Don't forget to give a Christmas present to yourself

Thanks to the time of year and the weather patterns, I've begun rereading a couple of books of poetry that involve Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. Kooser wrote Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison during the last years of the last millennium. Kooser and Harrison collaborated on Braided Creek, A Conversation in Poetry, during the early years of the current millennium. The poems in the latter aren't identified by poet. I have long admired and enjoyed the poems of each writer, and continue in my efforts to discover more details of the long-standing friendship between two poets who seem to me to be very different people, except they both love the Midwest and both are writers.

Next year I intend to once again risk paving part of a road to hell, with my good intentions to return to poetry writing. Kooser put his aside for several months after he'd been diagnosed with cancer, and then began sending postcards to Harrison. I hope to avoid anything as traumatic, but want to slow down and pay more attention to the details in my life, especially as the world around us gets more crazy, at least leading up to early November.

My suggestion: give yourself a Christmas present that lasts all year. Set aside time each and every day for meditation and meaningful reading. Try to stretch you attention span. I know I've shortened mine by spending too much time on the internets and social media. No matter how easy and addictive it may be, we don't have to do things that are unhealthy for our minds, bodies and emotions. In fact, it seems to me that learning to treat ourselves to health is part of the message of the birth and rebirth we celebrate at this time of year.

from “Braided Creek”

How one old tire leans up against
another, the breath gone out of both.

Old friend,
perhaps we work too hard
at being remembered.

Which way will the creek
run when time ends?
Don’t ask me until
this wine bottle is empty.

While my bowl is still half full,
you can eat out of it too,
and when it is empty,
just bury it out in the flowers.

All those years
I had in my pocket.
I spent them,
nickel-and-dime.

Each clock tick falls
like a raindrop,
right through the floor
as if it were nothing.

In the morning light,
the doorknob, cold with dew.

The Pilot razor-point pen is my
compass, watch, and soul chaser.
Thousands of miles of black squiggles.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be