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

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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.

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At least they’re not commandments. Holy Moses! Ten more from my end of the universe.

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1. Sometimes I enjoy being in the front passenger seat the entire trip. Get to see more, for one thing. It’s an opportunity not to be in charge, not to be fully responsible – just let go and observe. What a relief!
2. All the waterfowl, the tip of the wing nearly touching the surface they fly over: how do they do it?
3. As Richard Brown Lethem says of his work, “For my entire life I’ve been trying to mine the subconscious.” No wonder I’m drawn to his paintings, inexplicable as so much remains to me.
4. I feel myself to be from another planet, looking at a world I once wanted to inhabit.
5. The grief men carry. Could it simply be the passage of time? Or something more fundamental to Eden?
6. As the news story reported, a neck-slasher to his stepdad: “I’m going to kill you and your life is going to end.” (The redundancy is emphatic.)
7. The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston’s Bay Back really is a magpie’s nest, an egocentric collection of bright and shiny objects. I do wish the curators were at liberty to give its masterpieces better display, contrary to Isabella’s directives. My, there’s so much clutter in the way!
8. Rather than heading back to Maine, she’s spending the night here. Thus, it’s NO YORK.
9. Pockets in a room that aren’t doing anything: that hold, in effect, dead energy. What’s the better usage?
10. Who am I, at the core? What do I really want? (That, for someone she accuses of being self-centered.)

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

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1. Anyone else hate raking leaves? Find bagging them’s even worse? A reminder, too, of the tons of snow to be shoveled, all too soon around the corner. Will this be the year we cave in and buy a snow blower, rather than continue by hand?
2. Commuting to choir each week requires driving through Belmont. That is, the one in Massachusetts. When folks mention the name, it could as easily refer to the one here in New Hampshire, up in the Lakes Region. Or, in my past, the neighborhood where I grew up in Ohio, going all the way through Belmont Elementary and High.
3. Sometimes on that commute, the GPS sends us through some exclusive neighborhoods. We note the tonier neighborhoods are dominated by slate roofs.
4. As a midday meal, it’s hard to beat fresh mussels and a baguette.
5. So many things have to be taken at a leisurely pace, doled out over time.
6. Would love to hit weekend morning dim sum in Boston’s Chinatown again. The restaurant basement function rooms fill with 250 or more diners as a dozen carts of delicacies pass your table. Pick something, if you wish, or wait for the next. Nothing in English, and no prices in sight. Just what’s in that steamed bamboo dish? The total for this “Chinese fast-food tapas” turns out to be about what we’d pay for breakfast at McDonald’s.
7. Another unanticipated side of my Motets: the close connection between religion and politics, or at least social responsibility.
8. Did Quaker culture essentially fail to address the earthy side of life? Could we have become all too refined?
9. Guiding and teaching a new generation – a swami at last. Or whatever you want to call the guru or elder or abbot.
10. What are we really afraid of? Really afraid of?

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

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1. Am imagining evenings for violin and piano. How long since I’ve even picked up rosin and bow!
2. A drive through a stretch I call the Black Forest can be quite amazing now. So luminescent, a golden-yellow tunnel of light.
3. Indian Summer officially comes after the first killing frost. It’s almost scary.
4. How much I feel myself a dilettante. A little of this, a little of that.
5. The Big Question? (Questions! Yes, it’s questions!)
6. It’s important to have a place to wind down, to fester, to percolate. To look at the messy side of your existence. (Nothing of that in a Frank Lloyd Wright home.)
7. Reza Baraheni is the Iranian poet I heard read after his release from prison and torture. He warned that the alternative to the Shah would be even worse.
8. My Mediterraneo poetry project had me reconsidering Greek and Roman mythology and then seeing that in contrast to theology. What strikes me is how convoluted it is, more than even Hindu cosmologies, and how anthropromorphic, down to the birthing or immortals slaying other immortals while frozen in time. How intricately it’s bound to a specific locale and its people. In contrast to the One Truth implicit in monotheism, i.e., science, the mythologies give us a cosmos that’s chaotic, ruled by caprice, fear, vengeance, conflicting deities as the source of human suffering. How do you find direction in such confusion?
9. A neighbor’s 2 1/2-foot iguana is on the loose, according to the poster on the telephone pole. There’s a $100 reward.
10. You don’t shoot your own troops. Not if you want to win. Otherwise, there’s every reason to mutiny.

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

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1. We’re well into the foliage watch. Weather plays into it, too. Heavy rain, followed by glorious clear. Or sunlight blazing against slate-gray clouds. As for the chores, in advance of winter? “I’ve been on my feet all day.”
2. Each October I revisit the symphonies of Charles Ives. It’s not just his birthday month but also an acknowledgement of his deep New England roots. The annual tradition often leads to the symphonies of George Whitefield Chadwick and then John Knowles Paine. Inevitably, I wind up with the one symphony and the piano concerto by Amy Beach. Big, magnificent, often richly Romantic pieces, for the most part. Wish they were much, much better known by the public. (For more.)
3. A stay-at-home morning: pad about, get some writing and reading in, finally shower and dress at 2 p.m. And then? Swim in the indoor pool.
4. Am wondering what might have happened if I’d achieved “success” – at any number of points. I would have wound up moving along that groove the rest of my life, likely without exploring many of the other facets I now find overlapping.
5. My third-floor lair and my loft in the barn are both tree houses!
6. My wife resisted when I insisted on the dishwasher. How much she objected! My, my, how that’s changed! These days she even argues it can be cheaper than hand-washing the plates and flatware in the sink.
7. We live close to the state university but partake of so little of its arts programming. Even now that we know where to park.
8. Bought a new calendar but back home saw it was for the wrong year – this one, rather than next. Still, the illustrations are marvelous.
9. To gain the reader’s trust is the central issue of each work. It’s how transformation through action across time connects.
10. Degrees of Truth? Now this really gets complicated.

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