Anne Lamott, Baseball and the SCA

Lately, I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I’m almost at the end, and something she wrote about being a Giants baseball fan really stuck with me:

…the bigger point of baseball, that that it can give us back ourselves. We are a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, eachofusall alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us. (pp. 162-163)

She’s talking about baseball, but the feeling she describes—how something bigger than ourselves can bring us together—isn’t just about sports. It’s about any passionate, shared experience. And for me, that’s the SCA.

That sense of belonging? That’s exactly how I feel about the Society for Creative Anachronism. If you love the SCA, I hope you’ve found that same feeling of family. Here in the Kingdom of Calontir, that’s especially true. We have households, sure, but they’re all part of something greater—the Kingdom itself. It’s a place where camaraderie and support run deep.

I hope you have something in your life that fills you with that same sense of community and joy—something that makes you feel like you truly belong.