What if water grew scarce? What if polar icecaps melted, glaciers shrank, crops failed, the oceans rose, and water itself became a source of power? What would the world look like then? We have a story for you. You can read all about it here.
When the world you know spins out of control and you’re the adult in the house and therefore supposed to know what to do and nothing makes sense anymore and by the way love is never easy; then the wife you so love dies before the marriage counseling ends? Yeah, she might have wanted to opt out. But other than that? It’s your ordinary midlife crisis. Dearest literary friend you will want to read this one.
It may be August but it’s still summer and there’s plenty of good vacation reading left to do. Start with Rosecrans Baldwin’s debut novel. It’s a bright shiny star in the firmament of new fiction.
How many times do you go about your business and then suddenly realize that you can’t remember the last ten minutes? That you had been on autopilot, with your body operating the family car, stopping at lights and pausing for pedestrians while your mind had zipped off to distant canyons and \ gullies of memory and illusion? You’ve arrived safely and no one was hurt thank goodness, but what would happen if you were fully embodied, fully present, each day of your life? Would you see the world differently?
My vote is yes. It’s a fact that we do not cultivate the practice of notice very well. We are bombarded by television, radio, the Internet, literally thousands of messages a day (the gist of which are of the most dire nature by the way, and another reason to unplug) and so it’s natural that we begin to shut down. In many cases, shutting down is a natural mechanism of survival. The trouble is, once you begin to shut out the ugly of the world, you inevitably begin to shut out the beautiful and remarkable and miraculous, too.
Almost no one I’ve ever talked to about it thought their story was interesting. But I’ll bet their story is remarkable. They just stopped noticing the details. They forgot that their life was miraculous in about a million ways. So here’s an idea, write about your life like you don’t own it.
Cultivate an appreciation for each Now that shows up. Now, I reach for my water bottle and the cool liquid slides down my throat. Now, my fingers pull away the skin of an orange. Now, call on inspiration, and she takes my hand and we walk.
As it turns out, the best way to get creative is to get out of your head. Simple? Yes. Easy? Maybe not so much . . .but totally worth it.
Do you remember your first day of school? I remember that I was excited, but I can’ recall more detail than that. I imagine now that when I got home that day, I drove my mom mad with details about amazingly cool! things like chalkboards, desks, coat hangers, paint boxes. No detail was too small, too mundane to be spectacular!
What would it be like if you found everything around you to be new and amazing, if the world was an exciting place to wake up to every day?
We’ve become so conditioned to our habitat, our customs, that we’ve simply stopped noticing anything that appears less than epic. But to a child, a Cheerio is an act of magic! A school bus is a marvel! An artichoke spectacular! Do you sometimes wonder where the wonder went?
No, you are not too old, and unless you really insist, too stuck. You can retrieve it by tuning back in to your enormous and innate powers of observation. They’ve always been there, but over time you got busy, started to ignore them, and they went to sleep from lack of use. No worries, you can get them back by waking them up and putting them to work. Again, and again. Repeatedly.
Our brains have amazing aptitude for recording detail. We hear and see and smell things all the time. We are aware of temperature, texture, weight, balance, language, color, relative safety or danger, constantly. Your conscious brain may be focusing on having a conversation with your hair stylist, but your subconscious, the primitive part of the brain is calculating and recording every detail in a ten foot radius, from the height of the display shelves to the left and the colors of the bottles on them, to your proximity to the door, to the relative humidity of the cool air brushing your skin, to the inflection in your stylist’s voice and whether the smile on her mouth matches the smile in her eyes.
You must think like a reporter. Reporters are trained to see what’s going on, to put the evidence together like pieces of a puzzle, and draw conclusions. You need not come to any grand conclusion from your observations, but observe, you must. You must begin to see the world not in broad strokes; ‘oh, there’s a school,’ and ‘oh see, there’s a dog,’ but in very detailed specifics. Go overboard! Scrape as many details up as you can. You can never be too specific. While you’re looking at the world around you and may be tempted to get lazy and summarize the vista spread like a banquet before you, but don’t fall for that old game. You will surely regret it. You will regret it because you will forget it. You will not remember the exact butterfly pattern on the bobble-head girl’s dress who knocked into the boy at the park playground and made him cry. You will not remember that the scruffy grey dog that dropped a stick at your feet and smelled like week-old salmon and sported one blue eye and one brown. You will not remember that on that particular day, you savored a peach flavor popsicle and that the clouds marched like a row of cream puffs against a sky so blue it made your eyes ache. You will not remember these things and you will not develop a knack for populating your writing with a thousand details unless you begin to flex that muscle of observation and put it to work.
Journal keepers all agree; when you go back and read through the books stacked neatly on your bedroom shelf, when you randomly open a book to a page and scan, it completely brings you back to that day at that cafe in that town, and remember everything about it because on that sultry afternoon fifteen years ago, you sat over an iced coffee, threw crumbs to feed the sparrows, and you wrote in your journal. You took a snapshot of your life -not a fuzzy half-focused one, but an honest to God totally naked look at all the florid details that filled your life for just one miraculous day. You wrote it down as a gift to your future self, and oh my. The sensation of reliving a day you had completely lost track of While you were busy raising children, managing a career, writing a book, caring for parents, making lobster costumes for Halloween parties, baking cookies, loving a spouse, is pure; it is delicious.
Each day is miraculous in about a million ways, but we humans have a short memory. Then another day comes, and the previous day gets tossed into the comer. And then we get another one! And another one! Pretty soon, there are thousands of such days and I don’t care how good your memory is, how many synapses you’ve got firing, how Leica-like your brainpan is, you can’t remember it all. That’s what a journal is for. Grab your journal and before you open it, open your ears and open your eyes. Learn to observe. Be an anthropologist. Be objective. Be brave. Walk into a coffee shop with nothing but a smile and a journal and sit yourself down at a comer table. Situate yourself with your coffee or your tea, and peer into the room around you. I mean, really look. See things like you had never seen them before and you were taking notes to retreat back to your home planet and report on the customs of the natives in your neighborhood. The man at the next table may be wearing glasses and reading a paper. Okay, good details. But what color are his glasses? What shape? Is the paper he’s reading an international journal or a gossip tabloid? The details tell a story. You can say the girl wore a dress. Okay, many girls wear a dress. But ‘the girl word a red dress’ tells us that maybe she’s a little fiery, a bit of a firecracker. When you fill your journal with details, you bring your images alive.
So get out of your comfort zone. Take a vacation from the familiar. Stop acting like you’ve seen and done it all, because cynicism is just boring. Train yourself to see your world like you’ve never seen it before. Begin to pay attention to the details, at least some of the time. Fill your journal pages with the flavors of your exotic life. You may not think your life is anything special, but I bet you dollars to donuts someone on the other side of the planet thinks it’s gosh-darned amazing. So act like it. Act like your life is a rich stew of tasty details, and write them down.
C. Gregory
For thousands of years, we’ve used and reused the same water as the dinosaurs, Galileo, Genghis Kahn, and Jesus. Until now. Now the water is chock full of contaminants that the ancients didn’t even know how to pronounce. That’s because Mama Nature doesn’t know how to remove radionuclides, usually held safely within the earth’s crust, and other chemicals found in the fracking wastewater that’s slowly making its way into Her rivers, lakes, and streams. Until now, we’d been sipping the same stuff as Adam and Eve. Until now.
Enjoy an excerpt from THE QUALITY OF LIGHT:
She died that night. Doc attended the funeral along with dozens and dozens of ranchers and their families all come to pay their respects to this great woman, one of the “stickers” whose family had come in the late-1800s during the first boom and bust era of timbering and mining and oil and construction and who had stayed on to make a living. They worked the land for what it would produce – cattle. So when the time came and they asked if anyone wanted to say anything on behalf of this fine woman, Doc’s hand raised itself, his body stood up, and he took over the funeral.
“Twila’s great-grandfather was thrilled when the first oil men knocked on his door with a check and a promise. They may not have tamed the harsh out of the land, but at least they made it more hospitable. They built roads and paid well, and the ranchers loved them. That was the heyday when oil flowed like free love out of those great big underground reservoirs. Sweet gas, they called it. Back then a whisper could’ve coaxed that oil out of the ground.” To read more of this post, click here…
Persephone Walks
On a bright spring morning, she rises from a long sleep as if from the dead. She sighs, she turns. She slips into yoga pants, the sports bra that fits like wrapping. The smart phone with its Audible Pema Chodron lesson on compassion (because she needs this, she decides and as she listens, realizes that compassion is just the start, chica), and plugged in, walks to the edge of the property, to the edge of the seasonal river. She breathes the sweet, wet, morning air, the fragrance of loam and blackberry blossoms, begins her walk. It is the month of earth day; earth month, and the coincidental interval of her return. This year the timing seems off. The rains have come late. The storms rage larger, a swirl of unpredictability. It’s not her doing, she tells herself. Pema says to make it about herself, that to say it is the other is only illusion. It’s all Bardo, baby. It’s all Hades, honey. It’s all One. We are all Ophelia, we are all Hamlet.
Persephone remembers to breathe and in the rush of air she lets go of the border between her thin skin and the slow river, the rise of moist air warmed by yellow sun, the speckled quail darting for the shadows. This is compassion, she realizes. I am the earth. She is me. Separation is only willful delusion.
“I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place Read more
who doesn’t love a list? as a culture, lists are what we love. just take a look at the front of any magazine at the checkout counter and you will see lists of everything from the best vacation spots in the West . . .to the best way to drop ten pounds. personally, we love books, so here’s a short list of must-read books. just for you. how many have you read? how many can you read in the coming months? this is our challenge: read three. three is any easy list. we promise.
persephone's step-sisters 