Alexandersmap

    Category: Writing

    • Diligent Awareness (Life as a Poem)

      “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”
      ― Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

      “Imagine that you’re unwell and in a foul mood, and they’re taking you through some lovely countryside. The landscape is beautiful but you’re not in the mood to see anything. A few days later you pass the same place and you say, “Good heavens, where was I that I didn’t notice all of this?” Everything becomes beautiful when you change.” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

      It’s easy to say we should live with awareness, but harder in practice. This business of living demands attention, or rather, distracts our attention from much of the things we’d be focused on if we weren’t so damned busy with that other thing. We forget, sometimes, that life is merely what we pay attention to and everything becomes beautiful when we change. Most of us won’t change or become fully aware, but isn’t it pretty to think so?

      Most don’t want to change, they want to live with what they have, while wishing for more, and do it again tomorrow. When someone does we wonder at their boldness, but don’t connect the dots to doing it ourselves. If we are what we repeatedly do (Aristotle), then doing something completely different strikes at our very identity. No wonder so many refuse to cross that line in the sand.

      “How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can’t slow down? They can’t slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.” ― James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

      The thing is, awareness isn’t about turning our lives upside down, it’s being fully present in the moment. Being open to everything that surrounds us, not just those practical considerations. We aren’t quitting our jobs and living like a hermit in a hot tent when we’re aware, we’re simply inviting more of the universe into our present moment. It seems if we want a more fulfilling life then we ought to fill more of our life with beautiful things.

      I was once a closed young man who thought of poetry as frivolous. Something was missing within me that took years to fill. When you close yourself up the world simply cannot find its way in to fill you. Over time my awareness pendulum has swung wide open. Not coincidently, I write more, listen more, seek more and linger more with the world. When we realize the world exists as a poem, we’re more inclined to dance with its verse.

      “Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

      We expand into the world we create for ourselves through diligent awareness. Knowing what we are, and who we are, is the job of a lifetime. When we open ourselves to everything, we discover more, and we live a bigger life.

    • Sharing Moments, After

      “I’ve never taken a photograph of someone and created a persona, I’ve just discovered what was already there.” ― Anthony Farrimond

      I’ve been known to take a few pictures in my time. As with writing, it helps me focus on the things around me in a way I might not otherwise. I have friends that send me pictures of sunsets that they’re not putting on social media as a reminder that I tend to put a lot of such pictures on social media. I celebrate the ribbing, for it means I’m doing my part to share a bit of beauty and positivity in a world full of people inclined to share ugly and negative. That’s not us, friends. We’re here to light the world during our shift.

      During occasions when family and friends come together, my attention shifts from pictures of nature’s beauty to the beautiful souls around me. There’s a fine line between being a part of the party and being apart from the party, and I try to stay in the moment while capturing some of it. Stopping a conversation for a picture can be disruptive, but if done well it might enhance and draw people together. When done well it captures the illusive and fragile moments we have together. Looking back on pictures from the last few years, it’s striking how many people are no longer with us. We can’t control fate, but we can capture moments before it intervenes.

      At a Christmas Eve party just last night I was talking to someone about some of the settings in an iPhone. They shared a few tips that I immediately started trying. In portrait mode you can tap on someone’s face and everything in the background blurs, highlighting the face or faces you’ve chosen to focus on. It’s a nice trick that brings a measure of professional photography to the amateur. Perhaps my favorite thing about it is that focus. As in an intimate conversation, you’re drawn completely into the world of the person you’re focused on. In such moments we capture something more than the moment, we capture a glimpse into their soul.

      I’m not a great photographer (I know too many great photographers to claim such mastery for myself), but I take enough pictures that I get a few good ones worth sharing. The way I look at it, that picture is a time machine, shared after the moment, carrying life force from one moment to another. That after moment might be turning the image around to show those you’ve just taken a picture of what it looks like, or it might be our great-grandchildren feeling the love through the eyes of a long-lost ancestor. This is the nature of photography, it tends to outlast us.

      As the photographer in such moments, as with writing, one hopes for mastery, but accepts the best we can deliver in the present. Don’t we owe it to each other to capture our best moments together? Having captured an image, it becomes a gift for others in moments after.

    • Delicate Things

      “Why shouldn’t we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music […], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?” — Elizabeth Bishop

      For all the big plans we make, most of our life is lived in routine. This blog is most often fueled by an early rise and a freshly ground cup of coffee. But when routine fails me and I really need to focus on writing or some other work, I put on my noise-cancelling headphones and play the same song on repeat until I’ve completed whatever it was that was getting overwhelmed by the gigantic. No surprise for readers that for me, that song is Wild Theme by Mark Knopfler. You can go right ahead and put it on my playlist when I pass.

      I’ve paired that song with a Scotch whiskey nosing glass filled with sand from Camusdarach Beach, sitting just out of reach of a certain curious cat who loves nothing more than knocking delicate things off of solid places. That beach is one of the stars of another work of art, Local Hero, that elicits eye rolls whenever I mention it to family and friends.

      I still have a water bottle filled with a bit of Walden Pond from a few weeks ago. I’m somewhere between boiling it for a cup of tea and pouring it in the pool, that I might have a bit of Walden around me every time I go for a swim. This might seem odd to the masses, and I respect that, but isn’t it just as odd to fixate on the lives of the Royal Family or to get a Mickey Mouse tattoo? Everyone has something that holds on to them through it all.

      A sprinkling of adventure does a soul good, but so too does the collection of delicate things that quietly surround us and makes us whole. These prove to be more important to us in our daily lives than the bucket list moments. That quiet inventory of art, music, prose and poetry lifts us up when we need them most, keeping us from drowning in the angry sea of everyday.

    • Listen Carefully, Spend Wisely

      Colm Doherty: I just have this tremendous sense of time slipping away from me, Pádraic. And I think I need to spend the time I have left thinking and composing. Just trying not to listen to any more of the dull things that you have to say for yourself.
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: Are you dying?
      Colm Doherty: No, I’m not dying.
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: But then you’ve loads of time.
      Colm Doherty: For chatting?
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: Aye.
      Colm Doherty: For aimless chatting?
      Pádraic Súlleabhain: Not for aimless chatting. For good, normal chatting.
      Colm Doherty: So, we’ll keep aimlessly chatting, and me life’ll keep dwindling. And in twelve years, I’ll die with nothing to show for it, bar the chats I’ve had with a limited man, is that it?
      — Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin

      There’s a darkness in this film that is borne of desperation. The characters react to the bleak reality of their lives in different ways. Colm and Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan Súilleabháin, desperately seek something beyond their relentlessly trivial existence. Pádraic sees nothing at all wrong with living out his days one exactly the same as the one before. And this raises the central question of the film, one we all faced at the height of the pandemic: what are we actually doing with our time? Is this all there is for us, or might we create something meaningful that lives beyond us before we pass? These are questions many of us wrestle with, while others contentedly choose more of the same. We each reconcile our brief dance with the world in our own way.

      These questions are timeless, even if we aren’t. Indeed, this temporary shelf life drives us to find answers. Our old friend Thoreau famously observed in the beginning pages of Walden that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation”. We bear the weight of these questions still, amplified by that realization that time is slipping away. Memento mori, friends. Carpe diem.

      The thing is, we shouldn’t despair at the thought. There ought to be freedom in that realization. We have an opportunity to amplify our living, and make it resonate in our time. We have the opportunity to create something that lives beyond ourselves, something that ripples. Alternatively, we might simply live. Neither choice is wrong, unless we’re quietly telling ourselves it is. The answer for each of us is to listen carefully, and spend wisely.

    • We Are Growing Volcanoes

      “Countless things that humanity acquired in earlier stages, but so feebly and embryonically that nobody could perceive this acquisition, suddenly emerge into the light much later... All of us harbor concealed gardens and plantings; and, to use another metaphor, we are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows—not even God.” — Fredrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

      “I prefer to understand the rare human beings of an age as suddenly emerging late ghosts of past cultures and their powers—as atavisms of a people and its mores: that way one really can understand a little about them. Now they seem strange, rare, extraordinary; and whoever feels these powers in himself must nurse, defend, honor, and cultivate them against another world that resists them, until he becomes either a great human being or a mad and eccentric one—or perishes early.” — Fredrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

      Most of us feel the changes within ourselves, pushing us beyond our previous boundaries. Change is uncomfortable yet necessary, for aren’t we meant to grow? Nurtured or resisted by the host, we learn over time. We are, each of us, growing volcanoes.

      The thing is, the rest of the world doesn’t like volcanoes very much. Who wants volatility and fire? Volcanoes are disruptive. Volcanoes are change agents that turn the landscape upside down. The world wants tranquility and sameness. The world wants us to remain dormant.

      Forget the world. Volcanoes are builders. They create islands where there were once only waves. They create mountains where there was once only thin air. For all the fuss at the time, it isn’t until things cool down a bit that we see just what was created. For the world to grow we volcanoes need to tap into what’s deep inside.

      The very process of becoming is inherently dynamic and disruptive. Nobody feels this more than the volcano. But we must let our creative forces flow or we’re doomed to explode. History is filled with explosive characters who made a real mess of things in their time. We aren’t here to make a mess, we’re here to build something bigger than ourselves. When we let ourselves become what we want to be, that pressure is relieved. Flow is creative expression released. The trick is to flow, not blow.

    • Cultivating Discernment

      “The task of the craftsman is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.” — Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining

      “Just as we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about how all those poets out there are going to monetize their poetry, the same is true for most bloggers.” — Seth Godin

      At some point, several years ago, I was finally convinced to just begin writing a blog. At some point, not very long after that moment, I finally understood that the best reason to write a blog was to cultivate the art of writing better and the art of discernment. The two go hand-in-hand, and combined make us more engaged and active participants in living.

      The habit stuck, the streak continues, the writing may even be improving, but if there’s anything that has improved exponentially in these years of posting it’s honing that art of discernment. We learn to observe nuance and craft something of it. And then? Do it again the next day.

      There are very successful bloggers out there who have developed a large base of followers, subscribers and subsequently, advertisers. This is not one of those blogs. This is an act of discernment, cultivated daily. I suppose that in itself may be successful enough.

    • A Walk Around Walden Pond

      A visit to Walden Pond can be immersive, if you go at the right time. Many people go in summer to swim and enjoy the pristine water. Many fish for large mouth bass and other prizes. But the pilgrims go to visit Henry David Thoreau’s famous pond and the woods surrounding it. I’ve watched the place change over the years, but the pond and woods remain largely as Thoreau would recognize.

      You must treat a brief visit to Walden as you would a visit to a nightclub with a cover charge. There’s a flat fee of $30 USD to park. That applies for an hour or the entire day. There’s a lower fee, apparently, for Massachusetts residents. I suppose you can also opt for other ways to get to Walden Pond, but this was the simplest way to spend time at a place. The area surrounding Walden Pond is a mix of highway, commuter railroad (as it was in Thoreau’s time), capped landfill and houses increasingly further out of reach for someone choosing the lifestyle of the person who made this place famous.

      Early December is considered late autumn, but my visit felt more mid-autumn, with temperatures warmer than they should be this time of year. Henry David Thoreau would have shaken his head, I think, at some of the same behavior he observed in his day leading to the climate change we’re experiencing today but generally sitting on our hands about. But it made for a lovely day to walk around the pond.

      There is a well-defined path around the pond. It’s maintained and easy for most walkers to navigate. They make you feel like you’re in a cattle chute for much of it, with wire strung on each side of the path to keep wanderers from straying off the path. Signage explains this as erosion control measures. As a hiker of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, I’m all too familiar with the impact of popularity on trails and the surrounding landscape. I stay to the path, liberated from the freedom to wander, I instead focused on the environment around me.

      You can hear the world encroach on you at Walden. Distant highway sounds, construction, sirens, airplanes flying overhead and the commuter train all remind you that you’re in a suburb of Boston. It’s best to acknowledge this, but let it go as Thoreau let the train go as it went past in his time. The landscape is largely preserved, the water clear, awaiting those who would linger.

      When I was younger, there was no visitor center, but there was a bath house. At some point well before I came into this world some well-meaning people decided that the best way to save Walden Pond was to make it a recreation center. So a bath house was built, beach sand extended and you had a destination for family recreation. Thoreau’s cabin is on the opposite shore from the bath house, but it’s the first thing you see when you walk down the visitor parking lot. You’re either at peace with it or not, but it’s relatively benign in the off-season.

      Walden Woods extend well beyond the perimeter of the pond, and we can thank people like Don Henley for their commitment to preservation. Generations of developers find a way to squeeze as much money as they can from resources, and there are plenty of people who would turn the place inside out and up. There’s a place for development in this world, but there ought to be a place for preservation too.

      I’d brought a water bottle with me on the walk, warm day that it was, and decided in a moment of inspiration to fill it with water from Walden Pond. Thoreau drank straight from the pond in his day, I’m not inclined to do that without a filter. Instead, I brought the water with me for another pilgrimage. Just across that highway is the center of Concord, where Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson lived. Just beyond the center is the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, site of Author’s Ridge, where Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott and others are buried. I stopped for a brief visit on Author’s Ridge, told of my visit to his old cabin site, and poured Henry a sip of Walden Pond. Cheers Henry.

      Walden Pond
      A view of the pond just down the hill from Thoreau’s cabin site. This is similar to the view he would have had.
      Pile of stones next to the cabin site. I’m not loving it, but cairns are how people seem to express themselves. The site to me feels like a construction site, cleared and ready to build.
      The cabin site is surrounded by granite pillars to denote the position and size of the cabin.
      Creative cairn art rising out of Walden Pond.

    • Learn to Reawaken

      “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      How rare is the poetic or divine life today? It’s hard to say. In talking to people, there is a distinct lack of engagement in the workforce. A lack of inspiration for putting yourself into things, no passion for the work, a going through of the motions that must be reconciled. If one in a hundred million souls were sparked by the poetic or divine in Thoreau’s time, I wonder what the ratio is now?

      Do we linger in a post-pandemic stupor? Is it a generational change as the kids raised with iPhones and social media and gaming become the primary fuel that powers economic and cultural life? Is it older generations, churned and manipulated, poked and prodded, finally having enough? Is it the relentlessly obvious climate change impacting everything while seemingly nothing is done about it? It makes you want to sail away sometimes, especially when you see how much fun those who did are having. But there’s inspired work to be done still, and clearly a need for more of us to lift others.

      We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. We each have purpose in this lifetime that must be fulfilled. To do otherwise is to live in quiet desperation, as Henry would point out. But how do we keep ourselves awake in such a noisy, conflicted and demanding world? He showed the way, didn’t he? Walk away from the noise, find a quiet place to contemplate your place in the world and pay attention to what happens to you. He didn’t travel very far himself (his friends would take the short walk to visit him, and he them). Mostly, solitude is turning off the electronic babysitter and the insistent chatter of the uninspired and listening to yourself. Writing it all down surely helps.

      Thoreau has always been my grounding rod. When I become disenchanted or feel that quiet desperation stirring inside or have simply had enough of the loud talkers in my world I return to Thoreau’s work, or visit his grave, or take a pilgrimage to Walden. He remains a voice of reason in an unreasonable world, speaking universal truths like so many time travelers. Their spark forever awake, forever informing, forever a beacon to light the way even as their physical selves forever rest.

      From where do we derive hope and an infinite expectation of the dawn? Answers are inclined to find us. Don’t let its whisper be drowned out in the noise.

    • Our Best Work

      “I want to see your best work. I’m not interested in your new work.” — Jerry Seinfeld

      A couple of days ago I read a newsletter that contradicted Seinfeld’s quote about. The writer premise was that one should accumulate readers, and the best way to do that was to always have the newest and freshest content up top. There’s merit in this, I suppose, if your newest and freshest content is your best work. In a perfect world where we continue to evolve and grow as artists, this might be true. I don’t live in a perfect world, do you?

      Based on average likes per day, my greatest hits collection plays far better than most of my current work. I’m not exactly Joan Didion or The Beatles, we surely agree, but they too had work after their greatest hits that didn’t peak as high. It’s natural for us to have peaks and valleys in our creative work, while climbing ever higher. Some peaks we’ve previously attained rise above where we currently are. This is either an albatross or a simply a milestone. I haven’t broken 6 minutes on a 2000 meter erg piece since my early 20’s, but that doesn’t stop me from rowing. It should be the same for our creative work, don’t you think?

      The thing is, we all want to see our best work emerge from whatever it is we’re working on. We aren’t here to waste time, we’re here to do something with our time. That something ought to measure up to the greatness we aspire to. When it does, it tells some small percentage of the world, but mostly ourselves that we’ve done something bigger than we previously thought possible. That becomes something to build on, whether we reach it again or not.

      When we accumulate a body of work, some of it will naturally rise to the top. The aspiration, it seems, is to reach a higher plane, where consistent greatness resides. But don’t trust me on this one, for I’m merely a work in progress. Best to find out for yourself and let me know.

    • Keeping Streaks Alive

      Even when you have no energy, no mental clarity, and no motivation for such things. Sometimes you’ve simply gotta push through anyway. Sometimes the best we can do is just put something out there, and hope for better days ahead. Knowing that this too shall pass.. but the streak remains intact.