the sweet slowness of it all

Mountain and Hay Bales by Karen Dawson

Slow blogging is speaking like it matters, like the pixels that give your words form are precious and rare. It is a willingness to let current events pass without comment. It is deliberate in its pace, breaking its unhurried stride for nothing....  -Todd Sieling



this thing, this thing right here, has turned into an exceedingly slow creature, a slow blog that's like a slow jog, ambling along the countryside at a leisurely pace, a pace that allows it to enjoy the scenery and hear itself think without panting or huffing or puffing—or maybe, to be honest, with just a minimal amount of panting/huffing/puffing—without getting too sweaty, wearing out its knees, developing shin splints.

it can take its sweet time. please throw away the clocks! it may remain silent, if it wishes, for days, weeks or months. yesterday's aha moment remains suspended, on the verge of something, like all moments that hover on the quivering edge waiting to be written down, to be bestowed or, if not bestowed, that are left to fall away, unspoken for yet another day.

payment, please

one day it's warm, the next day it's cold. a little bit of rain, then a dusting of snow. the grass is green, the trees are naked. i have to stop to let three wild turkeys cross the road while en route to my annual mammogram appointment.

i pull into the parking lot of the new medical building in yarmouth. the macadam in this lot was rolled out black and slick onto a farmer's derelict field. a red barn still stands as proof of the old ways, a beacon hailing from more than a hundred years ago in the middle of tall, withered grass. without the barn, i would have no idea that this had been land that produced, that made something out of nothing. the farmer's acreage still produces, only now it produces housing developments, a gas station, and the medical office i am about to go into. the red barn is in good condition, obviously loved by someone. a smidgen of pastureland remains, clinging to the old barn like a child afraid to let go of its parent.

have you noticed there is no photo to go along with my story today? the powers that be at blogger have informed me that i am out of luck, i am at the end of the road, that i have run out of space.* odd thing is, i never knew i had space to begin with, let alone that i could run out of it. they are demanding payment for photo storage. don't quite know what i'll do next.

my medieval torture session over, i harbor gloomy thoughts as i exit, maneuvering along the pavement of the parking area under dismal gray skies.



*has anyone else been told they are out of space and will have to pay up to post their photos? one blogger i know has been doing this a lot longer than i have and has always posted photos, too. she received no such notice.

this missive: pulverized scabs

when abigail got down on her knees with her head bowed low, it could easily have been assumed—given the circumstances—that she was about to pray, that she was yet another whispering supplicant begging for a merciful god to save her children from a deadly epidemic. but the fact of the matter was she was on her knees searching—the praying would come later—bending over the floorboards muttering about the piece of thread she had inadvertently dropped—and the physician urgently needed—for the planned inoculation against smallpox in her boston household.

abigail adams made the decision in favor of inoculation on her own; her husband, john, was on a diplomatic mission overseas and already inoculated. besides, she knew he believed in its benefits. his wife was determined to take the risk of having herself and their four children deliberately infected in the hope of causing a mild case, rather than wait in fear for the disease to attack with its full fury.

by candlelight, after the children were tucked safely in bed, she inked pages and pages to john, unburdening her soul of doubts and fears and daily dramas, sometimes adding her dry humor or a quip about the shortages they suffered in 1776—god grant that we all may go comfortably thro the distemper, the phisick part is bad enough i know[....] a little india herb would have been mighty agreeable (suggesting john should place an order and get the damn tea home in a hurry)—until her hand ached and she put down her quill. her nights continued to be sleepless.

such a simple thing, and yet how frightening, this new medical procedure called inoculation: drag a piece of thread through the pulverized scabs and pus from the sores of an infected person, make a tiny incision in one who is healthy, and dip the bacteria-laden thread into it. done. wait for the arrival of pocks.

fat dispatches—paper covered with the sometimes blotchy markings of her dense script—held abigail's hopes and dreams and insecurities—and, at times, her deep loneliness and despair; they contained the passionate expression of her copious thoughts which ranged across the war and the children and the news of scabs and fever, but also other endless details from the management of her home and farm: the buying and selling of livestock, hiring help, construction projects, purchasing seed and equipment, planting and harvesting, drought and flood. details, details.

in past centuries, these missives were bound and sealed with wax and came to rest in the belly of a ship's wooden hull, sailing months upon the sea in the hopes of landing safely in europe or some other distant place.

i don't have a quill—but i have a keyboard. as i write i wonder what would abigail make of a keyboard? what would she think of my online missives—of all our online missives? would she think oh how i could have written! and exclaim oh, how wonderful! to have my thoughts and my news passed on fresh, not dreadfully outdated, by using this unimaginably timely mechanism, and to know that one's words will not be lost to the bottom of the sea but will be read and understood and that someone, hopefully, will find they matter and be glad to read them.

our words—the many, many viewpoints describing the funny, sad, reflective, exuberant, poignant, interesting, happy, thoughtful, crazy, introspective slices of our own lives—don't encounter the old dangers of mail delivery that awaited ships sailing on the high seas, or the perils pony express riders ran into crossing the great plains and the high sierra, or even the small problems of the modern day postman or UPS employee who must also brave weather and, occasionally, barking—and quite possibly biting—dogs.

in our century, words are mostly safe. in this, our unusual correspondence, the written tradition lives on and our "letters" journey free and easy, zinging across incredible distances through cyberspace where, in fact, there is no such thing as distance. instead of sinking or burning or being lost forever in a snowy mountain pass, our missives are transmitted instantaneously for the whole world to see. the snippets of our lives—the rendering of these astonishing pieces of minutiae, these bits of pulverized scabs—remain intact.

hit the orange rectangle and it's done.

you see? isn't that something? this missive—and yours, too—has already arrived.

beyond the hum and glow

are you really my friend?

in portland, maine, at the portland museum of art, photographer tanja alexia hollander is attempting to address that question through a photographic view of her cyberspace friends. ed and i went over on saturday afternoon and took a look .

hollander asks: who are my friends? are cyber friends real friends, even those people i've never spoken to face to face? her focus is on the cyberspace world of facebook, specifically her own hundreds and hundreds of facebook friends—old friends, new friends, professional friends, deep connections and the more superficial ones, and finally the friends she has never laid eyes on before, friends she has never met in person.

when i first see the words friends she has never met in person i immediately want to slap some quotes around the word friends in that context. how can someone you don't know, someone whose eyes you've never looked at except, perhaps, in a photograph, possibly be a friend? but i stop myself and don't end up adding the quotation marks after all because i am beginning to see there is value in some of those friendships in the internet realm. hollander, too, is basically optimistic about the power of social networks.

hollander traveled all over the united states—eventually she'll travel the world—on "a modern day odyssey" to visit and photograph a fraction (200 photos) of her facebook friends and "collapse the intangibility of cyberspace"for this, her first, exhibition called are you really my friend? during her trip she met many of those friends for the very first time. her project idea was to reach across time and space to physically connect with friends she knows well and friends she doesn't know at all except for on a computer screen.

this exhibition is nothing like the usual "please do not touch"deal in art museums—this exhibition is hands-on, and that's always a treat. some of the old school portraiture (she used a hasselblad)—high focus, wide depth of field, long exposure, deadpan expressions—of hollander's fb friends are magnetized to walls so you can touch them and move them and group them and rearrange them any way you want (which i did) in your exploration of what it means to be a friend. for example, you might put images of people who were photographed with their dogs in one group, couples in another, people in their living rooms in another, or make a cluster out of folks in their kitchens. or you could sort them by age groups or sex.

in her exploration of the meaning of friendship hollander invites visitors to answer her questions—which change regularly and are posted on a wall like a fb wall—including how important is face time? how has social media made you more social? which are collected by using sticky notes and attaching them on the wall.

the day we were there the question was can you be friends with someone you have never met? many of the answers were yes and of course. there were a lot of it depends.  

an exhibition like this is certainly thought-provoking. plenty of ponderable questions are raised: are the friends we meet on the internet real friends? can cyber friend connections become real and personal? (i am only talking about adults here, not teenagers talking to strangers—that's a whole other (scary) topic altogether.) and, taking it even further, are the people on fb and blogs even real? how can we tell if they, and the subjects they write about are real (unless, of course, it's labeled fiction) or merely inventions, their worlds complete fabrications?*

the answer is we can't. without doing what hollander did—visiting every friend (i would love to do that)—there is no way to be absolutely sure, is there? it's freaky and bizarre that there are people who live in a make-believe land they pass off as real, and they would have to be freaky and bizarre people, or just unimaginably pitiful and lonely and craving attention.

final thought: you know, i believe if you read a person's words long enough, and their voice breaks through loud and clear, you won't have to suffer being repulsed by the smell a fake, but you will instead be able to sniff out and recognize the scent of someone genuine. there is a body living beyond the computer's hum and glow: flesh and blood make words on a screen and, conversely, words on a screen make flesh and blood—blood that flows warm and red but also circulates its own hum and glow back through a distinctly true heart.

*note ~ have you now been totally spooked into wondering if i am even real? i can tell you yes, i am really real. really. (and i am sure you are too.) you have my word on that. what, my word's not good enough? then pack up the wife or husband and come down east to maine for a visit and see for yourself.

slumming it

and here i was, getting good and comfortable in my cramped, humble, but always well-lit abode down a remote and unheard of lane called sweet whisper dreams, when i happened to read something that i already knew to be true deep down in my heart of hearts, in my soul of souls, but was avoiding like a plate of okra and haggis.

i had slipped off my shoes and curled up on the sofa with a blanket and a cup of steamy tea intending to relax and lose myself in a novel (something by joyce carol oates or ian mcewan) or the new book about the civil war, midnight rising by tony horwitz, but first i decided to open my laptop and check out what was happening in cyberspace. i read a new post by a charming brit—a darling of mine—who, in his post, reminded his readers of the harshness of the world in which we creative writing types of bloggers live—creative writing being that warehouse of stuff including the almost infinite forms of fiction, non-fiction, personal essay, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting, etc.

the truth can be cruel, but i am i firm believer in facing the truth, in facing reality head on when it makes itself obvious. therefore, i carefully studied his honest and well-crafted sentences and tried to be brave and tough—which for some, possibly genetic, reason i pretty much am—and not get too many knots in my neck and stomach. turns out there are many people who think you and i, fellow bloggers, are slumming it in our crummy little blog homes because we do not reside in an expensive landscape-company-tended, exotic-tree-filled, rolling-perfection-of-a-golf-course-lawn mcmansion called the novel.

hot dog, typing that last sentence felt good.

to those who think a blog filled with creative writing is not, in fact, "real writing"and who say when's your book gonna be finished? and you must be spending your time here in blogville just "killing time" until your [nonexistent] novel is done (we've all heard those comments) i say, loud and clear, excuse me people, i am hardly killing time but reviving it, resuscitating it, breathing life into it with my diligently sought-after words. frankly i don't give a damn what other people think because i enjoy what i do in my blog. i want to write, need to write, as much as i can; i want to write what i want to write, and i want to write what i enjoy writing while i still have breath left in me. above all, my motto is a girl just wants to have fun and that's exactly what i'm having right here, and i must say i am tickled to be surrounded by like-minded folks who are also really into slumming it.

that, too, felt awfully, awfully good.

surgeons and blogs

thank you dr. asherman for prescribing pain meds after my foot surgery last year which caused me, as i was flying oh-so-high, to think "a blog, what fun! what's a blog?"

thank you christina for suggesting i ought to look at jill's blog to help relieve my boredom ( right leg in a cast, no driving for 8 weeks) and to find the answer to my nagging question "what's a blog?" you are a sweet and thoughtful niece.

thank you jill for answering that infernal question and for being supportive. your blog inspired me to start my own blog. good to see you this weekend and congrats (again) on your engagement. your ring is awesome.

i ask you, where has the year gone?

the writing room

i'm flying off for a few days (but i'll still be posting) and i've got to finish packing my bag, but i thought i would write a note about this little digital place i occasionally inhabit. shhh.....don't tell my husband, but i am still having a love affair with words. i can't get enough of them! words move, excite, grab me, fascinate me, dazzle me, make me go weak in the knees, and at times make my head hurt. i fell into this nook on the web to gush about the glorious state of maine, to express my thoughts and observations, to utter rhapsodies about the lushness (and brutality) of nature, to weave stories as they pop into my head - hopefully something more substantial than the i-drank-a-great-cup-of-tea-and-ate-a-hot-scone-two-seconds-ago kind - and, quite simply, to have some fun.

in general i don't hang out in the big web much; frankly, i am not often connected to the cyber world. i'd rather be outside enjoying the fresh maine air; or heading out on the road; or hanging out with the family; or laughing with friends at gritty's; or reading a good book or my hot-off-the-press copy of the new yorker; or i'd rather be scribbling ideas in little notebooks and on scraps of paper.

when i do find myself stuck in the web (at times it's an awful struggle to get out!) i manage to read a few noteworthy blogs. i like ones which offer up great writing and which are often poignant, introspective or humorous—especially longer pieces of writing. there's some incredibly eloquent stuff out in blog land. the brits seem to have a good thing going, with posts that are thoughtful, humorous and well written. evocative. ah, only in the land of shakespeare.......

i like my quiet, simple bloggy home. some nice faithful readers drop by; they aren't necessarily "followers" and they hardly ever comment (are they either shy or left speechless by my scribbles?), but they are out there and i appreciate them. i hope when they visit they are entertained or amused, or they like what they see and read, or they are a little moved by my more serious and reflective posts.

so hello to you my dears. do come on in, grab a seat, get comfortable, take a peek and join me. that's great. welcome, welcome. i like some company after all. and i'll be right here, happily gathering my thoughts, taking a few pictures as i travel around in maine and elsewhere, and writing, writing. as long as i keep having something to say (!) and as long as i keep having fun saying it, i'll stay right here in my online "room."

this is just my own little place, my writing room, to be myself, to do my thing - a little bit of this and a little bit of that....exploring, observing, asking questions, stretching my brain, tossing around ideas and opinions, dreaming up stories (some are fiction, some are not), happily creating with words.....all for the love of writing.

the perfect name

sitting framed on a shelf in the kitchen is a list of names. you can see some of the list above. the old devil. the shire horse. the seven stars. the blue cow. boot and shoe. the black horse. white house. the grapes. the names go on and on. what are these names? where did these names come from?

here is another list of names. can you guess what these names are? the peach tart. the pop eye. 5 orange potatoes. whiskey marie. the best life ever. pants with names. not enough mud. the blue yak. the time crook. slugs in the refrigerator. lobster and swan. skybluesea. the gentlebear....

give up? the first list shows pub names in great britain. one time when we were traveling in the north of england, i wrote down all the names of the pubs we encountered as we were driving. and no, we didn't enjoy a pint in every one of them (just some of them), but we were tempted.

the other list is blog names. i follow a couple of these blogs. to be honest, what gets me looking at something is, in fact, that oftentimes i am lured by the name. i love names. how do people come up with names?  how do people finally decide on what, to them, will be the perfect name, be it person, pet, pub or blog?