“Writings from Wild Soul”

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Blogging, blogs, books, Creative Nonfiction, Nature, nature writing, poetry, Wendy Sarno, Writings from Wild Soul

The first blogger I ever followed and the first to follow me back was Wendy Sarno.  What drew me at first was the name of her blog “Writings from Wild Soul” since the word “wild” is also featured in my blog.

But what made me follow her and keep on reading her all these years was the deep, soulful, way she writes about her encounters with nature, which are always rich with detail.  When I read her posts I am swept away to a green, lush, world that humbles and excites me, and I always learn something new. A new way of seeing, a new way of being. I come away feeling blessed.

She calls herself wrensong, and says:

I am a poet who collects stones. I am a wanderer of creek beds and forests, canyons and high desert who, coming home, sometimes finds words to tell the story. I am a companion with others in the search for Deep, Wild Soul. I shape containers in time and space for others to come together to write, to tell their stories, to hold each other in the telling. I am a grandmother and the companion of a cat named Alaya. I often travel out into open country with a man who calls himself Dunewalker who has hung his hammock in my heart.

She has now collected her storied essays and poems in the book “Writings from Wild Soul.” She writes of this experience:

A friend just wrote to ask if I felt a glow of accomplishment. Well, not exactly.

Years ago I remember reading about Pueblo potters, mostly women, and how after they had made a pot and were preparing to put it in the fire they gave thanks to the clay and to the newly formed vessel saying simply with honor, “Now you are a made thing”. That’s how I feel when I hold this book. Not a glow exactly at all but a simplicity of wonder “My goodness, now you are a made thing”.

Here’s just a taste of the kinds of rich, satisfying meals she serves.

From “Into the Silence”

My husband and I just got back from the Pacific Northwest. We spent two weeks nestled under those great tall trees on Bainbridge Island and went off roaming the region. One day, out on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula, we hiked into the Hoh Rainforest over a rooted and winding trail along the Hoh River.

There the Sitka Spruce grow eight feet in diameter, two hundred feet tall and the great Western Cedar even larger. In that damp world everything grows thick with lichens and moss. The forest floor is strewn with moss covered fallen nurse trees, licorice fern, sword fern, lady fern, salmonberry and huckleberry. The huge big leaf maples cover their trunks with epiphyte mosses and drip with long beards of moss. It is a lush, moist realm of old tree life blessedly preserved from the ubiquitous clear-cut logging fields.

We went in search of silence, one square inch of it. No, really, there is one, sort of. On Earth Day in 2005 Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, dedicated this spot he had chosen in the Olympic National Park as a sanctuary to silence. He calls it One Square Inch of Silence.

I was thinking about this invitation to silence this Sunday morning in July when I looked out and was struck by the intense green of the neighbor’s tulip tree against an intensity of blue sky, the etch of brilliant green against that fierce, endless deep blue. I was struck with my instant need to put words to it, to find words to say it, this meeting. I think it was Annie Dillard who said something like “God imbues the world like color”. This I have faith in, this imbue-ing god, the one who looks out at me from your blue eyes, from the red cherries, the gold finch, the grass, the moss covered Sitka Spruce. This god who offers the god-self as beauty, intensity, tenderness, who meets me silently the way the sky meets a tulip tree, the way an ancient rainforest holds its moist, mossy self. And for a few moments I’m enthralled, held in a large, sweet order to things, belonging to this encounter between tree and sky. All the while the sunlight spilling thru in silence. All in silence.

From The Bones of Winter

I had the sense all morning on this day between winter and spring that I walked at the edge of life and death. Wandering up the luminous green of a grassy trail that snaked thru the prairie blackened from a winter burn with its charred grasses and woody stems, I saw flocks of robins browsing listening to what stirred under the flattened mat of an old season. Here and there shoots of green emerged from thick tangles of old root hinting at the tall grasses that would wave here in a summer wind. It was there I found the bone -white shell of a box turtle lying belly up on the ground. Part of the lower plate was gone and it lay there like a mouth open to the sky where season by season it collected seeds and leaves and fallen petals and rain and snow and dust. The yearly stories shed by the land into this waiting cup.

All winter I fed the small birds from bags of old seed and I was as hungry as they were for something fresh and moist and alive. When I walk I tell my story. I whisper my hungers and my hopes to the grass and the wind. I share whatever arises in my wandering mind, memories or dreams. Sometimes poems. Sometimes tears. On this Sunday, as I leaned into the rising path and the wind, I felt my good, deep breath, muscles warming, a flicker of joy at the sight of green, and a sweet pleasure in the gift of a broken turtle shell like an offering, offering its stories and offering to hold mine. And as the hours moved my slow steps along this trail or that, I began to feel the gift that wild places always offer us, an easefulness rising thru my bones out of the moist earth, something around my heart unclenched, made room for delight in a pond chorus of frogs in their spring song.

From her website Listening to Stones which features her poetry:

Rain Like Fallen Grace

I’m cutting daisies in this rain falling over the quiet morning like Sunday Grace.

I’m holding utterly still breathing the scent of water and flowers

The cups of the small roses reaching up

Every leaf trembling

 green prayers

answered.

-wrensong

The Seeing

I’m on the phone with a friend who

is gazing out her living room window when

she notices a dead branch has fallen

across a live branch in a big pine

and formed a perfect cross.

In the center of the cross is a nest

and in the nest is a dove who is feeding

her three nestlings.

We were talking about how to keep

our souls alive in these difficult

political times and suddenly in

this seeing, and in her telling me

of what she sees, and in my seeing

thru her words the branches, the tree,

the nest and the doves,

we know.

This is how.

-wrensong

This is how we know, in the seeing. This is why I read her writings: that deep seeing, that deep knowing.

I hope you feel as blessed as I do today after tasting her rich offerings to the world.

 

5 Years Blogging from the Edge of the Wild

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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.

Can You Paint a Poem?

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art, Blogging, creativity, inspiration, painting, poetry, the creative process

It’s a question a blogger friend asked one day in response to my comment that I would like to try to paint my poems.

Often my poems start with a strong visual image, and as I’m reading them I’m seeing these images flash through my mind.

When I wrote “Hot Hills in Summer Heat” I was travelling on Highway 101, looking up at the golden hills profiled against the blue sky as they cascaded down to the sea.

I watch them every summer, the hot hills

Crouched like a lion beside the road.

Something masculine and sensual about that image gripped me, and a poem was born.

I’m not sure if my poem “A Pleasing Design” was inspired by, or inspired, an abstract drawing of the male and female forms that I created long ago.

Both appeared around the same time. I don’t remember which came first.

I like the intricate pattern we create,

Stripped bare and essential,

The piling planes and lacing lines,

The way we meet and mingle.

My poem “Walking Among Flowers” was inspired by the image at the top of this post, drawn by a Zen monk from the 17th century. Something about its blunt beauty, or stark un-beauty, struck me fiercely, as if tearing open something deep within.

Walking among flowers

Drowning in scent

Petals assault me

Cool and bent

But the poem itself was written as we lay anchored in a bay in Moorea, looking up at a house on the bluff with a garden spilling over the edge. I wanted to roam that garden, to let the deep, dark beauty I imagined there tear me apart so I could be reborn. I wanted to swoop down from the high garden wall and swallow it whole.

Even now, I want to paint that garden with the rough, blunt strokes of Pa-ta Shan-jen.

A poem, after all, is just a vehicle to express something deeply felt, some emotion or insight or new way of seeing. And a painting is another way to express the very same things. Each would be distinct, it’s own unique creation. And neither would ever quite capture what you wanted to share. Both mediums are limited.

Poems inspired by paintings are common. But the other way around less so.

Recently, though, another blogger friend led me to the website of Lena Levin, an artist who does just that. She’s  created a whole series of paintings inspired by Shakespeare’s sonnets.  Her blog on the Art of Seeing is well worth reading as well.

I don’t know if I will ever paint my poems, or how successful they might be if I try. Words and images tangle in my mind, and it’s hard to sort them out. In the past the only way I could capture what I was seeing/feeling was through poetry. Now I want to see if I can use color and contours, images empty space like words, shaping them into phrases to be felt and understood.

Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to the works of the French Symbolist,  Odilon Redon, and his “Mysterious and Poetic Paintings.” Viewing them is like reading between the lines of a poem. It says more than words can tell.

I don’t know if I have the expertise at this stage of my learning curve to be able to do such a thing. But I do know I want to try.

You can read the full text of the poems mentioned in this post at the links below:

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

“A Pleasing Design” from The Geometry and Geography of Love

Walking Among Flowers

 

Celebrating Poetry: Blown Away By Matthew Dickman

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Blogging, Matthew Dickman, National Poetry Month, poetry, Zen

Matthew Dickman

In celebration of April as the National Month of Poetry, I’ve been looking back at posts on poetry that I’ve written over the years, and thought that I’d share two “firsts” with you:

• the first poet I blogged about back in September 2012, and
• the first of my own poetry that I shared in July of that year, which, coincidentally, was turned into an exquisite piece of music by a classical composer.

I’ll save that one for next time and start with Dickman under the original title.

Wild Poet, Talking Nerdy: Matthew Dickman

I stumbled across him by accident.  One thing led to another and another, the way it often happens surfing the internet. And there it was, a video of Matthew Dickman reading at the San Francisco Zen Center.

And I was blown away. Yes, I actually was. The same way Emily Dickinson said poetry affected her—as if the top of her head had been removed—“blown away” I believe is the expression we’d use today.

Now, Dickman’s poetry isn’t Zen, or even spiritual. It’s earthy, sometimes crass and crude, lightly humorous. Hip, you might say, in the way the beat poets were hip, so clued into the “street life” of their age, with such insight and understanding, that they could be said to speak for that generation.

So I think is Dickman’s poetry, though since I’m not from that generation, and don’t normally speak that language, I may be wrong.

So please listen and tell me. Am I right? Does he capture something from today’s youth that expresses its particular angst and yearning , love and loss, in a way that both elevates and exemplifies it?

I’m trying to figure out just what captivates me in listening to him read his poetry. It’s so unpretentious and unassuming:

Like a scrap of paper blown down a dirty sidewalk that takes on a beauty of its own without meaning to.

Like that paper bag being blown around and around in the film “American Beauty.” Remember? It’s like that.

In this way, it may be Zen-like, after all. In that his blunt, sometimes unbeautiful images strike you as an unexpected blow, like that “thwack” from the Master’s stick on the student’s head, that makes you wake up and “see,” but you’re not sure yet what you’re seeing, only that this quick-silver clarity is already fading, while something solid and meaty seeped unawares into your bones and shored them up.

If you’ve felt this way before, you know what I mean.

If you haven’t, don’t stress, you will.

Listen to Dickman reading his poem “Slow Dance”, or read the poem “V” I’ve posted below the video. See if it happens to you. Tell me if it does or doesn’t do what I say. I really want to know. People either love his work or hate it, I’ve heard, so either way I’m open.

If you want more, pick up his book All-American Poem.

Or go to the blog where I first found Matthew Dickman reading at The San Francisco Zen Center. It’s about 22 minutes long, but well worth the time it takes to listen to it.

Matthew Dickman reads his poem “Slow Dance” at Narrative Night 2008 in Seattle, Washington.

V

By Matthew Dickman

The skinny girl walking arm-in-arm

with her little sister

is wearing a shirt that says

TALK NERDY TO ME

and I want to,

I want to put my bag of groceries down

beside the fire hydrant

and whisper something in her ear about long division.

I want to stand behind her and run

a single finger down her spine

while she tells me about all her correlatives.

Maybe she’ll moan a little

when I tell her that x equals negative-b

plus or minus the square root

of b-squared minus 4(a)(c) all over

2a. I have my hopes.

I could show her my comic books

and Play Station. We could pull out

my old D&D cards

and sit in the basement with a candle lit.

I know enough about Dr. Who

and the Star Fleet Enterprise

to get her shirt off, to unbutton her jeans.

We could work out String Theory

all over her bedroom.

We could bend space together.

But maybe that’s not what she’s asking.

The world’s been talking dirty

ever since she’s had the ears to listen.

It’s been talking sleazy to all of us

and there’s nothing about the hydrogen bomb

that makes me want to wear a cock ring

or do it in the kitchen while a pot of water boils.

Maybe, with her shoulders slouched

the way they are and her long hair

covering so much of her face,

she’s asking, simply, to be considered

something more than a wild night, a tight

curl of pubic hair, the pink,

complicated, structures of nipples.

Maybe she wants to be measured beyond

the teaspoon shadow of the anus

and the sweet mollusk of the tongue,

beyond the equation of limbs and seen

as a complete absolute.

And maybe this is not a giant leap

into the science of compassion, but it’s something.

So when I pass her

I do exactly what she has asked of me,

I raise my right hand and make a V

the way Vulcans do when they wish someone well,

hoping she gets what she wants, even

if it has to be in a galaxy far away.

 

My Art or My Novel. Which Would You Choose?

Tags

art, Blogging, creatiity, Novel, painting, personal, Pleasure, writing, writing process

Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph

Someone asked me recently what I loved more, my painting or my writing? Or, she added, is that like trying to choose which child you love most?

It is a little bit like that. Writing has always been the love of my life. Like a first child, I never thought I could love another as much as I loved him. And then number two came along and I learned that I could. Just as much, but differently.

Some children are easier to raise than others. My writing, like my first child, has wild mood swings. It’s like riding a roller coaster, one moment were up, up, up, dizzy with exhilaration, and the next were down, down, down, hating each other and sure we will never write another word again. But painting, like my second child, couldn’t be easier to live with, and there’s never been a cross word between us. She’s always ready to play when I am, and she keeps me delighted for hours.

Painting gives me more pure pleasure than writing. There’s pleasure in looking for a new project and in planning it. Pleasure in the process of painting and in the finished product. Pleasure hanging it, and every time I enter the room to view it anew.

There’s pleasure in writing too, especially in those first few hours, or days, or weeks, when the writing is hot and flowing out of me like I’m taking diction from some inspired muse. There’s even pleasure in the revision process where I’m weeding out what is extraneous and trying to make it as lean and luscious as possible. There’s pleasure in reading what I’ve written when it goes well, when I’m in the right mood, when I’m feeling confident or inspired.

Those are the peak moments. But in between all this pleasure are deep, deep lows. The sense of futility and frustration and despair can seem overwhelming. And then there are the long droughts when nothing inspires me. And the long, cold slogs when nothing is going well. And the times when I cannot force myself to sit down and try again, to keep it going. When I’d rather clean the toilet or go to the dentist or pull out my own teeth with pliers than sit down and write.

With painting, I never have to force myself to start or finish a project. If anything, I have to force myself to leave it be so I can do the laundry or prepare dinner. It’s not that I absolutely love everything I paint. But at the end of the day, it’s deemed good enough. And I feel my time was well spent. Sometimes I’m thrilled with the results and hang them on the wall. Other times I’m mildly pleased and lean them against some bookcase or pin them on bulletin board. Either way they keep me company. They suffice.

But writing, when I’m finished, disappears from sight. I might get pleasure re-reading it from time to time, but mostly I don’t bother. The few pieces that get published seem to go into a dark vault and are forgotten. Worse are the pieces that were much-loved but remain unread, unpublished. Instead of pleasure is a sense of loss and regret, of unrequited love, of stillborn life.

Given all that, you might wonder why I bother to write at all. Why not give it up for painting?

Because I can’t imaging life without writing. In some ways, for me, it’s like breathing. It seems a natural, intrinsic part of me. I can’t live without it, as difficult as it might be. I’m writing in my head all the time. Thinking and writing gets all rolled up together. Writing–putting thoughts on paper–takes me to a deeper place, and sometimes I don’t know what I think until I write it. It’s like the act of writing pulls up astonishing things from my unconscious and twirls them before my eyes so I can see what I’ve never seen before and be amazed. How could I give up something like that?

Writing this blog gives me pleasure and is a great outlet for my need to write. And your “likes” and comments help to sustain that pleasure, make it seem worthwhile. I don’t feel like the writing has dropped into a black hole or disappeared into cyberspace. I don’t feel I’m engaged in a futile exercise.

But my novel. My poor, poor novel. Unless I return to it, it will remain stillborn. And that I can’t bear. Pleasure or no, I must do it justice and publish it myself if nothing else. But all that takes time. Days, weeks, months of dedicated painstaking work. And I’ve become bewitched by painting. I can hardly stand to be away from her for a minute, let alone days, weeks, months.

So if you were me, what would you choose? Pure pleasure, or high anxiety and uncertain results? The answer seems obvious.

And yet, and yet, in the still of night my novel still calls to me.  In soft, wistful whispers.

Dare I Share? Paintings in Progress

Tags

art, artists, Blogging, creativity, inspiration, painting, personal, travel, Visual Arts, watercolor

Family and friends have been asking me to show them some of the watercolors I’ve been working on, so I posted a few on Facebook the other day.

I thought when I first started that my painting would be “just for me” and not shared with the world at large. But it’s hard to keep things you love, that bring so much joy, to ourselves, it seems. And I’m curious to know what others think.

I’m averaging one watercolor a week, and so far, all have been deemed “wall-worthy,” unlike the pastel paintings I worked on last year. My walls are filling up fast. A year from now, will there be any wall space left to fill?

I’m reminded of an immensely talented but public-shy artist friend. She’s been painting for 13 years, but rarely shows her work and does not display for sale. “What do you do with all your paintings?” I asked her one day after class, which she attends for the camaraderie, since she needs no instruction at this point. “Your house must be full!”

“Oh, yes,” was her nonplussed reply. “My house, and my garage, and a storage shed to boot. I trade them in and out of the house to mix things up a bit and give each a chance to shine.”

What a shame, I think. So much talent and beauty hidden from public view. Then I wonder what I’ll do when my own walls are full. How soon will I need a storage shed?

What a think to worry about! Especially when I’m having so much fun, and when there’s still so much I want to paint. I have at least a dozen paintings in my head that I want to get on paper. And there’s more inspiration every time I go to my Pinterest boards and view all the amazing artwork I’ve collected there.

Which brings me back to this blog. Perhaps I will start sharing some of my work here, despite what I wrote in a previous blog post about my painting being “just for me.” I’ll start by sharing my first three watercolors, which already have a place of prominence on a bathroom wall. They were inspired by photographs taken when we were sailing on La Gitana. I’m planning a whole series of tropical paintings–seascapes, boatscapes, landscapes, all from our travels.

Lately though I’ve become sidetracked from the sea to try my hand at some more impressionistic or symbolic paintings, as well as some florals and still lifes. I’m still experimenting with style, you see. While I admire realistic, representational painting, and I think it’s so important to be able to do this kind of painting well, I find myself drawn to a looser, more imaginative style that captures the essence of things with all its attending emotions and conotations. Like the paintings from artists I’ve featured on this blog.

Of course, representational painting in the hands of talented and inspired artists can do the same thing. But I’m not there yet. And these first three paintings I’m posting aren’t there yet either. But they capture enough that I’m pleased with. Enough to inspire me to keep practicing, keep painting.

They don’t capture that “something more” I’ve been writing about in one of my last posts on art, the form and the formless. But each hint at it. Something in the shimmer of the sea with the rocks half-hidden beneath. In that white-sand serenity of a turquoise sea. Something deep and dark in the dream-like beauty of those mountains rising out of the mist during our first tropical landfall in the Marquesas islands after thirty days at sea.

They hint at, but do not quite capture what I was after. Yet viewing them with the mind’s eye I can still go there and feel it. And that to me is what art is all about.

Snorkeling in the Bay Islands, Honduras. Watercolor by Deborah J. Brasket, 2016

dd

Anchored in the Isle of Pines, New Caledonia. Watercolor by Deborah J. Brasket, 2016

Landfall at Nuka Hiva, the Marquesas Islands. Watercolor by Deborah J. Brasket, 2016

 

Blogging A Trail of Bread Crumbs – 2014 Recap

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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.

On Herds, Husbands & Riffing on Writing

Tags

Blogging, Creative Nonfiction, husbands, Julia Shipley, Marriage, poetic essay, riffing, riffing on writing, The Toast, Willa Cather, writing

Serendipity, it’s sometimes called. Those happy coincidences that lead to some unexpected pleasure or insight. Or synchronicity. Those meaningful encounters that, touching tangentially upon something you’ve been musing upon, spark a new way of thinking about it. Then off you go, riffing on the topic the way jamming jazz musicians will do.

Here’s how it happened recently. I was grazing on Twitter and found a link to an essay that sounded interesting, taking me to new site called The Toast. The essay that drew me there did not pan out, but I found a link to something else that sparked my interest: “Some: Poetic Essay” by Julia Shipley. So I went there.

Now the essay starts out talking about horses and cows and the poets who write about them. Normally I’m not much interested in barnyard animals, but once when I was looking for a particular poem by Hayden Carruth, I came across his “Cows at Night” which I loved so much I blogged about it. (Another example of serendipity.)

Hoping that Shipley’s essay on cows might provide a similar unexpected pleasure, I continued reading. That’s when I came across these lovely lines and immediately tweeted my pleasure to others.

“The names of the herd tell a story, the way a group of stars makes a constellation.”

As I continued reading, the essay took an interesting turn, morphing from a mediation on cows, to a mediation on men, or on prospective husbands, to be exact.

A line about how some couples “pull together” in a marriage “like a pair of horses working in a synchronized pace” caught my attention. I’d been musing a lot lately about marriage, how it goes through different stages, and how while my husband and I still pull together in the same direction from time to time, more often than not we wander off in different directions. It’s becoming apparent how little we have in common.

While we both took early retirements, and we’re both home bodies, we seldom see each other and do little together. We eat at different times mostly, take walks at different times, swim at different times. We watch different shows on TV and pursue separate hobbies. Our paths cross only intermittently throughout the day, and while those crossings are pleasant enough, they are usually unplanned.

Sometimes I worry about us. Our marriage. Do we spend too much time alone? Is this healthy? Should we try to find ways to spend more time together? But then I realize: I’m quite content this way. As a writer, I like having time to myself. I like knowing he doesn’t need me or feel neglected when I’m off by myself. We’re alone, but not lonely.

I’m coming to think of us like the lines in a sparse drawing. We rarely touch, but we cross now and then, and our crossings shape our days and our lives and fills up the space that surrounds us in meaningful and comforting ways. Spare lines and plenty of white space, but pleasantly so.

Shipley writes about all the men she met over the years and cultivated relationships with, but who never turned out to be the husband she was looking for. She thought perhaps she was in love with the idea of love more than in wanting any particular man.

I wonder that myself sometimes. I like having a husband, I love him deeply, but I’m not “in love” with him. I am, however, “in love.” It’s just not with a man, or perhaps, more truthfully, it’s with so much more than the man. It’s the man and the life and the kids and the cows at night and names like constellations. And the walking and swimming and writing. Just this, right here, right now. Riffing about the things I love.

Her essay ends with something similar:

“Once I approached another heroine, former dairy farmer Gertrude Lepine, who never married or had children, but farmed with her sisters in a Vermont hinterland called, Mud City. I asked if she missed her cows. Her herd was famous, her registered Jerseys attracted buyers from as far away as California when she retired. Sure there were some favorite cows, she told me, But it’s The Land that I love the most.

The Land.”

Yes, I’m in love with The Land too. The Land, and all it holds.

Just before her essay ends Shipley quotes a passage in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers :

The passage describes Alexandra, who took over her father’s Nebraska farm and coaxed it to glorious success, and who is now a single middle aged woman.

“ . . . she lay late abed . . . luxuriously idle, her eyes closed, she used to have the illusion of being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by someone very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew; he was much stronger and swifter, and he carried her easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat.”

What held her lightly “as if she were a sheaf of wheat” was something so much more than mere man. I feel that way too sometimes. Like I’m being tenderly picked up and carried away. By life. The joy of living. These unexpected, serendipitous pleasures. By the act of writing–taking chance encounters and spinning them into something else, tossing them out into the universe, watching them drop down into a poem, a painting, a song. A blog post perhaps.

Here’s wishing you today many serendipitous pleasures that pick you up lightly and carry you away.

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!

“Wake Up Amazed” by Kaze Gadway

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Blog, Blogging, compassion, Homeless, Homelessness, Judith of Norwich, Kaze Gadway, kazegadway, kazestories, Love

Sometimes I come across a blog post that I just have to share. The excerpt below is from Kazegadway – Finding the Wonder Daily.

As I cruised the streets where homeless sleep, I encounter a single young woman wrapped up in a blanket trying to keep warm. I stopped to give her a warm sleeping bag. She spoke very clearly. “I was so cold last night that I didn’t think I would wake up. Then I wake up and someone is offering me a sleeping bag. That is so amazing.”

I grin and leave as she wraps up and goes back to sleep. I worry that she is going to be harmed by sleeping in the open with no friends nearby. Then a homeless man in a jacket and backpack calls out to me. “I’m watching to see no one steals her blanket. Thanks for stopping by.”

I am blessed twice over. Once by a young woman who awakes amazed at the world. And again by a homeless man who watches over her.

The author is in her “7th decade.” A woman who, after spending a lifetime working to address the root causes of poverty around the world, now spends her days tending the homeless, and writing about her encounters. The excerpt above is from a post called “Wake Up Amazed” and you can read the rest of that post at that link.

But every post is a gem, filled with compassion, wisdom, and humility. She writes in “Attention“:

I find myself paying attention to where the homeless sleep or just hang out during the day. I notice who has a blanket or a backpack and if they are alone or with someone. I look at their faces and see alertness or maybe pain. Since I have moved to Albuquerque, they are never just in the background.

Perhaps that is why they talk to me. Something they see in me tells them that I notice them as people.

Here’s another brief snippet from Prayer and Action

One middle aged man talks frankly about looking for a job. “I’m not going to get a job. Every day it seems less possible. The longer I stay away from work, the more I look like a thug, unshaven and dirty.”

I give him all the contacts that I have. I don’t want to end the conversation by saying “good luck” or something else lame. So I hesitate.

“You aren’t going to pray for me, are you?” he says with a laugh.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “But I don’t know how to acknowledge you are a part of eternity without praying. I want you to know that you are special.”

I stop, feeling very stupid.

Stunned, he says “That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.” He walks away.

Silently with wet eyes I pray “God have mercy.

Her stories touch me deeply. “There but for the grace of God, go I” we sometimes say when encountering people less fortunate than us. There goes my son, your daughter, our Nana, that guy I went to Prom with, the girl who broke my heart in college. The professor who seemed half-crazy in the kindest, wisest way. The next-door neighbor who took in stray cats and fed me cookies when I was a kid. They are part of us.

Reading her simple posts brings to mind what the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich wrote so long ago:

God is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us: He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, claspeth us, and all encloseth us for tender love, that He may never leave us; being to us all-thing that is good, as to mine understanding.

Between God and the human there is no between.

I hope you will take a look at her blog.  You may “wake up amazed” by how profound simple kindness can be. Kazegadway – Finding the Wonder Daily.