The vibe lives on
While we’re still reaching way back
MY BALD-HEADED, VERY-STRAIGHT boss and I were smoking dope together. He was smiling. Just like Eisenhower.
I DREAMED IN A FOREIGN language. Espanol, never French, on occasion.
MARY WAS SURROUNDED by death asleep next to Sara, who was driving a hearse to pick up hitchhikers. Mary, bless her, was running from the Devil, who wouldn’t harm Sara because she’s Jewish.
AN EQUESTRIAN BESIDE ME was riding a horse. Flashing a fantastic double-edged golden sword, she vindictively slayed three standing enemies, one at a time with a clean sweep, splitting them symmetrically, as if with a razor. They fell away. The first time was funny and unexpected. The next two, a warning that awakened me.
Down at Breakwater Bagels
Love their fresh rye bread, if I can get down there in time on the weekend.
It makes great toast and croutons, in addition to marvelous sandwiches.
Ten major American religious dissidents
Who says you had to conform growing up? Here are some people who made America the land of the free, not that I agree with all of them. Still, it really does come down to language and how we use it. Especially when religion and politics are mixed in.
- Samuel Gorton. Just plain onery in early New England.
- Roger Williams. Leading to a progressive movement then known as Baptists.
- Anne Hutchinson. Pointing the way to New England Quakers.
- John Woolman. A Quaker who worked ardently against slavery and other economic perils.
- Henry David Thoreau. It’s a Unitarian thing, ultimately.
- William Miller. The foremost of the voices that would become the Seventh-day Adventist church. Ellen G. White emerged as an essential proponent in its development as it organized in Battle Creek, Michigan, and then Takoma Park, Maryland.
- Joseph Smith. You know, the Mormons. Along with Brigham Young and Utah.
- Dorothy Day. Catholic Workers, a truly radical movement.
- Martin Luther King Jr. Civil rights and much more.
- Bayard Rustin. Gay Black Quaker ahead of his time on many fronts.
Who am I overlooking?
Maritime map perspective
As I’ve said before, a landscape comes together much differently from the water. And then there are all the depths you don’t see from the surface.
Note that north is not always straight up on the map.
With ten years of blogging under my belt, let me say
- You have a global audience. I remember being startled after posting a posting of a snowy New England day and getting a comment from the Philippines, “I’ve never seen snow.” In my life, I’ve always taken it for granted. And professionally, my daily journalism career focused on a well-defined circulation area, perhaps a single county or an entire state, depending on the newspaper at the time. My Red Barn posts, on the other hand, often get read on five or six continents.
- On WordPress, you’re part of a community. Sometimes posting can feel a bit like corresponding to pen pals in the old days. And it’s important to see what they’re up to as well and letting them know you’ve stopped by, too.
- At first, I didn’t understand “likes.” Yes, I was that naïve about social media. They do help me know who’s tuning in on a given day or topic, even though the number of hits now is generally lower than I had five or so years ago – I take it that’s one thing happening across the board. But I’m also surprised by the number of new likes on archived posts.
- Tags. They help invite readers. Just don’t use too many or too few. These days, I’m finding readers show up less frequently but then stay around longer, sampling other recent posts or digging into my deep past. I do find tags quite helpful in navigating the WP Reader for fresh voices.
- Categories. I find them quite useful in navigating the Barn, so I assume that applies for others, too. With the Red Barn’s unique merry-go-round approach to topics, I find them quite helpful in organizing the ongoing mix.
- Scheduling. Unlike most other bloggers, I often work on posts long ahead of their release. It’s one way to create time for my other projects, admittedly, as well as to juggle topics for a better rhythm of presentation. The practice also allows me to go back and polish a post before it goes live or to add from additional reflection. And paradoxically, it can also have me releasing in a more timely pace with the changing seasons – working “live” would actually put me behind the action.
- Classic editor, rather than the newer “block” format. Old-timers here at WordPress will definitely understand. Ditto for the Administrative working option.
- Reader’s comments are important. Some days they’re the best part of a post. But they’ve definitely declined, and I’m not sure whether that’s a consequence of the Barn’s current appearance or of its shifting round of topics or just something else in general.
- Photography. Despite a lifelong love of visual art, I had intended the Red Barn to be a text vehicle. But then photography crept in, first through a borrowed digital camera and then a cheap point-and-shoot Kodak leading to an Olympus and now an unbelievable smart phone. In short, I now list photography among my hobbies, even if it does seem like cheating compared to the historic and very real craft of light meters, f-stops, and darkroom developing of film. As for texts, length remains a puzzle – sometimes a longer “think piece” gets more hits than the bright briefs that seem essential on other social media. And photography on WP? Let me suggest it seems to be more thoughtful than gossipy or copped from other sources.
- I’m still ambivalent about the decision to branch out into related blogs. Should I have kept most of their posts within the Barn? Or would that have cluttered the mix? The genealogy of Orphan George does seem to demand its own bookshelf, as it were, as do the free poetry chapbooks of Thistle Finch, but I do wonder about the money-and-your-life project now archived at Chicken Farmer as well as the Quaker spirituality and Bible reflections at Sowing Light.
Oh, yes, it does take far more time than I anticipated, even when I had a backlog of poetry and correspondence for republication. And I do miss the Fresh Pressed selections in the Reader feed. But not so the self-congratulatory “awards” nominations that made the rounds.
As an introduction, here’s a suite of dreams from long ago
MY BUDDY’S IN A TEN-GALLON HAT and riding an elevator at his old high school in Brooklyn as we go to watch his honey in a swim meet. We get out at the top floor and there’s a river, where all the girls but one are swimming upstream. He hops in, swims downstream to a rock with a girl sunning on it. She starts screaming, and the other girls turn to come to her rescue. He watches as his pistol sinks in the water. He swims through the rapids to his horse only to find the other girls already there, holding rifles.
WE’RE IN A VICTORIAN-ERA ghetto at night. She wants to go to church. We go in amid a semicircle of people and sit down with friends. I take a break, get up, step outside to meet a city transit bus, kiss a girl, go back in to sit next to him, shamefaced a bit. My chair, a folding metal chair, is sideways, out of kilter. She whispers, “Don’t move.” That’s when I realize there’s a dead body beneath me and a man in the balcony with a rifle pointed at me. The preacher in the pulpit is silent.
I’M TRAVELING WITH a seven-year-old blonde cousin through a suburb. She speaks fluent French. I don’t. Everybody but me speaks French. She is my translator as we journey.
Kinisi 139
the double meaning
once you were here
For tiny Dover, why all the hoopla?
As improbable as it would seem now, Dover was a throbbing center of dissidents and misfits in its early years, at least from the perspective of the Puritan authorities to the south in Boston.
Nor would I have expected a settlement inland from the ocean to be the one that took root, rather than the companion complex facing the ocean, but the Dutch trading post at Albany, New York, was even further up a river and survived.
There are good reasons that Dover became the center of action north of Salem, Massachusetts, and of Boston further south, not that you were taught any of that in your history classes.
I have to admit, it’s taken a while for the fact to sink in. Dover was the heart of the New Hampshire province, not that we see that today. Still, the roots remain.
My book, Quaking Dover, looks at the history from a minority viewpoint that leaves most of the last 200 years pretty wide open. Yes, there’s so much more to examine and include in the full picture leading to the rebirth of the community in recent years.
But what I’ve found is still pretty remarkable.
To think, it was such a humble and audacious start 400 years ago and counting.
It’s gonna be a big year!
Senior citizen breakfast
Jnana's Red Barn 