Notes From a River

NSP Meditations , , , ,

The river runs downhill but this course isn’t the low road. On the contrary, a river, if a person decides to flow with it, represents the highest possible road a human being can take. Most don’t; most can’t. Following a river’s metaphors is a road rarely taken. I invite everyone to try. Rivers are everywhere around us. Watch one flow. It never costs a cent.

I pity people who look at the river and see nothing but extraction and commerce.

Did Narcissus gaze into his reflection in a river or lake before falling in and drowning? I could Google to find the answer but I won’t.

If I could order a sixer of Rainier cans from Amazon as I sit by this river, would a drone’s delivery of the beer desecrate the river?

Perhaps my reanimation as a human being the last two years has turned me more into a man of the river than a man of the ocean. I need to ponder that notion.

I wish someone would order me the special CD release of Bruce Springsteen’s The River and have it delivered to me. I miss that album.

Ford is such a great word of the river. It is a verb and a noun. I love words that can go both ways. Love is one of those words.

I have someone in mind I would like to accompany me on this river.

All that time growing up in Oregon City and I never connected to the rivers there: Clackamas, Molalla, Willamette. Certainly other Oregon City youth of that era did. Perhaps I was too busy playing tennis, writing savage anti-administration editorials and reading Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. I think I missed out.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

The Struggle of Letting Go

NSP Meditations ,

A new friend sat in the stuffed chair in the beaverwood studio and expounded on her personal philosophy of handling the unforeseen vicissitudes of life. It was a philosophy borne not from books, degrees, academies, trainings, pews or consultants. Rather, it had been shaped through experiences, searing experiences.

She expounded not a novel philosophy, but the way in which she articulated it, crystallized its meaning. Total lucidity.

I listened to someone like I’ve never listened before. Her words sounded almost verse-like.

It was all about “letting go,” she said, and the extraordinary struggle that authentic“letting go” entails. She clearly had mastered the act. It was like an aura around her.

In the last two years, I have struggled mightily with “letting go.” At various points, I thought I had, only to wake up at dawn or midnight or walking down the beach at high noon, and realizing I had not.

Is the ultimate in “letting go” like setting fire to a burn pile and watching it go up in flames? Or is it more subtle than that? A burn pile metaphor almost seems too theatrical. Maybe it’s just like the leave carried away by the wind with no one around to witness it, let alone care.

In the Bonnie and Clyde book, I ask myself the question: “What is the final thing I must let go?”

When I asked that, I didn’t know. I still don’t. But my conversation with my new friend awakened me to the fact that I still have not completed the final act.

It will emerge. Or appear instantly

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Spirit Dogs

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , , , ,

Depression infiltrated me on Monday morning. It felt strangely novel and dangerous. Nothing was happening, with the writing, with love, with life. Everything was underwater and I had no breathing apparatus.

I had to move. In a bygone era, my big dogs would have compelled me to move, get them romping on the beach, the clearcuts, or atop Cannery Hill. Their antidote never failed to heal me.

But all my dogs were dead. Clyde was gone, too, and Bonnie could barely walk anymore. I had no dogs to instill movement in me.

I closed a book and got up off the couch. I drove to the beach and hiked to a fort with a tin containing fort messages. While sitting on a log, I perused the messages and found nothing new. Fifty yards away, at the wrack line, a vulture tore apart a dead harbor seal. No one else was around. The ocean was flat and gray. Listless. I felt utterly listless.

A text beeped. I almost never use the phone at the beach unless taking pictures of forts. I looked at the text. Two great friends and their two kooky dogs were romping down a nearby beach. They’d found a weird ceremonial candle left behind on a rootwad and sent me the image. They also sent me an image of one of the dogs bounding madly after a ball.

I got up from the log and walked to the car. I drove to the beach where my friends were, parked, and hiked through the dunes to surprise them. I did. There is nothing as uplifting as meeting friends on the beach. Or long lost reunions on the beach.

We hung out together for an hour and I threw the ball to the one dog and watched the other do her funny moseying around. My friends and I discussed writing and beach combing. I laughed a lot and broke a sweat.

The movement worked.

One day I will have my own dog again.

Probation 5-7-18

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , ,

Who will show first today,

besides me of course?

Who will implode?

Who will wither with grace

or squirm?

Who has disappeared?

Who suffered a tracheotomy

to breathe foul justice?

 

The sweatband man skates up!

Cigarette dangling,

black slacks,

black knee pads,

black loafers,

black satin jacket,

gray hair pulled in a ponytail.

The ponytail blows

like a flag,

gray against the gray sky.

Dude has style,

a style keeping him alive.

 

I’ve decided to sit by the Coke Machine.

It feels full of life. I say hello.

No Walt Whitman in here anymore.

I bulked up on him.

I read a historian who wrote

that Walt supported

the invasion of Mexico in 1848.

He probably did,

the Manifest Destiny and all.

He was ahead of his time,

but not then.

It was soon to come

in Leaves of Grass

when he invaded

American poetry

and took a scythe

to the tall rigid meters,

and cut loose liberation.

Can a poet still do that?

 

Rigs roll up in the parking lot,

another skateboard, too.

A dog is vaping.

A woman is crying.

A gull drops a shit on the heather.

It will be on soon,

and I won’t believe

what I see and hear,

until I do.

Distress Call

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , ,

I took the call from inside a driftwood fort. It was 50 degrees and a fat rain drop splattered here and there. The call came from a friend marooned in a Las Vegas hotel room where the temperature pushed 100 degrees outside. It was probably the first call in the history of calling where the conversation unfolded between someone in an air conditioned driftwood fort and someone in an air conditioned Las Vegas hotel room.

I answered the call because I knew my friend was in great distress over some recent upheavals in her life.

You never know when distress might engulf, obliterate you. What do you do? Where do you turn? I’m writing a book on that very subject.

We talked for half an hour. I told her of the messages left behind in the fort in my latest edition of the ongoing driftwood fort writing project. Most writers expressed joy and wonder. But a few expressed severe emotional pain and trying to work through it at the ocean—in the fort. I recommended the ocean for her. It doesn’t work for everyone but the attempt is certainly worth it…and in, Oregon, free. That no-cost deal counts for something that is hard to quantify and I know a thing or two about trying to quantify it. It’s sort of Oregon’s greatest secret.

I sent my friend a couple photographs of the various forts in the area that I had started and fort fairies had taken over from there.

She sent me a smiley-face emoticon in return and she told me she was driving out to the desert to walk in the heat, sweat, and think.

Stray Thoughts While Drinking Tea on the Back Deck

NSP Meditations , ,

I must create to respond to the desecration of human beings around me.

Social media desecrates human beings and monetizes our interactions. Why are decent people still engaged with this?

What can you say about a writing non profit that profits by exploiting writers? I met one.

Patience has made me weary.

There really is no more hope for rapprochement with several people who formerly played unique and powerful roles in my life. At least it’s not possible on my end. A wise new friend with boat-making skills reminded me of that recently. That letting go is so torturous, but so necessary.

Nevertheless, I will always listen to someone from the past. I will respond unless the approach is hateful. These still come my way from time to time.

I love watching bumblebees. One is bounding around me as I write this. She wants the tea.

Today is Mother’s Day and I am lucky to have the mother I have. I hate the hell I’ve put her through the past two years. She, above all, is who I seek to honor through my future work and habits.

And what will that future work be? I can’t get a job, although I am inventing ones.

Why do some important people disappear from our lives without a trace? Have I done that to someone? It recently happened to a poet I met and I can’t fathom why.

A deer has come into the yard. Or at least I want a deer to come into the yard. I have an apple ready. We’ll break apple together.

Amity is a great word and so rarely used in writing or conversation.

E.L. Doctrow wrote: “There is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.” I used to scoff at statements like this. I don’t anymore.

I am rereading Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song for the fourth time. This is the thousand-page book I read in 1979 in high school that made me want to become a writer. It still does.

A noted Oregon playwright is writing a musical about Vortex I. The playwright sought me out for counsel on the project. I think this far out idea is going to fly. No, there won’t be any nudity. Sad.

«‹ 252 253 254 255›»