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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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. How quickly the sun goes down these days. How quickly, darkness descends.
2. Even if I could read a new novel a day, in a year I could not catch up with a single week of publication. So many good writers! How on earth could I possible keep abreast of them? Recognize names, even? It’s hopeless!
3. Every autumn I have to be on guard. Take my meds. Something in the air often takes me out, sometimes for a week or two, with something resembling “flu like symptoms” that remains a mystery to my doctors.
4. Moonlight at the lighthouse: silvery on shimmering surface surrounded by smoky blue.
5. Sometimes I look at the barn and think of Joseph Albers. All the paintings he made with only three colors, each one a square band within another.
6. What a wonderful fall tradition, these potted mums! Especially since we have so few flowers left that can be cut and brought indoors. Even the green leaves must feel they’ve overstayed. There’s something tired, browning, even before any blight.
7. Take care driving the back roads at night. Much wildlife’s out and about roving.
8. End of the season at York Animal Kingdom comes sharply. The pygmy goats in the pen by the highway are gone, as are the Ferris wheel cars by the beach.
9. The goldfinches have lost their yellow. How sudden and uniform their molting! Back to winter’s gray duster c0at.
10. In our autumn foliage, one day can turn everything. Or even overnight.

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