Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Satisfaction

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Lughnasa Waning Harvest Moon

The next morning. Anxiety has subsided as the time approaches, probably no different from or in fact the same as stage fright.

There is some hoary bit about the anxiety being necessary for a good performance. Sounds like rationalization to me. The anxiety hits because we want others to think well of us, to like what we do and appreciate it. Sometimes they do not.

Since I long ago put on the mantle of one cuts across the grain of received wisdom and will voice unpleasant truths and questions, I know this too well. This does not mean I get no satisfaction from my work, not at all, just that sometimes the most satisfaction comes from the preparation, the crafting and presenting rather than the reception.

As for Roots and this morning, well, that now moves in the realm of action. Much better than imagining it.

Faith and Spirituality, Writing

I Wonder

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Lughnasa Full Harvest Moon

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” – Greek Proverb

I’m nervous. Not sweat on the palms, head for the door or the tunnel kind of nervous, but nervous anyhow. It has two sources I can identify. One, will I dress well enough to preach in Wayzata? After a life time of playing down the importance of dressing up, I still know when it can hurt. I know this seems hopeless given that I’m 62, not 16, but there it is. These folks (folks I imagine attending a Unitarian-Universalist church in a wealthy burb like Wayzata.) dress better than I do. I imagine. And, they probably do. I only want to come up to minimum standards and I’ll probably make it. What if I don’t?

I’ve shaved and cut my hair, trimmed my nails. I’m not about to buy new clothes because I believe Thoreau was right, “Beware of ventures that require new clothes.” but here’s the problem. I don’t wear sport coats or suits at all any more. This is so true that when I went in the closet to fetch a jacket I might wear I found most of the shoulders covered in dust. I’m not kidding. It’s been that long. Also, I’m no longer the svelte guy I was when I bought all the dress pants I own. Fortunately, I can still fit into a few pair.

The second source of anxiety is also about vanity. I’ve preached around the state in several congregations, but I only get asked back in a couple of places. There’s no need for me to preach at all, financially, but I do have an intellectual stake in being heard and appreciated for the work and original thought. That intellectual stake comes freighted with an emotional stake, too. It’s not like I’ll roll over and quit writing if I don’t get good feed back. I generally do good feedback.

Part of me says it’s the changeable nature of program committees and the changing tastes of even those who remain constant from year to year and I’m sure that explains some of it. Part of it, too, I’m sure, is the non-pastoral nature of my preaching. That is, I don’t write to inspire or to give practical advice; I write to make people think, to get them to act, to consider new ways of seeing old problems or to see possibilities and problems where they never saw them before. I can make people nervous. On purpose. Because I’ve understood that to be my particular calling from day 1 in seminary.

In spite of all those it might just be that people don’t like what I say, the way I say it, or me in particular. Oh, well, if it is this, then what can I do? I’m gonna be who I am anyhow. Still, I’d like to know. I think.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Il Dolce Far Niente

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Lughnasa                             Waxing Harvest Moon

Kate and I sat out on the deck with the dogs.   Il dolce far niente.   The sweetness of doing nothing was a theme for paintings in the mid-Victorian era.  Apparently the Italians have always been after la dolce vita.

A point where Kate and I meet, where our inner worlds and outer worlds intersect,  is our horror at these moments.  There is something in the northern European blood that suspects doing nothing, finds nothing sweet about it.  Instead it has a bitter taste, something mom may have given  you when you didn’t do your chores.

These later years may be the time to catch up with the Italians, to learn how to kick back and relax.  If they’re not, then we’ll never get it, not in this turn of the wheel.

I wrote several hours in a row yesterday and today, but it was not fun.  Usually writing pleases me, gives me a sensual satisfaction as well a creative one.  Not this time.  It was as if I had tried to stick a large ball into a glass Coke bottle.  There was too little space in the three thousand words, the maybe 15-18 minutes of spoken English, to contain what I wanted to communicate.

Too much truncating, jumping, glossing.  The whole needs more metaphor, a way to condense big ideas into small spaces.  I have two metaphors that work pretty well.  I use Rembrandt’s etching of Faust and Vermeer’s painting of the Astronomer to illustrate the difference between the ancien regime and the Enlightenment.  I also use Petrarch’s letter to posterity to underscore the Italian Renaissance’s influence on our understanding of the individual.  So far, so good.

After that, though, I lean more into short summaries of complex ideas, philosophical vignettes no bigger than fortune cookies.  All this means I’m not done.

Writing

Mind. The Gap

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Lughnasa                                  Full Harvest Moon

I have a first draft of Roots of Liberalism.  I’m not happy with it.  All writers  struggle with the gap between the elegance and concision a work has as it takes form in the mind and the clumsy apparatus, strung together with baling wire and bubble gum that hits the page.  Sometimes the gap is further than I imagined it would be, this is one of those times.

I’ll let it sit for a day or so now, then re-read it and edit.  If necessary, I’ll start all over again.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Writing

Woodpeckers and The World of Ideas

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Lughnasa                             Waxing Harvest Moon

All afternoon as I have wandered the precincts of Enlightenment thought a pileated woodpecker has drilled one of the dead trees in our woods.  The sound compels attention, a drummer of a truly ancient tribe with a steady and resonant sound.  Each time it comes I’m drawn away from the abstract world of ideas and the delicate process of translating thought into words.

The woodpecker sounds push me away from the desk, here where I now have three desktop computers, two monitors, two large external hard drives, a router, a cable modem and a weather station in front of me, two printers and a phone off to my right.

When I turn toward the sound, my gaze lights on the purple blossoms of clematis, a fragrance worthy of tiny glass stoppered bottles selling high and it’s mine to enjoy for free.  This plants is special, because it’s plant of origin was in the garden of a woman who died from breast cancer.  We got our plant several years ago and I have divided it many times.

Then I notice the late afternoon sun, so low now.  By September 20th the earth will have moved enough along on its orbit that the angle between us and the sun will diminish to 46 degrees, a decrease of 23 degrees from its high at the Summer Solstice.   By December 20th it will decline another 24 degrees to its low of 22.  The angle casts interesting shadows, illuminates the clematis and a late hemerocallis bloom, a golden orange set on fire by our one and only true star.

Both of these places, the abstract world of thought, nestled in that small yet infinitely large space between my ears, and the cabaret set with a woodpecker drumming and Sol doing the lights exist, yet the relationship between them has felled many trees and spilled gallons of ink.  In what way can my conception of reason, a chunky idea studded with links and nested in a web that includes Europe, the mind of God and the Lake Minnetonka Unitarian-Universalist Society, be like the woodpecker, its lattice combed skull vibrating with each pile driver punch driven in a quest for food?

Its equivalence to the liquid, dying sunlight is more accessible, more plausible.  But why?  How does that sweet clematis fragrance fit?  It is all a mystery, yet here I sit writing about it.  Another mystery.

Faith and Spirituality, Sport, Writing

Writing Can Wait

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Lughnasa                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

Geez.  Took the whole day to organize my notes and quotes, tweak the ideas and find a thread.  Now the intellectual journey about liberalism has to contend with the Vikings 3rd pre-season game.  The starters will play the first half at least.  Hmmm.  What to do?

Writing can wait.  The y chromosome has its mysteries and football is among them.

Faith and Spirituality, permaculture, Writing

Not Yet Ready

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Harvest Moon

I wanted to start writing this morning.  But I could not.  The piece was not ready.  I had to do more work, winnowing ideas and quotes, looking for contra arguments.  Now, I’m almost done, should be ready to write sometime after the nap.  This work tires me out as much as working outside.

When my eyes glazed over, I got up and helped Kate a bit in the garage.  She’s boxing up the last of the garage sale stuff or pick-up by the Salvation Army.

While doing that, Paula Westmoreland of Ecological Gardens came.  She’s finalizing plans for some additional work on an edge to our woods.  We’ll be getting plants that attract birds away from the orchard and to themselves.  Plus, the look out the kitchen window will finally have a finished look, except for the small shade garden that we decided to postpone.  Those big clompy feet of the pups would have made its life difficult right now.

We’ll also get some trees in the area where we have prairie grass, a sort of screen for the neighbors.

Up at 6:30 with the dogs, very sleepy.

Writing

A dark and stormy day

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Lughnasa                        Waxing Harvest Moon

When the storm clouds rolled in on Tuesday, I went into a writing place almost immediately.  My novel bones got itchy, wanted to scratch out a new book.  Fall, as it gets darker and grimmer, colder somehow turns a creative crank, my engine sputters to life.

Life’s richness right now jolts me, makes me feel able.  This is not a constant feeling, so I like to ride it when it arrives.  How to work a novel’s discipline into my days?  As the garden winds down, those hours can go for writing.  I could write at night, after working out.  I have the juice later in the day and early in the morning.

Maybe the next stormy day I’ll get started.

Writing

Who Is a.t.?

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Summer                                Sliver of the Waning Summer Moon

Who is a.t.?

a.t. is a personification of Ancient Trails.  Using these initials allows me to write about myself in the third person.  I’m trying it out, seeing how it feels.  Part of the notion is that third person would allow people not familiar with me personally to take more from this website.

The website has had a consistent and satisfying number of hits each day, averaging 500 unique visits.  The number of pages per visit has increased over the last year, so readers stay longer and read more.  All that makes me feel good about writing this.

I’ve wondered what might make ancient trails have broader appeal.  In one sense I don’t care at all, that is, I’m not earning any money from this, nor am I in competition with anyone else.  In another sense, the one that makes me write this at all, I enjoy the idea of more people reading.

Anyhow. It might just be a phase.  Write to a.t. and give him your thoughts.

Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Politics, Writing

What Do You Do Well?

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Summer                      Waxing Summer Moon

“We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.” – William Hazlitt

What do you do well?  No false modesty, please, just a clear honest look at yourself with an assessment of your skills and abilities.  Each of us has something that we have forgotten the how of in the midst of performing the act.

Typing is one such skill for me.  I long ago broke with the eyes to the keyboard, careful typing of the uncertain.  I’ve used a keyboard since turning 17 and it is now a tool about which I think little.  Perennial flower gardening is the same.  Vegetables not so much, since I still have to think about growing season, water and food preferences, sun and varities.

Politics comes naturally to me now, but only because my dad and I started watching political conventions when I was 5.  Weighing the political possibilities in a given situation is like typing.  I no longer look at the keys.

Writing, too, has begun to come into that category, too, though the longer pieces, like novels, still require a good deal of careful planning and thought.

Parenting and child-rearing, also, seem to have become second nature to me.  I can think about it, but I don’t much.  I just do.  In the same vein caring for dogs now has experience and attentiveness to guide me, not conscious thought so much.

Cooking, too.  I’m not confident in my cooking skills when it comes to cooking for others, but for Kate and me, I work in the kitchen with interest and experience.

Touring at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts has gone through peaks and valleys, with my comfort level and confidence now beginning to rise again.  This one will take a while to pass into something I do well consistently.

OK, that’s my list.  What about yours?