Yeah, it's been a while since my last post... I phased out my "writing blog" (but not my writer's blog) figuring I really didn't need to have both.
I think my LJ, my oldest and much-loved blog will have to be next.  I just don't have the time, with the new magazine, etc., to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, and four or five blogs.  
But I may be back.  Who knows?
Since I phased out the writing blog, and my other's a bit too public to post something like this, here's a quote I read today from an NYT Magazine interview with Frederick Seidel.  What he said sort of summed up where I am now with that much-discussed matter of "finding one's voice" as a poet:

I asked Seidel if, looking back, he understood what was in the way of his getting back to poetry. Seidel didn’t hesitate:

“Cowardice.”

What was there to be afraid of?

“The expression of aspects of the self that you understand or, rather, that you fancy may not be attractively expressed or attractive once expressed.” He added: “Another way of talking about this is to talk about your becoming yourself: your finding who you are as a poet, finding what you sound like, finding your subjects that bring you out of you that are your subjects. It’s almost as if there’s a moment when you decide, Well, whatever the problem of writing this way, of writing these things, whatever the difficulty with presenting yourself this way . . . well, that’s it.

(Well, Pomeranians are descended from
Norwegian elkhounds, so, somewhere in
their genome, they know their way around
snow...)

... was the 12th anniversary of our first date, and thus our own personal (and less overbooked) Valentine's Day, and we spent it having an absolutely freaking delicious, (count them, including "compliments of the chef" interludes and palate-cleansing sorbets) seven-course meal, not to mention apertif, bottle of wine and complimentary champagne, at L'Auberge Chez Francois, which, as you can see, is a really cute little place, Alsatian-style inn near Great Falls, VA.  Merci encore, Kyber! (pronounced Key-BEAR, of course ;)

Well, not my year, in particular,
nor this year, in particular,
but this is pretty cool, see?

... Smashing Pumpkins, that is, at Constitution Hall last night.

Yes, it's impossible to tell from these, but Billy Corgan was wearing a dress.

But it was a good show.  Contrary to a heckler's accusation at the end, they
(who's left of them -- the heckler also questioned the whereabouts of James Iha,
and Billy brought a random girl up on stage) but, yes, they can still rock it.

The oddest moment was hearing a song I hadn't listened to in over a decade -- 12 years,
13 years? -- but prior to that had played nonstop in my dorm room for a year -- and slowly
recognizing it as such... Really took me back for a sec...

At Longwood Gardens on Saturday:

I haven't been in the habit of writing about politics on this blog since I started my "current events"-themed blog, but it's pretty hard to avoid comment on the event that just transpired this week.  We have elected, by a clear majority, a Democratic president... and not just any Democratic president, but Senator Barack Obama, a young man, but a man who I predict will turn out to be one of the best American leaders of my lifetime (I was going to say "of this millennium," but that would have set the bar pretty low so far.)

I wanted to post that celebratory note on this blog partly in light of an entry I remember writing after the last presidential election in '04.  That November was kind of a low point for me in general.  I hated my job and was feeling generally aimless, and at some level I guess I blamed George Bush.  Now there's a lot one could have blamed George Bush for back then (even more so right now) but my job probably wasn't one of them.  Still, I took Kerry's unexpected loss personally, and was pretty bummed.  It seemed like we would be mired in Bush country indefinitely.  And although martial law was never declared (for a while there, we started to wonder), my fears weren't completely unfounded, because it did feel like forever.  The last four years have, for many people in this country, been a nightmare of extended tours in Iraq, deaths of loved ones over there, the loss of jobs and homes, and a bleak economic future.

I know that Barack Obama isn't our savior.  Neither was FDR or JFK (or Ronald Reagan, if you're of that persuasion.)  It wasn't so much what they themselves did, but what they inspired and brought out in the rest of us.  Sometimes hope is more than another four-letter word, and right now, it feels like more than just a flicker in the breeze.

To a reporter, after winning the World Series:

"Forget all that other crap.  This is it." 

Go Phillies!

Ah, seeing the Phanatic frolic about on the field brings back fond memories of being physically pried off the poor mascot by his entourage when I was four or five, during one of his public appearances at a mall.  Well, I was four or five, and he was big, soft, and green!  Why does that sound dirty?  Get your mind out of the gutter.  The girl knows what she likes.

At a nearby state park, we exited the trail
in the wrong field and encountered some
horses who were quite friendly and even
tried to follow us back into the woods...






Autumn Maypole at the Renaissance Festival:




Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (puppy getting warm after his bath)

From our trip during the last week of August through Labor Day:

Niagara Falls:




Niagara-on-the-Lake (Wine Country):

















Toronto:






Montreal:






Auberge du Lac Morency, Quebec:

How to Meditate

I wish I'd read this when first attempting meditation many years ago.  It took a while to get past the whole mystique of it, but it's really just that simple.  No special mat, incense or lotus position required (although I guess they don't hurt.)
I agree it's hard to meditate while depressed, probably because concentration is difficult to achieve, and a walk is probably more effective because it gets the blood circulating, etc.

OK, I'm a little late with posting these, but here's
a few snapped with my phone from the concert
at the Verizon Center on August 3.  Yeah, we were
kind of high up, but had a nice direct view, at least.
It was a good show.

I know it's unpatriotic, but I always have a soft spot for the underdog.

Olympic Upset in Men's Beach Volleyball

I was fascinated by this when ksatyr posted about it recently. 
Here's a pretty good article in the Washington Post:  Complicated Grief
And here's a Q&A on the subject.
I think the implications could be broad for this in Psychology.  The reward system and the role of dopamine is still understudied, in comparison with serotonin.

We were having a dry spell there, a break in our monsoon season, so I'm glad things are back to normal (I assume this is the new Mid-Atlantic weather pattern; soon we'll be subsumed by the Subtropics.)

In other good news, KSatyr has affirmed me in my effort to leave a small electronic footprint.  Unless he's just being nice.  In any case, the Internets are just what I've always wanted.

Last night I had the sort of half-waking dream that makes
me wish I were seeing a Jungian analyst... how we'd talk
and laugh for hours!  Heh :)  But I guess I'll have to puzzle
it out for myself.
I was standing in front of a garden gate, and on the other
side was, very clearly, my life, the one I've been inhabiting,
but now in full-color, 3-D, not the gray-scale 2-D version with plastic slip-
covers on everything. 
I knew it was there somewhere! :)  All I had to do was walk through the gate. 
I really felt like I could do it, at that moment, effortlessly.  Why didn't I?  Either
I woke up, or I fell asleep, but somehow my consciousness left that state of
possibility. 
But I still feel really optimistic about the whole thing.
I'll imagine, in retrospect, that it looked like this branch of the rose bush that
Kyber trained over our gate.

... where Kyber's company had its picnic.  A nice park; a good day.
P.S.  I think the longest day of the year is still coming up (it's not
always the same as the solstice.)  I don't think I've missed it yet,
and I have a good feeling that maybe this year I won't.

Since drifting away, in my mid-twenties, from the religion of my youth into a more scientific outlook, I've found myself "seeking," as the term goes, now and then -- obsessively at first (once the dizzy honeymoon with simple, benign materialism faded) and then just intermittently -- for some kind of ethical system to replace it, and I always ended up coming back to Buddhism.  Even when I still held to the Judeo-Christian cosmology, I started reading into Buddhism, and didn't find it in conflict, since it's so much more about the pragmatic than the cosmological.
Now I seem to be drifting back there again, starting with the very basics.

But this time, I see something different, and I guess that's just because of where I am right now in life.  I'm reaching the age where I need to really know where I'm going.
The Middle Way used to represent to me only the middle ground between hedonism and asceticism (that's the textbook definition.)  But if you follow traditions like Thich Nhat Hanh's, there's a lot more to it than that.  It's not just about the practitioner and his/her individual ego.

I've always thought of myself as a nice person, because, in general, I'm nice to people, but I know that there's also a side of me that is goal-oriented and selfish in how I interact with people, even if it shows up in more subtle ways.  Sometimes I forget how much sway I allow that side of me to have, and I need a wake-up call.  I guess its origin was a sort of defense mechanism or survival instinct for my always being different and feeling different.  I think I reacted, out of some sense of injustice dealt by a world that made me a square peg, with a sense of entitlement to habitually want what I can't have.  But that's no longer an acceptable excuse, and it should have long since stopped being an excuse.  I thought I'd beat that "rebel without a cause" mentality long ago, but this seem to be its last vestige.

But back to the Middle Way, this time, looking at it, I see it not in terms of looking inside, but looking outward.  I see it as being about openness to the world, especially one's fellow human beings -- openness tempered with generosity, and, quite simply, love.



P.S.  Kyber took these photos at Longwood Gardens several years ago.  It's possible I took one of them, but they were probably all him :)

From Rumi (the Persian/Afghan Zen master):

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely
to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.”

... these snapped while strolling up
Connecticut Avenue in Northwest. 
I love this city this time of year. 
Spring makes even the politics seem more palatable.