Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit: the beginning of my first blog post of each month, to bring back a little bit of the childhood playful hopefulness. It seems especially apropos today at the start of #DigiWriMo. I expect to be staying with the metaphors of journey and narrative through much of #DigiWriMo and so I envision the narrative today to be about the start of a journey.

It is as if we are all standing around the starting line. We’ve introduced who we want to think we are, as opposed to how traditional CVs introduce ourselves. It feels a little bit like the kids dressed up for Halloween last night in their hopes and aspirations.

This week, I went to the funeral for the mother of a friend. She was 95 and loved music. In her final days, he heard his mother say, “Who, are you? Who? Who?” She was a Who fan and was singing one of her favorite songs. The minister at the funeral talked about that great question, “who are you?”

Last night, I thought a little bit more about who I am. Our town has “Truck or Treat”; Halloween at the local volunteer fire department. They started it the year of Hurricane Sandy, the year my mother died. I was running for State Representative and was supposed to be there campaigning. Instead, I was there mourning. I was there as members of my community helped one another out after the storm, and as much as I thank my neighbors and volunteer firemen, they may never know how important that first Truck or Treat was. This year, they were asking how my wife, who is recuperating from sinus surgery is doing.

So, as I thought of the kids dressed up in the hopes and aspirations, as I thought about my AltCV and #DigiWriMo, as I thought of Peg singing to herself, asking “Who are you?” part of the answer came to me. I am part of a community. I am part of the wonderful community of Woodbridge, with all its quirks and foibles. I am part of the wonderful community of Grace and St. Peter’s where I worship on Sunday mornings, and I am part of the #DigiWriMo community, which I’m just starting to get to know.

At Church today, All Saints Day, we will remember those who have died. We will sing great hymns about all the saints, and we will balance it with four baptisms and a community meal afterwards.

For #DigiWriMo, we will have the chatter that is exchanged at the start of a shared journey. I shared my quote from Christian Wiman, “existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person”. The same applies, I hope, to #DigiWriMo.

Another person shared a quote from Allen Ginsberg, “We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”. Yet another took the idea of the AltCV, and combined it with another. It makes me think, what is the combined AltCV of everyone in #DigiWriMo? We are greater than the sum of our parts as we type on the same dreadful internet.

I am tempted to head off in a postmodern poet philosopher Christian mystic direction and start talking about the relationship between The Body of Christ and the #DigiWriMo group AltCV. Yet before I do that, I return to the quotes of the day and find Scott Johnson’s “Even paradise needs work” and John Spencer asking, “How do we create a sense of place online?”

I’ve often criticized my friends interested in “church social media” on a related thought, “How do we share a sense of the mystical, the divine online?” How do we do it as an inclusive shared experience for the atheist, agnostic, wiccan, Buddhist, Muslim, so many flavors of Christian, and so many other experiences of the divine?
And so, I set out on the first steps of #DigiWriMo, surrounded by a great cloud of believes, to use the older language, or a bunch of really interesting people I look forward to traveling with virtually and learning more about, to translate some of it into the twenty first century digital vernacular.

Slowly, I’m learning more about who I am, as it changes along this journey, and I look forward to more quotes, and more answers to “Who are you?” as we journey together.