“Love After Love.” A Poem. A Feast.

Tags

Derek Walcott, inspiration, life, literature, Love, poetry

Gertrude Fiske (1868 – 1961) American Impressionist

Love After Love

by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Many thanks to Ken Chawkin and the bread crumbs he left that led me to this poem on his blog Uncarved Block.

Reading it moved me deeply. One wonders if the whole purpose of our life journey is to lead us to that place where we see ourselves, finally, “face to face,” and greet ourselves with love and elation in this ultimate homecoming.

Ken describes his own tender home-coming on his website and provides many interesting links about Walcott, the Nobel Prize winning poet and artist.

In the video below you can listen to Walcott reading his poem from his island home on St. Lucia. You don’t want to miss this.

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Blogging, Another Way of “Breaking Bread”

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Blogging, breaking bread, Community, Entertainment, Pleasure, sharing, Social Media

Recently I wrote about blogging as virtual “love-making,” riffing on the new science which defines love as a“micro-moment of positivity resonance.” 

But there’s more to it than that, it now appears.  According to an article in The Atlantic, “The Selfish Meme – Twitter, dopamine, and the evolutionary advantages of talking about oneself” by Frank Rose:

“Researchers have previously shown that certain online activities—such as checking your e-mail or Twitter stream—stimulate the brain’s reward system. Like playing a slot machine, engaging in these activities sends the animal brain into a frenzy as it anticipates a possible reward: often nothing, but sometimes a small prize, and occasionally an enormous jackpot.”

Apparently this behavior of constant searching taps into a primal food-hunting drive and the reward we feel when the sought-after food is actually found—it’s matter of survival.

But even more interesting is the discovery that sharing information about ourselves as commonly done on Facebook and on blogs can be even more pleasurable.  It can, in fact, give the neurochemical equivalent of an orgasm, according to an article on the Web site for the Today show “Oversharing on Facebook as Satisfying as Sex?”.

So beyond the reward of the hunt, it seems, is the deeper pleasure of sharing what we have (our catch, ourselves) with others.

In that case, blogging may be a new form of “breaking bread.”

We’ve all experienced the pleasure sharing a meal we’ve created with people we care about, and we know how this stimulates conversations in which we share our thoughts and stories.

In a sense, when we blog, we’re inviting others to our “table,” and sharing the best of what we have to offer that day—our thoughts, insights, images, poetry, memories.  We’re feeding each other and inviting responses.  And, while things we find on other sites may create those deep resonating connections we call “micro-moments of love,” the deepest pleasure comes from our own offerings: sharing ourselves with others. Giving more than receiving.

It all makes sense. Blogging, after all, is about creating community.  Creating bonds of interest, of mutual satisfaction, mutual admiration.

It’s all about connecting.  Hooking up. Taking risks. Being vulnerable and open.

Blogging may not be “orgasmic,” but if you think about it, it’s pretty darn sexy.

This was originally posted in 2013.

Virtual Love-Making, Why We Blog

Tags

Blogging, Deborah J. Brasket, Entertainment, inspiration, Louis Armstrong, Love, Love-making, Science, writing

Often when I leave comments on a blog posts that moved me, I write “I love this post” or “I love the way you do [this]” or “I love that quotation.” Lately I’ve been wondering if I’m overusing the word “love”.

Am I really feeling this strong emotional attachment, or am I just being lazy, unwilling to take the time to precisely articulate what strikes me about a particular piece?

After reading an article in The Atlantic on the science behind love, I’m inclined to believe that, more often than not, I use the word “love” because that’s what I’m actually feeling– a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.”   That’s how Barbara Fredrickson defines love in her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do.

In The Atlantic article “There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science), author Emily Esfahani Smith writes:

Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in “It’s a Wonderful World” when he sang, “I see friends shaking hands, sayin ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.”

So when I say I “love” Louis Armstrong’s song, now I know why—because I feel such a strong positive connection to what he’s saying, as well as with how he says it, and the music he says it with, that I experience a triple love-whammy!

What I feel when reading things by fellow bloggers, or see the images they’ve created, is similar—a deeply-felt resonating connection, often on several levels.

In “Tao and Creativity” Chang Chung-yuan describes this connection between poet and reader as a “spiritual rhythm.”  It is the means by which the reader participates in the inner experience of the poet. He writes:

In other words, the reader is carried into the rhythmic flux and is brought to the depth of original indeterminacy from which the poetic pattern emerges.  The reader is directly confronted with the objective reality which the poet originally faced. The subjectivity of the reader and the objective reality of the poem interfuse . . . .

This is very interesting because Fredrickson discovers a similar phenomenon when she compares the brainwaves of a storyteller and listeners. Smith describes this in her article:

 What they found was remarkable. In some cases, the brain patterns of the listener mirrored those of the storyteller after a short time gap. The listener needed time to process the story after all. In other cases, the brain activity was almost perfectly synchronized; there was no time lag at all between the speaker and the listener. But in some rare cases, if the listener was particularly tuned in to the story—if he was hanging on to every word of the story and really got it—his brain activity actually anticipated the story-teller’s in some cortical areas.

“The mutual understanding and shared emotions, especially in that third category of listener, generated a micro-moment of love, which ‘is a single act, performed by two brains,’” as Fredrickson writes in her book.

Fredrickson also discovered that the capacity to experience these daily love connections in our lives can be increased through simple loving-kindness meditations, where, as Smith describes, “you sit in silence for a period of time and cultivate feelings of tenderness, warmth, and compassion for another person by repeating a series of phrases to yourself wishing them love, peace, strength, and general well-being.”

“Fredrickson likes to call love a nutrient,” Smith writes.  “If you are getting enough of the nutrient, then the health benefits of love can dramatically alter your biochemistry in ways that perpetuate more micro-moments of love in your life, and which ultimately contribute to your health, well-being, and longevity.”

So remember, fellow readers, as you go meandering from one blog site to another like busy little bees, making those “micro-moment” connections with people whose work you admire, that you are engaged in a kind of virtual love-making.  You are distributing a pollen-like “nutrient” that nurtures others, as well as yourself.

As Louis says, “what a wonderful world” we live in!

This essay was first posted in a slightly altered version in 2013.

Wrapping Up 2017, Embracing New & Old Loves

Tags

art, Blogging, creative arts, creativity, Deborah J. Brasket, music, painting, passion, writing

Discovering New Loves – Painting

2017 was the year I revealed my newly discovered passion for painting, and dared to share my work on these pages. So I thought it fitting to end the year with an unfinished painting of a passionate embrace, inspired, no less, by the works of Emil Nolde, Edvard Munch, and Marc Chagal, as follows:

Nearly half my posts in 2017 were art related, whether of my own work, or the work of favorite artists, or just about the craft and love of painting. One favorite, my own and others, was a rhapsody on Naming a Painting, “Like Two Lovers in Conversation.”

Several posts paired art with music, starting with Friday Pairings – Butterflies & Vivaldi and including Almost Blue, Jazz & Art, which, along with Artists & Writers in Their Studios, were two art-related posts that made the Top-Ten chart in my blog sidebar, a list that traditionally does not move much.

Renewing Old Loves – Playing Music

But 2017 was also a year for reuniting with old loves, a passion of my youth, playing piano. I treated myself to a baby grand, something I never dreamed I would own, and began relearning to play. Old favorites like Beethoven’s For Eloise and Moonlight Sonata were flowing from my fingertips once again.

In pursuit of my music I discovered, amazingly, two master pianists that you would’ve thought I’d already known: Bill Evans (jazz) and Martha Argerich (classical). I wrote about them and shared their music in Playing Piano, a Full-Body Workout for the Brain and Perfect Pairings, Evans’s “Peace Piece” & Sapiro’s Skies.

In a way, 2017 was the year for making time and space in my life and my home for all my loves, old and new, which I also wrote about. But it wasn’t, isn’t, easy.

Returning to My First Love – Writing

As new loves (painting), and renewed ones (playing piano), took center stage in my life, there seemed little time for my first love, writing, apart from blogging. And so I made a concerted effort to increase my blogging output.

When I started blogging, I averaged one post every 7 to 10 days. But in 2015 and 2016, when my life changed in a dramatic way, my blogging fell off, and once or twice a month became the norm.

This year I made a concerted effort to pick up the pace. Inspired by my 5-year blogging anniversary in July, my posts nearly doubled over the next few months, with 8 posts in August, a new high.

After that flurry, I’m back to about once a week now, and this feels like a good, satisfying and sustainable, pace.

But as much as love blogging, and I DO think of it as “real” writing, I miss creative writing. The novels that have been pushed aside, that wait patiently for my return, still call to me, as I wrote about early this year in Which Would You Choose, My Art or My Novel? Clearly, art won that contest in 2017. But I promised myself that I would return to my novels in 2018. It’s a promise I mean to keep.

Part of that return will be wrapped up in my blog posts. I find writing about writing inspiring. It gets my creative juices flowing.  When I’m thinking out loud on paper about my characters, my themes, their dreams, what drives them, I discover that they are also my dreams, my themes, what drives me essentially, as a writer, an artist, a blogger. Even the music I love and love to play comes from the same place that feeds my soul and fires my passion to create.

In a way, it’s all about exploring our passions, the things that set our souls on fire, and sharing those loves with others. Because love is not love if it does not spill out over onto everything we touch, and touches all who come within its reach.

Wishing you all a happy and passionate embrace of the coming New Year.

Touching & Being Touched, Why We Blog

Tags

art, Blogging, blogs, Creative Nonfiction, creativity, humanity, inspiration, life, sharing, touching, writing

 

“The function of language is not to inform but to evoke . . . responses.”  So writes Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher and linguist.

But perhaps the same could be said of art, or music, or dance. Any creative endeavor. Certainly it’s true of blogging. We create what we do with the explicit purpose of evoking responses from some largely unknown Other. It a very human thing. The desire to touch and to be touched. To share what we love, what evokes responses in us, with the hope of evoking similar responses from them.

I wrote about this some time ago in Blogging and the Accident of Touching.  But I wanted to revisit it, to reassess why I put so much time into blogging. What is its value, to me, to others? Why do I persist?

What I love about blogging is being able to share the things that are meaningful to me with others–art, music, poetry, literature, nature. But also discovering from others new art, new music, new ways of looking at and being in the world. That reciprocity. That sense of connection. What do they love that I may love too? How will it deepen and broaden and enrich my own experience of life? Every day is a new discovery, a new love, a new insight into what it means to be.

In that original post I likened blogging to “those conversations we have in the wee hours of the morning . . . ”

“. . . when the party is over and all have left except for those few lingering souls who find themselves opening up to each other in ways they could never do when meeting on the street or over dinner. Those 3 AM conversations, you know.

That’s how blogging often is done too, late at night when we can’t sleep, or after we’ve put our novel to bed, or when we wake early and are seeking the company of other early risers, or those living half-way round the world from us.

We can share our thoughts and evoke responses in our own time, and others can respond in the same way, with a quick “like” or a longer comment. And we can respond in return.

It’s a way of reaching out to others that for some feels more comfortable than the spoken word. I feel I may be getting “the best” of them in those wee hour revelations, as they are getting the best I have to offer, a side of myself I seldom share apart from the written page.

There’s another part to all this, why we write, why we blog, which a woman who would not be forgotten wrote about a thousand years ago:

“Again and again something in one’s own life, or in the life around one, will seem so important that one cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, the writer feels, when people do not know about this.” —Shikibu Murasaki, Tale of Genji (978 – 1014 AD)

Touching and being touched, yes. That’s part of why we blog. But also passing along to a larger world something of ourselves that seems too vital to pass into oblivion. In some small way, perhaps, this blogging about our lives, our loves, our insights, our art, is a way of passing on through the minds of others a part of our larger self. Letting it echo out there in the universe for a wider while.

 

5 Years Blogging from the Edge of the Wild

Tags

Blogging, Deborah J. Brasket, Ghost Stories, human consciousness, life, memoir, mystery, personal, Philosophy, writing

I began this blog five years ago, in July 2012. It’s been a wild ride, and I’ve loved every minute of it. My first post earned me one “like” and no comments, and now I have over 9000 followers, mostly due to being “Freshly Pressed” three times.

Still, it’s humbling.

When you start blogging it’s like tapping out a weak signal into a vast universe wondering if there’s anyone out there listening who will pick up and respond.

You feel small and alone at first, but powerful too, like that first explorer setting out into the wilderness, not knowing what you will find there, if anything at all.

And then you get your first ping back, a response. That’s all it takes.  You’re not alone after all. Someone is listening, someone like you, and community of like-minded adventurers is formed. Your little spacecraft has a purpose, and a grounding (a following), as you zip through cyberspace exploring what’s out there.

The purpose of this blog, as I wrote about in my first post , has not changed much, although the emphasis has shifted over time.

“I created this blog to explore what it means to be living on the edge of the wild.

 

We all are, in some way, living on the edge of the wild, either literally or figuratively, whether we know it or not.  We all are standing at the edge of some great unknown, exploring what it means to be human in a more-than-human universe.

We encounter the “wild” not only in the natural world, but in ourselves and our daily lives, if only in our own strange dreams, our own unruly minds and rebellious bodies, our own inscrutable families and weird and wonderful pets.

We encounter the “wild” at the edges of science, the arts, and human consciousness.”

I started out with a series of “Sea Sagas” about when we went sailing around the world, most posts on the why and how of it, not getting very far in our journey, and I’d like to get back to that again.

The wildest, bravest, and most romantic thing I’ve ever done was to fully embrace my boyfriend’s dream of sailing around the world and make it my own.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s why I married him.

I also wrote a lot about the art and craft of writing, and my own writing experience. The two-part series about writing with Annie Dillard is one of my and my followers’ favorites.

When I look at the things I write about, that I’m drawn to write about, that seize me, here’s what I see, what I’m drawn to explore:

The gap between appearance and reality; between what’s real and what’s not, and how we can ever truly know for sure. If it’s possible at all.

The dark and the light, good and evil, beauty and brutality, the foolish and profound: how they play together, how they are all wound up in each other, how it’s almost impossible to tear them apart, as least in our ordinary, daily experiences. They lay side by side, or one on top of the other; they copulate over and over, and we, this life itself, is what they give birth to.

Some of my most “viewed” posts explore those darker edges of human consciousness. Hardly a day goes by where the following post does not get several views:

A Deer’s Scream – Beauty and Brutality at Home and in the Hills of Vietnam

The most horrifying sound I’ve ever heard came one night soon after we moved here.  A scream of pure terror that seemed to last forever.

Although I wrote it five years ago in October 2012, it got 106 views last month and 93 the month before, even though it was never freshly pressed. It was one of the hardest posts to write and one of my favorites because of that, I suppose. It spawned a similarly hard post The Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry,

Perhaps at the very end, when there finally is no escape from death, like that deer, like my mother, and that awful inevitable conclusion chasing us down grabs hold, something unimaginable happens.  Some unseen hand plucks us like a ripe strawberry from the jaws of death and swallows us whole, savoring all the sweetness of our brief lives, and reaffirming with a sigh, “Oh, so delicious!”

A prose poem followed, based on my experiences caring for my mother when she was dying: 13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After.

IV
“Come here. I want you to sit on my lap.”
“No, Mama. I’m too heavy. I’ll hurt you.”
“Come, I want to hold you, like I used to.” She pats her lap.

Her hands are all bone now, her nails long and yellow. Her pajama bottoms are so loose there’s almost no leg to sit on. I balance on the edge of the recliner and she pulls my head down to her chest.

“There now,” she says, “there now.”

I feel like I’m lying on glass. Like any second I’ll break through. Like the long sharp shards of her body holding me up are giving way, and I’m being torn to pieces in her arms.

Another popular series of posts began with True Ghost Stories, Part One, Growing up in a Haunted House. One of the most popular in that series was about A Demon Sitting on My Chest. The series ends with me questioning whether all I experienced was “really” real, and evoking the voice of one of my favorite GOT characters.

So are the ghosts, demons, and other supernatural beings that have haunted humans through the centuries, that make brief appearances and then disappear, “real”? I do not know, and I’m not sure if it even matters. They are real enough to those that experience them, as least while they are experiencing them, and then afterwards, one wonders.

Each of us makes but brief ghostly appearances in this world we call real. We apparently spring from nearly nothing–a few multiplying cells, and then disappear into nothing as our bodies disintegrate after a short visitation that can last a few days or a few decades. Are we “real”?

“You know nothing, Jon Snow!” So claims the wilding Ygritte in the Game of Thrones series, a saying that has become a popular catchphrase for fans. And rightly so, I believe. It has the ring of truth about it.

Author George R. R. Martin created a soft-edged, constantly evolving world that surprises and delights and dismays us at every turn. And if we become too comfortable in believing we know who the good guys and bad guys are, or who has power and who is powerless, what is real and what is not real, we are sure to have it turn topsy-turvy in no time at all.

It is a world that feels very much like our own, psychologically, emotionally, if we would only admit it.  Perhaps we are all Jon Snows, grasping to know for certain, what can only be known tentatively at best. And this is true when considering the limits of our own private, personal lives, as it is when considering the Big Questions about Life and Death and Reality.

So when people ask me now if I believe all this stuff I’ve written about in this series of ghost stories, I can hear Ygritte’s mocking voice challenge me:  “You know nothing, Jon Snow!”  And I wisely keep mum.

But lately my posts have been more about exploring the world of art, and my adventures playing with watercolor, than about writing or exploring the darker corners of consciousness.

I don’t know where this little blog-craft will take me next, and that’s the fun of it, that not-knowing: The mystery that lies beyond the edge of the wild and beckons us onward.

Thank you for taking this ride with me, for reading and responding, and for allowing me to be part of your lives as I follow you on your adventures.

Grandparenting, Dark and Light

Tags

children, Family, grandparenting, grandparents, memoir, Parenting

I’m writing for the first time in months—my granddaughter started preschool today. She’ll be going twice a week now. I miss her already.

I haven’t had time for writing or anything else since she and her dad came to live with us five months ago. Caring for her has stirred up my world in all sorts of ways, and nothing has really settled yet. The past, the present, the future swirl around in my mind, some bright and sweet, some dark and scary.

I love her beyond words and we are very close, maybe too close.  What will happen when she and my son move out? Last week he took her unexpectedly for the day and my home seemed so empty and I felt so lost. I didn’t want to do anything—not write, nor read, nor clean, nor paint, nor walk, nor just sit and think, alone, undisturbed—all the things I wish I had time to do when she’s with me. I couldn’t wait till she came home so I could scoop her up and feel her small, sweet body melt into mine.

We spend our days playing and singing and dancing together. It’s filled with sweet cuddles and kisses, silly games puffing our cheeks and popping them together, playing with puzzles and legos and coloring and reading stories. We swim and pick roses and watch Disney movies together. Making up stories and pretending to be kittens and crocodiles. She loves to play hide and seek, where she hides in plain sight and I pretend I can’t find her while she laughs and giggles, and when I do find her, she demands—AGAIN!—and hides in the same place once more.

But by the afternoon, I’m tired. I’m wishing for a few moments alone. I’m wishing she could play by herself for longer than five minutes at a time, stopping her play to look for me, to demand to be held, to read a story, to come back into the room where she’s playing.

I try to get her to nap, but too often it’s late in the afternoon when she does, at 3 or 4 or 5, when I know doing so that late means she won’t want to go to sleep before 9 or 10. More often she doesn’t nap at all.

“Grandma needs quiet time I tell her,” time away from her is what I mean, but she doesn’t understand that, doesn’t understand that demanding my constant attention frazzles me as the day wears on. Even sitting her in front of the TV to watch cartoons (bad grandma!) doesn’t help as much as you’d think—every commercial she looks for me, and it’s the same with movies. “Come watch with me, Gwamma,” she says in her sweet, tender voice, pulling at my arm.  My heartstrings tug, and my nerves tighten.

And then there’s the tug-of-wills, where she tests my boundaries, doesn’t listen when I tell her to leave something alone, to not go in there, not do that. I haunt parenting advise forums on the internet looking for ways to discipline, to cope, to mellow.

What did I do when my children were young?

I don’t remember my daughter ever wearing on my nerves with the demand for constant attention, or defying my will the way my granddaughter does now. My son defied my will on a daily basis, but he wasn’t as demanding of my attention as she seems to be. Still, we had our tug-of-wars too. I remember one dark day when I needed him to take a nap so badly and he simply refused to stay in his room.  He’d come out, I’d put him in, he’d come out, I’d put him in, over and over again, like puppets in demented play, him crying and me yelling at first, then me crying and him yelling. I thought I was losing my mind. We were stuck in a hysterical repetition, like a broken record that would not stop. I don’t remember how it ended.

I do remember that I let him play in our fenced backyard by himself for long periods of time when he was a toddler, where he had a swing set, and sand box, and lots of toys. Something I can’t do with my granddaughter where we live now. Even so, he “escaped” several times, wandering off down the street—three years old—to visit grandma five blocks away, or to visit the little green store across a busy street.

Once a police officer brought him home to me. I hadn’t even known he’d gone missing.

I was a bad mother. If that had happened today, I would have been arrested. But things looked different back then. Children were encouraged to spend the day outdoors playing, to be independent. Little boys wandering off with a penny in his pocket to buy candy at the neighborhood store was “cute.” It showed his independence and adventurous spirit, not my poor parenting.

The thought of my little three-year-old granddaughter doing something like that today horrifies me. The thought of her living alone with her father on a busy street with chance of unlocked doors giving her access to the great outdoors makes me want to keep her here at home with me forever.

And yet, and yet, the other day my nerves were so frazzled I wanted to lock myself in a closet just to have a few moments alone without her, without hearing that sweet, tender voice calling out, “Gwamma, where are you?” And I wondered: Is this what drives some parents to lock their children in closets? The thought was so mind-chilling I wanted to sit down and cry.

Instead, I gathered my granddaughter in my arms and let her melt against me.

“I didn’t know where you were,” she tells me frowning, holding my face between her small hands.

“Don’t leave me,” she says, as she does several times every day.

“I won’t, baby,” I tell her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

But I will leave her. Or rather, she will leave me eventually, when her father finds a place for them to live that’s closer to town, closer to his work. Will she think I abandoned her, betrayed her?

Part of me longs for the peaceful life we had before they moved in. And part of me is terrified at the thought of them leaving.

Treasure what you have now, I tell myself. Don’t think about the past or the future. Now is where we are. Where my arms and heart are full. And while my poor nerves may get frazzled at times for want of the peace and quiet I sometimes crave, it cannot eclipse the wonder and joy of this child and how she fills my heart with light.

Blogging A Trail of Bread Crumbs – 2014 Recap

Tags

2014 review, Blog, Blogging, favorite blog posts, freshly pressed, poetry, Recap, writing

Blog posts are like a trail of bread crumbs leading you back through a misty past. They tell you where you were, not where you’re going. I can’t say I’m unhappy to leave 2014 behind. And if a few of those bread crumbs get gobbled up by birds, so much the better.

Still, it’s instructive, looking back before you plow forward. Here are a few trends, challenges, and highlights from my last year of blogging.

Is Less More, or Just Less?

I wrote fewer posts on this blog in 2014 than in previous years. But I’ve always been a slow blogger. Even at the beginning in 2012 I was posting only twice a week. Eventually it turned into once a week, then every ten days of so. I’ve gone as long as two weeks between posts now. I seem to be racing toward some decline. But it worries me. I don’t want to stop blogging. I don’t want to lose you, the readers who have come to mean so much to me. I love blogging. I want less to be more. Is that possible?

Into the Pit and Out Again

One reason I’ve blogged less is because I’ve been challenged more–both personally and professionally. Early last year, I thought I lost my son to addiction for good. I’d given up hope. In desperation, I created a new, anonymous blog, just to vent all the rage and grief and craziness I was feeling. And it helped. It brought me back from the brink, and him as well. Now he has 8 months of recovery behind him and still going stronger than ever. Still, we take it one day at a time. There’s no other way.

Professionally, I was thrown down into the pit as well. I finished the last draft of my novel in December 2013.  2014 was supposed to be the year I sent this darling out to agents and publishers. I put it aside for a few weeks so I could re-read it fresh. That’s when it all came crashing down. I hated my novel!

I was devastated. After so many years of tender loving care, this baby too was lost to me. In a frantic, I reached out to a few writer friends and researched the web, searching for a life-line, hoping this was a normal reaction. Did all writers end up hating their novels? It turns out, most don’t, but some do. It’s not uncommon. I found a new beta reader and, working with her strong encouragement and deep insight, went through the draft one more time. (Thank you, Kerri!). Now I’m back on track again. I’ve finished what I hope will be my final draft, and set it aside for another read. I’m keeping my fingers crossed I won’t hate it this time.

I had one more personal crisis in 2014, but I’m saving that for another blog post. All this did slow me down and drain away some of the energy and inspiration for keeping this blog going. In retrospect, I’m surprised I wrote as much as I did. Maybe I’m more resilient than I thought.

Now for the 2014 highlights:

Most Viewed Posts: A Blast From the Past

According to my WordPress Annual Report, my most viewed posts in 2014 were written in 2013. Hmmm. What does that mean? Well, I could take it sunny-side up: My writing has staying power, or so WordPress euphemistically suggests.  Or it could mean my best blogging is behind me. Well, time will tell. Here’s my two most viewed posts:

• Blogging and “The Accident of Touching” (Freshly Pressed in 2013)
• Growing Up in a Haunted House (part of a series of blog posts I wrote in 2013 and re-blogged last Halloween)

Binge Blogging

Series are all the rage now, both in television viewing and reading. We love characters who linger, whose stories become our stories, who return to us day after day, week after week. Even season after season and book after book. We boast of our binges: mine was Downton Abbey last week. I re-watched all of Season 4 during the afternoon, then watched the premier of Season 5 that evening. I went to bed fully sated.

Binge blogging, sadly, is not quite the same. It’s done less for the pleasure of readers and more to accommodate long-winded writers. Like me. I take more pleasure in my series than my readers do. It’s a guilty indulgence.

The first one was a 4-part literary deconstruction, tying together the themes found in the writings of Milton, Wordsworth, and Lacan. (I know, ouch!) The first and last posts in the series are listed below.

• “Some Tragic Falling Off” into Difference and Desire
• “Thou Art That” – Part IV, “Some Tragic Falling Off”

The next 2-part series on Annie Dillard’s writing and my own was much more popular:

• Dialogue with Annie Dillard on “The Writing Life”
• More on “The Writing Life” with Annie Dillard

Hu-More, Not Less

Three personal favorite, which readers also seemed to enjoy, were attempts to lighten an otherwise overly heavy and oh-so-serious blog load. Not to mention, help me lift my head out of those pits I mentioned earlier, if for just a moment. It was quite refreshing. Maybe I need to hu-more in the future.

• Humor, It’s Serious Stuff
• Selling My Babies. Where’s the Joy?
• Dreaming of Death—Oops, Bears

Freshly Pressed (Again!)

I’ve been freshly pressed three times now. Each time is a surprise and delight. Gifts that come from out of the blue. The last time was in June 2014. This one’s about marriage: drifting apart, pulling together, and finding that magic balance.

• On Herds, Husbands & Riffing on Writing

My First Guest Post!

I was also honored, and delighted, to be invited to write a guest post on poetry for the lovely Luanne’s blog, Writer Site. I posted it on my site as well.

• A Cranky Reader: What I Crave When I Read Poetry

Your Favorites and Mine

Surprisingly, and happily, some of my readers’ favorite posts were mine as well, and several featured my poetry. I can’t tell you how gratifying that is. I haven’t written much poetry in my life, but all of it is deeply personal. I think sometimes that to truly know me, who I am at heart, you would have to read my poetry. And you have. Without blogging–without my poetry being read–large, intimate parts of me would remain relatively unknown.

Three of your favorite posts featuring my poetry:

• “Taste and see – I am spare”
• The Slant of Afternoon, Playing with Light
• Song from a Dream – “My Queen’s Soul Lies Naked”

Two of my favorite posts featuring poetry from my favorite poet, Wallace Stevens:

• Cultivating “a mind of winter”
• Downward into Darkness on Extended Wings

Two of your non-poetry favorites this year was a photo-essay on fallen oak trees, and a list and lament about all the books I’ve abandoned this past year.

• My Roman Oaks
• Books I’ve Abandoned

Hugs and Kisses

Thank you for bearing with me through this long post, and through this last challenging year of infrequent posts–those bread crumbs scattered along a dark trail with its few gleams of light, and rare laughter.

Your comments and encouragements have meant the world to me, and made all the difference. May you all have a truly marvelous 2015.

Writing on Writing – A Writing Process Blog Hop

Tags

Blogging, writing, writing process, writing process blog hop, writing process blog tour

Writers love to write about writing. It’s not surprising. It’s our passion.

So when I was invited to participate in a blog-hopping writing process tour, I jumped at the chance to talk about one of the great loves of my life—writing.

The first to invite me was the lovely Rebecca Koonst, a new blogger at Mom’s So-Called Life. She writes about the pleasures and struggles of being a mom, a woman, and a wife, in a light-hearted, heartfelt way.

Author Kelly Hand also tagged me. Or maybe I tagged her. Let’s just say we got caught up in a game of tag, and we’re featuring each other in our Writing Tour posts. She wrote the Au Pair Report, a novel I loved about childcare and politics in Washington DC.

In turn, I’ve invited three other blogger-writers that I admire to join the tour on June 23: a novelist from Australia, a poet from Canada, and a fellow blogger who writes about the creative process. I hope you will hop over to their blogs next Monday. There’s more about them and links to their blogs below.

So, first question, what am I working on?

Well, it’s a bit of a jumble. I have four writing projects in various stages of completion.

From the Far Ends of the Earth, a novel: I’m in the final stages of editing this, which has gone through several sets of beta readers. It’s about what happens when the mother who has been holding together a hopelessly dysfunctional family mysteriously disappears. It’s told through the perspectives of the three family members left behind—a cranky graduate student, a heroin addict, and their emotionally distant father. How they cope with the mother’s disappearance, learn to reconnect with each other, and forge new relationships in her absence, create the heart of this novel. I wrote more about this book in a blog post celebrating the completion of my first draft, and also in the post When Things Go Missing, which includes a link to a short story based upon one of the chapters.

A Play of Dark and Light: a short story collection. I’m also working on a collection of short stories, many that I wrote long ago—getting them dusted and polished and out to literary journals. Four have been published so far. You can read more about them, with links to the stories here:
13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before and the Moment After; Us, Ancient; When Things Go Missing, and Looking for Bobby.

The Adventures of La Gitana, a series for middle graders. I have the first book completed in what I envision as a series for middle-graders about a family that sails around the world, based loosely on our own family’s experience. I’ve put this on hold until I get the literary novel out to agents. You can read more about this adventure series on my writing website at www.djbrasket.com

Living on the Edge of the Wild, my blog. When I began blogging, I saw this as something I needed to do to be a serious writer, as a means toward an end. Now it’s become an end in itself, as important to me as the other writing. It’s a way to explore ideas and share them with others. It’s part memoir, part reverie, part reflection, and partly a way to share my love of art and literature with others, as well as things I’ve written and am writing (like today’s post!).

How does my work differ from others in its genres?

If From the Far Ends of the Earth differs from other literary novels, it may be in that one of the main characters, the mother at the center of the story, is absent. Apart from the prologue, which is written from her perspective, the reader only comes to know her through the eyes of the people she leaves behind. And through the photographs she mails her son, and the messages she leaves on her daughter’s answering machine. Otherwise, she remains an enigma, as I believe we all remain in the end to a large extent. This is one of the main themes of the book, how we see each other subjectively, filtered through our own desires and fears, memories and misconceptions. While the “truth” about each other remains largely a mystery.

My short stories may be unique in how they explore psychological states of mind. While they have plots—things happen–what’s of interest to me, and I hope the reader, is what’s going on inside their heads and hearts, what makes them tick, or not tick. There are some elements of magical realism:

Fine and Shimmering tells the story of a young woman in a bad marriage who feels she’s not quite real, but lightly tethered to earth by a fine and shimmering cord.
In Tamara in Her Garden, the daughter of a Jeffry Dahmer-type mass murderer recognizes traits of her father in herself and retreats from her lover and analyst to her garden which becomes a metaphor for the beauty and brutality she sees rolled up together in the world and others.
The Man in the Attic is about a woman who has become so hyper self-conscious she believes she is being constantly watched by a romantic admirer who eventually takes up residence in her attic.
On the lighter side is Joshua’s Tea Cup, the story of a young autistic man who sees galaxies floating among his tea leaves.
And Petite Marmite is love story about an habitual liar and his gullible wife with an O’Henry style ending.

These are just a few of the stories in my collection so far.

The middle-grade series may be unique in that I’ve yet to encounter a book written for that age group about children growing up while sailing around the world.

I’m not sure if my blog is unique. My readers will have to answer that question.

Why do I write what I do?

As I’ve written here about my blog, I like exploring the edges of things, the borderlands between states of consciousness, and states of reality—the social and psychological, the human and more-than-human, the physical and spiritual, the known and unknown, the world we know outside ourselves and within our own minds–and how they overlap and re-create each other. I see the creative arts as existing on that fringe, the thing that helps us negotiate the borderlands and translate one to the other. Writing is my point of entry.

All this is true for my novel and short stories and blog. But for the sailing adventure, I’m writing that to preserve for myself and my family, what it was like to live at sea, and to share that adventure and my love of the wild with others, especially children.

I could say much more on the topic of why I write, and have. But I will spare you here and refer you to the following posts if you want to know more about why I write and how: Writing, A Leap of Faith; Wabi Sabi Writing.

How does my writing process work?

A lot of my writing springs from my reading. Stories and poems and other blog posts trigger a new line of thought, and off I go off in that direction, allowing it to take me where it will. I think of it as “riffing” on other’s works, as jazz musicians will do when they jam together. The same happens when I engage with nature, go for walks or hikes, or merely sit on the patio taking in all the sights and sounds around me. Thoughts and images will spring to mind, and I’ll grab a notebook and start writing.

I usually start writing in the morning, sometimes in long hand while sitting in bed with my coffee. Then I’ll go to my office and type what I’ve been writing into a word document, revising as I go. Most of my revising is done on the computer. But I’ve printed out my novel to revise as I read it, as well.

I keep a writing log, setting weekly goals, and tracking my hours. This has helped a lot, because I can get pretty scattered and off-track otherwise.

Who’s Up Next?

Don’t miss the next installments of the Writing Process Tour on June 23. The following bloggers will be sharing their writing process.

Author Nikki Tulk, Shadow, Wings & Other Things – Niki loves” to write, dream, read, learn and make art in many different media from theatre and music, to making up her family’s next weekend breakfast menu.” She is also the author of the lovely and lyrical book Shadows and Wings, which I highly recommend.

Poet, Jeremy Nathan Marks, The Sand County – Jeremy’s blog is “an exploration of the natural world, our relationship with it and the necessities that govern life on Earth. Here you will find a little bit of everything that brings us to that interface of human dreams, desire, repose and the wisdom, austerity and sublime power that the natural world offers.” Jeremy also writes some amazing poetry that he shares on his blog.

Writer, Kim Hass, The Art of Practice, The Practice of Art – Kim blogs about “Creating Mindful, Joyful, Compassionate Moments of Being.” She writes about the creative process and “what makes a Writer with a capital W–no credentials needed.” I love that!

“I See You But Do You See Me?” – Artist Marc Clamage, Bearing Witness

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art, bearing witness, beggers, Bernie Glassman, Blog, Homeless, I Paint What I See, living on the street, Marc Clamage, painting, panhandlers

“I see you but do you see me?” Maxine by Marc Clamage

Since my last post, I discovered another artist who refuses to turn away. He bears witness one face at a time by painting panhandlers he sees in Boston Harvard Square near his workplace.

“I used to hurry by them,” writes artist Marc Clamage, “but then I began to stop. Each face tells a story, I realized, and I would try to capture as many as I could through a series of oil paintings.”

Rosie and David with pet guinea pig, by Marc Clamage

He’d noticed there were more than usual that year, and that they seemed “younger, and more troubled.” Sometimes even whole families begging on the streets.

Many of the people he encountered were simply passing through, on their way to a new job or to visit family. Some panhandled to supplement a low-wage job, or help pay the rent.

Others were homeless. Panhandling was their only source of income. A few of these were mentally disturbed, or drug addicts. Some were sick and dying.

 Marc writes: “I do not ask the panhandlers to ‘pose’ for me, but to carry on with their business. I pay each person $10, though I wish I could afford more, because they earn that small fee in the hour or two it takes me to paint them.

“Newly Engaged, Need Motel to Celebrate” Justin and Lauren (The Lovebirds) by Marc Clamage

Over that time, we often get to talking, which has been a privilege and an education.

I’ve seen or heard many human dramas: the tragic love story of Gary and Whitney; squabbles over the best places to work; the mysterious figure everyone calls “The Rabbi,” stuffing $20 bills into cups and disappearing before anyone can see his face.

“I’ve witnessed a few instances of cruelty, but many more of thoughtfulness and generosity. And when I head home, I’m always struck by one thought: There but for the grace of God go the rest of us. Perhaps that’s why we find panhandlers so hard to look at.”

I was deeply touched by Marc’s paintings and by the stories of the people who posed for him. You can view more of his paintings and read the stories on his website “I Paint What I See“, or at his blog.

Gary, Desert Storm Vet, by Marc Clamage

I also like what he says about how he paints:

“I paint what I see, only what I see, only with it right in front of me, only while I’m looking right at it. I do not work from photographs, or imagination, or memory, or even from sketches. I paint exclusively from life. The essence of representation is that every choice, every brushstroke must be made in direct response to the experience of visual reality.”

To really “see” someone, the way an artist does, objectively, without judgement, and yet responding to what is seen, the pain, or loneliness, or confusion, or anger; to see and be seen like that, must be freeing, for both the painter, the one painted. And for the viewer as well.

To simply behold what we see–the good and bad and beautiful and ugly–without judgement, but with compassion and humility, is the essence of “bearing witness.” And it must have a healing effect.

Bernie Glassman in “Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace” wrote:

“In my view, we can’t heal ourselves or other people unless we bear witness. In the Zen Peacemaker Order we stress bearing witness to the wholeness of life, to every aspect of the situation that arises. So bearing witness to someone’s kidnapping, assaulting, and killing a child means being every element of the situation: being the young girl, with her fear, terror, hunger, and pain; being the girl’s mother, with her endless nights of grief and guilt; being the mother of the man who killed, torn between love for her son and the horror of his actions; being the families of both the killed and the killer, each with its respective pain, rage, horror, and shame; being the dark, silent cell where the girl was imprisoned; being the police officers who finally, under enormous pressure, caught the man; and being the jail cell holding the convicted man. It means being each and every element of this situation.”

Whitney, cancer victim, by Marc Clamage

To bear witness in that way must be the hardest, the most healing, and the most humbling thing we could ever do. And the most needed.

Elsewhere, Glassman writes: “When we bear witness, when we become the situation — homelessness, poverty, illness, violence, death — the right action arises by itself. We don’t have to worry about what to do. We don’t have to figure out solutions ahead of time. . . . Once we listen with our entire body and mind, loving action arises.”

More of Marc’s paintings follow. See if you see what inspired him to paint these people. Sometimes we see something that cannot be “passed over” lightly, but must be “passed on” to others in whatever way we have of preserving them:  in paint or print, or images on a blog site. So I pass these on to you.

Colleen, by Marc Clamage. Died of exposure and a drug overdose.

Gideon, by Marc Clamage

“Too ugly to prostitute, too kind to pimp.” Anthony by Marc Clamage

Maria by Marc Clamage

Laurel by Marc Clamage. Her sign says she’s a mother of 4 and victim of domestic violence. On the flip side it says “I’m not a whore, asshole.”

Carrie by Marc Clamage. Now clean and sober and off the streets.

[This post originally appeared on another blog in a slightly different form]