If it’s not personal, what’s the point? While I am talking about writing, in particular, let’s extend that to religion and politics and life in general, wherever we can.
Please make every effort to see those points where we may connect with mutual respect if we’re to advance the human condition. Period.
~*~
I’m left with the realization that my “serious” writing, meaning literary rather than the quickly perishable daily journalism, originated as contemporary poetry and fiction but now falls into historical.
So much has changed, it’s almost hysterical.
Photography, for instance – the career of a central character in four of my novels – no longer requires film, dark rooms and developers and enlargers, or light meters and F-stops.
As for rotary-dial telephones and thick books of people and their numbers?
Instead, I’ll start with the fact that America has never come to terms with its hippie past – positive as well as negative. At least my cool end of it. I’ll let the uptight ‘Nam side defend itself. For my side, it’s like we’re scared or embarrassed of what opened our hearts and minds. While we retreated from the general effort to push the envelope, to advance to Edge City, to demolish boundaries, we also failed to examine what we learned and carry from that experience. Instead, there was a society-wide state of denial that was bound to erupt in unanticipated ways – likely, without any sustaining wisdom. I’ll insist that’s why the nation is in the state that it is now.
For now, my novels stand as a witness to that era and experience and the root of many changes for the better we take for granted today. I do wish there were more voices to tell of that revolution, thwarted as it eventually was. Histories, whether of the scholarly sort or as the art of its time, sustain societies.
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To that let me note that daily fresh air essential for my well-being. The outdoors counteracts feelings of entrapment or engulfment and depression I’ve been susceptible to otherwise. I need to get a taste of wild nature – my feet on the ground, my fingers in the soil, my eyes on the horizon and sky.
It’s part of my spiritual recalibration, even when I was living in the yoga ashram in Pennsylvania’s Pocono mountains.
In this, every day counts, good weather or bad.
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Personal relationships have certainly changed within my lifetime. My parents’ generation suffered many more unhappy marriages in contrast to today, though many youths at the moment have only an envy of deep connection and commitment.
My love poems of the turbulent ‘80s and ‘90s stand as witness to that transition, as do my novels Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Nearly Canaan.
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I am embarrassed for Ohio and Indiana since I’ve left. They had such greatness and potential.
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You’ll find my novels in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. They’re also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain them.
Jnana's Red Barn 