MindSpinner

OK, let’s just say I have low long-term expectations regarding my Technorati rank, but I am thrilled about the particular readers who visit here, including those who post a link to this site at their own blogs. I found a trackback this morning noting the addition of MindSpinner to the blog roll at the Daily Blague, one of my regular, delightful reads. (I think this is my first formal introduction.)

Benjamin Randow - Le Vrai Parisien a tombé amoureux - has fallen in love. Perspicaciously, he has decided to stop blogging. Or perhaps his chérie has urged discretion. I can’t imagine anything stickier than being over thirty and trying to keep a blog while building a new relationship. Yikes.

My first thought was to replace the link to Journal d’un Vrai Parisien with another francophone blog, and I may yet do that, but for the time being, the slot has been given to MindSpinner. I don’t know anything about the author of this site except that she’s a single mother of teenagers who teaches at a high school. She is thus doubly yoked to the problematics of adolescence while being by no means an old phooey herself. In short, she’s out to teach/show young people how to enjoy life without destroying themselves. MindSpinner has been on my shortlist since late last year; it was in the course of running through the list this evening that I discovered MindSpinner’s link to this blog. Er.Go!

My first words have to be “Wow!” and “Thanks!” (For some reason, I can’t successfully post comments at the Daily Blague from my computer in order to say so there.)

I would have to note, too, with a wink and a grin, that I am unperspicaciously determined to keep writing here despite life’s complexities, which are not limited to raising teenagers, outwitting two Jack Russell terriers, teaching high school English, publishing a yearbook, and coordinating prom and graduation, but indeed also encompass nurturing a relationship which is currently made possible by US AirWays Express nonstop flights to and from a city 500 miles away from here. As Dickinson would assure us, “Much madness is divinest sense.” I would be referring here to the nonstop flights, which qualify as “divinest sense,” and not to the acquisition of devastatingly cute Jack Russell pups, which amounted to “much madness.” (Love ‘em, though.)

If I’m going to show young people how to enjoy life without destroying themselves, I have to learn to do the same. I have the near destruction part down pat, given the job description I accepted to consolidate a living wage; now I’m working on the enjoyment piece ;->.

There’s something to be said of the course of a life over years, of arduous journeys and lighted gifts.

I am glad I am not younger. I would not retrace any step, give up any ground gained. I have slowly learned this: all good gifts begin someplace deep within. Sometimes they necessarily begin in the echoic space that “without” carves.

They do not come to us from outside ourselves until we begin to do the work of stillness and wholeness, until we learn to perceive beauty and weave small joys where we are. The first soul we must mercifully embrace, in order to find ourselves embraced - and heed, in order find ourselves heeded - is our own.

I have learned that I have a lot of nerve - and that I’ve needed it all.
I’ve learned that I don’t have to resort to behaviors that are beneath the kind of person I want to be, even if situations afford me excuse (not that I don’t occasionally momentarily forget this).
I’ve learned what I need in order to breathe - what is oxygen and what is smoke.
I’ve learned not to try to drown feeling in any sort of distraction, but to be still, to heed everything, and to let silence work. No anesthesia.
I’ve learned that crying can be wise heart’s work. The best way beyond tears is straight through the middle of them.
I’ve learned that my head really can’t tell my heart what to do.
I’ve learned to see what small things do me good in my life and to follow them like a thread that leads me out of a maze into open air. If it makes me smile to go outside and look at the moon before I go to bed, then I make a ritual of going outside to look at the moon. If I pass a fascinating tree every evening coming home from work, then I stop to take a photograph. If flowers and gardening make me happy, then I make a garden. If writing in this blog is a way of being alive, then I write here when I can.

A breadcrumb path of poems traces this journey, all the way from the days when I dealt with the fact that I was living a life that wouldn’t work. What awes me now is how many deep good gifts I find coming back to me, answering that small inner work I undertook when there seemed no other way to get from today to tomorrow - lasting friends, joys, love.

2000 (the year of deciding dangerously)

airless in a house of glass

Possibility

2003

In the desert, there is always an oasis

2004

To you, sailing onward ever: a benediction

The stone path

2006

Alchemist

The Atlantic Ideas Tour offers the text of a speech given by John F. Kennedy at Amherst just weeks before his assassination. In this excerpt, Kennedy reflects on the role of the artist in society:

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment. The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, “a lover’s quarrel with the world.” In pursuing his perceptions of reality he must often sail against the currents of his time…

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, make them aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him…

In the blue of winter morning,
above the tops of trees,
the moon shone still.
An airplane climbed aspiring
just beneath, then
banked to chalk a trail
arcing partway round
her three quarters’ face.

***
This we know

In our beginning is our end - it will come.
But between our beginning and our end
is all the gift that life can be.

***

Dancer in the moon garden,
brushed by gossamer
sleeves of breezes,
to music and silver
surrendered.

***
Caveat regarding what you will find here: you just never know. I promise absolutely nothing by way of consistency, theme, tone, genre, or value ;->. You’ll no sooner exact such things from me than you would a flight plan from butterfly. So tonight it’s haiku in too many words.