May 2018 Reflections by Rev. Barry Bloom

Now that there have been a few balmy days it really feels like spring has arrived.  Yet, there is always the omnipresent cool/cold breeze or, at times, crashing winds that smack us out of our spring reverie.  Then it’s balmy again…. for a day!  Springtime in Colorado!  Mostly we need the warmth to thaw out our minds, bodies, and spirits.  To bring us back to a kind of aliveness that is hard to generate in cold times.  I hope that is happening for you all. For the month of May the service theme is creativity.  How lovely.  It invites us to think/act creatively certainly, and it serves as the “smack” I related above.  Because, Creativity can bring awareness, wakefulness, self-knowledge, celebration, and joy.  Acts of creativity loosen up our perception, our consciousness of who we are.  It can spread our wings.  It certainly can dig us out of our ruts, overnight. So, I looked at this as an opportunity to celebrate creativity by getting to know two people who are deeply creative in the services I am leading in May.  The first, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning poet, Mary Oliver. The second, Unitarian-Universalist Minister and Author, Robert Fulghum.  I don’t know of any more original thinking creative people than these two.  
They could hardly be more different.  One, a small New England woman who walks the beaches and fields of Cape Cod, MA finding the grist for her poetry mill.  The other a robust man, a Westerner, living near or on the Pacific coast.  Oliver, a shy introvert.  Fulghum more outgoing, or a least seeming like an extrovert, even though we UU minster’s can fool you about that.
Rev. Barry Bloom