Celebrating Ten Years of Blogging

Tags

basic human need, Blogging, borderlands, celebration, Community, exploring, Friends, Living on the edge of the wild, personal, ten years, touching

When I created this blog ten years ago I named it “Living on the Edge of the Wild.” I saw this space as a place to explore what I saw as the borderlands between what we know as humankind and the vast wilderness of what we do not know. I wrote in my first blog post on July 12, 2012:

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 . . . at the edges of science, the arts, and human consciousness.

I began my exploration into the wild quite literally, when our family was living aboard La Gitana and traveling around the world for six years. It became starkly apparent when I was sailing across the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by nothing but the sky above and the sea below, that I was living on the edge of something primitive and uninhibited, vulnerable to potentially terrifying forces that could rip us apart or swallow us whole. And yet those very same forces are what filled our sails and moved us forward, and what cradled us below, harboring in those depths the creatures that astounded us with their beauty and power.

I came to appreciate in the most intimate way how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in the natural world that surrounds and supports us.  We are indeed living on the edge of the wild, the largely untamed and unknown world into which we are born, exploring the borderlands that lay between the human and the more-than-human worlds, and the ways they overlap and mirror each other.

Looking back over the past ten years of blogging, I’ve tried to stay true to that original vision. sharing my thought on what fascinates me in nature, the arts and sciences, as well as my own creative endeavors and explorations of what it means to be a mother, a writer and someone who worries about the world—who wants to save it and savor it—all its beauty and joy—at the same time.

Over the years I’ve managed to gather 10,000+ followers (according to the website metrics which is not always accurate). But interest in my posts wane and flow, and sometimes, for personal reasons, I’ve let the blogging trickle to a near stop. Eventually, I’ve always returned. Because there’s still so much I want to explore, so many things I discover (books, artwork, music) that give me such pleasure I want to share them with others, and because blogging meets a basic human need—to touch others and be touched in return.

That was the topic of my most popular post, “Blogging and the Accident of Touching,” written nine years ago. I wrote:

We’ve all heard how physical touching is essential to human health and happiness. They say people can shrivel up and die for want of being touched or having someone to touch. A simple pat on the shoulder, a hug, a hand squeeze can make all the difference. Merely having a pet, they say, saves lives.

But there’s a basic human need for another kind of touching—from the inside out. Touching others with what means the most to us, our deepest responses to the world around us. Keeping those unspoken, unexpressed, can be as withering as being untouched physically. Which is why, perhaps, so many writers and artists will give their work away for free if need be, just to allow what’s inside out into the world where it can touch others, and “evoke responses.”

I’ve enjoyed reaching out and touching others over these past ten years, and being touched in return by your likes and responses, and by reading and responding to your blog posts. I’ve made several dear blogging friends whom I’ve never met but feel I know quite well. I’ve learned so much sharing this space with you.

So please accept my heartfelt thanks to all of you who have been with me from the very beginning, to those of you who have stopped by from time to time, and to those who have only recently tuned in to see what this space is all about. Thank you for helping me celebrate a decade of “Living on the Edge of the Wild.”

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Tags

art, Deborah J. Brasket, exploring, Love, Marriage, poetry, Robert Lawlor, Sacred geometry

I wrote these poems while still quite young, and very much in love, and loving the way our bodies “meet and mingle” when making love.  I loved the “lean lines” and “anxious angles,” the patterns we made spread across the bed.

I was fascinated by how the masculine and feminine forms complemented each other. It inspired the following drawing, something I was playing around with at the time, enjoying the lean look of pen on paper.

A Pleasing Design

I find satisfaction in form,
In bare geometric patterns,
In line upon line bisecting line,
In spacious planes spread out and open.

I like this silky stretch of skin,
Simple curves and supple cones,
I like the firm feel of your flesh,
Swollen contours, anxious angles.

Mostly I like the intricate pattern
We create, stripped bare and essential
The piling planes and lacing lines,
The way we meet and mingle,

When one fine ray of you cuts
Clean through me, and within that
intersecting interlude we come
To a common and satisfying point.

By Deborah J. Brasket

Since I wrote this poem,  I’ve learned something of “Sacred Geometry,” which seeks to synthesize the feminine and masculine principles of the discipline.

Medieval representation personified Geometry as a seated woman surrounded by the implements of her art, as depicted in some of the artwork shown  here.

Robert Lawlor in Sacred Geometry – Philosophy and Practice explains:

“Geometry as a contemplative practice is personified by an elegant and refined woman, for geometry functions as an intuitive, synthesizing, creative yet exact activity of mind associated with the feminine principle. But when these geometric laws come to be applied in the technology of daily life they are represented by the rational, masculine principle: contemplative geometry is transformed into practical geometry.”

Several love poems I wrote at the time involves the “topography” or “geography” of love, exploring each other’s bodies as if exploring an intimate landscape, with all its hills and streams, forests and caves, and vast flowing deserts.

Even then, so long ago, I was fascinated by how the human and natural worlds interconnect, and seem to complement each other.

In Exploration

I like the lay of your land.

You stretch before me
in large and rugged proportions.

The sheer volume of your mass
with its vast and varied landscape
is an irresistible invitation
to explore you.

You are shaped of firm and fertile earth
pressed lovingly round solid granite.

I lay my face close to smell
the sweet and salty scent of you
And there I hear
low, deep rumblings
of subterranean waters.

I trace you with my finger to find
Sudden softness, deep impenetrable forests,
and parts of you so finely chiseled
I must stop and marvel.

When I touch you my hand spans continents,
for there’s no lusher garden,
no sweeter field,
no depth more resounding,
nor peak more pure
than what I find in touching you.

I rise and hover over you like a cloud
then slowly, gently, cover you with my body.
I feel the touch of skin on skin,
your warmth rising through me
and press so near I hear
Your heartbeat in my body.

I am spilling with the rich fill of you,
Knowing all my sweet and wild secrets lie
Ever open to the finger of exploration.

Then I find within the far-off orb of your eye
a space so vast and distant,
and long to explore
the intangible reaches of your mind.

By Deborah J. Brasket

NOTE:  This post was part of a series that originally were supposed to be part of a series of love poems to celebrate April as National Poetry Month. Eventually it morphed into something else–a memoir of our marriage, or an anatomy of love as it evolves over time. Below are all five posts in the series, which seem to cover  married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts. The last one was Freshly Pressed.

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Love’s Duplicity

Love Lost, and Renewed

Celebrating Lasting Love

Related articles

• The Meaning of Sacred Geometry (wakingtimes.com)
• Δ Sacred Bodies:sacred Geometries Δ (threecornersdesigns.wordpress.com)
• A Brief Glance at Sacred Geometry (realitysandwich.com)

Swimming Among the Stars

Tags

adventure, exploring, human consciousness, Milky Way, poetry, sailing, Sea of Cortez, swimming, universe, writing

Milky Way

Last night I swam among the stars. The air and water temperatures were both 78 degrees, so it felt like I was moving from one warm atmosphere into another more dense when I stepped in my pool. There was no moon and the Milky Way was strewn across the sky like scattered bones of light. When I lay on my back to watch them, it felt like I was floating among the stars.

And then I realized–I was! We all are.

We sail across the universe on the back of a tiny planet at the edge of a galaxy that swirls around us. Too often we forget that–how embedded we really are in the universe.

I became acutely aware of this one night when we were crossing the Sea of Cortez from Baja to mainland Mexico. There was no wind, no moon. The sea was perfectly still like the surface of a dark mirror, marred only by our trailing wake.

Above us the bare mast stirred a billion stars, which were reflected in the sea’s surface below. I felt like we were on a starship sailing through the cosmos.

Stars reflected in the water

Later that night I wrote this:

Night Crossing, Sea of Cortez

The sea appears so simple

With a dark, indulgent face

The stars there twice reflected

Like a world spun out of space

Our sloop shoots through the cosmos

Through a mute and moonless night

Our wake a fiery comet

Streaming effervescent light

With all the universe inert

We slip from star to star

Then reach across the Milky Way

Toward galaxies afar

Eons swirl, light-years unfurl

And none can still our flight

Leaping toward the infinite

To apprehend the light.

I’m not alone in seeing the overlap between the ocean and the night sky. Various artists are fond of depicting whales and dolphins and other sea creatures swimming among the stars. The ocean and the universe stand at the edge of the wild, the last two true frontiers we have to explore, except for the human consciousness, of course.  The ocean and the universe have become symbols for consciousness as well as adventure.

We seem to grasp that there is something that connects all three—some deep, dreamy, ever-flowing, ungraspable, powerful yet nurturing element in which we all are steeped. That calls us to move beyond ourselves, beyond the safe and familiar, the already known. That inspires us to reach for something that lies just beyond our grasp.

I’m still reaching. Are you? What calls you to move beyond yourself into the unknown?

Other nature posts with poetry

Night Howls

Walking Among Flowers

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

Touching the Wild

“A Scattering of Rocks” – Zen in the Garden of Eden

Living on the Edge of the Wild

Tags

adventure, exploring, lifestyle, Nature, sailing, wild, writing

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 began my exploration into the wild quite literally, when our family was living aboard La Gitana and traveling around the world for six years. It became starkly apparent when I was sailing across the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by nothing but the sky above and the sea below, that I was living on the edge of something primitive and uninhibited, vulnerable to potentially terrifying forces that could rip us apart or swallow us whole. And yet those very same forces are what filled our sails and moved us forward, and what cradled us below, harboring in those depths the creatures that astounded us with their beauty and power.

I came to appreciate in the most intimate way how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in the natural world that surrounds and supports us.  We are indeed living on the edge of the wild, the largely untamed and unknown world into which we are born, exploring the borderlands that lay between the human and the more-than-human worlds, and the ways they overlap and mirror each other.

Now that I am again living on the edge of the wild in a home bordering a nature preserve, I find myself re-exploring those borderlands:

• Not only through my encounters with the wildlife and natural habitat that now surrounds me, but also through reflecting upon those years living at sea.
• Through my writing, plunging below conscious thought into that unruly wildness that harbors all manner of terrifying and astounding creatures to capture on paper.
• Through the books I read exploring the edges of science and the human condition, pushing the envelope on all manner of frontiers.

What’s really interesting is how often those explorations into the wild begin with seemingly mundane observations, ordinary sights and sounds, that caught in the right light, reveal something extraordinary.

This blog was created to explore those borderlands with others.  I hope you will share your thoughts with me on these and other topics.

• In what ways do you live on the edge of the wild?
• What borderlands are you exploring?
• What envelopes do you think need pushing?