Journal Keeping

I’m a certified terrible journal-keeper. I know several great journalers, people who have been writing and reflecting their way through life–some of them “writers” and some of them writers. Recently I was exchanging emails with the fabulous journaler and writer Kathleen Dean Moore (I’m not dropping names, honest–I had contacted her about possibly coming to speak at WKU). I mentioned that I was going to the Peruvian Amazon and she said something to the effect, “Oh, that must be such a wonderful opportunity for journaling.” It rather took my breath because a) she’s right and b) it’s another missed opportunity, which I immediately added to my very large collection. (By the way, I store these in an Earth-friendly shopping bag in my trunk underneath jumper cables, leaves, old sweatshirts, some crumpled concert programs, several plastic bottles waiting to be recycled, and an array of brown and white bags with who knows what additional decaying opportunities. I rarely look in the bag and for that matter don’t know if it’s still there.)

Another great journaler is my friend and colleague Trish, who has been keeping (and keeping) journals since she was a child. She too is a terrific writer, so I am sure that the connection between keeping journals and enhancing the craft of writing is profound. No end of books on “how to” would seem to affirm that. Other reasons for journaling, according to what I hear, include

1. healing
2. finding out who we are, at this time, in this place
3. creating a record for our progeny (who may write term papers using our 20-something drama rambles as primary texts)
4. understanding what’s going on–without writing it down, it may just mish-mash in our minds, knocking into other things, bruising and rising to the surface distorted and betrayed
5. feeling the joy of letters and words flowing from the nib of a pen, magic
6. exercising our creative spirit so it doesn’t languish

I suppose there are more, but that’s what I can think of right now, without consulting google or my bookshelves.

I have a few journals from now and then and I suppose I’ll keep them, but I don’t know why. I’ll never be famous and no tenure-track professor will ever discover them, giddy with excitement, in a box in the archives at Duke.

What I do rather like, at least today, is putting a few pictures and thoughts on this blog. I don’t think I’ll reflect much on the great events of the day–others do that so much better. Like my friend Mike Rivage-Seul http://mikerivageseul.wordpress.com/. What seems somehow worth my effort (in Mike’s words, “things that matter”), much more than sitting in contentious (or even congenial ones, which is actually more accurate for the good place I work) committee meetings where we are dividing scarce resources among projects we care about or trying to figure out how to make “it” work, this project called Education . . . is the noticing of little things going on around me. (and that’s what you call a long-ass sentence)

I think recognizing small features of the day, the place, the mind, and giving them a little nod to show we love them might just be what being 60 means to me.

Me on the Oroso, a tributary of the Amazon, journaling just once

Friends, 27 years and counting

When you are 60 years old or so, it’s not surprising that you might have friendships going back 27 years or more. Not surprising but no less remarkable, especially given how we come and go these days, following this job, that opportunity (for love, for adventure), wandering far from our childhood stomping ground, many of us . . . and probably most of us.

Last night I went up to Berea, where we lived from 1986-1991, to see my good friends Keila, Barbara, and Peggy. Dorothy joined us for dinner, but the over-night was just the four of us. It was in Berea that I found my first real job–real in the sense that it and I fit each other, grew and evolved into each other–it’s the job that taught me that teaching in a college or university was the best place for me to do whatever worthwhile thing I might be able to do, and that the doctorate was my ticket. It’s the place where our two oldest boys grew from 2 and 3 to the ripe old age of 7 and 8 (don’t worry about the math) and our youngest boy Casey was born, in 1987.

I found my best friends there, a new consciousness, community, love. I wrote a couple of poems that I’m still rather fond of, and one of which is about these boys and this growing, shedding old skin and learning to move in the new body. So I’ll share a part of “Cicada” here:

—
This transformation takes seven years, they say.
Right now my oldest heads down the homestretch
to his seventh birthday
and I wonder what’s in store for him,
what growing pains first grade will bring.
Seven years ago I began a marriage,
took it upon myself to offer the world two lives,
ended the marriage began another,
ended a job and began anew,
offered the world another life,
said, “Here, I trust you to care for these
they are mine I would not have them destroyed.”

Already I feel an itching at my shoulder blades
where I can’t quite reach the scaly skin
though I can just make out the v-shape through the steam
where my rubbing in the bathroom mirror
has left a filmy reflection.
Any day now I shall lay myself down
pull my body into its tightening shell,
trusting the stillness to remain free
from inquisitive hands
so I can let these wings unfold and dry
before I leap into that startling void.

I hope I will soar. I hope I will sing.
I hope I will meet up with other cicadas,
our wings a crackling testament to our joy.

But that’s not what I started this post about, though there may be a connection. I wanted to say something about friendship, the deep knowing we four friends share—about our frailties, our strengths, our histories. How the four of us want to grasp this thing we’ve got and honor it until we can no more. All of us professors, world travelers, authors, activists, one a Fullbright Scholar, 3 of us mothers and grandmothers, one an Episcopal priest now, two of us survivors of dead sons and a hundred other heartbreaks. Two still live in that town where we met and found each other (one lives in the country outside of town), the third lives now about 30 minutes away, and me, the furthest off, but still here in Kentucky, just a couple of hours down the Cumberland Parkway–I’ve contemplated chewing my fingers off in committee meetings as long as it took me to drive from here to there, a ride that gives you a series of hills touched by green and flowering trees and enough time to listen to a CD or two. On the way there, your mind rehashes the business of work till you shake it off finally. But on the way back you think how you are going to make your home a little better, having shared 15 hours with your friends and seeing, remembering them, yourself, listening, laughing. All the angst and frustration of work are just tempests in cracked teapots compared to what that kind of friendship means.

So here they are, my beautiful friends…..Keila, Barbara, Peggy . . .

Keila Thomas listening to Peggy

Barbara, listening to Peggy (she’s interesting)

Peggy, listening to Barbara (she’s interesting too)[/caption]

And the four of us . . . Sweet!

Peggy, me, Barbara, Keila

4 poems in The Journal of Kentucky Studies

Here’s a reading of three of the poems most recently published in The Journal of Kentucky Studies.

Click here: PoemsJKSmarch2013

Poetry Reading at Northern Kentucky University

Thanks to my friend and the wonderful poet Kelly Moffett, I went to NKU and read with these three poets yesterday. It was a wonderful experience. All of us have chapbooks out of Finishing Line Press: Below are: Gary Walton, me, of course, P. Andrew Miller, and Robert K. Wallace.

“Heavy,” Part I of a Healing Project

I’m teaching a course on Place and Healing and my students are all doing healing projects over the course of the semester. I wanted to do one along with them, so here’s Part I: http://www.slideshare.net/janeolmsted/heavy-ppt

Poem in TheScreamOnline

Here’s a link to my poem “The Tree You Come Home To,” which is in the online anthology “Heaven and Hell,” edited by John Guzlowski, on TheScreamOnline.

Fieralingue Take “Vajra”

My poem “Vajra” is on the list of 100 Thousand Poets for Change,” and you can view it here: http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=3860

Kodiak Ghazal

My “Kodiak Ghazal” just got accepted in the journal 5×5, coming out in the next week or so. Here it is:

Kodiak Ghazal

At dusk, the Kodiak reaches a heavy paw into the rushing stream—
the salmon a shower of gold and light against the darkening stream.

I see them rimmed in white, a snapshot from a dream, though sometimes
the bear looks up at me and then my heart is a roar that silences the stream.

Is she the Other or do I see myself hungry and full of purpose
pulling something from its known world, now a blooded stream?

She locks me with her stare, a whuffing at her curling lips, nose high,
body rocking as she rises above her hind legs, water streaming.

The eyes are ancient, close-set and keen for preying, body hot
and reeking of musk and earth and fish from that mountain stream.

Last night I felt the water slip along my sides, inhaled it and let it out,
racing reflections through a sun- and shade-splattered stream.

And tonight I had to choose between the sound of gasping and the raking
at my heart, bear them both or surrender one to the spirit stream.

Ghazal, by a Thread

You can visit the Innisfree Poetry Journal #12 to see my ghazal (first attempt) about life.