But cultural history is really about values and values inform our choices at every moment of every day and hence our politics--even when we don't realize it.

I've tried a couple of other blogs that didn't "take" partly because doing stuff and writing about it (i.e. a garden) takes a lot of time.  But I write about cultural history for a living so some of that can spill over in to my blog. I'm hoping that reading a blog about cultural history will help my readers think about what they value and to make choices more consciously as a result. That would make blogging worth doing.