Seedlings in Stone

On, In, and Around: I'll Be There Wishing Good Things for You

I took my girl to this castle-ish place (above) when she was a baby. She does not remember it.

Since then, fifteen years have passed. Six of those years (almost half her life), I have been a writer in this space. To her, I suppose, that must seem a lifetime.

Over that "lifetime," I have written almost 1,300 blog posts, both here and at two other personal blogs. Other bloggers would have garnered more page views over all this time, but I feel satisfied that these posts drew over 250,000 views.

Half a lifetime for my girl.

And what is that in blog years? (Somebody said to me yesterday that blog years should maybe be calculated like dog years. Maybe I've been really blogging for about forty years then.)

This week, one of my authors (I'm a small press publisher) sent me flowers, to thank me for believing in her book. I do believe in it. She'll go far. The National Review and World Magazine have both requested copies. She's going to be on quite a few radio shows. I want that for her.

I no longer want these things for me. If I ever did (I'd like to think I wanted these things as an author; it seems like the kind of things an author should want, to gain a certain level of success. I know I want my authors to want these things for themselves).

Anyway, I guess it's not important to settle this question. What's important is how I want things for other people. And how this has become the focus of my life's work.

Why yes, I'll still be a writer. That won't end. It might even grow.

Not that I necessarily want that either. Five books is a lot to care for. (Still, I do seem to have this little compulsion to keep putting things onto pages, where people can take them to bed, or on a picnic, or to their back porch.)

I do not any longer have a real desire to blog. "Forty years" is a long time. Or six, if you want it in human years. Or half a lifetime, if you look through the eyes of my daughter.

My girl is growing up. I want things for her. I want things for my authors.

And look... the sun is going down (or is it, in fact, just coming up). Let's walk into the sunset (or the sunrise), as the case may be. I'm in a good mood (don't let the mini-drama of this post fool you), so if it's okay with you, I'd like us to sing and laugh along the way.

Race you to the castle!

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You can always find me at llbarkat.com, to see if I do, in fact, keep writing (Oh, I'm sure I will. It's just a question of how and where). And I wish you a beautiful writing and reading journey, whichever you are on (and if you are a writer, it must be both). Thank you for letting me love you so long through the medium of words.

L.L. Barkat is the Managing Editor of Tweetspeak Poetry and co-creator of the quotes-on-photos app WordCandy.me. Give her another six years and who knows. She might be selling chocolate or teas.

Labels: in, my writing story, On, On in and Around Mondays, writing life

On, In, and Around Mondays: Her Biography

After the storm, walking.

At 5:30 a.m., when the sky is silver and the moon is adrift in a swath of clouds.

Or, having had my caramel apple tea, walking in the still-fast-moving air, seeing the sun peeking through and then being pattered by rain.

Five days later, up the hill where power is still failed, around the corner, and down the hill, I meet Adam McCrane. Never met Adam before. We are both watching the big white trucks and peering at the snapped electrical pole.

"They say 1,000 poles snapped and need to be replaced," he says.

I like the roundness of that. It is probably not exactly true, but it sounds good in the mouth. 1,000. I learn that Adam has been without power—today, at 10 am, it will be five days. Never been without for so long before, he says. I like the specificity of his tellings, even as that specificity has surely been altered by time and misremembering.

We continue to share stories on the road. He extends his hand to shake mine, which makes me smile.

I think of the book I am still slowly making my way through: The Old Ways.

MacFarlane finds that roads, and paths, and seaways have stories. That a relationship with the land becomes a relationship with people, through words and shared imagination. At one point, on an ocean trip with an old sailor, he gets to hear the story of the boat they are sailing.

"He knew her biography as well as that of any long-term lover, and he told it to me as a story," says MacFarlane.

I am ready to walk back up the hill now, my morning passage barred by the white trucks. "Nice to meet you, Adam," I say, and begin to turn. "Laura, yes," he says. "Nice name. Laura."

He has the beginnings of my biography. Maybe he will go home and tell his wife a story. But for now I am happy to hear my name, so lovely from the mouth of the old man on the hill.
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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Labels: in, On, On in and Around Mondays

On, In, and Around Mondays: Walking to Love

I am supposed to be reading The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, by Robert Macfarlane, to review it for Books & Culture.

So of course I've only gotten as far as chapter one, and instead of continuing to read, I began walking every morning.

Macfarlane's journey began in winter, and he claims you can't go anywhere without walking. I am already in disagreement. You might know why.

It's okay. He could be right, in his way. It doesn't change the fact that I went somewhere without going anywhere. Two things can be right. This is something I had great fun exploring in The Novelist.

Anyway. I began walking every morning, and whereas Macfarlane quotes Emerson, "the ground is all memoranda and signatures," I am noticing that the ground is a cradle for love.

And I, like some kind of wandering mother, have the chance to embrace what the ground is holding out to me, if I want.

One morning, the ground gave me an ivory-coated terrier. This little dog would not move until I came to greet him. I held his face between my hands and looked directly into his melty brown eyes. "I see you," I said to this tiny creature named Tiger. "I am so glad you are saying hello to me."

Another morning, the ground gave me a brown-haired girl, skipping her way to the school bus. She raised an eraser to her nose and sniffed hard. "I love the smell of this eraser!" she shouted to the wind. "I love this eraser!" I gathered her words.

This morning, it was two old men. Jamaican, I think, if I heard their deep, throaty sing-song correctly. "You gonna buy this house?" one of them asked me when I walked by. "Oh, just stretching near the driveway," I replied. "Great house, isn't it?" I added. And he nodded yes and turned back to his friend.

Macfarlane is right about walking. It takes you somewhere.

In my case, I feel like I am mother-walking to love.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Labels: in, On, On in and Around Mondays, Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Viking publishers

On, In, and Around Mondays: Fictional Seeing

"I do it on purpose, you know."

That's what I told my friend, when it was observed that I have a Georgia O'Keefe approach to photography.

After I said this, I went back over some of my photos to see if it was true. Do I really do it on purpose? Often, yes. And sometimes it is just that I go through a series of shots, after the fact, until I find the ones that do what I would have done on purpose, had I the mind to do it.

I am reminded, suddenly, of an idea I include in The Novelist, from Mario Vargas Llosa. He said this regarding the construction of fiction, but I think it might apply to all kinds of seeing and composing...

A successful fiction would always contain something inexplicable, something unbound...certain factors [are] crucial to a work—intuition, sensitivity, divination, or the elusive reality of chance. (p.106, The Novelist)

Now it is also true that whether or not I create in a purposeful way, somehow my true self seems to come through not only in the inexplicable and the divination but also in the elusive reality of chance.

Makes me wonder, then. Is Georgia, really, always on my mind?

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Labels: creativity, fiction, in, On, On in and Around Mondays, The Novelist

On, In, and Around Mondays: Listen to the Whisper

She rounds the turn, cantering, and it is like watching her fly.

My girl asked for this. Two years ago, as we drove by the stables, she wanted to know what went on there.

"Horseback riding," I said.

"Can you call on Monday?" she said.

I did. Because, you know, this girl doesn't ask for much. So when she ventures a request, I know it means something. I don't even need to know what it means. I honor it.

Watching her take those turns, flying free on a powerful creature, I ask myself this...

Do you honor your own requests? And how do you know when you are making them?

It seems more complicated for me. I have to know how to listen to myself, and it may not come as clear as Can you call on Monday. Sometimes a request is nothing more than a complaint that keeps resurfacing. Sometimes it is a sadness. It can even be something that looks like rebellion.

I want to learn to listen harder. For whatever it is I hear. The whisper, the laugh, the slight shift of cloth. Yes, I might want to fly.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Labels: in, On, On in and Around Mondays, personal growth

On, In, and Around Mondays: The River Waves

I go to be alone. It's been a long week. And I took note, this morning, of a headline about how the most successful business people really know how to take a weekend.

My weekend has been okay so far. But my mind can hardly wrap itself around the day. Even though I've trimmed bushes, watered the cucumbers, scattered two children's treasure bags of seashells into my little herb garden.

Under the pine, I've stood and sprayed the white parasites from the underside of the branches, noting how such tiny, tiny insects have begun to suck the life out of my dear tall loved-one. (Maybe you remember how I sat under her, days and nights, for a year.)

Such tiny deaths, over and over, I think. These are what could bring her down.

I spray and think of the contrast. My pine slow-dying. My garden, slow-treasuring into a miniature memory of the sea.

And me?

How does a life slow-die, or slow-live? Can it be as simple as taking it one day at a time, and choosing the treasuring?

It might be.

So I listen to the tiredness inside me, and I go to the river, where I see pairs of geese and pairs of boats bobbing on the waves. A rolling repetition that soothes anyone who would take the time to see.

I watch the joy of children, so self-possessed in how they touch the day.

The water mesmerizes. Its motion. Its diamond dazzle. Its sound against the rocks.

I let it all wash over me. The breeze, the joy, the sounds. I can feel the fatigue falling away.

Yes, I stay longer than I planned. The sun begins to set. And I am one now, with the waves. We move together, it seems, to lap our treasures to the shore.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Labels: in, On, On in and Around Mondays, rest, solitude

On, In, and Around Mondays: Snip by Snip Approach to Goals

The thorn bush has overtaken its space in my front yard.

Prickly stems with teardrop leaves reach into the azalea, hover over hosta, poke the leaves of the chocolate plant.

I can't believe what it takes to tackle this goal of mine, to bring the thorn bush back into shape. First I must buy a better pair of clippers. Then find a suitable pair of women's gloves (the store only has semi-suitable, but I buy them anyway... leather on the palms will provide some needed protection). I need a sunny day when the spot is still in shadow, because I seem sun-allergic if I'm out in the strongest light.

Then it's a job that requires patience. I can't reach straight to the heart. Too much in the way. I feel a bit daunted, as I begin snipping the outer rim, taking off no more than about 8 inches at a time. Snip, toss. Snip, toss. The detritus pile grows, the bush shrinks.

It takes a long time, but in the end, I've got what I wanted (despite also getting what I didn't want... a few well-placed pierces to the tender skin). Anyway, I have it now. A small thornbush, nicely rounded, looking like it belongs. In Fall, I'll get the red berries and the orange leaves. A lovely fire bush that will make me smile.
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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Labels: goals, in, On, On in and Around Mondays