OUR NEW NAME AND SUBTITLE: THE BARDO GROUP, an international collective fostering proximity, peace and healing through our love of the arts and humanities 

We have added “Group” to our new name to be inclusive and accurate, acknowledging the many people who support this blogazine through linking, reblogs, mentions, comments and as core team members, contributors, guests and visitors. All are valued. This has never been a “my” blog. It has always been an “our” blog.

We’ve kept “Bardo” in the title because that word is associated with this site.

The Bardo Group is “international.” Our contributors are from: India, South Africa, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, China, Malaysia, Canada, the United States and England.

We are nurturing a growth that goes beyond the simple idea of “connectivity” to a more productive virtual “proximity” … think in terms of artistic gatherings  – not always formally organized – that you’ve read about and perhaps loved –  Bloomsbury in England or the cafe gatherings of the so-called Lost Generation in Paris of the 1920s or even the Algonquin Round Table in New York, also the 1920s, though we will forgo the pranks and practical jokes of the latter. (I’m not sure why nothing more recent comes to mind as I write this. Oh my … )

Like the artists in those groups, we are bonding. We create virtual proximity through authentic work, spiritual, artistic and pragmatic. Our collaborations are productive of book publishing (to come), meaningful virtual events for bloggers, and the nurture of new talent.

Submission Guidelines, Core Team Bios and Roster of Contributors and Guests: That Page currently in revision. Once completed it will include submission guidelines as well as bios for active core team members including recent additions to the team.

Inactive core team members have already been removed from the blogroll. Inactive is defined as three months.

No one is deleted from the blogroll or the roster as a punitive action, a judgement, or because of any artistic shortcoming – only because they haven’t submitted anything during the last three months, are no longer blogging, and/or they are unable to deliver posts that are complete and ready for publication, what we used to call “copy ready.” Core Team members must have an active personal WordPress blog so that they are able to submit work directly to The Bardo Group via their own blog.

Everyday Artists Rock: There is a lot in the blogging scene and on the Internet that is awkward, inaccurate, and ill-considered – even downright ugly, silly, or mean – but there’s also a lot work being done by lesser-knowns who don’t have the support of big name publishers or academia but produce work that is profoundly beautiful, high-minded, and uplifting. We think such everyday artists rock and deserve this as a wider venue, one which we hope will continue to grow as our liaisons evolve and proximity improves. “It takes a village to raise a child.” We are the village. Our works are our children. The longing for peace and healing is inspiration and motivation.

In other times, we might have been the ones to paint the walls of caves, tell stories around the fire, or recite our poems for the villagers on special occasions. We might have been the hermits of the mountains or deserts or the  teachers – the rabbis, imams, the old stoic philosophers, the shamans, the Buddhas and saints, quietly doing the work of comforting, stimulating thought and fostering change and growth through philosophy, religion, and the arts. We might have been the poets of old China, gently hanging our poems on trees in a park or garden; or those in Japan, quietly leaving our death poems by the side of our beds. As it is we are the bloggers, our artistry embedded in those hard-stone caves called search engines, waiting to be found and embraced.

Please stay with us as we continue to evolve as human beings, artists, bloggers and as The Bardo Group.

MISSION STATEMENT: We’ve written a more accurate “about” and renamed it more accurately “mission statement.”  You can read that HERE.

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2014: It does look like 2014 is going to be a big year:

• Writers’ Fourth Wednesday with Victoria C. Slotto (Author, Fiction, Poetry and Writing Prompts) will start up again at 7 p.m. on January 22, 2014 and will run every fourth Wednesday p.m. through October 2014.
• Bloggers in Planet Love: This is a heads-up on an event in the planning for Valentine’s Day 2014. Details to be determined and announced. Look for more news about this collaborative effort addressing climate and environmental concerns and the meaning of nature in our lives.
• Poets Against War will run in concert with 100,000 Poets for Change, a global initiative scheduled for the week of September 27, 2014. We are working behind the scenes to get this organized.
• Poets Against War anthology is in behind-the-scenes works as well.  We may have to flex on the date (tentatively we’ve targeted the first quarter of 2015) and the title is a working title. We are considering a different title since we hope to include art and photography, essays, and short stories. If you have a suggestion for a name, please leave it in the comments below. Thank you! This publication will not be restricted to those published here, so please stay tuned over the next months for more news.

TERRI STEWART has changed the name of her blog to BEGIN AGAIN: Slow Down, Begin Again: Spiritual Practices in Context.  Don’t forget to join the Advent celebration she’s initiated and sponsored. Today’s topic is World AIDS DAY, an Advent Reflection.

NIAMH CLUNE (On the Plum Tree) has been busy charming us with the energetic reworking of her website, Plum Tree Books (children’s educational books), and her inventive Facebook page. Imen Benyoub and Jamie Dedes, both of The Bardo Group, have columns on Niamh’s Facebook page. Imen’s column, With Love From Imen, posts on Mondays and Jamie’s, Soul Speak with Jamie Dedes, posts on Saturdays, but everyday there is a new treat from a different writer and many wonderful tidbits in-between all.

ADVENTURES IN HATS: Speaking of nurturing new talent, Beatrice “Bea” Gerrard, Naomi Baltuck’s (Writing Between the Lines, Life From a Writer’s POV) daughter, started a new blog, Adventures in Hats, to share her writing and drawings. Bea is a student at Standford University, Stanford, CA and she just completed this year’s NaNoWriMo challenge for the first time. Hooray! 🙂 Check out her newly birthed blog and cheer her on.

Someone whispered in our ear that Bea writes lovely poetry. Stay tuned.

NANOWRIMO: Congrats to all those who participated in this year’s (inter)National Novel Writing Month event, including  our own guest writer, T.J. Therien (Liars, Hypocrites & The Development of Human Emotion). T.J.’s novel is “The Scrolls of Sion: The Rise of the Dark Queen.” T.J. has detailed what he learned from this rigorous exercise in his post NaNoWriMo Dragon Slain.

FYI: The folks at NaNoWriMo also sponsor the Young Writers Program every November as well.

MICHAEL WATSON: This is one gentleman who is full of good surprises. Dreaming the World is not his only blog. In October he kindly reblogged one of Jamie Dedes’ posts on disability (Thank you, Michael!) and we discovered as a result that he has  Gimp Stories: A blog about Disability and Disability Issues, with an Emphasis on Vermont. Subsequently we found that he also has Journeys, Writing About Everyday Life.

Michael’s posts here are well-loved. In Such Wonderful Friends, Dutch Nature Artist and The Bardo Group contributor, Paula Kuitenbrouwer (Mindful Drawing) mentioned our blog and said, “For a journey into the mind, I frequently visit [The Bardo Group], especially the blog posts by Michael Watson, Ph.D. an essayist and a practitioner of the Shamanic arts.” Thank you, Paula! 

DEMENTIA: Michael Watson caught our interest with his recent post on Dementia, Who We May Be: Considering Dementia.

“In many traditional Indigenous cultures folks think about human lives as sharing a trajectory. If we are blessed we may find ourselves traveling from childhood to childhood over many years. When we arrive at our second childhood there is a community of people who know and love us, and who will work together to keep us comfortable and protected. Nature is also helpful; illness and accident will likely aid us to pass over into spirit before we lose all sense of self.” Michael Watson

Another core team member, Victoria C. Slotto (Author, Fiction, Poetry and Writing Prompts), a retired nurse whose mother suffers from dementia has written Beating the Odds: Support for Persons with Early Stage Dementia eBook.  

Robert (Bob) Clark Young, a guest writer who engaged us with Escape from the Nursing Home has an elder care site HERE. His book, The SURVIVOR: How to Deal with Your Aging Parents, While Enriching Your Own Life, seeks a publisher. Bob says:

“For my generation, this is one of the biggest issues in our lives. The senior population is rapidly increasing, and now we face the prospect of caring for ill, disabled, or even demented parents in their homes or in our own homes, perhaps for years to come.” Robert Clark Young

HER WINGS OF GLASS: Poets on the distaff side, don’t forget the deadline is January 15, 2014 for this anthology sponsored by Second Light Network in the UK. You don’t have to be in the UK to submit. Details are HERE.

IN YOU HAVE OTHER NEWS TO SHARE, please feel free to share it with us in the comments.

– The Bardo Group