![\"cabooseopening\"](\"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/cabooseopening.jpg\")
<\/a>I have been working my way through a fifteen-year-old file cabinet, clearing out the old and making way for a transition to my new office, a small studio at the edge of the woods that my husband renovated for me. It is called \u201cThe Caboose,\u201d and it will be dedicated to writing and editing. And when I sit down in my studio, I am faced with a three-year-old computer that holds about twenty years worth of writing and miscellany, and I have been cleaning that up, too.<\/p>\nOne of the first things I discovered in the process is that I have already (inadvertently) lied in this blog. In my very first post<\/a> I wrote that \u201cuntil this past year I had never published a word as my unadorned self.\u201d But a decade ago, when I was organizing against the burgeoning wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I wrote two sermons for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, both of which can be found online, as well as a short piece that was published in their member magazine, Mosaic<\/em>.<\/p>\n All three of these pieces were written in the turbulent wake of September 11, 2001, when I was on leave from my doctoral program in history at Stanford, and working on The Insular Empire<\/em><\/a>, a documentary film about U.S. militarism and the indigenous communities of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.\u00a0 They were also written before I had children, and when I was questioning my commitment to becoming a historian, wondering (agonizing over) what kind of life I might otherwise lead.<\/p>\n The first sermon, \u201cLiving the Burn, Creating a Life,\u201d was about my experiences at Burning Man, and drew parallels between the radical creativity and community of that festival, and the creativity and community I found while organizing against the wars.\u00a0 The second, \u201cHolding Fast to Truth and Nonviolence,\u201d was about the principle of satyagraha<\/em>, peace as not just goal but means. It arose from my participation in a Peace and Nonviolence Study Circle at the church. The magazine piece was a journal of my reaction – grief, numbness, indignation – to the initial bombing of Iraq.<\/p>\n What I find now in the sermons especially is an out-loud confidence, a tendency towards proclamation, that I no longer feel, and that hid a lot of complexities I was experiencing inside. \u201cArt that preaches or teaches overtly is lessened by the sermon or the lecture,\u201d says Ursula K. LeGuin<\/a>. But I don\u2019t feel like beating myself up about that. It\u2019s an archive, after all, and as a trained historian I have a lot of experience with archives, and know that blaming and shaming the creators of them always, to me, felt like shouting into the wind. After a vigorous argument with a dead British imperialist or land-hungry settler, I always felt kind of winded, empty and even mean inside.<\/p>\n