One of the poems that I wrote during my most recent “November Write Something Month” stint (“Outward Voyage”) has been accepted for publication in Star*Line during the second half of 2011.
This is working out pretty well as far as actually getting words into lines and stanzas. I heard somewhere that April may be poetry writing month for some. I think I’ll play along, again.
Tuesday afternoon, and the temperature is above zero by 21 degrees. Here inside the gazebo (combination windows, but a deck-type floor), it’s 56 degrees and quite comfortable without a jacket and barefoot (with a long lap quilt to wrap up in). It is nice in the midst of winter to be able to come outside for half an hour or so to soak in the sun and breathe the fresh air.
It has occurred to me, this afternoon, that I really enjoy being me. I keep myself pretty good company. That’s a blessing!
Not that I think I have no faults, you understand. You’d be surprised at how many of those faults I’m aware of. And problems! Yes, I have some of those, too, but I’d much rather have mine, rather than someone else’s.
I also have more than one selective blindness to faults and foibles, one of which has presented itself to me to be dealt with. I have held since childhood, when one year—second or third grade, I believe–I won the drawing for the school classroom Christmas tree, that gambling is not something I should indulge in. Why I put my name into the hat, I’ll never know, and I’m even more mystified by why, having won, I actually accepted it and insisted on taking it home. Our family already had a tree in place for the holidays. There certainly might have been families represented in our classroom to whom the tree would have been welcome; it could have left more money to spare for food or gifts of clothes or toys beneath the tree. But, no, I had to take it home, because I couldn’t figure out what else to do at that point. Ever since, I’ve been torn between hating myself and feeling a lot of sympathy for the younger me at having to deal with the situation with no sympathy or moral guidance.
I had later experiences with games of chance, once I hit high school and ventured further out into the world on my own. There, I found that not winning could run a close second to the problem of winning. It was easier to deal with emotionally, because I wasn’t taking anything away from anyone. Still, the whole thing didn’t set well with me.
The Present
As an adult and with gambling, gaming, and lotteries becoming more accepted, I find the problem more difficult to deal with because it is so insidious. Our ham radio club has a ham fest (radio and electronics flea market…sort of) every year to raise money, and all the tickets (there’s a charge to get in) go into the pot for door prize drawings. I’ve reasoned that away by telling myself that I would be buying a ticket anyway. The club holiday party was a little more touchy, because I actually filled out a ticket for the drawing; the people who put on the parties made sure to buy prizes enough that the youngsters got something, and there were lots of smaller prizes with the intention that almost everyone would go away with something. I am glad we don’t allocate money for party prizes anymore, and I would no longer put in for a chance. For the upcoming ham fest, either I won’t buy a ticket or I’ll withhold the stub from the drawing.
What’s been more complicated for me to deal with is the proliferation of promotions among my friends on the Internet to publicize their books and other items by means of a lottery (random drawing of names). I think that I am inclining toward not taking part in those, anymore, either, just as I would not buy a lottery ticket. It’s still gambling.
This self-examination, which I realize may seem to some like petty nitpicking, has been troubling more for longer than I care to admit without my doing anything about it other than feel vaguely guilty. It came to a head when project I’d been involved in went to a point system like the United Blood Service uses, with so many points per month for taking part in the project (or, as with the blood service, each time I donated a pint of blood), but with a lottery system for distributing extra points.
I don’t like that road as far as its being one to walk down. Wanting to get something for nothing. If I protested the lottery system for the draft and do not participate in the lottery system to fund state projects or gaming establishments to support charities, why would I take part in any other system that requires involvement in gambling, no matter what scale it’s on?
Now, some of the games of chance, the lotteries, the promotions, and other similar devices may well be just in fun and not wrong on an absolute basis, and they may support worthwhile causes, but I have become convinced that they are wrong for me. I am too susceptible to the temptation to justify avarice in myself. A craving to win…to come out on top…to get something for nothing. For me, it’s an issue that needed resolution. It’s just too easy to justify doing the wrong thing and let the justifications spread out, and then start kicking myself about it, again. Better for me to keep completely away from such things.
I have duly recorded my poems for the first three days of November on a limited-access blog. As last year, I am attempting to write a publishable poem each day during November.
This evening, though, I wrote two poems. It doesn’t hurt to have a few extra.
The leaves have turned color much earlier than I would have expected, and the weather during the first part of the month was cool and wet—which I enjoyed. This last week, the daytime temperatures are to return to the mid-70s, and there is no rain in the forecast. That’s just as well, since Al has decided to take a vacation week to get to some of the fall chores.
One of the chores is to figure how to keep the wasps out of the gazebo. It looks to me as though they once more are trying to build a nest in the peak where the ceiling beams meet at the hub. I have stuffed tissues in the cracks to be filled as temporary plugs, and I’ve put the foam blocks into the ventilation spaces between walls and roof.
I shouldn’t think this would be a good place for wasps to winter over. The sun shining into the gazebo warms this small space into the high 30s and even 40s, which must interfere with the insects’ protective winter sleep. Yet I hear them bouncing off the windows as they try to bully their way through the glass. The screens are worse, because they are convinced that just a little more work will see them through to the other side…just a bit more searching, and a hole will certainly be found.
Sometimes I get that way about barriers in life. Just a little more bullying, persistence, searching, persuading, or pretending, and I’ll fight my way through. It’s not that way, though. Every year I have great plans, plans that I almost could have achieved the previous year, and every year I’m just a little less able to carry them out. MCS/fragrance sensitivities do wear on the system, even though I have spent the majority of my life since college graduation avoiding everything and not letting anyone close. During my school years I spent the majority of my time outside of school either out in the woods and fields or locked in my room with a stack of books. During my college years and after, I simply spent a lot of time walking and singing to myself. Jazz songs and songs from Broadway musicals.
Now? I still write, and the frustration at not being able to draw has vanished as I become better at taking photos that speak for me when I have no words.
My vivid imagination may be more of a hindrance than a help, since I am never bored. The world inside my own mind is…not real in the same sense that the outer world is real, but intricate and absorbing in ways that external reality has never been. That may be because I never paid much attention to it. We’ve existed in parallel, I can go through a lot of the motions, but it’s not surprising to me that I spent my early years convinced that I’d been dropped here by people from another world and that someday they would recall where they left me and return. (I’m not surprised to have learned, either, that one of my sisters harbored a similar conviction.) A stranger in a strange land? I wouldn’t know how not to be.
Perhaps "scattered" isn’t the correct word to describe how I am feeling. "Attenuated" might be a more accurate descriptor. My focus stretched between too many competing demands. That statement highlights the existent problem. I am reacting to demands. I am not initiating. In the midst of so much activity, so many stimuli, I have retreated into passivity. Pulling back, these few previous days, has felt good. I want much, much more of this. There are things that I want to do, to focus on, to carry out. Call it "looking for another job"—I need to reconnect with my inner joy and live it out doing what is meaningful to me.
The sun is shining!
I do not know why, when I hear the words “busy bee,” the poem “The Tiger” comes immediately to mind. What I actually recall, once I stop to consider, are the following lines:
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
the first stanza of a poem written by Isaac Watts: “Against Idleness and Mischief.” And following hard on the heels of that first thought, the parallel “How Doth the Little Crocodile” by Lewis Carroll.
The mind makes such odd associations, sometimes!
A lot of my on-line photographer acquaintances have made a move over to RedBubble since the initial troubles with JPG Magazine, a year or so past, and so I also set up an account there, the middle of the week. It has several advantages over my JPG Magazine pages, including a set-up that facilitates replying to comments made on one’s entries, photos, art, and writing. Also, when one uploads saleable pieces to one’s account, they are made available for purchase. Fulfillment’s always been the dreadful thing about selling art. Well, submitting poems to those what publishes ‘em is more dreadful: finding out who publishes the particular genre and flavor; their submission guidelines, schedules; gathering paper, envelope, postage, printed copy, and writing a cover letter (yes, I know I do that part of it for a living, but still…); and keeping track of what has been sent there, when, how long to wait before sending a follow-up inquiry; etc., etc. While the response rate has been very good, that’s not been sufficient to prompt me to go through the process more than a dozen times over the past thirty-six years.
I would then suppose that seeing my work accepted by edited publications is not one of the reasons that I write.
Sometimes it’s really nice to have more than one park to play in…more than one place to write. I have been digging through my old archives, and I found some recipes that I used to have on the web, years ago. I’m thinking that it would be fun to save some of my 15-minute soup lunch recipes on the web, too, so that I can find them, again. Anyway, I uploaded three of my gluten-free dessert recipes to My Kitchen.
April is poetry month, and I have not decided whether I really want to write a poem for each day. Didn’t make it for November, but I came close. If I don’t get one for each day, perhaps I will upload all of them at once to a dedicated “Poetry Month” page. Take some of the pressure off, to write one every day.
My youngest sister is doing well and should be ready to go home, soon. Our mother will undoubtedly feel much more relaxed, once that happens. She was right, evidently, when she said that one never quits being “Mother.” It never ceases to amaze me that so many people are willing and able to commit to parenthood and see it through for almost all of their adult lives. What a calling!
I’ve uploaded a page of photos taken in my home town, mostly older ones. Still hoping to get to family pictures, this spring. Putting some up for my mother on her site has inspired me.