Journal Prompts

If the five gratitudes aren't enough for you, here are 5 journal prompts for the New Year.

1.What in the past yeaar are you proud of?

2.What did this year leave you yaarning for?

3.What is causing you anxiety?

4.What resources, skills and practices can you rely upon in the upcoming year?

5.What are your wildest and most hair brained schemes and dreams?

I am most proud this past year in making the contact between the South Jersey Artists Coalition and the Woodbury Friends Meeting, also I got a book ark for our Meeting to give away free books. Also, I am proud to have been in more Art Shows at the Station in Merchantville.

I am left yearning for greater mobility and physcial fitness. I listened to an audio book on weight training and I really wished I were doing that, even in my state.

What has been causing me anxiety is my fianncial situation. I attempted to ameliorate some of it by cutting cable out of my Verizon bill which brought the price down by 50 percent (from $200 to $90), and I just talked to my insurance agent about a lower auto insurance policy (it will also be cut in half from $370 to #180 a month). I am working on curbing amazon impulse buying and in the past two weeks, I have stopped myself four times from buying things (pictures frames, books) by reciting: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without! I succumbed once by ordering paints and one book. My resources and skills are painting for pleasure and distraction, my sister's help is a great resource and I help her in any way I can. My practice is doing gratitudes daily and avoiding letting our political chaos upset my mental and emotional balance. I speek with and meet friends daily. I need more exercise.

I don't have any wild or hair brained schemes or dreams although sometimes I fantasize winning the lottery, but I don't buy tickets due to wariness about addiction. I am a pretty sober and practical realist. I have hopes, though - I hope I can win a prize in the upcoming March Haddon Fortnightly Art Show, or perhaps sell a painting!

Hope you find these entertaining to answer and perhaps, enlightening for yourself.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com >?

Shards of memory - an aging experience

Monday - January 18, 2025 9:30 a.m. Frozen snow on the ground, four paintings waiting to be framed.

One of the odd little phenomena of my current aging process is the flash up of fragrments of memory, unbidden and seemingly out of nowhere. This one came to me this morning.

A psot divorce anecdote

About 45 years ago when I was married, my ex-husband Mike and I would visit his parents in New Port Richie, Florida. There was a beach (Dunedin?) that was littered with an astonishing array of different kinds of seashells. Having only ever experiened the seashell varieties of Ocean City, New Jersey, clam shells, this was a revelation to me. I collected those shells like a gold miner collecting nuggest from a river. At my favorite antique store on Haddon Avenue in Collingswood, I bought an antique wooden type case (very popular in the 1970s craft movement) and cut little squares of green felt to line the small square compartments. I identified each of the shells I had collected, plus some that I bought, and put them in the compartments then I bought a sheet of plenxiglass at the hardware store for a cover, and put eye hooks and wire in the back for hanging.

I have always had an interest in certain aspects of science, archaeology, evolution (I read Darwin's Voyage on the Beagle), animal life and the history of classification, genetics, all sorts of things. I had a great full year science course at Trenton State extension college in the 1970's "History and Foundations in Science." >p/> When I left my marriage, I left a lot of my things behind. I took nothing from the walls, only my art supplies and my clothes and a few necessary furnishings. I left the seashell collectin on the wall. I never thought about any of it.

About 15 years later, late 1990's, my former mother-in-law phoned me and said she and her husband were moving from my old marriage house which they had moved into when my ex moved to Colorado and they came home from Florida. They were going into assisted living. She asked if I wanted my seashell collection.

My daughter (not from my marriage, but from a relationship after my divorce) was about 10 and just an age to appreciate something like that so I said that I would like to have it.

I want to interject here that while married, I had paid half of our bills and mortgage, at a struggle since I didn't make much money in my library job, my biggest expwnse was my college tuition $700 per semester at Glassboro State College, which I paid. When I left Mike, he emptied the bank accounts and kept everything. I didn't fight him because he was clearly metnally unbalanced and psychotic. It was, after all, only stuff. I wanted freedom from fear and intimidation, safety, peace and my life back. He could keep the house. And he did. I signed no fault divorce papers that he sent from Colorado though he was clearly at fault in many proveable ways I will not discuss here.

To get the seashell collection, I drove to Collingswood and the mother met me outside the assisted living building and handed in the seashell collection. We spoke only briefly and I left. A few days later, I had a phone call from her, very distraught, crying, and hoping I would be kind enought to bring back the seashell collection because she had told Mike she had given it to me and he had pitched a full on rage display and she was crushed and intimidated.

I understood. I had taken Mike's most prized psosession, myself. And he had at first done what he could to prevent my ability to survive on my own by taking all the money from the shared banking accounts, and then selling the house and keeping all the contents, things I had bought as well as his own. Even after all these years, his vindictiveness was potent like the burning underground coal fields in Pennsylvania. Naturally I gave back the seashell collection and drove home (the house I bought myself with my own earnings), glad to be free of them - Mike, his mother, and the world he created with his mental illness. I felt then and now, pity but also a wary fear of the power of this mental unbalance and the destruction it can wreak upon the lives of those near.

This kind of possessiveness and control is a big plot device in much classic European literature, think Anna Karenina. Men keeping the children when the women leave, depriving them of the means of support in the days when women had no legal rights and couldn't inherit or even keep their own wages if they had any. And it is very evident in our contemporary American politics - Trump's infinite vindictiveness toward former adversaries. The far right threat to take away women's right to vote along with our reproductive freedom.

That seashell collection is kind of a symbol of the poison in my marriage born of Mike's mental instability for which I can't blame him as it was inherited, but he never did anything to heal himself and refused to take responsibility in any way for his own misfortunes - both his first and second failed marriages and all the trouble in his life. He wouldn't or couldn't see it and do anything to fix it. He took the easy route of blaming everyone else and acting out his seething anger on those closest to him - his mother, his wives.

At 80, often when these memories from the past arise, I realize that most of the people in them are now dead! By 80 a lot of people are dead, so I recognise it is a privilege to succeed to this age. Many of my former boyfriends and lovers are dead. My daughter's father lives, at 70, and Mike is still alive in Colorado at 82. His parents lived well into their 80's so he might too. I wish the LSD, the pot, ad all the reading about Zen Buddhism and other books on enlightenment he experienced in the 1970's could have helped Mike more to understand he was making the world he lived in and could have helped him get a better focus and insight on himselfand his emotions.

This blog is like a trunk in the attic with old letters and photographs in it. This memory is another old letter. I wonder where the seashell collection is now, and perhaps I should have left those shells on the beach anyhow.

Happy Trails in the here and now, as well as in the there and then. wrightj45@yahoo.com

What does a good man look like? the Good Coach

Tonight I was watching a documentary on one of my favorite actors, John Candy, and the things his friends said about him made me think of what makes a good man, a loved man. They said he was kind, generous, devoted to his family and his friends. He was NOT quick to take offense although often things were said about his weight, for example, that hurt him. He moved on. He was a man who picked up the tab even when he was with actors who were making the same money he was making. He was expansive.

My favorite movie with Joh Candy was

Cool Runnings

because his character as a coach was like that - humorous, kind, generous, funny. It was not the usual image of a coach. The antithesis would be J. K. Simmons as the coach in the movie Whiplash, where the coach is so demeaning, insulting, enraged and demanding that his student ends up committing suicide. John Candy didn't have a cruel bone in his body.

We are all waiting for the new season of Ted Lasso, another film about a good man, a coach who cares more about character than exploiting his team to generate money. Money cannot be the most important thing - it is material - it goes away - it really does not buy happiness. It may buy stuff but stuff doesn't make us happy for more than the few seconds after we buy it - if that long. What makes us happy is connections with other people, love makes us happy. Being good makes love and happiness.

If you haven't seen Ted Lasso yet, I heartily recommend it In this era of bullies and crass, ignorant, cruel public figures, it is nice to be reminded of what good men are like And it is good to remember the good men we have known and what it was about them that made us love them and made us think of them as good. Happy Trails wrightj45@yhaoo.com

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