Tag Archives: Hiatus

The more things change…

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June 6th, 2024

Okay, so I guess it’s been a long time since the last post.

I was shocked to see I’d actually gone 18 months without writing a post for Life In Engleville. I wrote four paragraphs about all the changes I’ve been through the last couple of years. Suffice to say I’ve driven over a number of Life’s speed bumps, but nothing we don’t see every day. Others have seen worse.

Rambling on about my activities seemed like a monotonous account, and nothing that would inspire a reader to keep reading.

I’m not the only person to observe a considerable change in the world at large following the global pandemic. Maybe that’s just the milepost, and some of these things would have occurred regardless. Folks seem to feel “fundamental shifts” in their lives, or more so perhaps the lives of others that occupy their worlds, the interface with “the world” in general.

I’ve become keenly aware how boring it can be for everyone in the world to be writing or talking about everything under the sun on social media. Andy Warhol was right. Everyone wants their fifteen seconds of fame. YouTube and Tik-Tok are all the rage.

It didn’t feel that way when I started blogging fifteen years ago. Before “The Change”.

I’m not sure blogging isn’t just about dead, but I know I’m not.

August 6th, 2024

The siren calls to me and I must write. As always, the wheels spun searching for the topic, the inspiration. The thought.

I haven’t spent 30 years beside a stream or seven years in Tibet, but I’ve been on my own sort of pilgrimage, I guess. Not exactly a Vision Quest, but two years akin to wandering in the desert only without the desert.

The premise was all around me. I walked through it and watched it out the window and talked to it where fitting. Thirty-nine years here in the Ark of Engleville, in this humble glen, and suddenly its sameness spoke to me. No, she grabbed me firmly but gently by the shoulders and shook me a little. “Hey, hey! Come to!”

My compositional kernels were a maelstrom of thoughts surrounding changes. Current event changes and changes in the world over the last twenty years and changes of the world over my lifetime. Personal changes, chapters of sixty-five years-to-date, from the innocence of childhood to the glory years and and gory years, and finally a return to a second childhood.

Then I opened my blog, and discovered this forgotten draft “The More Things Change…”

My hiatus from the blog world coincides with a hiatus from the world at large, a two-year binge intoxicated by total liberty; no job, no wife, no mortgage…no plans. I decided there was to be no plan. Wake every day and make it up as I go, just the way I would have on summer vacations when I was 10 years old. I played like an emerging teen with my lifelong friends music and photography. I methodically insulated and isolated myself from the “outside world”, the news, the television, the internet, the influencers.

I had always found the world to be generally intrusive, and in the past fifty years it has been marketed to us at an ever-increasing and overwhelming rate. People have become zombies, staring at their cell phones, filming everything and seeing nothing, subscribing to everything that comes down the pike, swallowing anything they are told. Jumping on virtual bandwagons to avoid missing out. Sorry if you must live or work out there in it, but it’s really a bit of a nightmare. On steroids. With a soundtrack.

I looked out the window at the bird feeder. The grass and birds have not changed in the least over the last thirty-nine years. In fact, they haven’t changed in the last thirty-nine thousand years. I went out to sit and watch most of the last one thousand sunsets, and though each one was unique, sunset has not changed much, either. The breeze that stirs the cottonwoods is the same breeze that blew threw my mother’s hair when she was just a tot. Clouds are still made the old-fashioned way, and still look the same as when my father eyed them from the helm of the Honey-Doll. In spite of modern science, rain is still wet, falls when and where it pleases, and makes the same pitter-patter sounds striking the waterproof leaves of the Touch-Me-Nots.

Oatmeal is still a good breakfast. Black coffee is as good as ever. My bed remains as soft as the stars of The Milky Way that splash across the summer sky.

My Moon rises and calls to me. A billion stars sing harmony. That’s all I need.

And the more things change, the more I cleave to those that remain the same.

Slainte,

Paz

The Retiring Kind

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In our last episode, I talked about making the decision to retire from the working world. After Family Leave for my wife’s terminal illness in 2020, I returned to work on a semi-retired schedule of 3 days per week. I retired officially on April 15th this year.

It’s a big step and and something of a drastic change in one’s life, and I am keenly aware that the subconscious brain is not particularly fond of change. Perhaps that’s unfair. Closer to the truth to say brain goes into a certain “scramble-the-jets” mode when substantial changes occur. It’s doing its important job of keeping us healthy and safe from our environments. It’s looking for the landmarks that remain, and sorting through every bit of new data that is sent its way.

So I decided I better go on vacation before I tell my brain that I have retired. Vacation is mostly a good thing, and brain is accustomed to the concept. I say “mostly a good thing” because I have planned and taken more than one vacation dedicated to wallpapering a kitchen or building a porch or changing the engine in a Subaru, so they aren’t always relaxing and reinvigorating, let’s say.

The plan ensued to slowly get brain comfortable with throwing away the alarm clock and not caring if there is a clean shirt for tomorrow. This could pass for vacay, easy. I figure this will be good for about two weeks or so, then brain will start getting antsy about not being awakened from a perfectly-sound (and needed) sleep, or getting that after-work rush of running around to feed the dog and the cat and serve dinner and change clothes and maybe mow a little or clean the pellet stove.

My new plan is to suggest that when I return from vacation from my semi-retirement after leave, I will go on sabbatical. Sabbatical is all about rest and recharging the spirit, and usually lasts up to a year and specifically excludes paint and wallpaper. Hopefully, subconscious brain will start to take a fancy to all this nothing-doing-ness and perhaps think about going on retreat for a while before returning to the world. Rest is good for the brain, too, y’know. It’s not just for muscles and spirits.

“Vacation” is going well, pretty much. I’m real glad about a lot of things like having time to paint (landscapes on canvas, not clapboard on houses), and have been able to mow the lawn at my leisure, enjoying it from the morning window in the kitchen. Writing seems to elude me, but I guess one needs to vacation from many aspects of daily routine on sabbatical. I get an urge to write and subconscious brain is so slick it’s right there behind me with a suspicious sneer, “I thought we were on vacation?!” And I’m so afraid of letting the cat out of the bag and throwing a wrench in the works and upsetting the apple cart that I zip my lip and hold my tongue and don’t let on and close the journal on that, so-to-speak.

I have been writing a lot of poetry. That’s an acceptable vacation thing, I guess. Just one page at a time typically, and you don’t even need to fill a page or have a topic or anything. Almost like doodling. Or writing your name in the sand with a stick. You can write poetry from a hammock or an Adirondack chair. Heck, you could stay in bed and write poetry all morning, Way late. Like 8 o’clock. Yeah, that’s vacation alright.

On sabbatical, I think it would be alright to keep a journal, don’t you? Not like just a diary like “I got new roller skates today” but more like a place to make note of all you appreciate in that now or the wonders on which you ponder in a spiritual battery recharging. Those sound like nice things for a subconscious brain to go along with for a while, wouldn’t you agree? I sure would. Sabbaticals can have more than just poetry.

‘Cause y’know I really like to write, and it’s really a part of me and has been for a long time before I got to retir this year’s vacation and subsequent sabbatical. Retire This year’s schedule has allowed me to relax to degrees I have not been able to experience for decades. It was fruitless trying to recall what it felt like when last I was a bachelor. Technically, a widower, but I am a man who is responsible only for himself now, one who answers to no one and can grant any preference. It’s simply normal life for so many, but it is new-ish to me. Sure, I lived as a bachelor before I married and had children and grew from apartment to home and from job to career.

Writing was one of the things that has always connected to the real root of me. In many ways it joins other artistic pursuits as an indelible, inalienable core. Perhaps an alter ego. A face beneath the many hats of son and father, husband and citizen, supporter and leader, guest and friend, mentor and grandfather. For all of those strong spokes of my life’s wheel are directed outward and connected inward. They return joy and glory and pride and love and feelings of accomplishment, drive, duty and productiveness to the eyes on the face beneath the hat. And aren’t “the eyes the windows to the soul?”.

Yes, I agree with you. Thanks for seconding the notion that journaling is good for the soul. That’s a solid statement subconscious brain can sink its metaphoric teeth into and symbolically chew on for a while as our virtual vacation nears its imaginary end.

A little distraction as we speed-bump over a small change and move on from vacation.

On sabbatical, we’ll have time to consider going on hiatus for a while.

Take care and keep in touch.
(You may experience some delay if my mail is held while away)

Paz