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. Just as we settle in at the beach, two busloads of day-campers march in, all wearing Camp Wanna Iguana tee-shirts. (No serious writer can make this stuff up.)
2. Hot, hazy, humid, lazy at last. Full leaf.
3. Revisiting photos of trails in the high country of the Pacific Northwest, I almost smell a spicy edge in the air or taste that incredibly blue sky. All of this imprinted, somewhere in my soul. Those days we headed to the high country for relief from the sweltering valley. Now we head straight to the Atlantic, hopefully free of the day-campers.
4. We wonder what’s happened to the couple who had the amazing garden a few blocks over. For years they both inspired and shamed us. But more recent years have shown far less effort. Could it just be too much for two? How much food do you need, anyway?
5. The Cold River in North Sandwich, New Hampshire, passes through a rocky stretch known as the Kettles before turning into the Grotto under the highway bridge. It’s a most glorious place to swim. But beware, it can be very chilly and after a big storm upstream, the current can knock you off your feet, especially on slippery rocks.
6. Vanilla Bang is a misreading, of course, of what looks like a fuse.
7. An army must be clothed and fed as much as armed and fortified, and that’s where the trouble begins. Think of all those farmers, fishermen, and merchants.
8. The kid never, ever, accepted the word No, not from anyone. She did – and does – what she wants.
9. In too much of what I’m reading in literature, all the Manhattan or MFA settings. Well, even I do have one that takes place, in part, in New York City.
10. Just what is a marriage, anyway?

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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. Hard to believe we’ve entered our 17th summer here. The garden’s looking gorgeous, even stunning, in its simplicity of blocks and clumps rather than straight, unbroken rows. Our soil is so much livelier than it was when we arrived. The house and barn have undergone many renovations, too – with much more remaining on the to-do list. That is to say, this bit of land has become home. I return to the old lesson from Boy Scouts – leave a campsite cleaner than you found it. And she even dares raise the possibility of moving?
2. Asked when he knows a poem’s finished, Gary Snyder replies: “When I lose interest.” Or I might add, “Energy.” Just what is it in a text that energizes, anyway? Smolders. Seduces. Dances?
3. The point of my writing fiction, essentially: I want to make sense of all this. Or even some corner.
4. It’s so clear – so painfully, embarrassingly clear – I’ve needed permission to feel anything. All my emotions, being repressed, generate my mask!
5. I’ve forgotten how to read an astrological chart. What are all these strange symbols?
6. After recasting a novel, I recognize a pattern that requires two more sweeps of revision, even after a proof-read. One looks for repeated words that could be changed to synonyms. The other inserts slang and more color.
7. Nothing like a rainfall to bring forth the dreaded garden slugs.
8. My psychic color this decade? Barn red! Traditional New England barn red.
9. You can’t expect a bolt from the blue. (There is a responsibility.)
10. We need to get praying. Any way we find fitting.

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Whenever possible, I love taking Amtrak’s Downeaster to North Station in Boston. Or the C&J bus to South Station. It beats finding parking — expensive parking — in the heart of the city. Alas, most of my forays wind up in the suburbs, where driving makes much more sense.

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. And now, fresh strawberries. The bed we renovated last year is making amends. So how do you like yours the best?
2. So delightful to have cut flowers indoors, too. A sprig of laurel (from the burial ground) is stunning against the deep purple velvet of a Siberian iris.
3. French 75s. That’s the cocktail they like at Chris and Linda’s.
4. I still aspire to writing a novel with only three or four characters. Two, however, feels just too tight. It would be something tightly focused and linear. But the current has often pulled me in the opposite direction. Big Inca, for instance, is essentially four – but look at all the others who keep wandering in and out!
5. How little of the traditional canon I’ve pursued. There are vast gaps in my reading repertoire. That doesn’t mean I haven’t read – far from it.
6. A perfect June morning: cool, touch of breeze, sunny and clear. After a full night’s sleep.
7. Her eye is so close I see my own reflection.
8. Maybe writing and revising have been my first love over all these years.
9. Headed to the liquor store to make sure I’d have enough gin for a martini but arrived five minutes after it closed: take that as a sign.
10. Being remembered as “an intense young man.”

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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.

~*~

1. In my life, a renewed period of purging and cleansing. One personal goal: to wear out shirts and shoes I don’t particularly like before donning the others – exhaust them and then discard them with a sigh of relief – rather than leaving them untouched. That way the pile keeps getting smaller.
2. How many talented people I’ve known. And how much blown opportunity.
3. How rarely I seem to read for pleasure. Rather there’s often a sense of duty – obligation – as in I ought to read this or that. Especially when it’s a gift.
4. Sometimes in revising a piece I touch on something (often I have no idea what) that sets off a deep grieving. It’s a psychological release, however painful.
5. Both the Hebrew Bible and Greek Logos point to a heightened sense of the individual and individuality in contrast to wider society and social norms. We’re each responsible – accountable – for our own actions.
6. We’re hoping to get to Lowell, Massachusetts, this month to take a boat tour on the canals that pass next to its historic mills. Sometimes, from the photos we’ve seen, the route’s like a narrow brick canyon.
7. I turn to the singer next to me and tell him how much I envy his fine tenor, especially in pieces where the melody’s in the tenor line. (He’s able to belt it out, too.) The woman in front turns to us and says, “I’m sitting in front of you two again tomorrow.”
8. Everything we’ve transplanted to the garden is looking happy.
9. PERFECT WISDOM, a John Woolman term, as in Sophia. Or Christ.
10. We can’t just sit on these things. Yada-yada-yada.

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At least they’re not commandments. Holy Moses!

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1. Observing a hummingbird in the azalea just outside our bay window – these amazing creatures really do have a ruby band at their throat.
2. All the vacation-bound traffic: boats, campers, trailers, RVs. Along with the state troopers, enforcing speed caps. There are somedown sides to living here.
3. A pile of bricks came along with the house when we moved in. Surprising how useful they’ve been.
4. How long ago, the realization and description: “She sounds like a parody of teenage upheaval.” It’s a rough rite of passage.
5. A stage of revision as an Acid Bath – fine lace of reduction opening passages for air. (Revisions grounded in the present more than any past.)
6. Look to that relationships stuff. Maybe the Proust questionnaires, too.
7. The next step in nuclear fusion, so I’m told, is to use the technology in conjunction with our existing nuclear waste, depleting those nasty stockpiles – a process that should generate 10-times as much power in combination.
8. Constitution, Consensus, and Consciousness. How far away they seem in today’s general scene.
9. From inscription over pre-war German synagogues: KNOW BEFORE WHOM YOU STAND BEFORE YOU PRAY. To wit we might add: BEFORE YOU WRITE or BEFORE YOU WORK.
10. Public life and business: “We’re sinking into the Abyss.”

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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. Time to start checking on the ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, courtesy of the NOAA buoys reported on the website. I no longer bother to venture into real surf until the readings hit 60 Fahrenheit. Below that it’s blue-toe water.
2. There’s an irony in performing sun-salutation postures but none, say, for the new moon or full moon. Om, my. Inhale and exhale, with incense.
3. On our apron by the back door, a small snake, whip motion, ever so slowly.
4. Here I’d been intending to write leaner, tighter, shorter, clearer – a lacework of Light. Wind up with dense blocks of prose-poems instead.
5. It’s hard to imagine my native Buckeye State was created, in essence, by eleven Connecticut veterans of the American Revolution who met at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston on March 1, 1786, to form the Ohio Company. The tavern was a gathering place for wealthy merchants sympathetic to the patriot cause. At least it wasn’t Manhattan. Who knows what we would have wound up with.
6. Sometimes you feel a new beginning – not just renewal but turning a corner.
7. My own pathway unfolds as its own guide.
8. Sometimes I read this place as CLOVER NH. Better, of course, than the unintentionally comic EFFINGHAM.
9. I’ve resolved to spend more time in the mountains to our north this summer. In recent years, even getting to the beaches nearby has been elusive.
10. So that’s it! Blah-blah-blah.

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

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1. This matter of scale – and balance – in a life that has an appearance of randomness. All these items collected throughout the house and barn. Somehow, order reasserts itself, if you look.
2. Remembering the volcano 37 years ago. Just look at the skulls I collected in that country.
3. Four years later, the move to Baltimore for the one I thought embodied that moment full of promise to take my life upward into a fairy-tale existence of class and repose, a much different direction from where I’ve landed. Alas, she’d already bolted. And mine has become much more organic.
4. Common Meter, 8.6.8.6, as in “Amazing Grace,” is simply the syllable count. A great way to swap words and music.
5. Am not having profound or imaginative dreams. But at least the flow’s beginning again, like looking at a secret movie or computer screen.
6. When taking portraits outdoors, how often the eyeglasses turn into sunglasses in the bright light – and how often people in party mode turn wooden.
7. Looking at a book of glass houses reminds me how deeply that Bauhaus aesthetic is embedded in my sensibility. Not that I’d aspire to live in one now. Who washes all those windows, anyway? And what about fingerprints or noses? These days I’ve chosen a different style, one based in Yankee houses that just keep growing, as needed. As for curtains, she and I will argue.
8. To ease back into Hatha – Ha-ha!
9. “The things that are not seen are eternal” – II Corinthians 4:18.
10. Still feeling so tentative rather than forceful.

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I chanced upon this scultpture at 15 Beach Place while wandering from Chinatown to Faneuil Hall. It’s about a block from the old Boston Music Hall, where Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto got its world premiere. Maybe this site is where he stayed while visiting? Anyone got a clue?

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. The return of warm weather allows more leisurely use of the top of the barn again, before high summer makes the space too oppressive. Eight years ago we made major renovations that made the loft more fully accessible and usable, gaining 500 square feet of storage and retreat space – my three-season retreat, as it were. The elbow room has been quite liberating. I love to sit at the hall door, reading and sipping a drink while overlooking my domain. How good, tranquil, it feels. How much I love listening to rain fall on its roof, too.
2. The rush of spring now brings on fresh lettuce and spinach in our garden. Turning the compost, I’m delighted to see so many red wigglers already active – my little buddies in restoring the earth where we live.
3. I’ve thought about The Daily Vulture as a title. Seeing them now reminds me of my bird watching on my daily commute, back when I was driving daily. Gee, would the name befit a newspaper?
4. Thinking, too, of all the near misses on those drives. A few seconds this way or that and I would have been road kill. A feast for the vultures. Far more times than I’d care to recount.
5. Nice poets are a dime a dozen and largely ignored. Makes me wonder about assuming a hidden identity as a Quaker Agitator, waiting to be claimed. As for amateur theologians? Time to emulate Swami?
6. There are far more writers than I could ever read. Even in any of my fields of interest. And far more advice.
7. After living here, in a richly pedestrian-friendly small city in New England, or on historic Bolton Hill in Baltimore, or even the inner city of Binghamton, how sterile I find so many other neighborhoods where I’ve lived or wandered.
8. How essential and uplifting that sense that says I’M HERE!
9. As he said of himself, “I go to extremes.” Still, there wasn’t a sweeter human. And he still had his beard in the end. As for our demons and passions?
10. Hebrew “to know” is yada. Another rich word.

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