The Get-up and Go

Rearranging routines is crucial for being housebound. Though I'll probably live long enough to eat these words right off the screen, mixing things up semi-regularly has gotten me through many years of isolation and a few of being outright housebound.

Being one who needs a change of scenery daily, I've taught myself to make that occur even if I'm trapped within the same four walls.

As a kid, it used to be that moving every three years pretty well did the trick; about the time you got settled in and your turf well established, it would be time to up end it all and begin anew.

I starved for deep connection to place. Finding a partner who's identity was sunk into the core of the planet (and the cosmos); parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, all in the same distant county, was a certain boon. He valued the farm stock heritage from which he came and wanted to begin his own legacy...but somewhere other than amidst the old family ties. Perfect!


We worked out our partnership and built a fine home and family in the hinterlands of SE, Alaska. Enough wilderness in our surroundings to keep my wanderlust fed for perpetuity.

However, twenty eight years later, the circumstances in my life (over these last two seasons), have drastically changed. The story of how these two veins come together is falling into place and I'm pecking away at a telling that hopefully will be of interest to others.

Today, for your adventuring pleasure, I offer a wonderful site.
Coupled with the Writer's Almanac each day, and listening to the creativity of A Prairie Home Companion on the weekend if I can catch it...(Garrison, dear friend, I missed the big 4th of July event. Damn! How to be in two places at once. We had a very good time though, drifting down the Chilkat), with these things combined, most everything at this end of our equation is keeping afloat.

I'm off with the cart to gather groceries for The Mazoo and I today.

It's terribly hot...I think I'll bring the computer and nest a while at Barnes and Noble. I'll be able to get a few character sketches while I catch up with the Surreal Circus at Gather.com. I'm helping there as a moderator/student, kind of a summer internship. Maybe helping to grease the literary gears of a few others as well.


Poet.org, and with this introduction a collection that is divine.

Enjoy!

The Bridge

Beringia called and you responded, but I was to go first
I hoped to hear the landscape moan, join the ancient song

Nellie Chinik won your heart and had you digging her potatoes
then cast her spell and offered you an amaryllis in exchange

“Fully occupied with growing--that's
the amaryllis... If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!”

You wished to know your own edges again
and saw them past your feet overlooking the bay

Fey morning, window darkness
Golovin lay, this side of the changeling a
Fata Morgana, dancing between a rock and a hard dawn illusion
or the illusion, set to conspiring from a hard drawn conclusion

“If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus!”

The chilled horseman’s star-ship? Nay.

It was the mammoth in the living room
who moaned from the distance
of bridges passed




The cuttings are from "The Métier of Blossoming" by Denise Levertov. Enjoy the entire poem from Poets.org

Also, a reference for a mirage known as a Fata Morgana from Wikipedia