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. I’m still impressed by all the latent energy stored above the waterfalls in the streams around us.
2. The water’s flashing. Rivers and ponds spark – shoot away – fire away – in rippling sheen.
3. Another of my spring tasks involves bringing the garden hoses down from the loft, connecting them to the faucets, and going to the cellar to reopen the valves.
4. It’s time to pencil in a trip to the Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts. The site, headquarters to the New England Wildflower Society, is especially popular through May into mid-June, for good reason. The organization goes to great lengths to enhance nature, though you have to look close to detect their careful irrigation units and similar touches.
5. Even when the material for a blog is mostly already done, this act of posting takes up more time than anticipated. Where do the hours go?
6. A fine time to hike in Maine woods: no black flies and no skeeters. The only sounds in some places: wind in the trees or water sounding like highway traffic.
7. It’s one of those years when the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western dates for Easter coincide.
8. Time to be on the lookout for tender young dandelions for our diet. They’re surprisingly good with eggs over easy, a drizzle of bacon fat, or homemade vinaigrette. Gotta pick ’em, though, before they bloom and turn bitter.
9. A favorite minitrip: Head up to Portland, Maine (just an hour northeast). Hit the Standard Bakery near the docks and then the 10 o’clock mail-run ferry around Casco Bay. Six stops on five islands. Reminds me at times of Puget Sound, so many years back.
10. And, as they say, introduce yourself. These days, could use something catchy, humorous. Something, for that matter, like a good pickup line, not that I ever had any. Feel free to share your examples.

~*~

 

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

~*~

1. On the highway north, somewhere just before Tamworth, comes that first big view of Mount Washington. This time of year the crest is an eagle span of ghostly white spreading atop powder-blue ranges below. Sometimes another band of clouds resembling mountains stretches above, and all three sit below a blue band of real sky. Knowing what’s coming up simply heightens the anticipation.
2. Back home, my rounds of outdoor spring tasks soon lead to the Smoking Garden. The bags of leaves stacked beside the barn as windbreakers will need to be moved to the big compost bin, which needs to be emptied first (though it’s usually frozen tight this time of year). Then there’s the hammock to reassemble, after being stored in the loft. Strings of twinkle lights will go up overhead, too. I’ll often take lunch here, though my wife finds the air too chilly. Not too chilly, though, to prevent us from grilling on charcoal.
3. Yes, warm enough to grill a beer-can chicken (insert open can into bird, which you cook upright). Excellent, despite the stiff wind.
4. Seapoint in Maine (town-resident sticker required for parking, May 15 to September 30, where the road ends at the ocean): trek out to the spit between beaches, hunker down in clefts between rock and sunshine for needed respite against wind. The restless blue ocean opens before me. A tease, awaiting summer.
5. Woodpecker still has a splitting headache.
6. Income tax time runs up against my professional life as a journalist. How much I hate waiting till deadline to finish something. Get it off, quickly, if you can.
7. Need to find ways to keep my lair from becoming a chamber of static energy. Ditto, the loft of the barn.
8. The leadership we’re seeing is a bunch of cowardly brutes.
9. Once again, the moral issue of civil disobedience comes to the fore. For the record, regarding the Transcendentalist Henry David, it’s THOR-oh, not Thor-OH. And Nixon lawyer Charles Colson came to advocate some powerful moral guidelines for civil disobedience, after he’d repented – that is, “turned” – while imprisoned.
10. What turns you WILD? (As in dreams and passions, secrets and fetishes. Am I really so orderly or repressed at this point? I’m clueless, apart from anger.)

 ~*~

 

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

~*~

1. The amount of sunlight these days is equivalent to September. That equinox thing. But with snow and no foliage or even plain gray, the sensation’s quite different from autumn green turning golden and hazy.
2. Spring rainfall turns our side yard into a glade. Are ‘gators next?
3. So who do they resemble, these women in my life? Which movie stars? Which protagonists in fiction? Even before we get to the guys.
4. On a walk about town, I stop at a bakery and pick up a selection pastries as a surprise for later in the morning. As my wife and elder daughter view me strolling up our street, they notice the box wrapped in ribbon and the way I speak with other pedestrians, and quip, “What a perfect picture of a guy a woman would want to have coming home.”
5. How delightful, too, walking three miles on a leg of the Community Trail beside rapids and sparkling waters. No need to drive several hours to the mountains for a similar experience. Reminds me of my hidden retreat at Lake Massabesic, back when I was residing on Wellington Hill in Manchester.
6. When I enter a house of worship, I close my eyes and feel the vibrations. Too often, the air feels leaden or dead, rather than welcoming, warm, filled with deep calm. Maybe I’m spoiled by so many Quaker meetinghouses and other sanctuaries of quiet heart-centered devotion.
7. Suppose I’d wound up back in Dayton or Cincinnati, rather than moving on? The very thought has me feeling emotionally constrained.
8. A reminder. Be authentic to your dreams, even in the face of the Greek chorus intoning, “Yay,” “Boo,” Ahh,” even “Mmm,” throughout. Much less Job’s friends in those periods of siege.
9. What do we do with the superrich freeloaders?
10. Internally, I’m still on Standard Time. How can it be so late already?

~*~

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

~*~

1. First crocus, first hyacinth. More welcome signs.
2. “Ice out” in our yard – the first day you can walk a diagonal pathway without stepping on snow.
3. At the feeder, our goldfinches have regained their yellow, first as a tone under the gray and then full-out bold. How rapid the change!
4. Jazz trumpeter Clark Terry had a special relationship with the University of New Hampshire, one town over. His legacy continues around here. Still wish I’d heard him live, when it was an option. Remember, he taught the incomparable Miles Davis. And my, how I remember that night!
5. How I love Robert Rauschenberg’s concept of Combines! Neo-Dada, me? Harvesting? (As in wheat. Or driving into fields of corn.) His approach infuses so many of my poems and much of my fiction. What got me labeled as a Mixmaster. Let’s see what we can throw together. Don’t leave out Roy Lichtenstein, either, with his Ben-Day dots fetish from the hot-type days of newspaper production. Oh, how that dates my sense of contemporary!
6. Another magazine renewal form, among those I’ve let drop. Constrained income has meant limiting my memberships, too.
7. Here, in a period when I’m supposed to be emerging from my shell, I find myself retreating instead.
8. In the graffiti at the top flight of the observation tower: “Sometimes love just isn’t enough.” (Looking down, I saw no evidence the author had acted rashly.)
9. What do we make of capitalism that buys a company and then expects the workers to make concessions to pay for the move? Shouldn’t the ownership go straight to the workers?
10. Buzzards – more properly, “turkey vultures” – have returned.

~*~

 

 

 

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. Wet, sloppy snow? The kind that falls all day, making me want to scream each time I look out the window, even when it’s half melting on the street and ground and even though I no longer have to commute through its hazardous, annoying conditions. The mere thought of it, though, has us going stir-crazy.
2. Maple-sugaring season, for some of our friends. Just listen to all the discussion regarding this year’s sap run.
3. Blame the switch back to so-called Daylight Saving Time. Keep feeling I’m way behind. Look at the clock, it’s 1:30 p.m., then have to tell myself it would have been only 12:30 just a few days ago. This internal ticking!
4. Revisiting Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle (four operas spanning 17 hours, which somehow pop up for me in late winter), I confess it’s hard for me to wrap my head or heart around the mythological story. Gods who are not omniscient or who are ruled by lust – that is, who are not omnipotent – make the first obstacle, even before we get to all the reliance on magic and potions. Only when I see them as today’s celebrities does any of this come into focus. And then there is the matter of flawed parenting and marriage. Even more tantalizing is the concept of casting the “gods” as the superrich who are bankrupting America – off they go to their compound.
5. In observing the Eastern Orthodox dietary restrictions for Advent and now Lent, I’m made more aware of the world’s poor and hungry. Reach for milk for my coffee or for an egg or cheese or butter, then pull my hand back, realizing they’re dairy products, and thus prohibited for the stretch. Under a lacto-vegetarian regime, which I’d practiced in my past, these would be acceptable. The vegan alternative is so much stricter. How out of reach our Western abundance is for so many in the world. As my wife says, the practice makes us tea-totaling oil-free vegans. Curiously, our temporarily limited diet (or “fasting,” in the terminology) does not have me feeling penitent but rather, as we pursue it, has me delighting in ranges of food we normally slight. Even so, I’m really looking forward to feasting come Easter.
6. Considering many of my favorite hippie-era writers, I’m surprised to see how apolitical many of them are. Richard Brautigan, ever so playful – or even Jack Kerouac, who inspired so many of us. I am open to alternatives, like John Nichols or Edward Abbey, though their writing feels far more conventional and less heartfelt. Makes for a fresh way of revisiting the literature of the era, especially as it leaps ahead to our current political situation.
7. Insecurity is a manifestation of ego, standing counter to humility.
8. A sense of being released in to the NOW for the NEW. The way some work continues.
9. How do people in the construction trades schedule their lives? Do the calls for repairs, remodeling, and new building really average out week after week?
10. No idea what’s on tap for tomorrow.

~*~

Yes, I’m still swimming laps in the indoor pool, the one in downtown Dover. Glad he’s not in my lane.

 

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

~*~

1. Keep an eye on the pussy willows, about ready to harvest – a sure promise of spring. How gallantly, snowdrops in bloom – green shoots of hyacinths – even in receding snowbanks.
2. Keep an ear open at night for peepers, coming to life in their thawing vernal ponds.
3. Time for seaweed runs, too. Off to the beach to collect mineral-rich debris for the garden. What about picking something out of the canister of kites in the loft before I go? Spend a little more time by the surf? Rather than just dashing off and back home?
4. As I’ve said, I welcome a faith that encourages questioning and action. I’ve come to appreciate the implicit yes in the Quaker queries. (Link to Light)
5. Keep hoping to find my appropriate schedule, my right routine, my most balanced pace of life. Years before retiring, I’d draft what I thought might be ideal daily and weekly rounds – charts that drew my wife’s derision when she finally viewed them. (To be fair, some predated our marriage.) Yes, there’s so much I overlooked or simply assumed would fit in. And so much that’s come into my life since. My weekly choir rehearsal in Boston, for instance, throws me off-kilter, since it means getting home around midnight. Otherwise, I’d be rising before 5 or 6, as she does, and sitting to meditate as a yogi or just write. So what have I really settled into?
6. We are getting days now when the top of the barn’s warm enough for yoga exercise and meditation in early afternoon. Not the schedule I’d projected, but one that’s organic to our situation.
7. Maybe it’s just a fantasy: past/present/future all within this moment, if you pause.
8. Fulfillment is ultimately not on my own time scale but the Holy One’s. How terrifying!
9. Perhaps Verdi’s most compelling plot line until Otello, his 1850 Stiffelio tells of a Protestant minister and his unfaithful wife. Tellingly, it was censored at the first performance and then lost until 1960. In the background, at the time, the composer was living with a divorced woman. Could this be the basis for yet another masterpiece?
10. Why do Americans keep reelecting the same members of the Worst Congress in History? Is there some death wish for democracy?

~*~

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

~*~

1. March, with its upheavals, has any bouts of single-digit lows unable to hold long. Typically, it’s the month most prone to heavy snowfalls, especially when temperatures hover around freezing. Country roads get their “frost heaves,” too, for bumpy travel. And bits of green begin trying to break through.
2. “Why are you getting so upset, so defensive,” she asks after I encounter a setback that makes a mess on the counter. “It’s the sort of thing that happens to everybody” Except I want to shout, “No! It doesn’t! It only happens to me!” Actually it’s an echo of the childhood reaction after being accused, “Why did you do this to me?”Or more accurately, “How could you do this to me?” Mother blaming the Golden Boy once again.
3. Making photocopies at our computer printer has me remembering one of my definitions of “making it” as a writer, back when – the desire for an IBM Selectric typewriter and my own Xerox copier. Just think, our computer keyboards are a vast leap forward from any typewriter, at least for klutzy typists like me, while our kids take the copier for granted. Oh, it’s just the beginning of a long list of good gear rendered obsolete in our lifetime.
4. Been harboring a lingering notion about selecting a “top 100” or “best 100” or “favorite 100” compilation of my poems. Not that I really want another project to tackle, but looking at the range of my work over the past half-century sometimes leaves me surprised. Yes, much of it has a graffiti-like imperfection, once I decided to write on the run and revise along the lines of jazz improvisation more than aspiring to a perfectly formed artifact – or whatever. Let me say there are more rough edges than I’d like. Still, that 100 cutoff would mean an average of just two poems a year from what’s been a prolific output, even without the novels and essays. I’m still wondering how I ever did it while working full-time elsewhere.
5. Rereading Walden with an appreciation of Thoreau’s pervasive satire. It’s a refreshing perspective.
6. Can the question “Who are you?” be addressed by “Whom do you hate?”
7. As an acquaintance was told at the office one Monday morning: “You have a billion dollars to reallocate.” It’s something that happens in a corporate buyout. Not that she saw any of it.
8. Gotta try praying rather than worrying.
9. Stay balanced and rested.
10. We’re big on putting the lentils back in Lent.

~*~

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

~*~

1. Would love to get back to another personal routine that’s somehow fallen by the wayside: sitting abed and “simmering” each morning with a cup of coffee to accompany some reading or just my own thoughts. Rather than popping right up and getting in gear. Theologian Howard Thurman was a big advocate of the practice and its reversal in the evening.
2. Do have the indolent luxury of hiding out in our third-floor guest room (a.k.a. crafts room), opposite my studio, maybe even allowing a whole thick novel to wash over me as I read if I’m not napping there. It’s the room up there that gets direct sunlight, unlike my north-facing studio.
3. Forsythia, which she insists are as hardy as weeds, are in danger of blooming too early. One more sign of disaster we’ve observed. We’re watching them, all the same, to bring a few sprigs in to force into flower sometime approaching Easter.
4. Returning to the memory of hitchhiking – giving a lift to others when you can or extending their generosity, in some manner – suggests compiling a long annotated list of our experiences and what we learned, pro and con. Maybe as Letters to Youth from a retired hitchhiker or a way of finally gleaning some wisdom in reflecting on the era. Yes, it could be giddy but also risky. And I’m not the one to see it from the “hippie chick” perspective. Anyone else want to rise to the challenge?
5. We’re well into sauna season, the little cabin at the edge of the pond. I’m still not breaking the ice for a dip. Let the younger, more foolhardy guys to that. No, there’s no reason for us geezers to tempt cardiac arrest.
6. Curiously, I don’t seem to be getting any more done in my personal pursuits than when I was working fulltime. Or was I really neglecting a lot more then than I remember?
7. February is such a short month, especially for those of us who have legal obligations to fulfill – car inspections and new tags, for instance. And then there are all those monthly payments coming due the equivalent of at least a weekend earlier.
8. Quakers traditionally eschew a liturgical calendar, preferring instead that every day should be holy. Not that we commonly manage that. But that doesn’t preclude some of us from voluntarily taking up disciplines that would be mandatory in other denominations. For example, my wife and I customarily delve into Advent and Lenten readings and abstain from alcohol for those periods. (As a practice, it’s good to be able to say “No” and stick with it, especially when it comes to temptations like my martinis.) This past Advent we engaged Eastern Orthodox “fasting,” realizing a vegan diet would fit the rules if we eliminated oil on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, apart from the fish allowed on weekends. The avoidance of meat was no problem, but we really missed the cheese and eggs, which many vegetarians allow, and I nearly added milk to my coffee more than once. Almond milk, by the way, is a fine substitute, but I also gained an actual fondness for black coffee. So much for the sugar. Still, it’s surprising how many labels I began reading – cookies, chocolate – and found offending additives. With Orthodox Lent beginning February 27, we’re looking at even stricter rules. It’s what she describes as being a tea-totaling vegan with no olive oil. We really have to admire all those who take this in stride.
9. And any day now we’ll be invaded by ants. They seldom wait for mid-May.
10. We’ve seen too many who shout “law and order” turn out themselves to be lawless and disorderly.

~*~