It doesn't take long for newcomers to Florida to realize that summer is not the best time for a jerkwater jaunt. What's a jerkwater? It's an American term for a place that's "insignificant and out-of-the-way; so called from the jerking (drawing) of water to fill buckets for supplying a steam locomotive."
By the end of April or beginning of May, it's no fun to spend a lot of time by the water's edge. The air gets steamy. The insects start biting. In early April, you still have time to check out a few trails in the Bear Creek Tract of Lake Talquin State Forest. It's not uncommon to see irises jutting out from the earthen dam.
The chance to capture native azalea beauty justifies a strenuous walk up and down steep hills.
Daughter journeyed a few hours east to spend a few days with her not-so-juvenescent parents.
After a couple of nights tossing and turning on the spare-bed air mattress, she didn't mind joining SAM in a low-back stretch or two.
By early June, the great blue herons inhabiting the area will have this jerkwater jaunting spot all to themselves. This one (a juvenile?) was curious about us but decided to fly away as soon as he noticed my jinks with the camera. It's just as well that the heat and bugs are cranking up and will drive us away. The herons don't need to hear humans jouncing about in the woods all summer long. It's peace and quiet they want--not jarring noises--while feeding, breeding, and nesting in the trees.
Please see A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "J's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.
Mention the word "India" to me, and you'll notice my eyes taking on a dreamy, faraway look. The very thought of the place transports me to a sensory-rich world of imagination. In my mind, I see vivid colors, smell fragrant flowers and spices, and taste savory food prepared to delight the palate.
How and where did I form these notions of a place where I've never been? Brit lit provided my first impressions: E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. All of these works and more made me wish for my own passage to India. I considered the possibilities. Train to be a nurse, missionary, foreign correspondent...?
Over the years, responsibilities here at home have kept my feet firmly on American soil, but my thoughts still drift to that place I once dreamed of visiting. Movies made of the aforementioned novels only made the longing worse. Then I found an amazing thing. Blogging. I could step aboard a flight to India without having to spend a fortune on airfare or endure the indignities of airport security. There were friendly hosts available 24/7 to take me on a tour of famous ruins, bustling marketplaces, and modern cities. They share their own experiences in these places, illuminating how many gaps there are between what fiction has revealed and what reality exists in India. My initialimpressions of their home have been challenged and changed for good.
Here is a list, in no particular order, of some of my Indian blogging friends. I hope you take some time to pay them a visit. Prepare to be delighted and inspired:
Alligators in H2O at St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge
H is for Hindbrain
Hindbrain thinking isn't a hot topic, I'll wager. Everyone these days seems to know what left- and right-brain thinking are all about. You've probably seen that image of a dancer spinning around. Supposedly, if you see her spinning clockwise, you're more right-brain oriented, meaning that your imagination rules your thoughts. You're also more impetuous and not opposed to taking risks. Yes, I can see that. But thought can't be that simple. And the brain isn't political. It's not one side or the other.
The brain, after all, isn't composed of just two halves. It has other lobes, other parts which affect thought and reason. Here's a document that explains much better than I can what all the parts do for you and where they are located. Take that hindbrain, for instance. Pons, medulla, and cerebellum. Together, these structures keep us moving, staying upright, sleeping when it's time to do so, breathing, and carrying on all those other bodily functions necessary to life that we're not usually aware of, like digestion. So what about emotions and feelings of love, hate, aggression...?
You've probably watched that scene with Adam Sandler and the professor in The Waterboy:
Contrary to what the professor says about the medulla oblongata (maybe the waterboy was justified in tackling him), and according to medical experts, it's what's happening in the amygdala and limbic system that makes us happy, sad, or whatever. We're a bit more complicated than alligators and maybe more than what those experts claim.
If thinking isn't dominated by just one lobe or the other but comes from a combination of activities going on simultaneously throughout the brain, then writing must do the same. It should be as automatic as breathing, as hidden and mysterious as blood cell formation, as simple as sleeping, as complicated as playing the piano. Or acting the part of a hilariously funny, swamp-dwelling football player in a comedic film. How many alligators--or medical experts, for that matter--can do that?
Please see A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "H's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.
Writers who have successfully navigated that sea--or plowed that field--of publishing tribulation usually advise you to write what you know. Okay. But not many people would be interested in reading stuff like: Keeping a marriage and family intact during a time when the economy was busting out of its britches and our president was caught with his pants down. Or watching the health care crisis unfold among untold transcribed pages of medical reports. Or learning something very unscientific about what plants/methods/chants work or don't work in a home garden.
Once I realized just how many big fish were already angling for publishers' attention, I gave up the idea of becoming a garden guru and decided to try the fiction waters instead. It can't be much more frustrating than seeing the first tomatoes of the season covered with these suckers. Right?
How does your garden or writing grow? Does Contrary-Mary slip in and mess with things, or do those maids always look pretty and toe the line for you?
Please see A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "G's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.
Cirsium horridulum, "Horrible thistle," commonly found in Florida's disturbed areas
F is for Florida
Florida in all of its many flavors takes the cake for occupying my thoughts most of the time now. Don't worry, Southern Illinois, I'm not abandoning you when it comes to this blog or any other writing. It's only natural for a writer to focus and feed on what's front and center.
When we were just tourists here in years past, I never gave much thought to how much the landscape was being changed to accommodate our family and others like us who would visit the state or decided to stay. Swamps were drained. Native plants were supplanted by more appealing but often aggressively spreading ones. As new houses, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses were built, freshwater usage increased. More wells were drilled into aquifers that supply that fresh water. Hard surfaces like parking lots and driveways increased polluting runoff like lawn and agricultural chemicals into streams and other surficial water sources that feed those aquifers. More and more sinkholes appeared as fragile limestone support underground collapsed under the weight of all that consumption.
I've always admired writing that allows landscape to be uninhibited. From Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, to Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and then on to Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, landscape becomes a prominent voice telling its own story. Imagine, if you will, characters who are not carrying the tale but are vehicles being driven by what surrounds them. Interestingly, that driving force moves not only the characters. It also approaches and attempts to scale manmade boundaries. Societal structures such as familial stability and moral values crumble.
Cactus found along a St. George Island trail
Remember the dinosaurs brought to life in the cinema version of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park? Dr. Ian Malcolm, a scientist invited to visit the park and give it his stamp of approval concludes that "life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously." Dr. Malcolm is someone quite familiar with unpredictability in nature as well as humans. He describes himself as ever ready to meet the next ex-Mrs. Malcolm. Stability be damned.
Things go awry when wilderness is hemmed in or otherwise "tampered" with. Nature takes over and tells the story. It's a powerful voice. Is it allowed to speak in any of your stories?
St. George Island Lighthouse
Please see A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "F's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.
Image of Ralph Waldo Emerson borrowed from this site
What's the first thing that comes to mind with the word "essay"? Ugh! It's that theme paper I had to write in Composition class, the one where I had to make a point and defend it. No wonder essays went the way of horse-drawn carriages. They're kind of fun to read for nostalgia's sake but not consumed on a regular basis by the reading public. It's more relaxing to do stuff like look for Waldo in a picture than try to see things from another Waldo's (Ralph W. Emerson's) perspective. Take a deep breath and think happy thoughts. Don't tax your brain. It is April, you know, and by now we've all had enough of taxes.
Who writes essays anymore? Actors and musicians are idolized, but other arts are ignored. Yes, writing is an art, even the nonfiction kind. The mind of a writer paints in colors imagined by the reader, with brushes assembled hair-by-hair in experience. That experience can be personal and/or gathered from other writers. A written story continues--while adding to--someone else's story, a thread picked up and added to a skein of yarns:
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.
Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history...This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time...We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly...
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (First Series), "History," 1841
What are you taxing your brain with or adding to the skein today?
