Overcoming obstacles and T. S. Eliot

I came across a quotation from the last work of T. S. Eliot that I really liked. Perhaps I already wrote to you about it. There were three that I found and that spoke to me. I actually like a couple so well that I put them in calligraphy in my Art Journal with an eye to doing some artwork on them at some point. When I was in college for the first time, in my 20's, I studied The Wasteland, which of course is what Eliot is most famous for writing. Later, of course, his lasting fame would be cemented by his Old Possums Book of Practical Cats which became the still popular musical Cats!

The quotations sent me on an old college style research mission which was complicated by the fact that I can't read books anymore due to my visual disability. So I searched my free library app - Hoopla - for a biography of T. S. Eliot on audio book. No luck. Then I tried my subscription to audible - again - no luck. I could get readings of his poetry but no biography on audiobook. I searched amazon, then pbs for a documentary - doors closed.

Then, I was talking on the phone with my sister and she was watching something on YouTube and I got the idea to search there and found a great documentary critiquing his work by literary scholars. It was so interesting and informative. Although The Wasteland is touted as his post World War exploration of the emptiness and despair of people after the devastation of the war, Eliot himself said it was more about his emotional state after his separation from his first wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood. She was described by all their contemporaries as intensely mentally unstable. Virginia Woolf said she was like a bag of ferrets around Eliot's neck./>

Although she had been experienced in love and life; it was said that Eliot was probably a virgin. He was besotted but she was so mentally unstable that he had to flee back to the US and take a teaching job at Harvard for a year to get away from her. He got legally separated from her and never saw or spoke to her again. Her brother had her committed for life and she died in the asylum at the age of 58. What a tragic story.

Having had a mentally unstable spouse, I can clearly feel Eliot's pain and confusion, despair, and betrayal She had also betrayed him with an extra marital affair with a friend and mentor of his! What is wonderful about this story though. is that Eliot (a famously shy and introverted man) turned his pain into art, used writing as his diversion from mental suffering and turned that negative energy into creativity. One of the things they mentioned in the documentary was that Eliot and contemporaneous poets were called 'landscape' poets because their experiences and the works were grounded in the natural world around them. One of the scholars said you could follow the Four Quartets right around the gardens and the property around the estate where it was written and the tiny chapel in little Giddings. It really made me think about PLACE in our lives.

Today, when I felt listless and uninspired, lethargic and flat, I got in the car with my dog and we drove to a park where I used to live when I was married, and then to a park along the Delaware River where I went daily with coffee on my breaks at school when I taught in that riverfront town. These rides which I take frequently always feel like hauntings to me. The scholars also mentioned Eliot's obsession with time and how we are trapped in time though we have the concept of infinity.

They mentioned many lines in which he reiterates that the past is alive in the present and the future exists in the past and the present as well. It made me think of the Faulkner quote which doesn't go quite as far: "The past is never dead; it's not even past." Which is true in a sense but only, to me, in the sense that it exists like a well worn garment in the closet. It is still there and bears the wear and tear of its use, but we aren't wearing it anymore. To me it is more ghostly than powerful. It exists like invisible waves, magnetism, electricity, radiation, gravity.

The sun is shining here today, a break from the gray filmy foggy days of the past week. I was just gathering the tools I have for the quilting class i am signed up for beginning next week. I have lost some of the shiny hope I had because I thought from the description that it was a traditional quilting class but apparently it is a modern traditional class and we use sewing machines. Well, I will give it a chance anyhow. I had to reserve a sewing machine (I am not dragging mine over there) and tomorrow I have to go spend money on some 'modern' quilting supplies - special cutters and rulers. It is getting much too much of a 'mathy' feel. There will be 5 weeks of it! I have rarely to never signed up for something and then not shown up or finished the course. I hope this doesn't turn into something I dread - the last ones I didn't continue with were fitness classes!

By the way, T. S. Eliot finally achieved a happy marriage at the end of his life with his secretary, half his age, who had been a devoted fan of his since her adolescence. She gave him a new lease on life in his last decade and spent her life devoted to his literary legacy. Fortunately, in recompense, the money from the royalties of "CATS" kept her financially well off.

Happy Trails in the past, the present and the future!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

How inspiration happens on a winter's day January 2, 2026

"We shall not cease from Exploration

And the end of all our exploring

will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

T. S. Eliot from poem "Little Gidding"

I came across this short excerpt from the long poem Four Quartets by Eliot, but I didn't know at the time where it came from. I just knew that it spoke to me about the leaving and arriving in our lives and how the returns to places of our past reveal things to us at the same time as it remains familiar - never quite the same.

When I meet my friends for lunch in Maple Shade, I drive by the places where I spent my teens, those years so fraught with the fires of emotion and which mark the major transitions in life, the leaving of the family home and the setting off into the world of independence. I see the place where I swam in the black water of the Pennsauken Creek and the little bridge I drove across a hundred times in the car of my teenage sweetheart. This is the creek where I contracted a deadly liver disease which also changed my life due to my Proustian confinement to my bedroom for nearly a year, the time it took to recover from the advanced ravages of Hepititis A.

Visiting the poem to find the context of this remarkable set of lines brought me back to another kind of memory, the kind of memory a dog might have visiting, in dead of winter, a park where it romped years ago in summer. It reminded me of college and the excitement and passion that I experienced in studying literature, the beauty and mystery of the use of words by brilliant minds.

Many people feel the desire to voice their strong feelings in what they call poetry, or some call music lyrics. I subscribe to an e-mail that sends me a poem a day, but I rarely find them inspiring or even very interesting. I guess I got spoiled by my exposure to serious and scholarly poets who were profound and visited big themes like life and death, war and survival, the immense passage of time in human lives; these are the poets who have stood the test of time itself and remain in our collective memory. Too much of the 'poem a day' offerings are pedestrian in wording and revolve around romantic disappointment complaints. They never offer a set of lines that grab me and make me want to write them down in my journal and look up the origin.

The lines above were written by T. S. Eliot during World War 2 when he was a 'fire watcher' during the blitz. He remembered the chapel in a village called Little Gidding. Reading some of the people who studied/analyzed and experienced this poem, I discovered it was the last poem Eliot ever wrote. Number four in a quartet.

Here is another quote that I chose from the poem:

"....for history is a pattern of timeless moments.

Sp while the light fades on a winters afternoon in a secluded chapel

History is now and England."

Surprisingly, T. S. Eliot was not a born Englishman but an American born in Missouri. He moved to England in 1914 to study at Oxford but World War I changed his plans. He stayed in London to work as a teacher and a bank clerk. He became a citizen in 1927 and a major figure in literary 'modernism.' His most famous work is probably The Wasteland.

I think this excerpt speaks to how events change our plans:

"Either you had a purpose

or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfilment."

Happy trails through your own drear midwinter afternoon - may a line of poetry make a flame in your mind. wrightj45@yahoo.com

Ringing in the New Year around the world 2026

I was just looking at photos of the celebrations around the world to mark the start of the New Year and it struck me how we all have agreed, globally, on this calendar. It wasn't always the case. Just thinking, so no evidence or facts to offer, only my musing this morning 1/2/26 - but peope have used other calendars and other ways to mark the year as we know from archaeological discoveries. Of course, the solstice has been the most famous archaeological and astronomical time marker I suppose. Civilizations from the Americas to Europe have created monuments to mark the Winter solstice which I should say is probably the most resonable way to mark the end of one year and the beginning of another - an agricultural time marker when people depended on crops to stay alive and the winter was a waiting game: Will the things we dried and smoked and salted and preserved last until we can plant and gather again?

Memories of famine are not far from the minds of people or our domesticated creatures like my dog. My dog carries the millennial memories of hunger with her at all times, she is always searching for that morsel. And I was raised right after World War II when people had made gardens in every possible place to grow food during the shortages caused by transportation disruptions among other causes. In South Philadelphia, where I was raised until I was 12, the people had created commuity allotments and worked together with their remembered skills. Below our neighborhood was a now lost settlement called "Schoolhouse Lane" which was the still thriving remnant of a Colonial era swamp reclamation created by German immigrants, off the grid. They had no municipal services and paid no taxes. They raised chickens, pigs, and after having made canals and drained the swamp that was the estuary of the Delaware River in that area, they did truck farming and brought their produce to the city in horse drawn wagons. My grandmother and other homemeakers went out into the alleys beyond the brick row homes and bought produce from these farmers.

My parents put in a truck garden in the backyard of our development house in the 1950's and my father had built a pantry underneat the second story stairs where he and my mohter worked mightily to preserve the bounty from that garden for the winter: stewed tomatoes, breen beans, jellies and jams, all sorts of things in sterilized Ball jars.

Now, I am not quite certain what the New Year means in terms of the civilization in which we live at present. We are so cut off from the sources of our food which arrives continuously all through the year from places all around the world because there is growing season all around the world so there is no interruption for winter.

The New Year means something social now, a re-setting of our lives, a kind of opportunity to start over, start anew. I have to go now but this is something I will ponder all day today.

Happy New Year (whatever that may mean to you!) wrightj45@yahoo.com A thought: maybe I am slow to get this but I suppose the big glittering ball dropping at Time's Square to mark the New Year is a symbol of the sun! Interesting!

Happy New Year 2026!

Last night I watched the ball drop on Times Square in New York City as I have for so many years. Actually the past 3 to 5 years I have not watched but have gone to sleep much earlier. This year, I was awake. What struck me most was the happiness on all the faces, the smiling and waving and the kissing and hugging -all the good will gathered in those thousands upon thousands of people standing peacefully in that Square, swaying to the music and looking dreamily at the world. I felt our common humanity and I felt hope.

The Morning - a news column in my e-mail news feed wrote about how it always brings us bad news: wars, mass shooting, natural disasters, political chaos, climate doom and then it went on to talk about how this morning, it would write about HOPE - not the sticky sweet kitschy sign kind, but the real kind, that helps us go on. Here is a little excerpt:

"To cultivate hope, people need three things, Zaki said: They first need to be able to envision a better future, either personally or collectively. Second, they need the willpower or motivation to move toward that future. And third, they must be able to chart “a path from where they are to where they want to be,” he added."

I keep lists because I hae always found comfort in them, order out of chaos. A plan, a map is indeed helpful in offering a view forward. Today I have one chore which is to empty and order my table drawer which can barely close now. My next item is to shower and dress in warm clothes and spend the day writing in my hournal, Art Journaling, and contemplating my resolutions and my state of existence.

It is freezing cold outside and when I awoke this morning, early, and let the dog out into the yard, the world was encased in a white frozen shell. The powerful sun has forced that frozen shell back into its water form and it has disappeared back into the soil mostly, but it is till too cold for me to walk the dog. Fortunately, Uma isn't tormenting me for a walk. She is sleeping on the sofa beside me. I am thankful for that little bit of peace. I am thankful for the bowls of creamy potato soup I have in the freezer too, that I bought at Pat's Select Pizza and Grill yesterday, which ensures me good hot midday meal that I don't have to cook. Thanks to my sister, I am fully stocked for the weekend. We went shopping at ShopRite yesterday despite her injured shoulser (which is better today) and Chewy delivered Uma's canned food and treats, so we are warm, well fed, and grateful on this first day of the new year. I cannot believe it is 26 years into the new millennium! I can't believe I am 20 years retired - or - for that matter that I am 80 years old! It is a shock and a gift all wrapped in one. Among the things I cannot believe is how all the relatives who were older than I am, are now dead - all the family I knew growing up are gone, most recently my Aunt Vinnie who died in Texas at the age of 87. These were my contemporaries as a child, Aunt Susan (dead and buried at Gloria Dei Old Swede's Church in Philadelphia. Cousin Ricky Hoffman dead in NJ - these three are the most recent and the ones who were my age and I knew in my childhood. The older Aunts and Uncles are long gone along with the grandmothers, grandfathers, and my parents - hardest of all to think of especially at the holidays.

WEll, more on resolutions later, but for now, I am signing off! Happy New Year!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Journaling, blogging, writing in general

You know I often write about ways to stay happy or at least, generally content in the world. Writing is one way I dispell the blues. You can't help experiencing anxiety and sorrow in this life, but you can mitigate or even lessen both the hold and the duration of such feelings and my go-to method is by writing. Yesterday, I blogged about the decline that aging has brought into my life. Today, reading my e-mail news feed, I came actross this line: Yahoo Health - Writing even one line in a journal about how you feel each day helps. I believe this and the line I would like to write today about how I feel is about helpers.

I feel grateful to the helpers who make my 80 year old life manageable, my sister and my neighbors. My sister works here one day every week or two to help with heavier household maintainance jobs, grocery shopping, laundry, etc. It isn't only her help but also her company. Many elderly people, like myself, live alone and even though I have pets I love, the interaction with other adults is essential to wellbeing. My neighbors check in on me and help with tasks like putting out my trash and recycle cans and also texting me in storms and even just daily when they think of me. This helps enormously.

If you are looking ror something to do, start a little journal and begin with the gratitudes - 5 things each day for which you are grateful. If you have a hard time finding them, then you know this is an important exercise for you! Also, consider texting an old friend or neighbor and just asking how they are.

New Year 2026 is coming - today my sister is coming, and tomorrow, my pension check is coming! i am grateful for my many blessings, including that all my siblings are alive and well, as is my daughter and all my siblings offspring and two of my cousins with whom I am in contact. I am grateful for the sunshine coming in the window and my general wellbeing even with the inevitable disabilities of age. I am grateful for writing and blogspot!

Getting ready for a Happy New Year! wrightj45@yahoo.com

A New Year A New Decade - for me Entering the 80's!

The Challenges of Aging

Spine Decline

My neighbor John has been walking my dog for me for about 6 months. He walks every day, two or three times a day, so it was no problem for him to pick up my dog for one of his walks. I had been walking her, first to the railroad and down to Northmont and around to my street, about a mile. Then my back began to decline and I lowered the walk to half a mile around a little local pond called Martin's Lake, a nice pavement and a pretty park view.

When John took over, I gratefully gave in to not walking. John is away with his wife and family for ten days and I am walking the dog again. Now, I get as far as where the two Food Trucks are parked, about two long blocks from my house and then back. By the time I reach the food trucks, parked at the corner at the end of the two long blocks, I have a pinching. biting pain in the right side of my lower back.

Of course, I have been to the orthopedic doctor about my spine. It began about 20 years ago with a severe pain in the space between my shoulders at the base of my neck. It was diagnosed as dessicated disc disease in C (cervical vertabrae) 3 through C 7 (just about all of them.) The Doctor warned me that it would spread down my spine over time. He was right and it has. Now it is in the lumbar region, and I know this because something dreadful happened to me over a year ago and I went to another ortopedic doctor and had xrays.

The first orthopedic doctor at Regional Orthophpedics, was my doctor from my 50's when I tore the meniscus in my left knee. I had gone to him for shots in my knee and he had prescribed Celebrex which I took until I discoverd it had nearly destroyed my kidneys. By then, I had a new medical service, Cooper Health and a new general practitioner and she referred me to a new Cooper Health orthopedic doctor.

The disaster that happened to me was that I turned in bed in the middle of the night, and became paralyzed in a lightning bolt of nerve pain. I couldn't move for 6 hours, until nearly daylight. I thought my hip had locked up somehow but the new orthopedic doctor said the xrays showed it was my lower back and I had suffered a back spasm. He prescribed some serious muscle relaxants in case it happened again but that was about all that could be done. I have not slept in a bed since that night. I sleep in a recliner.

Vision

That is one impending doom. Another one is my vision. Also in my 50's my eyesight began to fail in a strange and subtle way - first with colors like brown and navy and black when I was putting on socks in the morning, then as time progressed, with reading. Eventually, over the next decade, I went to 3 different eye doctors. 2 opthalmologists, then a cornea specialist because I was diagnosed with Fuch's Dystrophy - an inherited degenerative cornea disease for which there is no cure short of cornea transplant which involves transplant drugs and other complications. It will progress at individual rates. So far, mine has been slow and painless. But, I can no longer read, or read street signs or highway signs, or the gps map on the dashboard, so driving has become limited. I will eventually be blind. I listen to audio books.

Cognitive decline

Another problem with my driving has been a noticeable cognitive decline in the area of mind mapping. I used to be able to visualize the route to familiar far off places like a restaurant and antique shop I liked in Burlington, a hiking trail in Bordentown, and even some closer places. Sometimes the mind map just goes blank and I cannot see in my mind the route I was once so familiar with - like one day going to the veterinarian! I took a wrong turn and was driving all over the place trying to find my way back. So far this is the only sign of cognitive decline that I have noticed. Mostly my mind is sharp and my memory is good.

Memory

My memory seems to be in the normal range, by which I mean that I have no more trouble remembering things than most people at any age - the name of a an actor or a writer, or a favorite book or movie may temporarily evade me. Eventually, it comes to me. So far my two biggest problems are my spine and my vision, but I also have a lot of discomfort and crippling from my toes! >p/> First, a lifetime of slanted toed shoes has crushed my toes into an arthritic mess. That has caused toenail trouble from the curled under toes. Then, when I thought that was resolved with a good local nail salon, I got an infected toe there and discovered, after visiting the podiatrist, that somehow I had mysteriously invured my big toenail, broke it right in half and injured the nail bed. I thought I had a nail fungus but she said it was not a fungus but a broken nail and injured nail bed and a bacterial infection at the injury site. The infection is cleared up, the toe is still painful and medicare will only allow me to go to the podiatrist every two months so my nails are growing too long and exacerbating my problems. It makes it difficult and painful to walk. I need to find a new and more sterile nail salon.

Hearing

My latest decline is in hearing. Next year when I visit my general practitioner, Dr. Deborah Ubele, I will ask her to refer an ear doctor in the Cooper Health system. I can hear sitting at a small table with a friend, but not across a room. It isn't a problem of volume, but clarity. The speech is mumbled sounding, garbled. I can hear clear speakers sufficiently, but low voiced people are lost to me. None of these things are specific to me alone, half of my friends have hearing loss, all my friends have back problems some much worse than mine. Although others wear glasses or contact lenses, none has a permanent vision decline like mine - that is unique to me. Some of my friends have issues specific to them. We all have impairments due to our age.

The Future - Aging in place

As I face the future these situations cause me sudden spells of anxiety. I rely on my youngest sister for so much, but she is a heavy smoker and drinker, and I worry about her health and her son, my Godson and nephew, who is emotionally unstable. My sister is my Rock of Gibralter and to this point she is strong, reliable, kind and generous with her help. I pay her $30 ah nour and she usually works for 3 hours at a time for $100. She helps me do grocery shopping, cleaning, takes the laundry to the basement and she has been helping me move my overload of possessions along - the Free Books Project, Clothes for the Homeless, and so on.

A friend of mine, Barb S., has the perfect resolution to all of this. She is selling her house and moving to the Quaker care community at Medford Leas. She is going into a one bedroom apartment and she will no longer face yard work, snow shoveling, home repair or driving issues. At present she lives in a BIG house on a wooded lot with 3 bedrooms, two floors, and a big deck to maintain. Her pets have all died and she will be able to eat in the restaurant and cafeteria at Medford Leas and she will have compaionship there and lectures, hiking, bus trips - sounds marvelous.

Such a thing is not possible for me because I have 5 cats and a dog and I love them. My dog and two of my oldest cats will probably die within 5 years, but my kitte%s are only 6 and will live another 10 years. I have to stay home. And I love my house. My solutions have included the idea of my sister moving in with me and me leaving her living rights to the house when I die (my daughter inherits the property). My daughter isn't keen on the idea because she doesn't want to be left in any way responsible for the house or my sister, but she may have to adjust to that reality. A secondary idea might be to have my sister move in and take care of the pets, but I souldn't be able to go to Medford Leas because that would require that I sell the house for the 'buy-in' cost which is high! For a studio apartment it would be about $200,000 and $3000 a month, if I could even get in. They won't take you if you are sick. The option would be to move into an income adjusted assisted lviing facility of which there are more and more being built and one in this town, and two in next door Gloucester City.

For now, I am taking one day at a time, and I feel good. well and competent and sufficiently supported to live as I am. It is good to think about the future but not to be filled with fear about it. I can only hope I don't get a stroke or some kind of paralyzing crisis of health. Then, it is all out of my hands anyway. So, I will just live in the present and do what I can to maintain.

The Other Oldies

As close as I was with my grandmothers, I have often thought how they never mentioned a word of anything they must have been going through with aging. They stayed home until a cataastropic health crisis propelled them into the nursing homes where they died within about 2 years of entering. One had senile dementia, the other had heart attacks.

Well, now that's all put down in writing here on the blog and I can put it out of my mind. The farthest into the future I am planning now is to be more pro-active with my physical activity (the dog walk) and maybe returning to the gym, and getting a grip on my spending and credit debt with amazon and Bank of America. New Years is a great time for those resolutions! No more Amazon! No more credit card spending! Live closer witin my means!

In truth, the credit card debt wasn't frivoity - it was veterinary. Uma has cost me quite a lot in vet bills as have the cats, one at a time. That is where most of the B of A credit card debt came from. Amazon is entirely my own fault. That one I must work on seriously and it is a difficult one. Wish me luck!

This cannot be my New Years Post because it is too grim. But I have to say, as far as such things go, I am doing OK! Pretty Well in fact, and I am pretty happy most of the time. And I live in a good place, a home I love, a town I love, with great neighbors, and with the help of my sister, whom I also help, I am doing just great! As the comedian Tom Papa says "Look at You, Look at You! Still Alive! Good Work!"

Happy trails no matter how steep and rocky! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Merry Christmas 2025

Good morning and Merry Christmas whoever stumbles on this small and obscure corner of the mystery called the internet. So far, I have spoken with my sister on the phone as I will be going to her house at noon, and texted several old friends. My neighbor, John, walked my dog, as he does most mornings, and another neighbor sent me a picure from the local park where he was having a walk. He could smell someone frying bacon and eggs for breakfast. It all made me think of people throughout near history (the 20th century) and what they would be thinking or doing on Christmas morning. Women would've been making a list in their heads of all they still had to get done before the family came or they would be getting the family breakfast and getting the kids dressed to go and visit family. Throuhout my childhood, in Philadelphia in the 20th Century, that is what people did in our world on Christmas; they got dressed up and went to visit other family members, usually centered at a Grandother's house. In our case, we visited my mother's mother on 10th and Oregan Avenue in South Philadelphia. Sometimes we went to Ocean City to my father's mother and sometimes my father took us to pick her up and bring her to Philadelphia.

As Grandmothers got too old, my mother took over the role, especially when we moved to New Jersey and the old family network as we had known it was disassembled.

The old network was the Lyon's family, Grandmom Lavinia and Grandpop Joseph, their adult children, my mother, her brother Joe, and sisters Susan and Lavinia. Then the unit began to split and members moved, a kind of organic dispersion.

Whatever configuration the family unit was taking, the morning was the same. We kids, however many there were at any given time, would rush down to open our gifts under the tree! What a thrill - some new treasure. I was just thinking how I still have a doll saved from those long lost days. All my other Christmas treasures are long gone though I can remember a few, like my Paint by Number kits! I can even remember the picture that a I painted from one of the kits, a German Shepherd portrait.

The years in between youth and motherhood were like magazine pictures of Christmas. I had Christmas nightgowns, flannel with decorative prints, and I wrapped my purchases, bought with my Christmas Club money (a practice of the 60's whereby banking clients put a small amount of money into a Christmas account each payday) with extreme care. I can remember some of the gifts purchased with thoughtfulness such as the woxford shirts and matching sweaters that I bought for my brothers so that they could be dressed well over the holidays. In those days, I went back to the family home from my apartment for Christmas and watched my much younger brothers and sisters unwrap their gifts. My mother made a ham dotted with pineapple and cherries, potato salad, green beans, and we had fruit cake, except for one Christmas when my mother actually made a traditional Christmas plum pudding - flaming and all!

The days of my motherhood were so taxing it makes me sad to think of them. I was a beast of burden. So much stuff to carry all the time. I was alone in Philadelphia and had no car, and my family was in New Jersey and then in West Virginia. We only had one Christmas with my daughter's father and it was remarkable because it was one of the coldest Christmases in weather history and cars were freezing on the roads! We drove to his family's house in Chad's Ford, on Christmas Eve, which is when they celebrated Christmas and the whole way, with my newborn baby, I was afraid his (Karl's) old car would freeze up and my baby would be in danger from the cold. It didnt' and she is now in her 40's and in London, England for Christmas with her boyfriend.

Each year I tried really hard to get the gift Lavinia wanted for Christmas. We were pretty poor so she only really got two - one from me and one from Santa, and small stocking stuffers. Sometimes I made her gifts when she was really little,like one year a princess gown. There were always books, both for her and during my childhood.

One Christmas all she wanted was a Topsy Towers, which she must have seen on television because it was sold out everywhere. I had to beg a variety of friends to drive me in their cars to stores as far away as Philadelphia in my search for this toy, but it was sold out everywhere. In a sleet storm, I rode my bike to Capa's costume store on the White Horse Pike in Haddon Heights and bought her a red tutu and ballet shoes and tights instead. In the era of the cabbage patch doll craze, we got lucky because her Grandmother Jones made one for her. I could never have gone to the lengths people I knew had gone through for their daughters, such as camping out in the Mall parking lot to be first in line when a shipment was due.

Things got easier when my mother gave me her old car and I could take my paycheck before Christmas and go to a store, Penny's or Two Guys, or even further back, Korvetts, and in one swoop buy all the gifts I needed for my family in our trip to West Virginia and my daughter. I rmember many of her toys: Teddy Ruxpin, Chatty Cathy, all the Barbi's and their accommodations - recording studio, ice cream shop, hair salon, and then the American Girl Dolls and their accessories. all of which we still have in the attic. My father made a beautiful trunk for Kirsten, the first American Girl Doll. In her teens it was cothes and computers. Then she was gone.

Now, I am in my 80th Christmas. In a couple of hours, I will go to my sister's which is where I have spent the past Christmases of the 21st century, with my sister and her son, my Godson Archie, and Bryson, Sue's grandson.

Generally my brother, also old, 78, drives up from W.Va. but not this year. He didn't anticipate it with joy, but with anxiety - too much traffic, too many hours for his bad joints and back, and bad weather predicted on top of that.

I don't mourn for the past. It was so hard for so many years, the endless lists of things to do, the fear of driving long distances in bad weather with unreliable cars, the exhaustion of all these extra demands on top of a heavy enough work life - two jobs working 6 days a week. It is so easy now. Everything is done well in advance, less to buy and less to spend so less anxiety about money (though still plenty of that). It is a burden on my sister now, but she is young, twenty years younger than I am, and she has energy and accepts the burden with calm and generosity.

Just recently I was looking at a book that I have loved so much and given away and bought again about 3 or 4 times, OUR TOWN, the play by Thornton Wilder. The protagonist goes back from the grave, for one day, to look at the past, but it is too beautiful and magical and fragile and lived with too much obliviousness to be endured. The others in the graveyard warn her not to go back, but to acdept with peaceful resignation the eternity and peace of the afterlife. But she does go back for that one day and it is too much to bear. And that is how I feel now about remembering. It is too much to bear.

Thank heavens for writing - a place to put the thoughts and memories - to move them on like the books and clothes I no longer need and give away. The practice is to BE HERE NOW. This is the moment to be lived, and fortunately for me, it is one of beauty, peace, comfort and a kind of happiness.

Merry Christmas 2025!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Obsession, Love and Sex

Perhaps you, like me, fell in love when you were young, really, deeply, passionately and adoringly in love. The object of my affection was my teen boyfriend, Mike. I thought he was perfect. He was Bronte's Heathcliff Wuthering Heights, Dr. Zhivago, every brooding romantic male in the French movies played by Jean Paul Belmondo, and even the fireman in 1966 film Fahrenheit 451, Oskar Werner. But, as it turned out, he was mostly Heathcliff, with unregulated rage, petty temper tantrums, intemperate negative emotions the full range of the menu. His competent, take-charge side became domineering and belittling in order to keep me thinking I was incompetent and dependent. The worse his moods became, the worse his behavior, the more controlling he became because he feared I might leave him, and it is important to say, he loved me passionatey too and as much as he drove me away, he wanted to hold on to me.

P AS he was the classic male romantic lead of the period (including Terence Stamp in The Collector), I was the classic female romantic lead of our period, Julie Christie from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (an excellent film - a masterpiece). I was very pretty, very intelligent, well-read, a budding intellectual and artist. And I was enthralled, so I followed him like a loyal dog, until I jumped the fence and unloosed the leash.

But literature teaches us a lot, and not many write about that aspect of a literary education. The film from a novel by Truffaut, The Story of Adele H, taught me where obsessive love leads, to a beautiful and intelligent woman with her life ahead of her turned into a ragged beggar, roaming from military camp to military camp after a man who had discarded her.

Women, however, are not the only ones subject to the downfall in obsessive love. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, Cherie, by Collette, Nana by Emile Zola, are all novels of men brought to desperation, despair and ruin by obsessive love.

Contemplating these novels and films may seem irrelevent and yet today our headlines are filled with large print on the scandal of the world leaders caught with their pants down in a depraved network of exploitation of under-age girls run by Jeffrey Epstein.

Throughout my entrance ito the literary world, I have pondered the seemingly undeserved adoration of college professors and writers for Vladimir Nobokov's novel, Lolita. I have even read it more than once when some author has brought up some aspect with his admiration that I thought I might have missed.

To me it was not only NOT a great novel, but it wasn't beautiful or inspiring or enlightening either. it was the sordid tale of an old man obsessed with a teenaged girl. Did I miss something here? Some moral insight? Maybe.

The thing is, my object of adoration was a young man my own age who adored me, and he was beautiful, the same as I was, and we entered into our sexual experience together, discovering together and learning together, equals in every way.

These modern expose's of old men buying sexual service from economically deprived girls just barely emerging from childhood, are disgusting because of the inequality and the theft by these old men of the beauty of the experience of romantic love that belongs to young women by right. There is nothing mutual, only usage. And the way society has punished and shamed women who serve the sexual needs of men for money, intensifies the trauma and the destruction this exchange inflicts on these young girls.

Can you remember what a child you were at 15 or 16? I can. I was full of hope and a sense of adventure and the allure of the wide world and my own future. I was fortunate to find real love and experience the Romeo and Juliet of it, not the theft and impoverishment of it.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

The Story of Adele H. (Francois Truffaut) Mp/> Nana (Emile Zola)

Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser)

Cheri (Collette)

and a more subtle but also a view of imbalance in love - Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Vintage Postcards

A friend of mine from our Woodbury Friends Meeting has collected family holiday postcards from the early 20th Century and they are beautiful! Fortunately for me, she had some copied and made into gifts last Christmas. I sent one of my favorites to my daughter in New York this year; it is a small imagine af a girl skiing in the center of an embossed square, very delicate and elegant. I often send her postcards as wwell as pop up cards, a little tradition of ours.

I have written before about my Great-Uncle Yock, my father's uncle, who worked in the post office in Ocean City, New Jersey back in the 1950's and whenever postcards came through with postage but no address (a fairly common occurrence) he put our address in Philadelphia. We frequently had postcards from compete strangers having a good time at the seashore. It was funny.

That gave me a lifelong interest in postcards as well as in stamps and the US Mail in general. As a teacher, one of the art lessons I taught was designing a postage stamp during Black History Month and Women's History Month. As an enrichment mentor, I often took my students to the post office and helped them start stamp collections. I have given away my own stamp collections twice.

Back in the early 2000's I gave my most interesting postcards to my daughter to use to send thank you notes to donors to a couple of early film projects she was working on, the 78 Project, and later Love All Alices. I had stopped collecting postcards with about 2 shoebox size containers and begun using them and getting them back to their intended purpose.

My house had begun to feel like one of those little corners in a creek or river where the flotsum and jetsum deposits tree trunks and beach chairs and coolers and other items detached from their original purpose.

That feeling is also why I have been donating hundreds of books to the Free Books Project - to get these items out of my cove and back to their original purpose.

This past Sunday, my friend with the vintage family postcards brought them to share during our discussion hour from 10:00 to 11;00 before silent worship and again I was interested in postcards and I discoverd there is a postcard club not far from here.

Postcards: Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club (WC4) www.facebook.com › Pages › Businesses › Nonprofit organization Rating 5.0 (2) THE NEXT MEETING of the Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club will be held on Monday, November 10, 2025, at the Union Fire Company, 1396 River Rd. (NJ29), ... Local Postcard Clubs - Washington Crossing Card Collectors Club www.wc4postcards.org › localpostcardclubs Meeting day: Second Sunday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.. For additional information: Joan Kay - 718-375-7353

I don't collect anymore or even really have anything left worth showing or sharing, but I may drop in one day to visit. Also, I am painting postcard sized paintings and I have discovered on the internet that there are artists doing that as well.

By the way, a side note is that the original printed postcards began in the late 1800's around 1880 or so and in Germany. Before that, of course, travelers with art skills made painted scenes to send home and I saw a splendid show of these tiny masterpieces once in New York, many years ago. I suppose the days of all paper mail for private consumption are on the wane and maybe almost gone. This year I dropped from my origina 100 cards per year down to 15 Last year it was 75 and the year before, 50. People don't send cards anymore and they can be disappointed if they receive one because it means they have to go and get cards and stamps and make a return mailing. Perhaps it is wasteful but it is also a little beauty and adventure, this piece of paper traveling from one house, state, or even country, to another to bring a greeting. But now, here we are doing that electronically, can't collect these though, can we, and where's the history?

The American Museum in Deptford, a little local museum on Andaloro Way which used to be Andaloro Farm, has a collection of postcards as well as trains, fishing reels, fosils, and a myriad of other objects to amuse and delight and make you think about history in all its material forms.

Merry Christmas my Friends!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Quilts, Poverty, and Gees Bend - Part 1

For the second time, I am reading a book called The Quilts of Gee's Bend by Susan Goldman Rubin. A;though it is a book written for youth, it is a billiant and beautiful book for any age.

In a nutshell, After theCivil War the Pettway plantation owners left. They had enslaved 100 people whom they simply abandoned in the slave cabins. Of course, enslaved people had always had to spplement their sparse rations to survive, so the people of Gees Bend fished and farmed and stayed alive. Then another owner bought the plantation and turned their slave cabins into tenant farms which meant they did all the work and he took a portion of the profits. By then the slave cabins had become a small village. They had to live with a cycle of credit with the local store for seeds each year and paid off the debt with the money from the harvest.

The storekeeper died and according to the story, left no records of the debts so the widow sent a gang of white men who took everything the Gees Bend folks had, tools, pigs, chickens, stored sweet potatos, everything, and they were left to starve.

A local journalist got wind of the situation and wrote about it and sent the article to the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had begun the Works Project Administration by then. The WPA arranged to send flour and corn meal to save the people from starvation in the short term and then set them up with small farm loans to buy tools and animals for the long term.

The cabins were so quickly and poorly made that the wind came right up through the floors and the walls so the women had taken to sewing quilts from fabric scraps from worn out clothes, and feed sacks. They used the scraps of cotton that fell to the floor in the cottin gin for batting. These quilts were layered under the children, on top of the children and on the walls to keep out the chill. Every year in the summer, the women would hang out their quilts to air and it wa like an art show.

The quilts were discovered and sold in the New York market where celebrities and folk art enthusiasts gave them the attention and honor they deserved and the quilt makers began to see some profit from their work.

Sadly, a collector bought the quilts and turned them into expensive art works sold at high prices, cards, accessories, and even postal stamps, but the Quilters of Gees Bend had no royalties or a fair share of this bounty until someone came to their aid and they had a law suit.

I am leaving now, but I will write more when I return.

Quilting - Follow up on previous blog post about the book published by GCHS

Common Threads Through Time, Quilts of the Gloucester County Historical Society

In my previous post, I mentioned buying this book for myself for Christmas and a copy for each of the following, my sister, my daughter, and my Cousin Patty all of whom have quilts made by my Grandmother Mabel Wright.

I was so excited to find, this morning, a quilting store and a place to take lessons and I am signed up for January 2026 Earlu Girl Quilt Company, 235 S. White Horse Pike, Audubon, NJ 856-617-6322. Hours: closed Monday, open, Tuesday 10:00-5:00, Wed. 10:00 -7:00, Thursday, Friday and Saturday 10:00 - 5:00, Sunday 12:00 - 4:00.

earlygirlquilts.com

My own quilting experience consists of having made 2 original art quilts by machine for my daughter. One was very large on tan corduroy with a border of 2 inch denim pockets inside each of which there was a toy. On each pocket there was the letter of the alphabet. In the center was a cloth representative of the Ben Franklin Bridge; in the water were boats with velcro that could be taken off and put back on, and planes in the sky, also with velcro. This large quilt was hanging above a two story bed made by my father for my daughter when we lived on 8th Street in Philadelphia in 1983. Up top was her bunk, down below a curtained play room and sorage area. She could awaken in her top bunk and play with the toys in the quilt pockets or the boats and planes. The next quilt that I made for her was a portrait of our house, a twin sized bed quilt that she could take with her when she had to go for the weekend with her father for visittion. It was in case she got homesick. Those poignant quilts made me even more appreciative of the history of quilts especially as described in the book Common Threads. Many of those quilts were about women leaving their homes for a mariage or moving away to a new community, even a new region, or country.

Fortunately the Early Girl Quilt Company is holding day classes and I am signed up for January! I am so excited to be starting something new and meaningful. I will also be meeting new women and making new friends.

PBS Passport has a couple of quilting documentaries on offer and I have watched most of what they have but I will be watching again for a refresher. Also, I went to the Gees Bend Quilt Show at the Philadelphia Art Museum when it was on exhibit in 2008. I may stil have the catalogue from the show, even the book that I believe came out about the Gees Bend Quilters. I think I have a book tucked away somewhere about the Noank Quilters too.

It is so exciting to be starting something new, learning something new, especially something with such deep and meaningful roots in my life.

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Quilting - Common Threads Through Time, published by Gloucester Co. Historical Society, NJ (review and thoughts)

Several years ago, I was fortunate in visiting the Gloucester County Historica Scoiety for the Quilt show. I have been to GCHS many times for many exhibitions, but this was especially interesting to me because my Grandmother, Mabel Young Wright, was a quilter. Every grandchild was given a quilt and my cousin Patty Gushue. inherited several more which she gave to her granddaughters. She also gave one to my daughter, Lavinia Jones Wright, when she married 6 or 7 years ago. I still have my childhood sunbonnet babies quilt somewhere in the atic in tattered remnants from frequet use and washing. My marriage quilt, the wedding ring patter (I think) is still in the cedar chest in the attic as well- also much used and washed.

Among the many things I love about quilts are that they were hand made from readily available materials (often in early days, from re-purposed fabric from worn out clothing) and making quilts allowed women in the past, who had so few opportunities to excercise artisitic creativity in between child rearing and the rigors of housekeeping, a chance to meditate, concentrate and make something beautiful. I love the thriftiness of the early quilts from worn out clothing. I have an afghan made from scraps of wool yard too small to use for knitting, that the same grandmother made.

When I saw that the GCHS had published a book about their quilt collection, I hurried over to buy 4 copies, one for myself, which I just read, and one for my daughter, my cousin Patty, and my sister (who still has her quilt).

Not only do quilts tell the history of a community of women, their marriages, their departures and arrivals in new homes, the generations of daughters and sons and their life events, they tell the story of the history of fabrics, such a big part of American history - think COTTON ald all that implies.

For several years I have been searching for a close by daytime quilting group and this morning after I finished my book, I found one - in Audubon and I am on my way there now to see if I can sign up for daytime classes! I will write more about the book and about the quilt shop when I return.

I am so lucky! wrightj45@yahoo.com

My review of = Mexico: 500 Years of History, Paul Gillingham

For a few nights, I have been listening to the audio book of Mexico: 500 Yers of History by Paul Gillingham. I have always felt that Americans are shamefully ignorant of the History and Culture of our near neighbors North and South.

I read a history of Canada about 25 years ago when I was on a visit to Toronto, Canada. with my daughter as chaperone with Audubon Marching Band. Also, I read more, including the long narrative poem by Longfellow - EVANGELINE about the expulsion of the Arcadians, when I visited Nova Scotia, twice, many years later. In fact, I had visited Mexico once as well, but I was 18 and didn't know anything about where I was going. Back in the 1960's, a trip to Mexico was a kind of rite of passage for the more bohemian/intellectual/adventurous young people.

Anyhow, it happens that I have been working with a young Friend at Woodbury Friends Meeting, First Day School. Over a couple of years on Sundays, We took a chronological approach to world history from Dinosaurs to the 1600's, the Age of Exploration, and reached the point in time, this Autumn, when explorers from Europe were landing in the Americas. Several Friends will be exploring the topic from Indigenous people to Colonists including Puritans and Quakers, and Mexico, Central America and South America. One Friend has Canadian relatives, one Friend is from Mexico.

Needless to say, in the boiling turmoil that is our current state of affairs in the United States with Trump's persecution of Immigrants, so many of whom are from South America, Central America and Mexico, I felt a burning need to know more about these places, so when I read the review of this book, I knew it was the one for me. I have bought a map of South America to use with my young Friend and to teach myself where countries are down there.

I am writing my observations from only half way through, because it is such a big book and covers so much. What I wanted to mention was that chapter 13 delves into the 'invisible lives' of women in the 1500's and 1600's, in Mexico, the period of the invasion of Mexico by Spain. The first several chapters of the book discuss the invasion and the people involved, but when we get to Chapter 13, we hear about some of the women for whom records miractulously existed.

In Chapter 14 we hear a lot about the mix of races: Of course the Indigenous peopls in their millions, most notqably Mayans and Aztecs and Mexicans, the Spanish, but also the Africans, Portugese, and Germans. The author and several reviewers make the point that Mexico has the most diverse population in the world. There is a lot of discussion in this chapter about racism and racial hierarchy.

If you read CASTE: The Origins of our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson, then this will be a fascinating expansion and contrast to that narrative. If you haven't read it, you should!

Well, that's it for me for now. I have Christmas cards to write, but I will come back later after a few more chapters and drop some ideas.

As always if you want to discuss this or anything else, you can reach me by e-mail (not by comments - that blog feature is so polluted by spammers that I can't bear to look at it though blogspot does its best to root out the trash)

wrightj45@yahoo.com A review on-line said this: "As elegantly written as it is powerful in scope, rich in character and anecdote, Mexico uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs"

My thoughts after reading - Taking Religion Seriously, Charles Murray

Why I went back to church: When my daughter was a toddler, I decided I wanted her to have a religious education of some kind, but not the 'patriarchal' kind. To be clear, I wanted my daughter to have a basic education in EVERYTHING - literature, science, relgion, ART. I wanted her to be well rounded and I wanted her to have a chance to be successful in the world, whatever that might mean. I wanted to give her the tools as I could perceive them. She was in Girl Scouts, she played softball, she had theater classes, art classes from kindergarten on, swimming lessons, the works. So that was my first motivation, to give my daughter a bsic view of the Judeo/Christian belief system.

My mother had been my Sunday School teacher at Gloria Dei, Old Swedes Church on Front Street in Philadelphia and I not only had a basic education in religion but an introduction to Colonial history as well. Yhe church was one of the oldest in the country as well as in Philadelphia and it was founded by the earliest settlers, the Swedes. We had a Swedish boat model maybe the Kalmar Nickel? handing in the center of the small church. I liked church in those days, that church, with its small, intimate, quiet and orderly EVERYTHING: a brilliant an dhumane minister, Reverend Dr. Roak, the architecture, rituals, congregation. It suited me, a sensitive and frightened child in a fairly harsh environment.

Much later, I rebelled because I began to percieve the patriarchal structure of our society and the church and because we moved to New Jersey and had a drunken and ineffectual minister. I began to think ministers were a problem, at least that role and the power of it. In my teens I asked my mother to let me stop going to that church but I would explore some others and she agreed. The church was a bedrock for my mother and she served it in many ways, vestry, many many fund raising church suppers; my father even maide a stained glass window for the church, St John's Episcopal, two doors down from their last home in Maple Shade, on Linwood Avenue.

I tried all the local churches in Maple Shade, but like Goldilocks, each church was too something or other. When I looked for the right church for my daughter, I found the Quakers, perfect for Philadelphia dwellers; Pennsylvania is aa Quaker state. I had read up on Lutherans, Methodists, and what I liked about the Quakers was the 'no priests' system. When I met the buildings, I was even more enamored - I love old architecture and there was a lot about it that reminded me of Gloria Dei, Old Swedes Church, venerable, simple, elegant.

The people were wonderful at Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, kind, patient, accepting. And I liked going to Meeting on Sunday and listening to the witness of the congregants. But then, we moved to New Jersey in 1985 and for many reasons the transport back and forth on Sunday became impossible, so we stopped going. I needed at least one day a week off anyhow since I worked full time and all day on Saturday at the University of the Arts. As a single mother, I had housework, shopping, yard work - the works!

What I went back to the Friends Meeting seven years ago, this time in Woodbury, NJ it was to fix myself. I was suffering from resentment and anger over a family situation and I didn't want to feel that way anymore. I hoped Friends (Quakers) might be able to help. This time, I was going to religion to help myself be a better person and what I meant by better was more Christ-like, as in forgiving, loving, kind, understanding and generous, less selfish and less judgemental.

What I found was that attending Quaker Meeting gives you the opportunity every week to work on that. And I think that perhaps that is one of the best things religion has to offer, the opportunity each week to work on yourself, make yourself more Christ-like and perhaps that is how Christ is born again and again and again, in our hearts as we try to live up to his example. Isn't that what we mean when we say Christian?

Happy Trails whatever road you are on =

wrightj45@yahoo.com

(as always if you wish to talk to me use my e-mail because the comments section of the blog is polluted by spam)

Religion - Nadia Bolz Weber, Pastor

I have read a couple of books and many blog posts from Pastor Nadia. This one I copied to share with you. I will also find the link so you can follow her if you wish to. This is an excerpt "On Sept 2nd, Eric and I stood on a beach in St. Bees watching the grey movements of the Irish Sea before taking our first steps of a 200 mile walk that would carry us clear across Northern England to Robin Hood’s Bay on the North Sea. The tradition is to pick up a small stone from the first coast and carry it in your pocket until you place it on the second. Before we left, friends had asked what they could pray for.

They only answer I could summon was, “acceptance”. So that was the stone I carried in my pocket. That of a small, smooth prayer of acceptance. It was all I had that I thought might, maybe, perhaps slay the Goliath I was facing. Because sixteen days before leaving for Wainwright’s Coast-to-Coast hike, I was diagnosed with invasive ductile carcinoma. Breast Cancer. A treatable, survivable form of Breast Cancer, but breast cancer nonetheless. “C.a.n.c.e.r” As a word, “cancer” could really use some synonyms. How is it that we have but one word for such a wildly broad spectrum of implication? Cancer is the term for something as simple as a suspicious mole removed in your doctor’s office AND for Leukemia. That one word, “cancer”, when spoken for the first time by your doctor is a gunshot. It’s footsteps behind you in a dark alley; a tornado siren, and your spouse saying “we need to talk”, all rolled into one.

Acceptance When friends asked what they could pray for, I knew I did not need bravery. I did not even need strength, per se. I just needed acceptance. Why? Simply because I had cancer and wished I did not. For 2 weeks I walked with this simplest of prayers. When it was raining and I wished it wasn’t – I’d ask God for acceptance. When the trail was steeper than I wished, I’d do the same. When my legs ached and I longed for a place to rest and unlike on the Camino there were no café’s at which to stop, I’d repeat it. Acceptance. When I wished the day’s walk was over but we had two more kilometers to go and those two kilometers felt like five, I’d whisper, “acceptance”.

A prayer, a reminder, an aspiration. Each time I noticed myself wishing things were different, that the weather, the trail, Eric, or I myself were different, I whispered my one-word prayer. I hoped this tiny stone could hit my denial square in the forehead, knock my fear on its ass, and flatten self-pity. Because cancer is a giant, and I am so small, so ill-equipped, so prone to oppositional behavior. So in this way, over the course of two weeks trudging across England, I practiced acceptance I mean, what other options did I have? Fight the wind? Resent the cold? Be more miserable than necessary? I’ve done that throughout my life, and I’m exhausted. When we got home from the walk, I told my spiritual director Jane about my one-word prayer. On the day of my surgery she sent me this perfect text message.

“Mental health is a dedication to reality at all costs”.

-M. Scott Peck

Making peace with what is becomes a struggle when the “is” in question is not what we want; when what “is” changes us, humbles us, reduces us. When the “is” isn’t even clear yet, because you’re waiting on pathology reports. My God, the whole thing feels uncanningly like grief. To be in grief is to be emotionally left behind. The person IS gone, the job IS lost, the body IS changed but the world in which that’s true feels 1,000 miles away from you and you’re left in a ghost land of what was, crawling through a desert of molasses toward the country of what is. And it is a fucking process.

When we got home from the walk, I told my spiritual director Jane about my one-word prayer. On the day of my surgery she sent me this perfect text message. “Mental health is a dedication to reality at all costs”.

-M. Scott Peck

My God, the whole thing feels uncanningly like grief.

To be in grief is to be emotionally left behind. The person IS gone, the job IS lost, the body IS changed but the world in which that’s true feels 1,000 miles away from you and you’re left in a ghost land of what was, crawling through a desert of molasses toward the country of what is. And it is a fucking process.

Nadia Bolz-Weber from The Corners From: thecorners@substack.com

Things to do when you can't do what you used to do.

This morning, December 1st, 2025, I was texting with a friend who was talking about having what she calls 'the blahs' and I know that feeling well. It was my genetic gift to be almost always inspired by the world. Sparks were always going off in my mind from things I read or saw, or heard in conversation. But pnce in awhile, especially now that I am old, I get the blah's and even worse, the melancholy cloud drops over me - both at the same time! Ugh!

My subtitle for some of these posts should be "getting old/being old" but the fact is that younger people get this problem too. In fact when I retired, a bunch of teachers my age and also retiring were worried about what they were going to do with themselves. They had no hobbies! Hobbies seemed to be always banging on my door like salespeople "Buy Me - Try Me - Volunteer Here!" So when I retired, I DROVE (one of my go-to stimulators) and I found such interesting places, I began to volunteer everywhere, from Port Norris and the Bayshore Discovery Project to the Alice Paul Foundation in Mount Laurel with several places in between: Camden County Historical Society in Camden, Gloucester County Historical Society in Woodbury, and Red Bank Battlefield in National Park. In each of those places I developed a keen and avid interest and collected dozens of books which I read - they were each a passion, literally! And I made friends.

So what happened when I got visual disability and couldn't read anymore, or drive far away, and when my joints and spine deteriorated to such a degree that I couldn't sit for hours at a computer, or do a four hour touring shift, or climb steps to tour a house? Well, I discovered the Free Books Project and gave away all my books! I founded a small Seniors Group that met monthly at my local Seniors' Hall and that lasted for 7 years. We did 'show and tell' based projects such as a one page scrap booking project with an old family photo that we framed.

One cold snowy January Sunday morning about 6/7 years ago, I dropped in at the Woodbury Friends Meeting and I liked it so much I joined and religion became my next big interest. I have just listened to a great audio book called "Taking Religion Seriously." I volunteered to teach first day school there and that opened up a bunch of interests too.

Throughout all of this, my new found freedom gave me the time to develop my lifelong painting and art passions and I have been showing paintings in group shows at The Station (Eiland Art Center) in Merchantville, NJ. I have two paintings up there right now and tomorrow I am meeting there for lunch with an artist friend. She and I met at the Haddon Fortnightly annual show in March and we both have works in the Merchantville show.

In 2024, I was in seven group shows and that kind of burned me out, not for painting but for the rigors of framing, wiring, applying, dropping off and picking up for shows. This year I only did two group shows at The Station, my favorite venue.

What I have been doing lately though, is small postcard sized paintings, often in water color. I have a little pocket sized Windsor Newton water color set, and you just need a cup of water and some good small brushes. They are quick studies and I have become quite good at them. I can do a little beauty in about 2 or 3 hours and a couple in a day. Over my birthday week, I did half a dozen and gave them away (framed inexpensively with dollar store frames) as thank you noes to each of the people who took me out to lunch for my birthday. They are so small that they aren't a burdensome gift for people and those people can also re-gift them if they like. When a friend's cat died recently, I did a little 8x10 portrait painting of her cat for her and it gave her such solace that I have been thinking about doing little paintings of pets next to give away. But first, some landscapes to offer the people in my Woodbury Friends congregation for Christmas - there are only 6 or 8 of us who attend regularly so I could do 6 or 8 small landscapes to give away.

I can't hike anymore, or kayak. And I can't drive far away anymore as my eyesight deteriorates, or read. But I can still paint, and I listen to audio books!, and I can still write this blog - a big benefit for me as I love to write (compose and structure my thoughts) and this is a perfect venue. Also another friend introduced me to Art Journaling and I have slowly been adopting that as well. I learn a lot from this blog and writing it often inspires me to a new idea. This blog just now gave me the idea of the postcard sized paintings for friends of their pets. By the way, one year I saw a magnificent Art gallery show of 19th century painted postcard- size landscapes of famous travel destinations done to send to people back home from travellers abroad. It was before the time of printed postcards. They were beautiful and INSPIRING! Well, I hope you, too, are finding things to do to replace the things you can no longer do. "The world is so full of such wondeful things, I am sure we should be happy as Queens and Kings!"

Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com

Village Life (Small Town Living)

For the past 40 yers, I have lived in a small town in a small bungaow. I have known my closest neighbors, and although in this very mobile modern American world where people move around frequently some have moved on, I have neighbors who have been here as long as I have.

When I first moved here, my next door neighbor, Charlie Hooper, was the one who lit the fire under the Real Estate man who was dragging his feet on the purchase of my house. I was desperate at the time because I had givn notice on my apartment in Philadelphia and was all packed up when my first house purchase fell through. Those home owners had lost the house they were buying and the problem dropped down the line onto me, with a toddler and a full time job to handle.

Charlie gave me a wooden 1950's Coca Cola Santa he had made and that Santa has stood sentinel at the foot of my druveway every Christmas for 40 years waving at passersby with his hearty smile! I think of Charlie Hooper and his kindness every year when I put Santa back out front to greet the season.

Today on my way to the local Dunkin Donuts for my special treat of a lette' to give me the energy to help my sister with the final phase of the Christmas decorating, I saw Mark Cassidy, the man across the street who takes out my trash and recycle cans for me each week. He was just a little boy when I moved here and he is a handsome and chivalrous grown man now. His mother was in the Seniors group I founded to get her out and about after her husband died about 10 years ago.

Right now my neighbor from around the corner, John Krauss, is walking my big and energetic (even though she is old) Lab/Husky mix Uma. He walks her almost every day, only missing when he has a work appointment or a doctor visit or a grandchild's sports event. His wife was the one who told me about this house when it went up for sale 40 years ago. She was best friends with my babysitter at the time, Vicky T. My daughter and I saved the Krauss's house from burning down 3 years ago, when a cigarette in the planter ignited the fertilizer and set the porch furniture on fire. We were walking my dog and my daughter with her keen eyesight saw the smoke. We roused the nearest neighbors who had a fire extinguisher and who turned on the hose and put the fire out before the fireman arrived.

Another neighbor, Eleanor, a few blocks away is my sometimes walking buddy although we have both been out of commission in recent months with back and knee issues. Another neighbor, Debby, who lives in Marlton now, used to live behind me. Her backyard bordered on mine and I used to talk to her mother over the back fence. Her mother was a German war bride and every spring planted a little kitchen garden by our fence. Debby and I text with one another daily and her niece's family lives in the old house now.

My closest neighbors to the West recently moved but the new neighbors are friendly and warm. My neighbors to the east are sisters, one of whom is housebound with back problems. We see one another periodically when the well sister, Linda, is outsde getting in her car or doing a little yard tidy.

The town right beside mine is the one where I spent my entire adult career life, teaching, first working on a Federally funded program at the library, when I was right out of college, then moving pn to teach English at the High School, finally, as my continuing education and college degrees mounted and changed, I became Art teacher in the grade school (which is now closed, empty, and replaced). I visited the abadoned building once and it was ghostly, I could almost hear the echoing of childrens feet and voices as they raced down the hallways.

Often, I drive the mile and a half or so through my town, Mount Ephraim, into Gloucester City, the town where I worked and which is located on the banks of the Delaware, to look at the Delaware River.

Right across the Delaware river on the river bank in Philadelphia is the church my family attended for a couple of generations, Gloria Dei, Old Swede's Church. It was founded by the early Swedish settlers in the late 1600's. Several blocks away down Oregon Avenue is my childhood neighborhood, where my parents bought their first home, right after the second World War, in which my father served in teh US NAVY and was fortunate enough to survive.

It means the world to me to be so close and attached to these places, my home-ground, my village.

I watch a British series called Heartbeat, which is set in a Yorkshire village, and I can't help but note how my American suburban life is similar to the life of the village of Aidensfield in Yorkshire. My earliest ancestors are from England, as well as Southern Germany and Scandinavia. AS the modern world, here in America, is described more and more as lonely, I reflect on how my little hometown world is rescued from that anonymity and loneliness by our 'village' life, the neighbors who check in on me in my old age, and who help me, my sister who lives a small drive away. And I am sorry for the many people I know who do not have these blessings, whose children have moved across the country, whose brothers and sisters have retired far far away, or died, and who have no close neighbors or family. I think it takes a long time to form the warm family type ties I have with my neighbors.

This is something for which I am grateful this Thanksgiving, my Village Life!

When I went out onto the porch just now a raucous bird called out "Don't forget us!" and of course, the old old trees that were here when I first came and are now as old as I am, having been planted when this house was built 80 years ago, have been my neighbors too, the trees and the generations of birds and squirrels, opposums and raccoons, skunks and migrating flocks of small black birds that show up every Spring when the grass is bright green. These too are my neighbors in my Village Life.

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends far and near and known and unknown!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Book Review - Taking Religion Seriously, Charles Murray

In the November 21, 2025 issue of THE WEEK magazine, there was a review of a new release, Taking Religion Seriously by Charles Murray, and I was intrigued.

Since my visual impairment precludes reading books in print, I ordered the book from Audible, an app on my phone that my daughter set up for me. It is a wonderful new way to enjoy books, having someone read them to me.

This is a most surprising and engaging book full of personal exploration. It is like a conversation with your most erudite and interesting friend. One of the biggest surprises was early on when the author, who is also the narrator of the audiobook, describes his wife’s search for a religion and her discovery of The Society of Friends! Since I shared this journey, that was very interesting to me. Both Murray and his wife had been raised in other Christian denominations and had, by college, lapsed in any kind of religious practice, as had I. Both end up becoming Quakers.

Murray is an author of several well regarded books, the best known of which was probably The Bell Curve. He takes a far- ranging kaleidoscopic exploration of the of myriad views of religion. He takes the perspective of science, through physics and the Big Bang, philosophy, psychology, history, and he brings us along with him in very accessible prose and a casual, conversational style.

I would say that this book was probably the most interesting and influential book I have read in the last ten years, and I have always been an avid reader. Since my vision decline in the past 5 years, I have been listening to audiobooks every evening.

Some other stimulating books on the contemporary religious experience that I have read recently were written by Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz Weber, whom I had heard speak in an interview on Fresh Air, an NPR radio program hosted by Terry Gross on WHYY-FM.

Both authors offer a 21st Century experience with religion and I found them invigorating to my own religious practice. Good reads for the upcoming winter months!

Happy Trails

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Single parenthood - a topic I want to discuss at some point

Just read this in my e-mail newsfeed - putting up here as a prompt for me to think about. by Pallavi Gogoi, NPR's Chief Business Editor For a couple of years now, I have been unable to shake two key facts about the American population: One, that 40% of all births in America are to unmarried women. And two, that America has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. I wanted to revisit the topic this year because the collective despair over declining births in the U.S. has led to ideas and proposals that promote marriage, including a bill to make marriage great again. As I started digging in, I discovered another fact that has become the fulcrum of my new journalistic examination. Births to unmarried women aged 30 and up have increased by 140% in the last two decades, a period when teen births have fallen off a cliff.

Marriage and fortitude

This morning I awoke thinking of a friend who is going through a difficult period of many years with her ailing husband. The word that sprang to mind, as often happens to me with situations - I like words and I like finding the one that suits the ocasion: Fortitude! I hae a dozen friends with whom I text, talk or visit on a fairly regular basis. Four of them are married and five are single (divorced) and three are widowed. All of their circumstances are very individual depending on when they got married, how long they were married and which of them is sick and which is the caretaker.

v One thing that they all share is a financial pattern: the arried women have had twice as much financial benefit as the single ones with the exception of one single friend who managed her money well invested, and rose through her career to a higher paying scale.

Of my widowed friends, one was married her whole life and raised three sons who live far away. She has managed very well, partly, I think because she was raised by a single mother who showed her an example of independence and self reliance. Also she was of a practical nature and we shared a grandmother who was widowed early and lived an independent and happy life, though one definitely fraught with financial challenges. Our grandmother never owned her own home until my father bought her a house that she only had for a short period before she had a heart attack and died. An old childhood friend married a much oler man who took care of her like a child. She was of a fragile emotional nature anyhow and had been babied and spoiled as a child, which she would be only to happy to say of herself. When her older husband died, she was incolnsolable and drowning in self-pity because she had no one to take care of her anymore and she did't want to face the demands of ordinary living. She was left with a house and sufficient income, but she didn't want to be stuck 'managing' ordinary things like repairs and car inspection and so on. She was a whiner and a crybaby. Our friendship ended, sadly, over an incident unrelated to that, and also our deeply divided political affiliations. I have a bare acquaintance with another women very similar - just not up to managing her own life on her own and full of self pity.

My single (divorced) friends who spent most of their lives on their own are much more resilient and have much more fotitude, as have I. I do, however, have my youngest sister to help me when I falter and in areas where I simpy am not physically capable of maintaining any more. My other single friends were married and ended up with much more money so they can afford to hire help, and one has since found a very helpful and accomplished boyfriend who does a lot for her.

The friend who has the hardest time, is the one who is caretaker to a slowly declining hisband who has no fortitude. He got weaker and weaker over a period of years and was not inclined to do anything for himself. He had neuropathy in his legs and was in chronic pain and suffered other kinds of debility. She has had to do everything for him, and he is a whiner too. He even has suffered bouts of pain medication addictions. It reminded me of a novel by Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome.

I haven't had to face that kind of challenge, that was a benefit of my free and independent life, and I am not prone to loneliness - I have pets and hobbies and friends, so my life has been FREE and peaceful, full and pleasant. I wonder if I could rise to the occasion. Some people are ennobled by their caretaking sacrifice. I knew a teacher friend who took care of her father in his dwindling health over a period of about 10 years until he died in his 90's. She was devoted and uncompaining I guess it is a lot like the sacrifice of raising a child. You are curtailed necessarily. You have to be home and in attendance to raise a child. You have to be directed toward their well being and happiness often at the sacrifice of your own. I did it, and I can say for myself, that my single, independent life is much more comfortable and pleasurable than either my parenting years or my married years. I am hppiest now. But it may be that I am just that personality - a solitary, independnt. Anyhow that is the way it worked out.

I have seen good marriages, however, and I suppose if you can find and maintain one of those, that would be idea. I wasn't able to do that. I live in what Elizabeth Cady Stanton described in a speech once as "The Splendid Solitude of Self." She was married and have 7 or more children! Whether you are married or single, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and I hope you are happy! wrightj45@yahoo.com

Toy Train Show - American Museum, Andaloro Way

Hi Everyone! It's time again for the Annual Toy Train Show at the Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ! Starting November 28th, 2025 and running thru February 1st, 2026, the Show will be feature O and O-27 gauge toy trains, from the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. Lionel, Marx and American Flyer engines, with cars attached, will race on two different platforms, each one decorated with vintage buildings, and other structures to give a traditional holiday appearance! The Museum is open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 3pm.

Hope to see you soon at the Museum!

Jeffrey Norcross

The Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ NJ 08093 856-812-1121 sjmuseum@aol.com

Typewriters Part 2 - Underwood 1919 No.5

Also languishing up in the attique was a 1919 Underwood which I no longer remember how it was acquired. I have had it for as long as I remember. I can't imagine how I lugged that incredibly heavy cast iron framed monster from apartment to apartment, and to my house and up the steps to the attic! But today, I hauled it back down again, once again in risk of life and limb as I am 80 as of last week, and too old to be taking things up and down from the attic.

Although I managed to get it down and onto a shelf in my bedroom, emptied recently by my having donated most of my books to The Free Books Project of Camden, New Jersey, that's as far as I got. I am too tired now to dust it off and look for a serial number BUT a perusal of models indicates it is a No 5, and early model built in the first one or two decade of the twenthieth century.

Perhaps one of the reasons the typewriters have spoken to me so seductively is that I began my working career as a typist - first on an addressograph machine, another stalwart of the bygone era, and later, after a couple of years at Peirce Business School (now junior college) I became a secretary. By that time, we used electric typewriters. But these were the tools of my trade as the sewing machines were the tools of my grandmother's trades.

One line from a piece I found on the internet stood out - the evolution from manufacture of guns, to sewing machines to typewriters and then by World War 2, back to guns again.

John T. Underwood who founded the business built it from the manufacture of ink after he saw the success of Remington (yep the gun anufacturer) and soon, Underwood was the titan of typewriters in the WORLD. The Underwood 1919 5 was virtually indestructable which was part o its downfall as it never needed replacement. It was the tool of the governmental beaurocrat.

I began my typing life on a manual, befere the electric was available and I remember building up finger strength. At the peak of my office career as a secretary at W. B. Saunders Publishing Company in the 1960's, I could type 90n words per minute.

After I get the Rheinmetal repaired, I will see how fast I can type on it. The Underwood has a nice typing feel and a satisfying click, but I don't think I can afford at present to have them both restored.

Maybe at some point I will watch a YouTube and learn how to clean the old Underwood, and then find out how to get a ribbon or re-ink the one it has. It seems a fairly simple machine. (Yes, I know what a delusion this is!)

It is definitely in the realm of possibility however, that I will have the Underwood cleaned and restored at some point in the Philadelphia Typewriter Company that I will be visiting with my sister and the Rheinmetall next week.

It is interesting when you search the internet for some item and come across the collectors. I love reading the research they have done and engaging with their passion. My passion and interest for these items lacks their depth. I am a dilettant. Still, I say to my typewriter and sewing machine friends, nice getting to know you!

Happy Trails - wherever they may take you!

as always please contact me by my e-maill if you wish to comment as that part of blogspot is polluted by spammers wrightj45@yahoo.com as always

Rheinmetall Portable typewriter S 09/2552 USSR Occupied Germany

The Life Story of Really Old Things -

A few days ago I was lamenting the loss of the freedom of CD's because I liked being able to put a cd in the dash and play an album I wanted to hear. I am so far behind in IPhone and modern car stuff that I can't do that with my current technology although I am aware that it can be done.

At home, in my e-mail newsfeed, I came across an article about how some young people are embracing old technologies like cd's and cassettes for that very freedom and autonomy. We don't all want to be tethered to the cloud or wifi.

The thought persisted and I was thinking how I wished I had a portable typewriter so I wasn't dependent on my always unreliable printer. I have spent literally hundreds of dollars on having the repair guy come out and get it working when I was doing a project and none of the usual processes could get it working again. Every storm knocked it (wifi) out. I had to turn off the router, unplug everything then wait a couple of hours, plug everything in and wait for the router and hope it would work, which it often did not. So then I would start replacing the expensive ink cartridges that seemed to get used up or dry up on their own regardless of usage. How cool it was in the past to put in a piece of paper and type what I wanted and there it was!

I looked up vintage portable typewriters and found most places that had them on offer had closed and their telephone numbers didn't work anymore. Amazon had them starting at #190. Suddenly, I remembered I had a very old portable up in the attic that I had used years ago when I did presentations on World War 2 Women Journalists! It was a 1947 (?) Rheinmetal portable in perfect condition, though gummed up by age. I had bought it for $25 from a vintage shop that has since gone out of business. It was a popular prop in that presentation and kids in particular were entranced by how you could hit the keys and the words came out on paper! Back then, it worked.

I took my life in my hands and climbed the attic steps and brought down my prize. It was so gummed up the keys couldn't rouse themselves to the task so I looked up typewriter repair and restoration. Again, all the ones in New Jersey were out of business, but there was one in Philadlphia that was still open and functioning on Passyunk Street. I called and indeed they were still there and still repairing and restoring. I told the man on the line my model name and number and he said it was a very good model. In fact, my online search had told me that my model S 09.2552 was a very good model. That was what the S stood for 'Special high quality' and the 09 gave the location which was Sommerda, Germany. It also said it was USSR Occupied Germany, so it was a post war machine.

I had to decide if it was worth it to put that money out to restore the typewriter but I decided that it was because it seems to me that something that had survived bombs, occupation, all the destruction and chaos of that part of Europe for almost 80 years deserved respect and care. Maybe I feel that way because I just turned 80.

My sister, bless her generous heart, has agreed to go with me next week to take the machine to the repair shop. I am excited about this new venture into the past.

Some of you may have read my posts about my 100 year old Singer sewing machine and my quest for a 100 year old sewing machine table to go with it. This makes me think long and hard about these formidable survivors, these hard working companions. I wish the typewriter could type its own story and tell me how it got to New Jersey, how it left Europe, and who it traveled with and when. My heart goes out to these survivors; I guess that makes me a kind of romantic. I still think about the metal trunk I bought that had the letters and baby shoes of a Greek immigrant in it. How sad that these items were unloved and put out into the market. I feel I have rescued this typewriter which, unlike the sewing machine was not a member of my family, but it deserves a family.

If you wish to contact me, please use my e-mail not comments which is polluted by spam. wrightj45@yahoo.com

Happy Trails

Ken Burns' The American Revolution

Last night I watched the 6th episode of Ken Burns' new masterpiece of hisorical documentary, The American Revolution. It has been a passionate interest of mine for decades due to the fact that I was a volunteer for several years at Red Bank Battlefield in National Park, and because I was born in Philadelphia and have been immersed in history since my retirement in 2006.

I always found The American Revolution confusing. I had drawn maps and chronologies to somehow sort out what was going on but it really never emerged from the fog of confusion until I watched this documentary. I have been to many of the nearest most important battle sites from the Revolution such as Morristown which I visited several times including during the big re-enactment event, The Cliveden House in the Battle of Germantown, Valley Forge many times, and of course, the Re-enactment of the Battle of Red Bank which I saw annually and volunteered during (Octobers).

Our Red Bank Battlefield volunteer history club also visited the sites of the Battles of Princeton and Trenton, and we even held in our hands what was claimed to be the skull of Count Von Donop (dna later proved it was not. It was the skull of a Native American Woman). Somehow, I could never get these places in order and I was entirely stumped by Yorktown. (I thought it was all New England and New York) Ken Burns made it all clear at last. He also brought clarity to some of the names and relationships such as the British generals Cornwallis and Howe, and the Continental generals, Greene and Knox, Benedict Arnold and Charles Lee. I actually visited Lee's grave at Christ's Church in Philadelphia. (a passionate atheist his wish was NOT to be buried near a church!)

Themes: One of the things I enjoyed in this monumental undertaking was the use of excerpts from diaries. I had collected and read many of the diaries quoted in the film, the Hessian soldiers, the young soldier, Joseph Plum Martin, the women, Abigail Adams letters, and the writings of the Indigeounos people. Natie Amerians had usually been left out entirely in other depiction of the Revolution or portrayed as merciless savages attacking the frontier folk. This film showed how they were central to the story, and the most impacted by it.

The other theme for me was the suffering. In a time of hand tools, the destruction of hand crafted homes and furnishings, the burning down of entire towns, the destruction of crops and orchards and the starvation that followed. And the suffering of people, young men cut down in their prime by the thousands, entire tribes of Native American peoples slaughtered and displaced. The struggles and terrors of women left alone on farms with children to feed and the constnt threat of marauding foragers who would take the last morsels of food, possible rape and murder the woman and her daughters, and burn down their homes. What a terrible affliction of misery and suffering on people who, like all people in all time, wanted to simply live in peace and survive. Everytime I see a depiction of the suffering at Valley Forge, it literally makes me cry.

This is a huge experiene and one that needs repeating. I am already feeling my clarity and understnding of this vast campaign beginning to cloud. I will watch this 12 hour documentary again, and again, probably every 4th of July, and my unerstanding of what happened will, hopefully grow. So many of the great historians who commented during the film brought out insights that I will ponder and one of them was the impact of this revolution on the revolutions in the 20th century of colonial possessions throwing off the yokes of European conquerors. Just a week ago, I watched a documentary about the Iranian Hostage event, and realized for the first time that what had precipitated it was the attempt of the Iranian revolutionaries to take over the Petroleum processing plant, the biggest in the world, that had been built and owned by Great Britain which took all the profits and kept the Iranians in a kind of peasant/serf vassal relationship.

What I never understood clearly before about the main importance of the locations of the battles was the importance of the shipping ports to re-supply the British forces. I did read a book once that detailed the gargantuan quantities of cattle, pigs, barrels of salted pork and fish, and other supplies needed to feed armies of the size of 20,000 and so on for months, and even years. There isn't much talk about that in most movies and documentaries and I admit when I read the quantities I was astonished. As always - please write to me directily if you wish to share in the conversation as the comments section of blogspot is ruined by spam. My e-mail is wrightj45@yahoo.com Happy Trails to YOU!

Zen Mind Beginners Mind - Books that changed our lives

In my e-mail feed there was a post from NPR about a new series they were running where authors, critics, and others write about going back to books from their past that changed their lives.

This idea has stayed with me and I have been thinking about the many many books that changed my life, and about books in general. Over the past couple of years, I have donated thousands of books, the major part of my personal library to the Free Books Project because I am losing my vision to Fuch's Dystrophy and reading is too hard for me now. There was no point in holding on to something I could no longer use, so I gave them away.

I haven't gone back to many books over the years anyhow because there are always new ones and because my interests change as my life changes. But a book sprange into my mind last Sunday during discussion hour at my Friends Meeting in Woodbury and I ordered it from amazon. Of course, I can't read it, so I am going to give it away, but I have two forms of borrowing audio books and I am listening to it on audio book: Hoopla (a free app from my library, and audible, a 'pay for app' that I can use on my phone or laptop.)

Every night, I listen to audio books for about an hour. Usually, I listen to light weight entertainment, like someone teling me a story. Sometimes, I dip into something deeper or more challenging, such as "Man-Up" by Cynthia Miller.

I first encountered Zen Mind Beginner's Mind in 1970. It is a series of lectures given by Zen teacher Suzuki and it was the book that brought popular attention to Buddhism to the counterculture in the US. All the young peope my ex-husband and I knew back in our hippy days were reading it and I suppose our dip into drug culture via smoking marijuana and taking LSD was the inspiration for learning more about our minds and thinking. I believe at the time there was another book called "The Doors to Perception" and we all became aware of both 'perception' and that it could be observed and altered. We felt it drug induced but we wanted to find it naturally.

This isn't such an odd thing, even today, when even the most mainstream people regularly alter their perception with sedatives, anti-depressants, and of course, the most popular one of all, alcohol. Also, at present, November 2025, in the majority of the states where marijuana is legal there are almost as many dispensaries as there are pharmacies or convenience stores. My little town has THREE!

My fist introduction to Zen Buddhism and indeed, the book, "Zen Mind Beginner's Mind" was baffling and even confounding, Everything seemed to contradict everything else, which, I realized in time, was part of the understanding because it is teaching us how to struggle with the most subtle of mind tricks - intellectualizing.

I read so many books on Zen Meditation, in particular, in the beginning, Jack Kornfeld, Phd, psychologist and Zen teacher. After the Englightment, the Laundry, was one of his best sellers. My goal, always, was to release myself from enslavement to moods, to understand more about how my mind was blown hither and yond and to release myself from captivity in the more negative and paintful experiences. I understand now that there is no escape from these normal experiences of ife in the corporeal world, but you can shorten the duration of the suffering when you can understand that, like the weather, it is a passing field of forces.

It seems to me that this is the most essential struggle of our existence. People die every day, every hour, because they can't endure the emotional pain of various states. They become drug addicts, alcoholics, even suicides because they can't find escape from the more painful states of mind such as depression.

Along with millions of other peopke I hoped that Zen Meditation offered a route into understanding and perhaps controlling these states of mind.

What I eventually discovered was that Pema Chodrin was the guide for me. She is an abbot and Zen teacher in Gumpo Abby in Canada, and I have read every book she has written and they, along with her cd's saved my life during the most emotionally and mentally painful period of my life. I bought a 5 cd changer, for those too young to remember, a music/media player that you could load 5 cd's onto for continuous playing - used before the cell phone was invented. At night when I couldn't sleep, I would load her cd's and her soothing voice and simplified, uncluttered and clear lectures would calm the storm of suffering in my heart and mind and lead me out of the prison.

Listening to the Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, reminds me of how much it sounds like Gobbledy Gook. In fact it is what reminded me of that old phrase Gobbledy Gook. It seems to me that it ties as many knots as it unravels. But now, at age 80, and after years and years of reading and thinking and studying and meditation, I understand a little more easily what Suzuki is talking about and how he is talking about it.

One thing that both confounded and infuriated me and stuck inmind for years for pondering was the concept that our minds "Make the world" = surely not - certainly the world is empirically existing regardless of our minds. But over time, I came to understnd how our developed filters change and alter and translate the world, "Perceive it" and make something out of it that we come believe is the whole thing, the real thing, but it is, in fact, a creation.

Recently I saw a marvelous science program on how the brain works. Simply, the idea that caught my attention was that we have a limited and unique and individual ability to take in the information about the world. We know that by simple things such as how our dogs can smell things beyound the abilities ofour olfactory sense, and cats can see things we can't see, and other creatures can percieve sensory information unavailable to us, so we know there is more going on out there than we can take in. Our brains take in what they can and then fabricate the rest to make a complete picture.

That's how we "make the world." Finally I get it, and what's more, from reading all the Zen books, I actually understand it as well. Of course that is only the barest inkling in the challenge of using that information to 'control' our minds and emotions.

Composure has become something I identify as an admirable trait. I am not a terribley skilled practitioner of it, but I have known people who were and I have admired them. It has taken a lifetime to identify what that trait was that I admired in those folks, my Godfather Neal Schmidt had it, my Grandfather Joseph Lyons had it, Joyce Connelly, a volunteer from Red Bank Battlefield had it. These people could demonstrate composure under the most stressful of situations. How did they get it? They seemed to be gifted with more of it than most people. Joyce was always AWARE; when we had meetings of the volunteers and staff at Red Bank Battlefield, say the Book Readers' Club, Joyce was so AWARE of everyone, the forces driving them and all they were saying, and though she had an idea and a book to suggest that she found especially meaningful, she could wait patiently, make her case in a composed and calm manner, and accept the decision of the group with calm acceptance. I remeber the book she really wanted us to read "Escaped and Never Caught" the story of Ona Judge, a woman enslaved to Martha Washington. I immediately bought the book that Joyce recommended, the group chose a different book, a book about the First Rhode Island Regiment. The group, at that time, was composed by mainly men, so it wasn't surprising that they should choose a military title over one about a woman and a slave. Nonetheless, Joyce respected me and we formed a friendship over my choice of that book and our discussions about it later. In a very real sense, I loved Joyce and admired her. Joyce Connelly died from cancer.

So, I have always wanted to understand states of mind, mind and others, and to learn more about the mechanisms that drive them. I wanted to be released from the more painful and embarrassing ones and to acquire a better practice of the more admirable ones, liek composure. So I read Zen Buddhism, and books on psychology, and joined the Quakers! To me, The best Quaker book on this topic was Rex Ambler's pamphlet put out by the Pendle Hill Quaker publisher, The Early Mysicism of Quakers. The books describes how they discovered and practiced meditation and then goes on to compare it to various forms of phsychology that use meditation techniques to help people understand and work to unravel the snares in which they find themselves caught.

The most recentl insight that I have discoverd from a New Years Resolution offered by an article in the New York Times, was to take note of when I feel happy. Yesterday, I was pulling out of my drive way when the Fed Ex delivery van was pulling up to the curb. The delivery man handed me my package of 80th Birthday photograhs which I had printed by Walgreens Pharmacy photo department. I was thrilled to have them to take to lunch with me. I got to the corner of the street and a group of about 15 men women and children were engaged in a Christmas decorating party on the lawn of a house and they all waved happily to me, and I experienced a fireworks of happiness. Zen has taught me, however, that this too is a transient state, so enjoy it an dlet it go. You can't chase that state, any more than you could be excited by an array of fireworks that never burned out or stopped. Zen Mind Beginner's Mind wasn't the best, but it was the first and it was the KeY to understanding the mystery of existence for me.

Happy Trails! and Calm seas.

as always, if you wish to correspond, please use my e-mail because 'comments' in blogspot is polluted by spam. >p/> wrightj45@yahoo.com