March 6, 2011

Yes, spring is on it's way

Hang in there! Spring will be here soon.

Dear Bloggers,

Finally winter is moving out as cold and moisty weather is not my best friend I am looking forward to the Spring and Summertime again. The best part of spring is the great smells of new life in the garden. I think that this is natures best period of the yearly cyclus.


I noticed a few daffodils around town blooming this week and was happy to see two in my garden just starting to open. Another first bloom of spring is a lowly dandelion but it does look cheery after months of winter. I'll wait awhile and enjoy it before i pull it. The other sign of the season change is the longer days. Some days it's still pretty chilly but I get to spend some time each day doing some garden chores. What a great way to finish the work day. So here is the first daffodil that i saw.


It seems like a jibe in this weather. The icy blasts that hit you as soon as you leave towards the parking to grab your bus, the mornings are stone cold and the passengers are happy to see you. It is only –2 degrees celcius but the wind is biting cold. The morning dash of coffee and a loaf of bread did nothing to smash the calm blankness of sleep of my wife and kids. Mornings on the bus on Monday are a kind of zombie march. My head is not fully functioning yet, what can you expect at 06:30 in the morning. I have an automatic path that I follow on the route that I have to do as if I am trundling down a fixed railway line.



By the time the cold hands grab the steeringwheel and you drive to your starting point, you see people outside the bus doors on push bikes in that freezing cold weather and you are just partially awake, and my defrosted body enters again to go into chilling. Then into traffic, making little jokes with the passengers, most of the regulars are feeling home on the bus. After my two support rides that I need to do I unload the passengers and drive back to the garage, Sit down. Time to drink coffee.

I like to come home and write as soon as I can. It is already evening as I write this. I wonder, sometimes if the reason that I write is for the following reasons---is it Writers and the act of writing,--- or is it killing my devotional time, as some sort of way to enter aloneness and prepare for final silence? Or is it a well formed habit only designed to make products that I temporarily own and then discard? What is the purpose of weekly writing?



I’m not sure. I think that writing is a way to clarify my mind and my miserable life—as I am only here passing time, like everybody else. Today I write something down; this is true for this minute, but then the next thing I write contradicts what I said or thought about three days ago. Writing is sometimes difficult and somehow endlessly disruptive. When I consider this fact of lack of agreement in anything I write down--the fact that one day--I may be all for one position and the next --not--what this tells me is that I am mirroring my mind that is also as fluid as the writing. In other words, my mind is a thinking machine that functions on chemicals.

What do they do to store--memory--logical thinking processes--emotions--the self? And if everything is stored in neurons--how are they stored? Is memory a simple stockpile of chemicals with half lives that are reached continually and progressively until no memories are finally left? If so --this makes the act of writing down --critica But if what we write down is contradictory, emotional rather than rational, considered useless by our society--is it still worth it to be writing devotedly--as if despite these deficiencies in textual depictions of a mind--it is still a worthy practice to engage in the writing down of a mind?


I suppose this decision is based on what you value. Do you --if you have sufficient time--value working at something that will return you more goods and services--or do you in your free time prefer to do what makes you see clearly into your own small life and its attachments? It depends entirely on value and the type of life you want to live. This type of writing is not valuable if you would rather paint or draw; if you need to work on a career; if you prefer other activities. But if the main method of learning for you (and your main interest is learning) is to use words in multiple ways--then writing is a weekly practice that unknots and untangles a great many small minor problems a human being can encounter in a life. It also serves to waken up that human being to luck and good fortune.

I only think about nature sometimes when I am driving and my mind is at ease. After a few days I will sit down and write about it. I only think about the good fortune to be married to a kind, loving woman like my wife and the extreme luck of having two daughters, when others have no kids. Writing practice inevitably introduces you to the grace of your own extreme luck in being born into such a life of privilege.

Even the long winter is a lucky matter for it makes spring and summer like desserts after a long tedious meal of rubbery food. Outside the winter wheels and grinds us down to nothing. The pond that is still filled with a thin layer of ice that is close to my house.


Winter is the ultimate season. The poor trees stick out like old timers TV antennae and looking very dark on the horizon. And winter paints them with icy colours, It is all very beautiful –if you are sitting in the writing room like I am out of the battering fists of the wind, sympathetically appreciating the troubles of the ice cold conditions that nature has to go through, like the the locked in birds, the hares and deer that live right near here along in the bloody forest that gives them also shelter as well.

Usually I’m hanging on the couch together with my wife and watch some Tv at this time of the day. But today, I’m sitting behind the computer and my wife is leaving me alone without any resistance or whatsoever. The weather is a powerful incentive to writing—encouraging me by the hammering cold windy fists on the house walls. Crocusses and daffodils are showing their face that is the sign by the extended care that says—Spring is coming soon—but just not today.

The Old Sailor,

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