Taking Emerson's Advice

In this fast-paced world, the comforts are few and far between. But despite that, I still take great solace from Nature and the intimate relationship I have long had with her, one that started when I was a child. It deepened much later when I spent several nearly two decades living in the woods of southern Maine, and with the help of a friend, I've created a video of those years.

I hope you enjoy it and that it inspires you to adopt the mantra of the great naturalist write, Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGXFLf6KSwU

The Path Not Taken

The decision to share my writing in a different format did not come easily. It meant weeks of soul-searching and wondering if it was indeed the right choice to make. For almost six years, I wandered the woods and fields in this part of the world or took long roundabout drives that led me farther and farther and more deeply into the world of nature, beyond her external trappings, beyond what she chooses to show those who only cast casual glances about them but don't invite, for whatever reasons, their other senses, or their souls, into the process.

There was a time when I myself could be in a lovely place and not see it for what it was. I might have been lost in conversation with someone or focused on some other activity or event that minimized my surroundings. But then, I moved to the woods, and it was there that I finally learned not only to see, but to feel, to let nature wash over me and impart her own unique sort of wisdom, one which is often not possible to even put into words.

During those years, I went through periods in my life when nature and her beauty receded from my view to allow other things in, things that had to be dealt with, sadnesses that had to be borne, problems that needed working out, losses that had to be shouldered, and changes beyond my control that had to be faced. When I think back, I remember it occurring to me following any of those experiences that, had it not been for nature and her solace, lurking ever in the background and on their fringes, I might not have come through it all as unscathed as I did.

Now, my hope is that those snippets of time of which this book is made, these sights, sounds and impressions, will continue to float out there in the universe like milkweed or dandelion seeds, alighting wherever they will and taking root in the minds of others, where it will hopefully spark the same sort of curiosity, the same level of passion, that nature has instilled in me.

I'm grateful to all who go on that walk with me, as it is one we cannot take often enough.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876

Words as Seeds

Gardening can be a funny thing at times. You plant something and it grows into what you thought it would; but other times, something else entirely comes up. Maybe a few wayward gloriosa daisy seeds got mixed into the marigold seeds, or the morning glories came up part morning glory, part moonflower. That's nature for you. Not always perfect but always always interesting.
 


Take the volunteer plants in the compost pile. You toss potato peelings in there, along with a few dead and shrunken pumpkin carcasses. And the next year, voila! The best potatoes and pumpkins you ever ate growing there unbidden, undrafted. One year, a small tomato plant appeared in a pot of soil on my porch, and not knowing what it was but allowing my curiosity to best me, I let it be...watered it, monitored it all that summer, until the characteristic blossoms emerged followed by tiny green fruit. And ultimately, I was rewarded with the sweetest most delicious miniature yellow pear tomatoes I've ever eaten. And that's nature for you.




And then there's another type of seed that isn't sold in packets or out of bins at the grain store. And you don't plant them in soil, which means none of the backbreaking work of tilling and feeding new ground in the spring when the earth is more muckhole than paradise. These seeds you simply scatter across a sheet of pristine paper or a shiny glowing screen, and then you sit back and let them take root.




Like their biological and botanical counterparts, they need regular feedings and watering. But these are again accomplished, not by conventional means, but rather by surrounding the naked seeds with imagination, pulling the soil of other ideas firmly up around their delicate stems, and then watering them as needed with tears and sometimes even with blood, a rather unorthodox approach to gardening, to be sure. And at the end of the day, after the tilling and the planting and the watering are done, you'd swear you'd put in a day's work in the broiling sun, slapping mosquitoes away and wondering if it is indeed all worth it.




And each and every time without fail, it is.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876

A Certain Clarity

Ah, the blessed relief that is the ideal summer day, the kind that warrants no loud buzz of artificial cooling or the annoying whir of fans, and that allows nature's sounds in. Gone, for the time being anyway, is the mirror-clouding haze of humidity, the dampening of sound, the slowing of the senses. In its place, a masterpiece of a day, in which all is clearly defined and unmistakable in its purpose...each leaf delineated against the ones beneath, below and above it...each bird song a top-forties-chart-worthy melody...the pond a blue that not even the sky could aspire to. 


A wind hums in the trees as I write, providing the melody into which the distant sound of a lawnmower cannot intrude, with my wind-chimes adding their own melodious notes. Nature has arbitrarily decreed this day perfect, and who am I to argue? This is clearly a time to rejoice, if only within my own sphere of experience, in the tiny innocuous niche that I occupy.


This rejuvenation that comes out of the west via the ever-moving air masses imbues all that it touches, my own spirit included, with a new vibrancy, and reawakens my instinctive curiosity. I spy new depths among the greenery, new shapes which were hidden to me before, see new hues among the sun-drenched petunias, screen all of my sensory impressions like a 49'er to get at the jagged gleaming bits.


This is a day made for writers, for those processors of words who can take something like this and make others see without needing to utter the words "oh look!"

Heart Wrenching

The words come hard sometimes, like pulling weeds that just refuse to part with their roots or their small seemingly inconsequential places in this world. I dig down deep below my words, below their roots, and still, I am not at the end, I am not at the place where they began. That would take shrinking myself down to the size of a verbal microbe and plunging into the deepest recesses of my memory whose many doors are no longer all open to me. It means digging up rocks whose large ends are always the most deeply buried, teasing me from the top, saying "We're small...you can dig us up," until I try and find that, the deeper I go, the bigger the rock. And then I abandon the effort in disgust and walk away.


Words are like that, and the ideas they organize themselves into...rocks whose small ends show until I've broken a sweat digging, only to find that the big end, and sometimes the gem hiding inside, are too deep, and there is no getting at them, and so I must let nature, and my life, continue to pile even more experiences and memories on top of them, leaving me no choice but to move on.


But couldn't I get at them from the side, I wonder, dig down through the softer soil and then horizontally to the gem? I could, but that might mean ignoring those small seemingly insignificant words that are closer to the surface and that beckon less ostentatiously or lie there awaiting the sun's touch to glint their meaning to me. I might miss them, though, while I dig, blinded by the sweat in my eyes, failing to see the pebbles of greater meaning tumbling into the hole, gone forever.


https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS/

The Kaleidoscope Effect

Sometimes, a writer's thoughts, mine anyway, tumble about like the pieces of colored plastic inside a kaleidoscope. No matter how often I turn the end of the tube, the shards never regroup into exactly the same configuration, and my mind's eye must adjust to the new image and what it implies.

They're not like snowflakes, over which I have no control, nature sending water droplets down from the clouds through a swath of cold air where they crystallize and fall to earth as something we must bend our backs to. No, it's not like that at all. For the colored bits ask nothing more of me than to try to make something of them. And rather than my back bending, my mind must bend around them in as many directions as possible until it begins to recognize a pattern, a way to make sense of it all.

The trick is not to try to achieve any particular pattern but to let it assume its own, and then comes the deciphering, the translating, the refashioning from random shapes to words to coherent sentences that take the small incongruous pieces from inconsequential matter to ideas loaded with meaning. It's no small feat, this, which is why the writer's work can be as demanding and draining as the moving of stones or the hefting of tree trunks. Those colored pieces are heavy, which is the greatest irony of all.

https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS

My Reality

Do you ever have one of those days when everything outside of yourself is so perfect that you can't help but wish that everything inside was just as perfect? Today is one of those days, at least for me. Outside, the weather is what you would call picture-perfect...cloudless blue sky...bright sunlight bathing the leaves that seem to have unfurled overnight this year...light breeze...70 degrees...Who could not love such a day? Certainly not I, but then, for one brief moment, I turn inwardly, and there it is--my reality--and it is nothing like the day.




Oh sure, I could make it like the day. I could sit here trying to convince myself that all of my many problems and issues have no power over this day, that no matter how much I rant and rave (inwardly), the sun will continue to shine, the clouds will stay away, and the day will glow. For nature, as has been said, really doesn't care much about me or my issues, and everything around me existed long before I got here, so I am but a blip on its radar screen. It will persevere with or without me.




But once again, that would take yet one more enormous effort of the will on my part to achieve, to pretend, for the remaining hours of this day, that all is as well within as it is without. So is that really what it's about, getting up each morning and facing each day with a renewed resolve not to allow reality to spoil the view? If nature, and all this beauty around me is indeed a balm to the soul, then all that means is that my soul needs a lot of balm, and that the underlying issues will never go away and will need perpetual tending.




I've come to the conclusion that everything I do is but a way to offset the inevitable, which is that someday, all this will end. When my mother died 12 years ago, I spent the next several years grasping at whatever I could that simply FELT good, or at least that felt better than facing the truth that she was gone. I bumbled about for a long long time dabbling in whatever eased the pain for a few hours or a few days, and it took as long, if not longer, to finally reach a plateau where that was no longer so immediate, and I found that I could get through a day without needing so much solace or comfort.




Which takes me to where I am now, once again grasping at those things that feel good, and that make ME feel good, though they now represent choices that are vastly different from those I made back then. Now they involve walking in the woods, taking photos of the things I see and love, watching old movies, losing myself in a good book or some good music, and, of course, writing.




Always always...writing!


https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS