TravisBedard.com

Actor, Puppeteer, and Teaching Artist

Old Traditions of New Media

I have been “blogging” since the spring of 2001. Of course the rank and file didn’t call it blogging back them, I was keeping an online journal, which sounds even more horrifying in retrospect. A refugee from a poetry circle (I know!) on a community website called ECircles, we moved to Livejournal because of its robust community features. Which, along with hard lessons about the lack of privacy even a pseudonym and miles of fiber provide , is the best thing that could have happened. I met a couple hundred interesting people, and a couple of dozen that I would call friend. Over the 8 years I was active we lived the 00’s with one another through marriage, and children (real and theatrical) and school and grad school and 9/11 and two wars…

We were a nerdy little family. In my particular nerdy little family there was an understanding that while there were times when words weren’t enough, words were still something

We shared Patrick’s Rune, an poem used in Madeline L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet to ward off evil. 

I have since moved on from Livejournal and into trying to use social media to advance my craft and the state of theatre in general over at my companies’ blog, but in the intersections of blogging a new family has sprung up. Bound in our passion for theatre and a good argument it’s a crazy-quilt of brothers, and cousins, and crazy uncles; and now one of my brother’s is hurting. Tony Adams is making one of the journeys one hopes never to make, but one none of us can avoid, writing beautifully about it here,
and words are not enough.
I encourage you to read it aloud. Even quietly.

With Tony in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness
All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness!

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