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. 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?

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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. 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.

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

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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.

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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?

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1. Even before she argues I’m regressing to adolescence, she has many reasons to ask: Am I still emotionally … 15? Maybe this time I’ll get it right. Or just FINALLY.
2. How is it so many people see me as masked, restrained, even inhibited? All these years. Will the real me please stand up?
3. Like a pack of cards, “shuffle the deck,” the way of the Red Barn – or my all too rambling life with all of its competing interests! Don’t we need a job or children as focus? Or God?
4. A jazz guitarist asks me between sets, “Are you a musician? You listen like one.” I take it as a compliment. As for my choir?
5. Too easily I find myself retreating for too much of the day (and night) in my attic studio, apart from the rest of the house. Call me a third-floor hermit. That’s where I think I write best.
6. I’d dreamed of having Molly Ringwald join in a movie I’d scripted: 61 Candles. We’d all grown up. Or something like that. Even I was younger then.
7. It’s a familiar goal in revising a piece of writing and, as I’m finding, in making music. Think of the visual arts, too, and any number of places in daily life. Gain lightness in what had been blocks of density.
8. Inscribed on the tower: “Maybe he was the love of my life … but I wasn’t his.” (Which interpretation do you prefer?)
9. How is it I got so old? Even within an old soul?
10. My overcoat, still tinged with city grime, needs cleaning.

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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. I haven’t said anything about shoveling snow, have I?
2. One tension in today’s world is a matter of staying in place in a restless world. Sinking roots, as it were. Going deep. Without getting stuck. How is this rooting balanced with personal growth and evolution? And, too, how is it I’ve stayed Quaker, amid all the other self-identities in play?
3. Am continuing my practice of learning Spanish before breakfast – along with our Cuban-roast coffee.
4. A friend shows us the mass of stonework in the cellar of his 1755 New England saltbox house, and we recognize it’s a thermal mass that holds heat in winter, keeps the place cooler in summer. Those old Yankees were way ahead of our times.
5. So the day starts clear, then clouds over. Snow on the way? Gotta check our weather vane, see if the wind’s coming in off the ocean.
6. Observing two side-by-side icicles hanging over our second-floor windows, I see one’s bumpy while the one next to it’s smooth. Then realized, yes, water drops freeze as bumps, and thus the smooth one becomes the question.
7. As Boss would have told Bill in Big Inca: “I told you to report EVERYTHING.” Maybe there are limits.
8. Listening to piano music by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, keep hearing a riff that sounds like “Skip to the Lou,” itself a puzzling phrase. Turns out it’s Scottish for “love,” and the tune accompanied a circle game. Also, Gottschalk was quoting a slightly different and more wistful tune from New Orleans, which explains the notes that move sidewise.
9. The Libertarian Party really blew its big opportunity. Royally. Now where does it turn?
10. Perhaps tomorrow will be a bathrobe day. Or at least sweats. No driving, just stay indoors at home. Plenty to do here, anyway.

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