I continue to LIVE in my Imagination.
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The Question as posed:
...which I'll rephrase to whatcha doin'? since "how ya doin'?" is quickly answered with "just fine" and doesn't lead to much in the way of insights. But "whatcha?" poses the opportunity to stop and look around and take stock of wazzup and where it's headed next. There are projects in the pipeline, and they're worth trying to lay out and see their trajectories.
The area that Convivium has already heard about is Plantae, which was spawned in early June under Antidotes and Analgesics, when it looked like we were facing 6 months of a miserable slog toward the November election and its aftermath. That prospect has morphed unexpectedly into one that even looks hopeful in mid-August. I've continued to gather Plantae materials, while working on favorite trees, silences, happy days, reading , and the sense of Place in successive Convivia. /Plantae is bottomless, and turns out to connect various threads that I've been working on for many years: Ecology, Landscape, Geography... and encourages me to (1) Collection Development and (2) Curation of the materials in my library.
Another thing that's arisen in the last month or so is a scheme a-hatching to do another transcontinental driving trip in March and April, with the subtext of visiting far-flung friends whom we'd otherwise likely not see again. While the objective of seeing John and Laura and Kian is paramount, there are at the moment about 10 destinations along the way. And that scheme led to the purchase of a new car, a RAV4 Hybrid. The now-9 year old RAV would probably have been OK, but... So I pore over a new Road Atlas and begin to wonder about logistics...
Another prospect on the horizon is a new instrument from Nick Apollonio, surely the last I'll commission (though maybe not the last I'll acquire, since Jake is always capable of surprise...). It's now actively under construction in Nick's shop, and will probably appear in the fall, and occasion a spate of work in the Music spaces, which have been rather in the background lately. That musical realm has waxed and waned over the years, but is similar to others in that the primary audience is MYSELF. There's a lifetime or two of curatorial work that awaits with my audio archives, too.
Another area with potential-as-yet-undefined is the photographic, which has languished in recent months, awaiting some new inspiration. In the last 5 years I've got past the public-display bugaboo, with a succession of shows... but been there, done that, no need to think of shows as the objective. Of course there's an infinitude of rock persons to photograph, and I continue to study the work of others, and continue to be fascinated by the medium as I've known it over 60+ years. I'm now definitely in mouldy-fig territory, based in a monochrome aesthetic that is ...antithetical to the iPhone/Instagram photography that is now predominant.
And there's the everlasting reading, driven by (1) rediscovery of books I already have but find joy in picking up again, and (2) the incitements to find and read new material, thanks to Maria Popova and the various book-rich periodicals that arrive in the mailbox. The Amazon purchase list(s) track my wayward Acquisitions path, which I'm pleased to dignify as 'Collection Development'.
All of that adds up to: continuing to do what I've been doing, much of which has found its way into Convivium texts during the last 5 years.
I have also the prospect of writing the 60th Class Report submission, which is now in the yellow-pad stage—gathering up the developments of the last (quite momentous) 5 years, figuring out how to present my doings... to a granfalloon that I have only one thing in common with, which happened 60+ years ago—a lifetime, really. And yet I STILL want to read their versions of life stories. I'm pretty sure that nobody in H-R '65 has had as much FUN as I with their lives, though many have made Contributions and been exemplary in one way or another. But I knew almost none of them. Most of those I did know are gate gate parasamgate, and the lives of doctors and lawyers and such arouse very little in the way of jealousy, let alone wishes for what might have been.
And to what do I owe that felicity? Clearly, to my spouse of [nearly] 60 years.
I continue to LIVE in my Imagination.
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A Wednesday addendum:
In the last week or so I've been listening to David James Duncan's Sun House (Amazon page) while picking up trash (a couple of hours a day, so I can make reasonable headway with fiction or non-fiction, via Audible). It turns out that Emergence Magazine (which I revere...) did an interview with him that I've been reading the transcript of, and highly recommend.
The book is steeped in Kazantzakis, Dostoyevsky, Meister Eckhard, Marguerite Porete and the Beguines (of whom I had never heard), with a dash of Sanskrit scholarship and Zen poetics—a delicious stew. This puts me in mind of my long-running and continuing habit of finding things (books, bits of text, videos, cartoons...) and steering them to others whom I think would appreciate and otherwise find interesting... the standard modus operandi of the Reference Librarian, and referencing my Home Page intention to be "a serendib". And another instance of a deeply influential book that found its way into my life. There have been so many of them which just happened to arrive and served as ...watersheds... and all I had to do was be open to them.
The bottom line of wazzup as it now appears:
To know (and to seek always for more) recondite stuff, to deploy in Informing Others, for the sheer joy of Knowledge and its transmission. That's what I wanted to do in my professoring days, and what I worked at during the W&L Librarian career, and now see as Life's Work.