For reasons that are unclear to me, I stopped writing, stopped keeping a blog. As any writer who associates with other writers knows, this is a mortal error. Write, write, and write, no matter what. This is a mantra, a law of our kind, unbreakable, unimpeachable. No one questions whether or not pausing is something that, perhaps should be accepted. Not writing constitutes a failure of some sort: a missed opportunity, a period of time where the skills we have worked so hard to hone might become flabby, unbalanced and inelegant. Certainly, there were times when I wrote continually, with demented intention. During such spates I felt as though my efforts were segueing with a higher reality from which art depended, interfacing with the numinous spaces wherein what dwelled could only be spirits of inspiration. These spirits, Muses, informed my efforts as they do anyone with the proper devotion and any man who is honest will acknowledge them, admitting openly that there is no way the work came solely from his rough and animal hands.

To take a pause from such efforts seems to indicate a hesitation in love, a failure in true devotion-a transgression that, however minor will be punished. We fear our talents are slighted, that whatever progress made slouches and we fall back. Or do we? Perhaps instead, by taking pause we feel the rhythms in ourselves and the world around us. Writing, as any art, is at least in part a derivative of experience. What is in our lives, whether we are aware of it or not, evokes itself in whatever we create. This may seem obvious, but taken to its fullest conclusion, this means that there must be breaks and there must be silences. We take from within and show it from without ourselves, but to do so in a manner that is consistent with our efforts and designs: the creation of something that is worthy of having been created, we must perforce take pause. And so, many months have passed since my last writings. The inner voice doesn’t merely sleep when we give it rest-it dreams.

He told me it was an old story because obviously this can’t be true. The earth orbits the sun and seasonal markers such as the solstice and equinox were due to its procession. He told me it was an old story so that I would listen and ponder its meaning instead of writing off as a bunch of nonsense people believed in a less scientifically advanced age. His trick worked-I did think about and thought about it for a long time and often since he told me.

I usually think about it during the holidays that attend the solstice. Slight moments of reflection amid celebrations:; in between feasting and drinking and gifting. While gathered with friends and family. Outside the warmth and merriment, the sky is a sheet of hammered zinc. The trees are naked, revealing as they sleep disrobed all the space that was between them. Bare stones, brown grass. Life has descended into the earth.  A thing can be true without being literally so and in fact this lends it a greater and more relevant presence. As shortest day of the year arrives at its final wane and before it begins to fulminate once more, all things meet: what was once before and is remembered exists again, what has yet to be though undecided shows itself in all its myriad potential, and the present exists in the midst of it all but unknowable.

Good stories keep memory, telling us who we are and what the world is around us. The tale unfolds and its backdrop is reality, sometimes explaining itself, more often, it is, simply landscape, but no less beautiful for it having been so. The story is predicated upon what has preceded it, keeping up what he hold today, it will change again before tomorrow and  in its river like body, course on through to other times and places. The story keeps us going and we live inside of it. and are parts of it.

And so telling a story is a great responsibility because it defines-if only for a moment-reality. I’ve written events and seen them come to life, the print a strange talisman summoning forth through its letters and intention a cascade of people, situations, outcomes. The greater the story, the more the magnitude of what it becomes, opening like a vast blossom, a universal rose. Open ended, we all participate in what we’ve written and the stories that we were and become, shared are who we are.

Our lives no less than this. We find tales within ourselves, a meaning inside of events that on the face of themselves are a fusion of design and circumstance. I learned a long time ago that humanity remembers mythology but not history. Are our own lives, history in the personal, events in the small, no less? It is a difficult thing to extract narrative from event and to look at what has happened, is happening, will happen without our own projections, to stand aside and not only see matters from another’s view, but impartial, outside, like a Deist’s divine watchmaker who observes events without precipitating cause or outcome. Perhaps what happens in our lives, the world and the universe is both of a personal and impersonal nature. An extreme causes the appearance of its opposite. Things happen by accident but everthing happens for a reason. We foist meaning upon life when there is no inherent value aside from what we choose to see-but upon observing, the witness causes a shift, a change occurs and suddenly it is full of meaning. It means something to us, and that is of the greatest importance.

Everyone carries a universe inside of themselves, a personal reality shared when it is spoken of, written about, its likeness painted on canvas. The shared efforts converge and become a common reality, one in which we see ourselves and everyone else reflected-not always acurately, sometimes as though in a fun house mirror-and from this the world is made. Given this, surely the most important thing in the universe is each other-by knowing others we can know ourselves, a greater story of who we are because it is written by another, even distortions give insight and pause for reflection.  And so, everything is interconnected by our thoughts and our words.

But there are times we find not fit to blog. Omissions are made to spare the living, to spare the dead. There are so many things I would like to write about but decorum prevents me. The tragedies of others are unfit for strangers to bear in the pages of their texts. When someone anonymous dies, should we, in fact, try to make it pertinent and relate ourselves to it? When Memorial Day came and went, I wanted to scribe my own feelings on war, to say what I think about current conflicts and about the sordid past of man. But it seems a small thing to me-my own views, that is-I’ve never fought in a war. There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion and voicing it, in fact, it is admirable when people do. But I’ve read old essays and articles, editorials from before and after the fact. The men and women who have thought actions against other human beings were justified, only to find later that their words collapsed under their own weight.

The same holds true for other affairs. To be critical of the world means, all to often, that we spare ourselves subjection to the microscope, like a photo taken up too close where everything that is out of sort is there to see. Only-everyone looks that way through that lens. To that end, rather than engage in a matter offensively, I’ve often tried to keep a cool head and stick to the facts, to not let emotion bleed in and remain inviolate. Certain core positions are unassailable: the sanctity of human life, the transcendence of nature, the highest expression of love. And so, instead of throwing out my political views or religious beliefs (they’re mine, not anyone else’s after all, and surely everyone is entitled to their own) I want to share things that make the continuum of being, a common language that, being the property of all, is poetic in nature: a gibbous moon, the language of birds, leaves rustling in the wind…

Case in point: A story came to me once, to write about two young men growing up in a small town. There is an intimacy and an oppression that comes with village life. Everyone knows you-but that’s the problem, you have an identity you can’t escape from. You always are who you once were, not who you are today and with that sort of binding you will never be who you really want to. I’ll admit it’s a little autobiographical, and its nuances strike home all the more for me since Facebook seems to have brought all the dramatis personae from my hometown back into my life, even if I’m not friends with all of them on FB, I see their profiles on other people’s lists and remember the weird and now poorly understood conflicts and drama from so long ago. The boys grow up in fractured families-the sort that would have been solidly middle class if their parents had stayed together, and in the confused daze of adolescence find their parents apart and sliding down the scale economically at the precise age when status and identity become so entwined. Like most youth, they take it at face value and with little reflection. Perhaps a little nihilistic self-destructive behavior like bad grades and mild substance abuse finds expression. That and raucous music and outrageous personal style.

Eventually, of course, the two boys go their separate ways upon adulthood. One leaves town. The other stays. During the course of their coming of age, they live together in a borderline bad part of town, living demented bachelor lives that feel more like those of feral lost boys than how young men were in times now past when people seemed to know themselves better and have more control. The borderline part of town abuts an industrial area, and a feature of the story that was to figure prominently was the flashing red beacon of a radio tower in the distance. A light like an all-seeing eye, a part of the landscape even though it was mand-made, the thing is somehow a silent witness, mute in its testimony it observes everything but does not judge. They’d wonder at it occasionally on late nights when they were out of their head. When they were younger and everything had to be funny, idiot joke stories encompassed its meaning, but as years pressed on, it became something more profound. All the more because no one else seemed to notice it but them.

Years later, the young man who left returns. Visits. They go out together and talk about old friends who are dead, or what happened to other friends-where they were and how they were. The women they were interested in once and what they looked like, who they wound up with or were without. Some of it is happy, a lot of it is sad and both have their own parts of melancholy regardless. Stories about school plays, the eclipses of the sun they remember over the years. The past is strange and familiar, the present strange and anonymous. It’s not all that bad for it being so. There is a sense that with the passing of time, things have flattened out, and even if we aren’t who we thought or hoped we would be, nonetheless, it was alright for what it was. It was, it was just being. That night, after carousing and the quasi guilt that accompanies it, he sees the light in the distance. Still there after all these years.

When I was a young man, the days of Equinox and Solstice seemed especially magical. The shadows and warm glades of midsummer twilight ensured that there were other worlds than this one, places where human beings rarely treaded. I felt glad knowing that the Longest Night was over and that, despite the cold and saturnine skies, light was slowly returning to the world, and a pivot would soon be upon the year and again it would be spring. Later, I joined secret societies that met on days once revered whose meaning now was largely lost. The names of the days were evocative: The Eve of Saint John, Dies C (Corpus Christi), Pentecost. The Eve of Saint John is around the time of the summer solstice-the feast of John the Baptist, standing in balance on the other side of Christmas and the feast of Jesus. The idea intrigued me-there was deeper meaning at work here. Pentecost refers to the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles-but it is also when King Arthur and his knights would meet, and when the Holy Grail descended to the Earth. According to these hidden traditions, certain days held special significance: the fires lit for Saint Brigid in the depths of winter, the Perseid meteors were the Tears of Saint Lawrence, icons of Mary rising from the beneath the waves. There is a Feast of All Souls, of All Saints, of All Angels.  Walpurgis Nacht or May Eve reserved by the darker powers of the world to enact their nefarious ends.

I’ve worked to keep traditions, inside and outside of the one I was raised in and currently practice. Candles and rites and special foods and special clothes. Without fully grasping just why I was doing what I was doing, I kep to the task at hand. Over the years, a framework evoked itself, a sacred time in keeping with the seasons, the year as holy making the world and all life holy and in tune with the procession of the earth, the turning of one season into the next, the stars in the sky, the chariot path of the sun, the phases of the moon, the tides of the ocean. All life is sacred-and some of the most connected moments I’ve had with this mandate is watching a calf suckle on a cow, a chimney swift feed bugs to its young, hearing the chorus of frogs at night. Keeping tradition-whatever the tradition is-keeps a part of ourselves, marking our procession through the year and hence through the years, as our lives encompass decades we have them inside of the days we’ve kept: the wine drunk, the fires burning in hearths, songs sung and those who come into the world and those who leave for other places.

As a story teller you come to learn that what you tell becomes real. It’s an evocation that calls into existence the elements of its story. Life and death and rebirth. Good and evil-they don’t exist in our world, just ask anyone. But they’re as real as your eyeballs or loins, it’s because someone told a story about it and we’ve all been telling stories about it ever since. A writer does this even more so, as he codifies the tale for a generation and further iterations must wait their turn. All true writers acknowledge the Gods-they’re what make the stories real in their truest sense. A writer with no Gods is a homunculus, a stillborn thing that could have been but never fully formed.

I wanted to be a fully realized writer-I wanted sex and death and dreams and mythology. The poetry of fucking (excuse me if that’s trite). It seemed self-evident to me that there were archetypes, things that were greater than myself. All I had to do was look outside and not ask for explanations. It is all out there somewhere, you just gotta look.

Sometimes I think about it and sometimes I don’t. When it’s the turn of the seasons, it’s hard not to. Flowers and birds and storms and stinging insects returning to the earth. When I was a young man, I was open to it with no real preconceived notions. People would tell you I was crazy, and they were right. And some of them got it (a lot didn’t). It was an intentional madness-not contrived or self inflicted, it was something I submitted to. I let it all go, let it al happen, let it out in all it terrible and bloody, broken lunacy. This is what I am damn it, looking at it for myself. The mud washes away, and when the dross is gone there is no stone more precious.

Once, in a bar, Dionysus told me there was no meaning to life-that life contained its own meaning inside of itself. It was foolish to try and define it because there were things that always lay outside definitions, that crashed into them in the process of their becoming. He had horns on his head if you looked to see them and a greater knowledge of wine than I’ll ever have. He was serious about being the lord of temporary dementia, of darkness in the corners that expands outward when nightfalls. Things are meant to be broken apart and out back together again-different than before, whether it’s better than it was or not is up to whoever is currently thinking about it. When there isn’t enough of that, things flatline and life becomes still, static and a more oppressive thing you can’t imagine. The longer it lasts, the greater and more maddened is the release from imprisonment. Everyone who’s lived through the past ten years in this country knows what I’m talking about.  We got drunk and chased women and things got crazy. And to this day, years later, I’m not sure what to make of what happened that night-except that I respect and am scared of the mother-fucker, even if I don’t always believe he exists outside of me…

Up to that point, the crazed anger I felt at a system that had failed me in a vast manner expressed itself in typical teen-age nihilistic self-destruction. There was no higher calling to the extreme rebellion I felt welling up inside of me with beautiful, elemental fury. Little did I suspect, incident and cause would be laid up at my feet.

It was the Ides of March. I was downtown with some friends, drinking a beer and getting ready to go see a band play. At that time Athens had a local TV station that aired live footage. The TV crew was going around asking folks what they were planning to do on the Ides of March. It just so happened that my English class was reading Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, so of course, the play gave me what I thought were great ideas for a clever answer. The TV crew came to our table and asked my friends and I what our plans were, and I burst out with an exclamation that we should do to Reagan what was done to Caesar…although I must admit, I didn’t express myself too eloquently. Instead, it was just teen-age me saying dumb teen-age things. I was pretty pleased with myself at the time, very sure that no one could top what I said. I don’t really remember the rest of the evening-presumably, I hung out, saw a band play and probably tried to meet college girls.

I forgot about what I said-didn’t think there was too much to ponder on, really. A few weeks passed uneventfully. I played around with theater when I was in High School-the production at the time was Jesus Christ Superstar. One day, practice let out early and my mother showed up (she wasn’t in the hospital yet). Usually she picked me up late, and practice let out early-so this meant she was realy early. And that meant, of course, that I was in trouble. The thing was, I couldn’t for the life of me think of what it could be.

It turned out that, whatever the problem was, there were men at the house who wanted to talk to me-and my mother couldn’t tell me about what. That was particularly chilling-as my mother was my only real advocate. I racked my brains for what it could all be about this time.

Two men waited for me in my own house. One was a fat guy with a broken arm-local law enforcement. The other was a poster child for the SS: gigantic, dressed in a dark suit and tie, square jaw, perfectly combed blond hair and blue eyes. He asked me if I was who I was and then told me to take a seat-again, this was in my own home. It turned out he was FBI and they were investigating me. They had seen the film footage where I made my comical remarks about the Ides of March.  Remarks, I would like to reiterate, that were obviously made in jest. This from a local show in a small town on a Friday night on a station that no one (or almost no one, it would seem) watched. I was too shocked to be scared-the situation was surreal, like watching myself in some weird indie movie.

What I said was against the law. What about freedom of speech? Well, apparently, that’s open to interpretation. Technically, because of legislation enacted during the Kennedy administration, I was on the wrong side of the law-again. A lot of people today have lionized Reagan and his era as some sort of Golden Age. It’s their answer to the Kennedy Camelot. Well, let me tell you, it wasn’t that great. The nation was reeling from recession, the Cold War was stepped up so that WWIII and subsequent nuclear Armageddon seemed inevitable. All the environmental concerns I was raised in during my 1970s’s childhood were tossed out the window. Callow materialism gripped the land-the hippies had grown up to sell insurance and bought their kids designer clothes.

Here I was, a fourteen year old boy, trying to hold his own in the world, and the FBI decided I was enough of a threat to national security that I was worth investigating. They said the reason it took them so long to find me (two weeks or so) was because they assumed I was in college. After that, they looked through local High School year books and there I was-positively identified by a school teacher that was trying to date my mother. They knew who I was, where I lived, who my associates were. They took photos of me: my front and my profile. They gave me a hand-writing test. I was on record. Nothing else came pursuant; fortunately, I lived in the US and so a black bag wasn’t put over my head and I wasn’t dragged off into anonymous oblivion for insulting El Presidente.

When they left it took awhile for me to realize no real prosecution was going to take place. A colossal sense of relief fell on me as I felt that for the first time in recent memory, I was given a break. My father called and asked me what I’d done now. Nothing. I’d done nothing. Except open my stupid teen-age mouth and say stupid teen-age things. And to my surprise, Big Brother really was watching.

Years later, the US government talked its citizenry into going to war with the nation of Iraq. They did so with fraudulent evidence and deliberate fabrication of the facts. As a result, thousands died (20% of the casualties were children, by the way) and millions were displaced. Illicit spying on Americans by their own government was engaged-a person I know even said “as long as you’re not doing anything, what do you care?” Under the excuse of war, kidnapping and torture were also employed by a government that people assume is responsiblebecause they assume it is accountable. Countries are destroyed and private corporations are given contracts to re-build them. The cost of oil triples. Health care sky-rockets. The free press is just another business interested in profits. And the pockets of one percent or so of the population are lined with yet more gold.

Sometimes, I look back at myself when I was fourteen-1984. It was one of the most formative years of my life. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: “Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.”

What did it mean? I found myself wondering. I look for signs in the world around me. A shooting star, the appearance of a person or object just after we have thought about them or it, a coin in the street, a dream full of chthonic and archetypal meaning. Augury, the signs of the birds in the sky no less than any other part of the living world that continually reveals itself and by doing so initiates us to deeper levels within as we spiral through our lives. The birds give portents and omens, the creation of cities and alphabets comes from them. The language of birds is an interior one, and the men and women who understand it know what the gods know and dwell in mythology where the temporal world segues with the eternal.              

The first bird I remember was a rooster that lived nearby. I was in my crib, shadowed in the blue light of early dawn, the rooster was crowing. Its call waking me up-not just for the day, but for the life ahead of me. It always seemed fitting that this was the first bird I knew-although I never saw it, just heard its sound, and can still hear it today when I think about it.

When I was young, there were long stretches of silence and solitude. The world seemed, on occasion, overly vast, unconfined, sprawled about me in gigantic proportions. A little boy on a hill by himself in the looming dread and sparse chill that accompanies the later days of fall, when the early afternoon just after school is empty and alone. Amid the dead brown lawns and vacant houses, I often looked up into the blue reaches of the sky. There, gracefully tacking in widening circles was a vulture. Often, vultures, associated with death and scavenging, are maligned creatures. But this seems to be a projection of our own fears. Taken for what it is, as the vulture soars in the highest planes of heaven, it is silently meditating, taking it all in, its flight is unhurried. It brought peace, calm, reflection.

There was a single birdhouse in the backyard where I grew up. A simple, box shaped, plain brown, wooden place nailed to a pine tree. Cardinals nested there every year. The brilliant red plumage of the male stood out for all the more of its glory against the dull brown. I would marvel at how it seemed that only cardinals liked the house, they were the only birds that ever occupied it. Later, I learned that cardinals mate for life, and so it was the same family that lived there, year after year, raising generations of cardinals in the house we put out there for them. To this day, I feel a connection with the cardinals-as if by providing them with a place to live for such a long time, I’d earned their friendship and knew them better than others.

One of the great bird sightings in the sky is the great blue heron. It flaps ponderously, impossibly lifting the length of itself and then winging onward. When I see the heron, I think of how the Egyptians regarded the ibis as the bird of wisdom, how Hermes devised the alphabet from the leg movements of cranes. Here in America, surely, the great blue heron is a bird of wisdom that is our very own, and watching its flight and stances we can learn things heretofore unknown to us.

A red pleated woodpecker makes its home amid a row of high standing oaks to the southwestern point of my home. High above, it knocks out its meals from the wood, like a workman with a hammer, day in and day out. I recently learned their primary food is carpenter ants, of which, there are many in the area-once, there was a gigantic nest of them in the broken stump of an oak tree that fell in a storm.  The woodpecker has lived there for sometime, and seems to be undisturbed by the red-tailed hawk that, in its turn, lives in the northwestern part of the yard. The hawk announces its presence with triumphant screeching, and while this may be a way to warn others away from its territory, I am quite certain that he simply enjoys shrieking, its his way of exulting in the day, saying hello to the world as the other birds, squirrels, rabbits and small mammals dive for cover.  At night, the owls engage in a similar activity, and hoot themselves to the night, calling to each other in cries that sound like there is at least some sort of conversation taking place. This is the neighborhood of birds, where they know about each other. Along with mourning doves, mockingbirds, crows, nighthawks, listening in is hearing about a voice of nature, a music of the earth that with frogs, whales, coyotes and more is the chorus of life with all its undefined meaning-the meaning is contained in the thing itself and by seeing and hearing and experiencing it we have that meaning within as well.

We have a hummingbird feeder near the house and a ruby throated hummingbird darts to it furtively. At first, if we were near the window or moved at all, it would shoot away. But over time the little guy figured out we meant no harm and that we were just observers. No need to fear, please, hover all you want and drink your fill. My children marvel at the bird, seeing it at the feeder is a brief moment of wonder-and brevity, perhaps, sometimes should accompany wonder to truly leave its marvel in the soul. Like the cardinals from my youth, I feel a connection to the bird and see in its flight the language of birds.