Daily Archives: August 15, 2014

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, The Move, Writing

Walk In Free

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Letting go. Retiring. Easing up. Yes, the pedal has lifted up from the metal and the car has begun to slow down. And that’s a good thing. Letting go of the expectations, admitting they were not met and saying damn the consequences has lifted a large weight off the shoulder of my psyche. Retiring it. Shrugged off and glad to have it gone.

Does this mean I’ll stop writing? No. Does it mean I’ll stop writing novels? No. It does mean that I no longer have my self’s forward progress attached to the results. And, you might say, about damned time. Maybe so.

Why is all this bubbling up right now? The move. As the stuff of my work gets winnowed, I can see the bones of my ambition more clearly. The skeletal support of my dreams are familial, horticultural, intellectual, classical and creative. The flesh and bones will be grandchildren, sons and daughters-in-law, wife, friends, plants, ideas, translations and more novels.

Failure does not mean stop. Vanish. Extinguished. It does not mean failed. No, it means redirection, recollecting, revisiting. This move has given me the freedom to shrug my shoulders, let the load fall to the way side. I want to walk into Colorado free to live a life given to that place, those people, that time. Now I can.

Going west has always had an element of reinvention, claiming another facet of life. May it be so.

Writing

Fail. Not so epic.

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                     Lughnasa Moon

Fail. Failed. Failure. I set out, in 1992, to write novels and publish them. Though I worked hard, wrote six novels, and tried to learn the craft, I failed, or have so far failed to sell a single one. There is no way to paint this as something other than failing. I had a plan, a set of expectations and did not achieve them. In other words I spent 22 years striving toward something I did not accomplish.

I have been afraid to look back on the last 20 plus years and acknowledge this. Why? Well, who likes to fail? I find myself wanting to reframe them, put them in a different paradigm, redefine success, but to be honest with myself I have to say what is.

Were my expectations reasonable? Doesn’t matter. They were what I claimed as defining my work and they are a fair measure.

There. Having said that I can move on to the second and more important question, am I failed man because of this? No. And I can say that without reaching for the other matters, happening over the same time, that had positive results. Why? Because the measure of a man is different from the measure of a man’s accomplishments or lack of them.

It’s funny, but I feel no shame in writing this. No glory either. Just an it’s time to say this and move on feeling. Yes, all this has the root beliefs of middle class white male USA culture entwined about it on all sides. Yes, this need for notches on the public belt or on the office door reaches deep and wide, but I admit freely to being complicit with them.

That is, I’m proud of my achievements. I cannot be proud of my achievements and not acknowledge my failure. So consider this my admission of having come up short.

Now then. What’s different? Virtually nothing. The last 22 years passed and I have arrived at 67. The Dilbert cartoon this morning in the Tribune said it very well and reminded me of a conversation recently with friend Tom Crane.

 

Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

Boys and their Tractors

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Into St. Paul this morning for another America Votes meeting at the Minnesota Nurses Association. Solid, information packed as usual.

On the way in I listened to a radio discussion of masculinity and on the way back an Ira Flatow Science Friday story on regenerative farming. NPR is listening to my brain.

Men in America has its main hook in the changes since the 1970’s in men and women’s education status. Women have pushed ahead of men, or girls ahead of boys steadily, until today girls dominate boys in all of the academic disciplines through high school. While in itself this is neither alarming or surprising, when joined to the decline in manual labor and other manufacturing jobs, a disturbing picture emerges. Men begin to look left behind in the contemporary labor market. There are a lot more matters to discuss here. Another time.

Regenerative farming pushes forward the no-till farming movement, moving beyond merely sustainable agriculture to an agriculture that positively enhances the soil. In this show a number from the book The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson got my attention. She says that if 11% of the worlds agricultural land were to convert to no-till farming the resulting natural sequestration of carbon dioxide would balance the climate change equation. Don’t know if this is true, but it’s intriguing.

It took me immediately to rain follows the plough which I mentioned here not far back. That was the belief that created the vast agricultural lands of the plains where industrial agriculture has combined with center pivot irrigation to drain the Ogallala aquifer and destroy the once ten foot deep top soil created by prairie plants. If that land were to convert to no-till agriculture, water use would plummet and the plains could begin to heal themselves. Might be the 11% right there.