Post lack not slack
My blog posts have become infrequent lately, and I wonder why: Is my personal life--at least that part of it I don't feel like sharing at this semi-public level--taking up so much of my time that I can't find the words to post? Are the subjects I am involved with at my job at SDSU's Summer Bridge Program, a set of first-year college composition readings, keeping me from accessing the stuff I need in order to post some personal ecology on the web?
All I know is that it seems like there's less stuff I want to write about on this thing lately. How has my life changed, in ways that make for fewer posts about the nominal paradigms of this blog? When I look at the subtitle of the thing, I start to get a clue; "literary ecosystems, ecological texts, and poetic politics" haven't been happening lately in my life; I haven't written a poem in a while, and most importantly I think, I haven't taken the time to be out in the wilds, really out for a few days, the time it takes to get the civilized smell off me and see the big picture.
Perhaps I have a classic case of what Richard Louv calls nature-deficit disorder: crushed by the interpersonal dynamics of human discourses, unable to engage in the organic play that frees my mind to write the stuff I want to say here, I find my voice blocked. It's a very complicated way to say "I'm too busy to write" but the problem for me is that writing about natural things, things that take in the total biosphere and integrate it with the human, is necessary for the well-being of my soul and my writing. I find myself thinking about, and writing about, the sterile mindgames of politics and spirit, the disconnected mental spaces of purely theoretical paradigms instead of getting my hands dirty with real work of the spirit, that kind of stuff done with shovels and feet, hands and asses, where you get tired and sit down for a while just to take it all in. I think I want to go for a nice long hike, and read some good stuff.
All I know is that it seems like there's less stuff I want to write about on this thing lately. How has my life changed, in ways that make for fewer posts about the nominal paradigms of this blog? When I look at the subtitle of the thing, I start to get a clue; "literary ecosystems, ecological texts, and poetic politics" haven't been happening lately in my life; I haven't written a poem in a while, and most importantly I think, I haven't taken the time to be out in the wilds, really out for a few days, the time it takes to get the civilized smell off me and see the big picture.
Joseph Kleitsch (1881-1931), Laguna Canyon, 1923. Courtesy Florence Griswold Museum 
Perhaps I have a classic case of what Richard Louv calls nature-deficit disorder: crushed by the interpersonal dynamics of human discourses, unable to engage in the organic play that frees my mind to write the stuff I want to say here, I find my voice blocked. It's a very complicated way to say "I'm too busy to write" but the problem for me is that writing about natural things, things that take in the total biosphere and integrate it with the human, is necessary for the well-being of my soul and my writing. I find myself thinking about, and writing about, the sterile mindgames of politics and spirit, the disconnected mental spaces of purely theoretical paradigms instead of getting my hands dirty with real work of the spirit, that kind of stuff done with shovels and feet, hands and asses, where you get tired and sit down for a while just to take it all in. I think I want to go for a nice long hike, and read some good stuff.
Happy belated birthday, Gerard Manley Hopkins!Pied BeautyGLORY be to God for dappled things --
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
posted by The authors at 9:27 PM
2 Comments:
Oh Jim,
Come to the back country! It's hot, it's humid, and it's stormy in the afternoons.
But no good for emotions recollected in tranquillity and thence transcribed to the page. Maybe nature's telling all of us to take the next couple weeks off?
A couple of long hikes on a 7 day trip to the Eastern Sierra might do it,I think.
We cannot thrive without the refreshment of spirit available in wild places.
TRW
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