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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I’ve long been fond of collage as an art form. These Tendrils continue the stream.

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1. Ground Hog’s Day marks the end of solar winter, in contrast to the standard calendar’s use of the equinox on March 20. We have as much daylight now as we did around Halloween, back t the end of October. It’s another reason I view the year as eight seasons rather than four.
2. I’ve previously posted about the ways observing Advent as the days leading up to Christmas Day – which then ushers in the Twelve Days of Christmas –greatly alters our way of experiencing the holidays. As a result, since we don’t put up our tree until Christmas Eve, we leave ours up much longer than our neighbors. Long after theirs have headed for the dump, ours is still casting magical light around our front parlor (the room we call the library) while the mass of tiny lighted bulbs outside the bay window are also still glowing. Deep winter’s much more tolerable this way.
3. When the evergreen tree does go out of the house (meaning any day now), its place in the bay window is soon taken up by flats of seedlings we’ll transplant to the garden, likely in May. My task now is to retrieve the appropriate shelves and bars of lighting from the shed – out in the brittle cold. We always seem to be behind schedule there.
4. How sad to see so many so-called conservatives turning barbarian, intent on destruction – pillaging civilization and culture.
5. My last days at the office included erasing my tracks. A lot of stuffed folders went into the trash.
6. I finally acknowledge my past lovers would have never made me a suitable spouse. How blessed I am now.
7. Think of the books we keep returning to. Or simply journals. Which of them keep you on track?
8. There’s a day, as the rabbi admits, for sex and delight, free from the usual intrusions. It’s called Sabbath. Seriously.
9. Goose – all dark meat, a lot of good tasty fat – a spoonful is great for favoring other dishes while cooking.
10. Someday has come.

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

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1. Since we don’t put up a Yule tree and decorate it until Christmas Eve, ours stays on display longer than any of our neighbors’. The lights make January a less forbidding stretch. Make it more festive and relaxing. So what do you do special this otherwise cold, dark month?
2. She’s really at home in a grocery store. Knows all the comparative prices, what’s a bargain, what’s special. Not so in other retail settings. Still, you should see our pantry. Or the two big freezers in the barn.
3. Swami had long ago said I didn’t need a job (I’m an old soul) because that’s not the work I should be offering. That was long, long ago.
4. How often does it seem: Fashion = Money … along with the race for something better?
5. Would I be satisfied with a single-line poem that said everything? Stake my reputation on it?
6. Considering all the hours I put in on my “personal writing” over the years – the poetry and fiction, especially, or genealogy and Quaker fare – it would have added up to a lot of overtime pay. Even at 10 hours a week, though I suspect with vacations and holidays thrown in, the average would have been closer to 20. I’d really have to land a bestseller to come anywhere close to recouping that investment.
7. The frustration of my twilight years in journalism, seeing us increasingly pander to stupidity, ignorance, and hatred rather than trying to lead and enlighten.
8. As the funeral director told me, “We hate holidays. Holidays suck.”
9. Fortune cookie: You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily.
10. Can this really be happening to America? Or the world?

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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?

~*~

1. This month’s annual perusal of seed catalogs leads to opening our shoeboxes of seeds themselves – counting and inspecting all the packets remaining from previous seasons. Makes for quite an impressive array, even if I’m not the principal gardener. Just listen to all that considered discussion and dreaming on the part of the actual planters, the mother and daughter and their friends.
2. Even in retirement, I require a timetable – a to-do list – some sense of priorities and direction, in addition to routine. What does that say about me?
3. From spam email: “Man Snake Enlargement.” Also, “Man Pole.” (Um, like a May Pole?) English terms pale by comparison.
4. My Motets move in poetic processes that largely lack images. It’s a curious twist for me.
5. At a holiday gathering with friends and family, one of the tots picks up my Peterson bird guide. Claudia intercepts it, opens it, and, as if it’s an illustrated children’s text, begins inventing a story. “This is Emily. And what’s this duck doing? It’s FLYING! And this one …” Anyone else think there’s another book waiting to take off there?
6. Taking a few risks, looking at the proposal and rules. If I fail, it’s more on my own terms.
7. Memory, as counterpoint and harmony for the present. Or maybe dissonance and discord.
8. Still can’t take in the news.
9. Parasite: a freeloader, usually fatal. Lives off the work of others. Seldom demonstrates gratitude or other qualities of good upbringing.
10. What happens when we lose our sense of mission?

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