Just a taste of what’s popping up. In case you were looking for a prompt.

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1. Somehow as a Subway Hitchhiker (at least in my imagination and dreaming) I’ve settled in a small city in a cluster of small cities amid moose and deer and the occasional black bear. As well as the eagle, overhead. Here, with my city farm, as we garden.
2. Always the Outsider – even when I’m the Leader.
3. This slow process of learning to trust each other again.
4. Yet some Wants are also Needs! (To be loved, accepted – even as a writer – even successful or victorious in some manner.)
5. My Wall is an aspect of Control. (Even if it’s so classic it’s trite.)
6. Sometimes it seems we don’t play. We don’t play enough.
7. The pathway is not straight but strait. Not even like a tightrope. No wonder I’m so often off-kilter.
8. In the beginning was the Plan and the Plan was (as I paraphrase the gospel of John). Yes, simply was. And all we have to do is step into it! As if it could really be that simple.
9. This is hardly a Literary Life. How different my work would be had I led another existence. Something with more time for serious reading, teaching, refined social circles. Rather than laboring out in the field.
10. So comforting, this thick terrycloth bathrobe that reaches to my ankles – not a given, at all, when you’re tall. Nice way to round out the year.

~*~

Why wait for the dust to settle? Here are 10 bullets from my end.

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1. Is anything more relaxing than sitting in front of a wood fire? Even when it means sitting on the floor?
2. Gift-buying husbands? Just look! As she says, they’re subjected to indentured shop-itude.
3. First day of winter and the flannel sheets should be on the bed by now, if not earlier. Flip the mattress and rotate, too.
4. Our traditional Christmas dinner includes fresh homegrown Brussels sprouts, which means I’m out in the garden harvesting – sometimes in several feet of snow. Likewise with kale and chard: frost improves the flavor.
5. Let me suggest Mary, as the mother of the church … a slightly different twist on the Nativity story.
6. For someone who’s lived under relentless deadlines, Christmas itself can be seen as another damn deadline. Or series of deadlines. This year, I think I’m ahead.
7. Still, I’m deeply grateful for the sense of release – notes, poems, correspondence … the logjam broken … now that the poems and novels are available.
8. Grandfathers have grandfathers too. In case you’re in one of those inner-child perspectives.
9. What are the theological dimensions of Alzheimer’s or dimentia? Where are the connections – the response ability – when your story gets so fragmented you’re no longer connected to anything you encounter?
10. Tell me something true.

~*~

The mind dances here and there, rarely in a linear fashion. So what’s on my mind these days? How about counting on these fingers?

~*~

1. She’s big on Christmas traditions, including our observing Advent these days. I’m still surprised she inherited none of it in her family! Created it like a radical quilt. Makes this array all the more remarkable, from my perspective.
2. Slush on the windshield. Ice underfoot.
3. Winter’s setting in, though I’m already tired of it.
4. The earliest sunsets of the year have plateau’d and are already inching back in my part of the world. The oppressive late-afternoon darkness will soon be obviously relenting. We don’t wait for the solstice.
5. I like the Eastern Orthodox insight of Mary as the Mother of Light.
6. In reality, I hate being the caretaker, responsible one, cleaner-upper, put-awayer. Contrary to my self-image.
7. It’s been a long road to here. Sometimes it feels like a hangover.
8. In working a seasonal job, she has a curious freedom in not having to worry about being fired, losing the mortgage, and so on. Just put the hours in and go home.
9. Whatever happened to my collection of winter scarves? (As if I really need to ask.)
10. Authenticity: something that speaks to the bones.

~*~

Being mindful of what’s right in front of us can always be a challenge. Here are 10 new items from my end.

~*~

1. Hard to think Christmas is so near. It’s just not in the air, at least for me, despite the bell ringers and carols around the stores. But then I’m often off on another planet.
2. I always intend to put up our outdoor Christmas lights while it’s still warm. Rather than freezing my fingers.
3. I’ve long said if she would only dance, she’d be perfect. OK, there are few other details I’d add, all these years later. Learning to read music, for one.
4. Another old fear? If you get to know me, you won’t like me. Or maybe: You won’t like what you find. (That muscular reaction when someone gets too physically close in a conversation.
5. I seldom I feel myself fitting in – in a crowd, an audience, a group, a family.
6. NOT THE USUAL … one of my strictures in my desire not to repeat myself in blogging. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Not that I usually remember.
7. I miss being able to get the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on local radio. These days I have to listen on my laptop or cell phone. Just ain’t the same.
8. In a depression.: Do I really LIKE anyone? Being with them? Am I having ANY fun?
9. Well, I am drinking Virgin Marys during Advent. (Cheers in the morning!)
10. You were supposed to save me.

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Just a taste of what’s popping up. In case you were looking for a prompt.

~*~

1. My wife can’t resist an opportunity to make a holiday feast, and that means planning ahead. (Somehow the menu keeps growing, enough to feed twice as many guests as we have.) I’m impressed by the checklists she makes, too, to keep herself on track. Three days ahead – or more – the work actually begins. And then there’s the last-minute shopping for anything she wants to be fresh.
2. Juncos and jays. Rituals and routines. Manners and mores.
3. No matter my affinity, I never would have been comfortable in the Society of Friends in any of the earlier eras. I always would have chafed at the limitations and discipline. Nor, for that matter, do I see anywhere I would have fit in neatly. (We could start with my interior “fort” surrounding my emotions, despite my public interactions. Or my Aquarian/contrarian nature.) Well, the Mavericks have roots in Boston Harbor. Look ’em up. Doubt I’d fit in there, either.
4. Opening my car door at the Nubble Lighthouse, I’m nearly knocked over by cold wind. Sustained, more than gusting. Barely a mile inland, only a mild breeze. This strange sensation of having my nostrils blown shut (or at least constrained): to breathe, I have to turn my back to the wind, a first in my experience. Make you wonder about sailors at sea?
5. In Eastern Orthodox tradition, Mary is a temple of God that surpasses the one in Jerusalem. Within her, the Light or Logos becomes incarnate. The nuances are quite different from what I’ve heard in Western Christian teaching. How much else have I missed? I’m certainly invigorated by the sharp contrast to our austere Quaker aesthetic. I love the extremes.
6. Launching this blog, as the horoscope said, came in my year to come out of hiding.
7. In contrast to any sense of guilt or some shame or impoverishment: LOOK AT ALL THESE RICHES! Even the matters of what’s unfinished or undone, now turned to opportunity.
8. A sense of progress, too.
9. What do I really want? To be accepted and loved, without feeling pain? Certainly there’s more.
10. What holds your life together?

~*~

Why wait for the dust to settle? Here are 10 bullets from my end.

~*~

1. Crows – dozens upon dozens – all over town, roosting together somewhere. Rook, as they say.
2. Late afternoon driving: so much glare, not just the low sun, either, but blazing up in reflections. Wet pavement or a waterway I’m crossing.
3. Midnight here now really fits around 10:30, unlike 12 in the summer, calculating midway from sunset to sunrise.
4. Cranberries, so quintessentially New England, remind me of driving to Cape Cod and passing all the bogs where they’re grown.
5. When it comes to Friends, we need new blood.
6. Eastern Orthodox Advent starts on the 28th and continues to the Feast of the Epiphany, Jan. 6 or 7, not our more widespread Christmas Day! Since we’re taking this up voluntarily, rather than under church discipline, we make some adaptations. Thanksgiving, for one, and ending Advent on Dec. 25, for another. Does it make us look like wimps?
7. Poetry as a heroic journey. Holy, my voice. Or gritty.
8. Where am I NOW? Where’s my HEART?
9. Good to be reminded of ACTIVE WAITING, especially through periods when you feel suspended, on hold until others make a decision or act or all the pieces to fall into place. Drawing from James Nayler, Brian Drayton sees a sequence in spiritual response. The waiting prompts a response, which requires prompt obedience. Next is suffering, perhaps as embarrassment or upheaval. And then public witness – telling others, even if only in a small circle. Throughout, small steps count, however tentative.
10. How much of being a public figure is a matter of being a performer, too – someone who needs a circle of fans?

~*~

The mind dances here and there, rarely in a linear progression. So what’s in my thoughts these days? How about counting on these fingers?

~*~

1. While driving through town, I glance over at a small cemetery and notice wild turkeys padding about. A whole flock, actually, reminding me of hunting season hereabouts and the national holiday just ahead. Somehow, the critters know the calendar, and the wiser ones find sanctuary in town. Good luck to the rest of their brood.
2. With the return of cold weather, we once again use our front entryway and the mudroom beside the kitchen as auxiliary refrigerators. Don’t trip over the pots and pans when you visit.
3. When it comes to problems, focus on what’s closest, rather than always on the horizon. (The view from Mount Aquarius.)
4. It’s all New Work, in the works.
5. After all the lost or difficult years, the dashed dreams and desires, broken promises, upheavals – mingled, curiously, with gratitude. I’M HERE!
6. What never happened – and then?
7. Asked how long they’d lived there, in an American Walden, the artist replied: “Too long!”
8. Could the text be made simpler, rather than wildly reaching?
9. It’s better to know, even if it’s bad news, than to be left hanging in limbo
10. We keep trying to find a good system for storing our leeks through the winter. We’re very open to suggestions.

~*~

Being mindful of what’s right in front of us can always be a challenge. Here are 10 new items from my end.

~*~

1. Been collecting bags of fallen leaves from the neighbors, urban farmer that I am. These days, a couple dozen bags are sufficient, unlike the 200-plus I gathered in many of our first years together. They get stacked against one side of the barn to break the sharp blasts of cold wind that otherwise freeze the pipes to the mother-in-law apartment on the other side of the barn. It’s another of my winter-prep rounds. Come spring, the leaves get moved to the big compost bin.
2. I carry a sense of being responsible for making everything better – me, alone. Except I have insufficient resources. Which takes us back to my deeply ingrained fear of poverty. No wonder I always want everything to work just right – and get so upset when it doesn’t! And that twists back to my fear of conflict.
3. All of my writing (as I’m venturing) assumes an experience, if only an out-of-nowhere phrase (exploring the subconscious, then), demanding discovery as some unity of the cosmos. Even when I’m writing about what I don’t know.
4. My appreciation of raw oysters on the half-shell goes back to my girlfriend in college, who insisted I eat (real) seafood while visiting in Florida. (And here we were, staying on a cattle ranch.) Up till then, it had been frozen fish sticks or canned salmon. Flash forward, to New England, where these days just before winter provide some of the fattest, juiciest oysters imaginable. These bivalves have stocked up for their version of hibernation. And, as one Mainer points out, you can count their age on their shells, just like rings in a tree.
5. Gotta brace again for the end of Daylight Savings, the day our winter begins. Really begins.
6. Of course location affects my writing and sensibility. The slums of a small city can be as urban as anything in a big metropolis, if you look and listen.
7. Turn up an old Gohn Brothers catalogue – Amish clothes etc. Realize that’s no longer me, either.
8. Ever so messy, the girl with the Lord & Taylor shopping bag.
9. Somehow, even my Quaker practice and theory break free from some past.
10. Taking the bus to Boston, I look out to see a field of big trucks just before the state line. Then remember, from a detour, it’s the truck spa. Seriously, that’s what it’s called. Keep wondering if there’s something on the side for the drivers.

~*~