thinking of you
and wondering
Tag: Memories
We may aspire to be a bit illegible this year
Having revealed my blogging direction for the coming year, please allow me to fill in some of the background.
As we enter the Barn’s 14th year, the merry-go-round concept continues, including Tendrils on Tuesdays and Kinisi on Sunday evenings. With our home renovation on pause, you’ll see fewer entries on that project, though one of its consequences will become the main focus over the year. To wit: As I posted last May, I need to downsize my possessions to fit into our new space, meaning collections, and my 200-some volumes of journaling have become a target. Frankly, I hadn’t opened most of those scribblings aka manuscripts in the past decade or two. Was I likely to do so in the next five years or so? Or would they continue to collect dust? As I was saying? Besides, do I want to burden my wife and daughters with one more burden to clean out when I’m no more? Heavens, no.
Setting forth five months after my New Year’s goal of culling those pages, I expected to find that the earliest volumes had been thoroughly mined in drafting my novels and poetry, and that what remained would be embarrassingly sophomoric. Well, many passages were. But there was enough other material I didn’t want to lose, which led to keyboarding those bits before ceremoniously burning the volumes themselves. More on that later in the season.
So far, I’ve gotten through the first decade after my graduation from college. Far more remained from what I had imagined.
As these appear here, perhaps they’ll work along the lines of Ned Rorem’s Paris Journals, though much less scandalously and thoroughly lacking celebrities. Who knows what morbid fascination you might engage.
I’ll try not to add too much context but rather let them pour forth largely unedited. You might feel something like an eavesdropper that way. Some of the identities may, however, be changed to protect the guilty.
With fewer photos here in the coming year, the Barn will be more word-driven, befitting a novelist and poet, but with a funky edge. As a “gentle reminder” I came across last year advised:
“Let life feel a little illegible sometimes. You’re not a quote. You’re not a theme. You’re a page with scribbles, rewrites, margin notes. Let it stay messy. That’s what makes it real.”
Thanks to YouBook Story at Instagram for that inspiration. Let’s see how it fits.
Onward, then!
Get ready for another turn here
Here we are again, another new year, another new calendar to fill. As if that should be any problem? Let me guess that you, too, never seem to have enough time to do so much of what you’re hoping to accomplish, day, week, month, or more. Right?
No matter. This time of the year is typically a moment for reflection of what’s happened in the previous 12 months of our lives and also for planning for our next 12.
Blogging, and my writer’s life in general, are no exception.
Blogging was, I believe, envisioned as a place for “live” journaling, or logging, in a ship captain’s sense, though my flagship Red Barn and four affiliated sites over the past 14 years have always put twists on that by scheduling long in advance. Even with that, each year has somehow always taken on a fresh emphasis.
The Barn started out with a huge backlog of previously published poems and related pieces to share, giving the blog essentially a literary focus. To my surprise, digital photography, especially once I retired from the newsroom, came to the forefront, too. As the pace picked up, marriage, family life, and our “city farm” in Dover provided fresh waves of inspiration, and there were files of unpublished poems and essays to add to the mix. Excerpts from my widespread correspondence and my Quaker writings also came into play. On top of that, publication of my novels and their subsequent revisions widened the perspective, including outtakes, as did my history Quaking Dover and the spirituality investigation Light Seed Truth.
More recently, the focus shifted to Way Downeast Maine where I’ve resettled.
So far, that adds up to more than 6,000 posts.
~*~
In addition, we’ve had the emergence of my quartet of affiliated WordPress blogs, which have undergone their own evolution.
Much of my Quaker-related writing led to establishing As Light Is Sown.
The photography has joined the Talking Money and New England Spirit entries at Chicken Farmer I Still Love You.
Poetry in chapbook presentations, especially, now appear at Thistle Finch editions.
And Orphan George Chronicles make my research findings available to genealogy investigators who share some of my linage.
It’s a lot, but it’s not sitting in dusty files or some editor’s sludge piles.
~*~
In the year ahead here at the Barn, you’ll be seeing excerpts from my physical journals, which started nearly six decades ago. Last year, having wound up on this remote island in Maine, I finally hunkered down revisiting the earliest decade of the books and found much of merit that hadn’t been distilled into my novels or poetry, so we’ll give them a final airing here.
It has me thinking of a poet I’ve dearly loved and his remark that nobody since could pursue the life he did. That remark came after he saw recent real estate prices for marginal properties around the lands he and his cohorts had purchased dirt cheap decades earlier in the Sierra Nevada range of California and then built upon and then realizing they couldn’t afford to buy their places now.
I wish I could advise kids today setting forth some advice for moving ahead.
All I can say is I’m glad I’m not in their place.
Looking back, though, I’m seeing ours was often a difficult journey, too.
Here’s how things unfolded for me. It really was a merry-go-round, something of the continuing nature of this blog.
Much of what’s ahead promises to be more confidential, subjective, off-guard than what you’ve seen from me before.
As always, I do enjoy hearing your comments and sharing your company.
Another epitaph
I didn’t change the world.
Saying “I survived” isn’t enough.
Some final shots for the year in my writing life
Sometimes my own writing goes beyond anything I can explain. For instance:
- My Kinisi here at the Barn? Prompts, yes, if you want.
- But firing them into full blast?
- Much less igniting a conflagration?
- We do what we can, each one on the edge.
- I keep shooting what I think are some good ones at you, hoping someone will take it the next step.
Meanwhile, over the years:
- I’ve attempted to walk in the Light daily, though fallen far short.
- Ridden the uprising Spirit.
- Found silent meditation crucial to writing poetry.
- Uncovered 12 generations of my Hodgson ancestors.
- Returned unknowingly to the faith of those ancestors.
- Survived a shrinking profession to reach retirement.
- Sought an incandescent language.
- Still need a champion.
- Never taught creative writing.
- Found literary writing can resemble prayer.
- Am perhaps best known for my Mixmaster approach to poetry and fiction. Or maybe it was my radical history of Dover along with uncovering an alternative Christianity in the Quaker metaphors of Light and Seed
- Prefer a religion that relies on questions more than answers
- Think we’re confused enough, already.
- Store bath towels in a basket.
- Wear reading glasses, more and more.
- Have become uncomfortable around smokers.
- Had hoped to reclaim my social activist witness, after years of journalistic neutrality.
Remember, you can find my works 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. You can also ask your public library to obtain them.
Our winters from the perspective of neighboring St. Croix Island
The French learned some harsh lessons in their attempt to establish their first North American settlement on a small island perhaps ten miles north of where I know live.
“It was difficult to know this country without having wintered there; for on arriving in summer everything is very pleasant on account of the woods, the beautiful landscapes, and the fine fishing for the many kinds of fish we found there,” Samuel Champlain wrote. “There are six months of winter in that country.”
I’ve previously contended that New England has a five- or six-month winter, so that passage offers me some confirmation.
As that winter dragged on, however, more than half of the men and boys developed what Champlain called a “mal de la terre,” or “land sickness” – scurvy, a disease caused by Vitamin C deficiency. It was common among sailors stuck on ships for months at a time, and many captains knew to keep citrus fruits on board, or beverages made from evergreen tree needles. During the European Age of Sail between 1500 and 1800, it was assumed that half of all crews would die of scurvy.
It wasn’t pretty.
“Their teeth barely held in place, and could be removed with the fingers without causing pain,” Champlain wrote of the horrific suffering the settlers endured over the winter of 1604-1605. “This excess flesh was often cut away, which caused them to bleed extensively from the mouth.”
Eat your apples and oranges and grapefruit, then, as well as lemons and limes.
Religion turns off readers, and yet …
That’s an advice given to authors, though it’s something I cannot avoid in my own novels and even poetry. Where else can we fully address the deepest values we hold?
Politics doesn’t seem to be working that way, for sure.
Is science fiction the best we can do for now when it comes to grappling with philosophical issues?
Still, I’ve dug in, ranging from the spirituality of yoga and Buddhism in Zen and Tibetan traditions to Quaker and Mennonite Christianity to Greek Orthodoxy as well as Indigenous strands.
I tackle this most directly in Light Seed Truth, an ebook that includes four earlier booklets investigating the revolutionary impact early Quakers found in applying the metaphors of Light, Seed, and Truth. To that I add examples of the power of metaphor in modern secular society, just for balance.
My goal is to raise readers’ awareness and sensitivity rather than convert anyway to a particular faith.
With religion, I want to hear how faith is experienced by different individuals, rather than what they speculate they should be experiencing.
The best mystics I’ve known have surprisingly practical and humorous.
~*~
You can find it and more 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. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.
Sounding so dated now
RETAIL THERAPY: used books or classical/jazz/folk CDs.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE HOTEL? To date, Omni, Providence, Rhode Island. Yes, over Boston, Chicago, and New York.
I’LL KNOW I HAVE IT MADE WHEN: I can rent a cottage by the sea or a mountain lake. Or I have grandchildren.
WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT PROJECT? Creating an author’s website and blog.
WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO INVITE TO DINNER? My agent or publisher. If only I had one.
UPCOMING: Retirement.
Notes from a Yule tree search in the woods
The tree the kid wants ain’t natchural! At least not the ones we’ve cut from the wild.
What we find in the woods are typically lopsided, with the growth mostly to one side. And they tend to be more open than full, which can have its own appeal when it comes to adding ornaments.
Not that she perceives that on her arrival from the metropolis.
She’s always been challenging and demanding.
In our longest nights
How long the day now? Our shortest is a mere 8¾ hours of visible sun if the clouds permit, barely a third of the 24-hour cycle.
Where I live, we’ve now reached the earliest sunsets. They’ll be inching later by the solstice.
Enjoy the long nights, then. Perhaps by a fire but especially in sleep. Or even out, bundled up, viewing Northern Lights and meteor showers.
Jnana's Red Barn 