Posts Tagged ‘writing’
Not Thinking
Some people use meditation to clear their minds. Shut out the thoughts. What fun, I thought, …without thinking.
There is a trick that writers can use to stop all thoughts. Here’s how it works. First, sit down at the keyboard. Well, that’s about it. That’s all it takes.
BOOM! The mind is blank.
It’s like magic.
But that didn’t happen to me today. Nope.
Okay, it did. But I got over it. The day is dawning with a zero degree (F) chill, but otherwise quiet. We don’t have a lot going on today, beyond the wonderfully entertaining chicken jigsaw puzzle and keeping a cozy fire burning in the fireplace. Tomorrow we expect it to start snowing and Sunday I plan to shovel and plow.
I saw a news item about conspiracy theorists (paranoid delusionists) seeing “signs” in a variety of ways and places and it has me thinking two things. Part of me laughs over how many signs could be found everywhere we look and a more mischievous part of me wants to start putting out some secret signs of my own for people to discover.
Not sure what I could point them to. Love, I suppose. Maybe I could start a conspiracy that everything is about love and there are signs supporting it everywhere! You just have to look for them.
Think about it.
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Evading Capture
The mind moves so much faster than words. Thoughts are like delicate athletic dances as compared to the awkward stumbling of sentences and paragraphs. In the blink of my right eye, indescribable realizations swirl through my head, launching emotions and chemical responses throughout my body in immeasurable doses before a single word begins to form in my mind.
Conversely, at the times when my busy brain is babbling on with endless mindless verbiage, the words appear from an absence of actual thought. There are no images playing. The screen is simply blank. Words are heard, not seen.
As I write this, there are delectable aromas of home-baked apple crisp wafting from the kitchen. It’s distracting. The scrumptiousness defies description, but my mind knows how to interpret it and launches into one of those delicate dances. It’s a joyful dance.
It’s a dance my sugar addiction is very fond of.
My taste buds have no complaints about it, either.
Before I finished writing this post, Cyndie presented a sample, hot out of the oven. `A la mode.
This batch tasted even better than it smelled. I’d describe it to you, but, well… you know.
Think about love. Let that ethereal concept dance through your mind and you will have a vague sense of my apple crisp and ice cream experience.
Mmmm. See if that evades your capture.
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Incredible Person
There are some things I find difficult to write about, even though writing my thoughts is what I am most often inclined to do. It’s been on my mind for some time that I should consider writing something to honor my father-in-law, Fred Friswold, but the task seemed too daunting. How could I do justice to such a heroic specimen of a human being? Especially when I know some of his flaws.
Well, in the end, I understand that attempting to do justice counts about as much as actually achieving it. And, his flaws are few and rather frivolous.
I’ve already written about the fact I won the jackpot in the in-law lottery. That tells much about the way I feel to have had the privilege of being granted the highest honor of becoming a member of the Friswold family.
Fred Friswold was an incredible person. Often, the first thing people think of about Fred is the robustness of his greetings and the reverberating heartiness of his laugh. It seemed an incredible injustice that his voice was taken from him in the last months of his life. However, not once did I witness him give in to self-pity or anger over the loss.
Suddenly we found ourselves needing to quiet down and look to him in order to hear what he had to say. It became an endearing thing to process the sound of his whispers. It has made the sound of his raucous pronouncements and booming guffaws all the more precious in our memories.
In the absence of my own father, who died shortly after I married Cyndie at my ripe old age of 22, it was Fred who became my reference for figuring out how to be a husband and a dad. It didn’t make things easy for me. When I struggled to navigate challenges that required repair around the house, realizing I didn’t know how to fix things the way my dad did, Cyndie would suggest we do what her dad did. Look in the Yellow Pages.
The man knew his limitations. Not that he didn’t tackle a few of his own do-it-yourself projects. He painted their house once. And, accidentally, a little of the neighbor’s house next door, too, using a sprayer. He must have liked spray painting. Late in life, he enlisted my labor to do a quick job of painting a new baseboard around their deck. Wouldn’t take long. He had all the stuff necessary for the job.
A can of spray paint. I spent 90-minutes taping up newspaper to protect the light-colored siding from the dark brown deck for the 10-minute job of painting.
One thing Fred never did was make me feel like I didn’t belong or wasn’t meeting his expectations, despite his high regard for academic achievement and career accomplishments. I didn’t receive the frequent queries seeking to hear what the 5-year plan was. Maybe a few “What did you do for your country today?” queries, but if my answer was that I rode my bike a respectable distance, he found a way to work with that.
Of course, we are absolutely heartbroken that his life has reached its end, but it pains us even more that it has happened at a time of the pandemic when we are unable to gather the throngs who also knew and loved him in order to process our shared grief.
Fred Ravndal Friswold was a truly incredible person for whom my words are insufficient to adequately describe.
He was an endearingly loud person who went out in a whisper.
We will, and do already, miss him in the extreme.
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Slowing Down
I’m going to try something new. With apologies to those of you who have told me how much you enjoy checking in every morning to read or view my daily “relative somethings,” I have decided to readjust my energies to free up time that I have been holding in reserve every day for over a decade.
I am not going to commit to how this change will play out, other than to announce that I am moving away from my old priority of striving to assure a new post every single day. This isn’t the first time I have considered making this sort of change, so I already have some ideas I may try out going forward.
One possibility I have favored in the past would be to post a single picture. That seems like it wouldn’t take much time. However, I have learned from experience that my picture-taking often goes in spurts and days can pass when I don’t get out with the camera. If I committed to posting a daily picture, I would still be in the mode of reserving some time every day to achieve that.
There are also fewer daily stories to tell about our adventures here since we returned the horses and Wintervale activity has dwindled, so, to spare you repeating versions of ‘me walking Delilah’ or ‘me plowing snow’ (two things that have commanded my time and energy recently), allowing some quiet time between tales will hopefully germinate new content of more intriguing substance.
One can hope.
Of course, one other option I considered was to just cease blogging altogether, but being so “all-or-none” extreme was an older trait of mine that has softened with time. There is no reason I can’t keep this blog space open for use as more of a periodical. Weekly? Monthly?
Who knows?
That sort of mystery is one of the fun aspects of creativity. I will be creative about slowing down my rate of publishing posts.
Before I step away for my initial pause from daily posting, I’ll leave you with two images that made their way onto the SD memory card late yesterday afternoon…
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No critters were harmed in the recording of that adventure (but not for lack of intent).
I’ll be back before long. In the meantime, send your precious love out into the world during the minutes you would have been perusing new Relative Somethings in the days ahead.
Namaste.
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Ferocious Feline
Settling into an upright seated recline on my side of the bed, I positioned my laptop across my legs as Pequenita jumped up to join me. It was time to do some writing, but not before the obligatory routine of granting our feline her daily intense head-to-toe scratching. If I don’t grant her my full attention right away, she begins a pattern of looping around my computer screen over and over again until I change my mind and adjust my priority.
Of course, eventually, I give in. Soon, Pequenita is in a trance of purring while I grind my fingernails across the loose folds of the back of her neck and drag them over her eyes and down her nose. She seems completely willing to stay and receive this attention indefinitely, but my alternative agenda usually brings the lovefest to an end.
As I reach for the keyboard, ‘Nita will stroll away to the end of the bed and give me back my space. Often, after I have entered my own trance of typing and thinking, the calm will be broken by the sudden appearance of “Attack-Cat!” Either it will be my toes under a blanket or a fabric project on Cyndie’s lap that becomes the target of our ferocious feline’s wide-eyed aggression, so we are quickly forced to take evasive action in avoidance of an incidental over-application of a sharp claw in her zeal.
Occasionally, our defense involves a scramble for the laser pointer to give Pequenita an alternative target.
Sometimes, I get back to what I had intended to write about. Other times, I just tell the story that happened instead.
rrrrrreeooOOWWW!
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Beyond Mowing
The time of mowing is upon us in multiple ways. Beyond the usual routine of cutting our lawn grass, the big tractors are finally hitting the local fields to cut hay. The neighbors who are renting our fields knocked down the tall grass in opposite corners of our property recently, leaving a very noticeable line of uncut growth along the fenceline that Cyndie tackled with our power trimmer.
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Despite all the mowing going on, Cyndie continues to pull off a heroic amount of raspberry picking which naturally led to canning jam. Since she was going to be in that canning mode, she also made a trip to a local strawberry grower to pick a bulk of that jam favorite, as well as a stop at the grocery store for a couple of bags of cherries.
Even though canning jam deserves to be a single focus task, Cyndie chose to merge it with preparations to drive to Northfield, MN, for a mini-reunion with visiting Hays relatives. There, we uncovered a treasure trove in my sister Mary’s files of family newsletters from the days before the internet took over communication.
I don’t remember writing all those annual reports detailing our children’s school years, but reading back over those missives now gives me the impression I have been writing the equivalent of this daily blog for longer than just the ten years I’ve been posting here on Relative Something. In fact, the old family newsletter was called, “Relatively Speakin’.”
Seems to be a certain congruency there, no?
Who knows what lies ahead for this relative crew? It won’t surprise me if it ends up involving less mowing, but I doubt I will ever stop writing about whatever is happening in all of our lives.
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Words
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they are just words
but you can’t write them fast enough
because they flow
like lyrics in a song
that everybody already knows
even though they only remember
two lines of the chorus
because the verses wander
all over the map
about kittens and deforestation
cloth diapers, crime, and comedy
lightning, goal celebrations
vegan recipes and political tragedy
ghosts, authors, fancy makeup
chainsaws and Ultimate Frisbee
cyber insecurity, false witness
lost love and fortunes found
like a blog roll of unending topics
scrolling down a glowing screen
ideas on how to make millions with ease
or at least to transform
this world
into a better place
than it could ever possibly be
through song
sing along
with incandescent harmony
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Another Thought
Well, tomorrow brings another thought. And, yesterday’s tomorrow, is today’s today. I have another thought this morning about how I might respond to the milestone of completing ten years of daily blogging. What if I did it for ten more? That’s another way to look at this interesting opportunity.
It has definitely become a comfortable habit that continues to offer me multiple benefits, and occasionally, surprising rewards. Also, by writing about my life every day, I avoid accumulating a build up of some wild idea about someday writing an autobiography.
I should try an experiment where I choose a memory from my past which I have already chronicled here years ago, and write a fresh version to compare how different they might come out. Last night, Cyndie and I met our friends, Barb and Mike for a fine dinner out in Red Wing, MN. One of our conversations touched on the fact that memories get reshaped a little each time we recollect them.
One way I have been contemplating a recognition of ten years of Relative Something is to mine the archives for a variety of gems from years ago and repost them anew. I’ve also begun seeking possibilities for resurrecting a couple of my old “games.” One involved guessing images from an extreme closeup, and another required readers to conjure their own picture in their minds from a description I write. A day later, I provide the picture I was describing for comparison.
Meanwhile, there is no shortage of new stories worth telling happening every day around here. The flooding wasn’t catastrophic for us, but it still caused me more anguish than I care to experience. I think part of that came from the fact that Cyndie was dealing with it alone, while I was so far away at work during the days.
The days of rain have passed and the return of below freezing nights has eased the worst of flowing water for now, but there is still a ton of snow yet to melt, so who knows how long this will last.
The horses were absolutely heroic in allowing Cyndie to guide them out of the barn through the standing water without panicking over the scary reflections and sounds, of which they have had little exposure in their time with us. They’ve dealt with a lot of mud over the years, but rarely, if ever, been asked to traverse water over their ankles.
Oh, the horses.
Man, we are going to miss the horses.
There will be much to write about with the pending re-homing of our herd, but it’s hard for us to even think about, let alone put into words. Maybe that contributes to my pondering the idea of ceasing to write.
If you know me, that is a pretty unlikely result. Writing is how I best process my thoughts.
Here’s to the possibility of ten more years of somethings you might find relative.
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Who’s Counting
Who’s counting? Apparently, I am. Today marks the 10-year anniversary of Relative Something. My first post here was March 15, 2009, after my son, Julian, recommended that I create a blog to chronicle my planned trek in the Himalayan mountains to best share my stories of the great adventure for friends and family to follow.
I’ve posted almost every day since.
Now, on this anniversary, I’m faced with a computer problem that has me stuck poking letters on my phone to compose these thoughts. It’s humbling, to say the least.
The barn has flooded and I am brooding after trying futilely to influence the water to drain around instead of through.
There is a new lake where our back pasture used to be.
The troublesome weather has sapped my energy.
We are back to dealing with icy conditions, as the temperature has dropped below freezing once more.
I had visions of composing some deep review of what ten years of writing daily has been like for me.
Instead, I’m now wondering if this ten-year milestone might be a time for closure on this chapter of my daily memoir project.
We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
Please stand by.
Latest Word
I have a habit of getting stuck on a pattern of frequent reuse of a particular word. The latest word that I’ve noticed –usually it happens without my being aware– is “gorgeous.” In terms of a hot August day at the lake, the word is well suited to describe yesterday.
After a lazy soak in the lake, Cyndie and I lost ourselves in an over-fascination with picking rocks that grabbed our fancy.
“I like this one.”
“Oooh, look at this!”
“Here’s one for you.”
In the water, they look so shiny and bright. Cyndie brings up a pile of them to keep, all of which tend to turn into much less spectacular stones after they’ve dried.
I like shapes and textures. Tear drop and smooth.
Both of our eyes are drawn to the ones with lines of different color layers.
I noticed an urge to break some open to get another view of the layers. That thought brought back a memory of hammering different colored stones to dust with my siblings to make layered sand art jars.
I remember thinking those always turned out gorgeous.
And for the record, this August weather totally rocks!
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Relative Something 