And now almost mid-October…
School has started and the harvest is almost over. Another week or two of dehydrating apples and the stores will be as full as they are going to get for 2019. I guess we will see if our stashes of dried fruit last until the first pears drop next August. It was a banner year for fruit in the backyard orchards of Pelican City. Most of the trees were well pollinated but I did not notice a surplus of bees. Maybe they work at night or perhaps my trees exude immaculate conception.
I’ve been stalling a bit on getting this blog started.
It isn’t for lack of writing. Since I launched the site just over three weeks ago I have written a fair amount considering the busy transition of season, but I am struggling with formatting issues, and questions about what I want from presenting my work.
At present, my plan is this…
When I feel that essays are suitable for rough draft status I will put them up here and marked as such. Hopefully people will want to read them and feel free to make comments. I treat the blog as a studio, like anything else in my life.
Other posts may come as letters that I have written (one of my favorite formats), poems, treatise, etc.
Essentially it is a digital platform for the fleeting mania that is my mind.
Another playroom. Hopefully an educational one.
The words are coming now as an exploration of a couple of big themes in my life. I am fortunate and grateful to have an extended time to re-purpose myself. Partially for the time to begin healing physically from a first career not made for my frame, but also to reflect on what I need to take forward from that first working identity into what I build myself to be in the coming years. 10,000 working hours from now I hope to find myself somewhere more interesting than I can possibly imagine from my couch tonight.
Maybe not. Maybe I will be blessed with a glimpse through the portal. A fast track.
You can’t count on that.
My first career and my marriage came to me in a vision about 9 months after I wrote the poem at the top of this entry. They are unconnected, it is just a timeline. I guess a person can tap into the path of least resistance if they are lucky in life. I will most likely never know why I was witness to the vision, but mortality has it’s limits, and extra-temporal experiences are usually outside what limits reality. It makes them hard to relate, no?
I have a lot of ideas about what the vision, and several other mystical events in my life could be, but mostly I choose to accept it and not dissect the memories too much. My atheist worldview could explain all of the exceptional into coincidence, but not the reality of the events as they happened and I remember them–in a couple of cases were witnessed by others. What I do know is that I know too little about the cosmos to completely dismiss the possibility of spirituality in some of the coincidences and improbabilities of my life.
That, was a beautiful sentence. Hard to read, but it wouldn’t flow if I contracted it. I don’t know everything.
Things have happened to me that might be able to be explained, but not by me. All I can do is report and hope my memory is accurate.
With that in mind, I will say that I feel my actions feel to be on the right path with this website and my career ambitions even if the exact goal of Cafe Irie Design has not been determined yet. Creativity is something best allowed to flow, and if I am focused there are opportunities to watch the seeds grow.
Uprising.
Beside the obvious challenges and anxiety of changing occupation in middle age, I am also processing my changing role as a father to my now teenage daughter. The last couple of years have been remarkable in that I have probably changed almost as much as my child. I escaped unhealthy stasis, and she plunges into unknown. We are changing together. My hope is that she observes my wife and I never stopping thinking of new experiences to have. New things to learn. It is up to her if she chooses to live that way.
Through writing about these shifts of consciousness I hope to bring peace to my mind, and perhaps calm the worries of other parents who feel overwhelmed in similar ways. I think most parents feel overwhelmed often, but do not have the leisure of reflection.
What a gift my life has been.
Another workshop application of this blog will be the archive of my older written work. I have a lot of material that is essentially lost right now, but really just needs to be inventoried. Occasionally I will be throwing in an old poem or other writing from the last 33 years. Maybe I will find much older material. Perhaps I can finish a project that I began as a child. If anything, the blog will be a good mechanism to revisit fragments of moments left behind.
My life is loose ends like Winter Wheat on a breezy Columbia Valley hilltop. Seeds abundant, seeking purpose, but tethered.
As you can see from the copy, I have a full winter storage waiting to nurture and feed. How it finds something to build is yet to be seen.
I think I have written enough on this for now and I will close with my signature end to what will be the emotive and reflective newsletter entries of this blog. It is conceptually stolen from Garrison Keillor, but I am sure he stole it too. Catchphrases are sure to sound trite.
“That is what I have to relate from Klamath Falls–where the Pelicans Soar, the lake turns green, and midges are natures kazoo.”
I will be pitching my campaign to the Chamber of Commerce, and selling postcards too.
Peace.
Andy
