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peace, love, happiness & understanding 6/6/24
June 6 - July 3
The Young Hare by Albrecht Dürer
THE OPEN ROAD
peace, love, happiness & understanding
June 6, 2024
Live righteously and love everyone.
—tag on Yogi Tea bag
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Alex sent this poem:
The Province of Clocks
There aren’t many leaves left in the galaxy
magnolia planted on the museum grounds.
Ravens explode from the county hospital
roof as a result of internal pressure, recalling
to me the nurse who caressed my hand
-cuffed wrists at two in the morning
when I was sick and awaiting arraignment. She didn’t
have to do that. Now when I’m bored and uncurious
I try to remember what it was like to remember
how I held my face so close to the juniper, redirected
a moth from annihilation, and asked my grief
for the hour. Contrary to popular belief, clocks have more
to do with space than time, and all guns really do is move
a thing very quickly into you.
—Alex Tretbar
first published in the journal Sixth Finch
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Ken Margolis shared this:
“Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience. Furthermore, while many of the young believe that the world can be made better by sudden changes in social order and by bloody and exhausting revolutions, most older people have learned that hatred and cruelty never produce anything but their own kind. The only hope of mankind is love in its various forms and manifestations—the source of them all being love of life, which, as we know, increases and ripens with the years.”
—from the “Author’s Note” to the book Old Love by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1997) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978—the only Yiddish writer to do so.
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I invited Elizabeth to write about her personal experience with blogs. Here’s what she wrote:
About Those Web Logs (Blogs)
I didn’t start writing regularly on the internet until the summer of 2000. Before then I had been posting poetry drafts for workshopping on a site called Open Diary. Not because I was workshopping the poems there. I was posting there because I met a couple of guys that wanted to workshop poems and instead of printing our poems out to share at our weekly coffeeshop meetings, one of the guys suggested we use this online diary site. We could put our poems up, we could see them, critique them, and hey maybe if we got lucky someone else would as well.
That was in 1998. We used what we called “diary names”. There were three of us at that first meeting. When we put up our draft poems there was a front-page feature that folks out in the world would scroll through and click on something that interested them. There was the ability to leave notes on someone’s post. I think we had rudimentary hashtags too, so people interested in poetry might find us that way.
I didn’t get much traffic, but the two male poets got more, and I would look at their notes and click on those people’s diaries. These were people writing regularly all over the world about their lives behind this porous wall of assumed anonymity.
There was flirting, there was drama, as more and more folks coming to the local open mic readings found out we were doing this and joined. People started writing more than poetry and those of us still writing poetry and reading it were parsing it for the juiciest possible details about each other. Factions developed. Feelings were expressed. It was a free for all.
I was reading about the daily lives of people all over the English-speaking world that I stumbled upon or who had found me. I remember a particular day clearly, keeping the poetry page, I decided to set up a page to talk about myself and my life, so I didn’t feel like I was lurking, I was participating. There were ads but somewhere around 2003 or so we got the option to have no ads if we paid a modest amount either monthly or annually.
There were various levels of privacy available too. You could have Friends Only; this is before Facebook became ubiquitous. But I decided to keep my writing public. This became an issue when my family and coworkers started reading what I was writing. Did I mention drama? Crazy drama with misinterpretation and envy and grudges and…
It was kind of fun in an I know this probably isn’t a good idea transgressive sort of way.
Now you would think, oh, well the thing to do then is manage privacy to minimize the drama, but being a person who likes a challenge I decided to figure out a way to write regularly about my life that my family and close friends could read and be okay with. This took a couple of years, and I would say that the biggest lesson I learned is that the only story that is mine to tell is…mine.
Still to this day, things can get a little slippery in this arena if I know someone isn’t reading my posts or a perceived affront occurs… but mostly, I manage the impulse and keep things on the understated side. So… no trainwrecks.
One of the poets I started this adventure with I became very close to, and he pretty much only posted poetry. He didn’t have the diary impulse. His diary name was Mr. Finch and mine was (and still is) noko. Noko was my first cat, a gorgeous Norwegian Forest Cat. Johnny’s diary name is Walt, for obvious reasons.
But oh, Mr. Finch was able to create drama. And he had strong (right wing I might add) opinions.
And then he got sick. By then we were inseparable. I wrote about his illness. He had lung cancer that had spread to his brain. Taking care of him was this isolating thing. I was working full time and caring for him and I wrote about it all on this diary, blog thing, as often as I could.
People we had connected to all over the world were following along. They left unbelievably supportive and useful notes. We would read them together. And it helped. It helped us get through the hard days and the days where silly things happened and the days, deep breath, I needed to interact with his insane family full of alcoholics and one particularly challenging niece with M.S. and a crush on him. But we won’t go there, okay.
At some point the guy running the website decided he couldn’t do it anymore. There was much distress. Eventually another guy decided he would set up a new website and many of us went there. It is called Prosebox. It works a lot better than Open Diary ever did, costs a modest sum to use without ads, allows pictures if one hosts them elsewhere.
When Mr. Finch and I, (we often called each other by our diary names) started a poetry press, open mic reading, we also started a Blogspot blog. We both wrote on that. It is a blogger’s blog called Meander Knot Press. I haven’t written on there since 2016 but it is still extant.
The reach of the writing I do on Prosebox, usually twice a week and noting every few days is small, meaningful, and broadly international. A number of people who “read me”, I read as well and (for some of us 24 years) our communications have developed into deep caring connections. I have met some people in person over the years. Never a disappointment.
I have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Medium and Substack. But I barely use any of them. I do read some accounts on Substack regularly. This has become the place where folks who are not part of a media organization go to say things they have to say. People put up a certain amount of content for free or you can subscribe for more.
Substack has expanded recently to include podcasts. I love podcasts, the voice is so intimate.
The most popular Substack is by the historian Heather Cox Richardson: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/. It is called Letters From an American. If you give your email address you can have access for free to some material. There is now a feature where if you subscribe, (I do for $5 a month) you get access to her reading her posts out loud. I wasn’t finding time to read them regularly, but I can listen when I am doing chores and I happily do.
A popular independent and successful blog is The Marginalian by Maria Popova that I know a number of you subscribe to. You can find her here: https://www.themarginalian.org/about/
The thing is… people are busy. When I get asked why I would write about myself regularly and make it public…that is crazy… I just smile. I don’t expect anyone to read what I write unless they find something to connect to there. I wrote a post a few hours ago with a picture of wild blackberries in bloom and a widow in Midland Canada who was born in Singapore and married a missionary and a retired maths teacher with partial dementia from Victoria Australia read it and left notes.
The sweet serendipity of it all makes my heart sing a happy song. It appears the years of effort were worthwhile.
—Elizabeth Domike
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“The Marginalian” was originally called “Brain-Pickings.” I’ve been getting it in my Inbox for years. It is one of the inspirations for “peace, love, happiness & understanding.” I like to think of this as a “journal,” rather than a “newsletter.” There’s no news in it. When Covid was arriving in early 2020, Nancy and I were thinking about how it was going to make life in prison even worse! I thought some of our friends in prison might enjoy getting something in the mail every week, especially something with upbeat, inspirational content. (I rely on poems a lot.) These days it comes out on or about the first Thursday of the month. I mail it to about 2o people in prison, and email it to a little over 100 people “on the outside.” (Does emailing it make it a “blog”?) Since the Spring of 202o, a lot of our friends who were then in prison are out now. Hallelujah!
On the Open Road website there is a peace, love, happiness & understanding Archive: https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-archive/. This is the 95th Issue!
Walt Whitman’s 205th birthday was on May 31st. We celebrated with a cake and I performed my hour-long version of his poem “Song of Myself.” I’ve been doing that for a long time. It seems to make everyone happy—including me.
It’s weird to me that 169 years after Walt wrote this poem, it is not more widely read, appreciated, and enjoyed than it is. Many people I ask about the poem say they haven’t read it—or that they read it long ago, in school.
Chapter Two of the book Black Elk Speaks and “Song of Myself” seem to me to be the most important texts that have come from America. As a wisdom text, I have found it to be more helpful in changing the way I see and feel and experience the world than the Sermon on the Mount, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Tao Te Ching. High praise!—but true, I think, for me.
Here are some things about Walt Whitman and “Song of Myself” from the Open Road website:
https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-walt-whitman-issue-4-9-4-15/
https://openroadpdx.com/event/peace-love-happiness-understanding-6-2-22/
https://openroadpdx.com/event/friends-of-walt-an-archive/
And there’s an essay titled “Walt and Me” in my book The Nonstop Love-In, which is available from the Multnomah County Library:
https://multcolib.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S152C2348579
It can also be ordered from Open Road Press
https://openroadpdx.com/open-road-press/
and from Powell’s Books and Amazon.
Well, that’s about it for this time.
Much love to y’all,
Johnny