Number 260: The Last Post

When something feels like it is naturally drawing to a close - I like that expression; I imagine a delicate hand drawing a curtain over a tall window as, outside, day fades to dusk over the distant hills - I believe in letting it.

For the past few months I have felt this blog pulling away from my reach. I have attempted to pull it in, to own it once more, only to have it pull away from me again. I am not one for forcing things, and so I think it is time to let it go for good.

I started writing my Letters online in September, 2009. Five and a half years and 260 posts later I find myself looking outward toward other projects. My life has changed, too, as have my areas of focus. Three of my four children are grown up now and I am somewhat less home-based. I am just about ready to begin the revisions of the novel I spent last year writing and I know the task will consume whatever limited creative output is at my disposal.

Allowing change is healthy although, admittedly, transition can be hard. I will miss the online interaction with other bloggers and readers. While it is a stretch to call these others in the blogging community 'friends', I do believe some genuine connections were made with people in the U.K., Colorado, Virginia, and other places closer to home, and I am grateful. The entire experience enriched my life and furthered my ongoing education immeasurably, but I believe I have exhausted the format I chose for my blogging project. I have tried to write Letters that anyone, young, old and in-between might enjoy reading. I sought feedback but grew uninterested in agressive self-promotion because it seemed to detract from the simple pleasure of putting together my weekly posts. I shared bits of my psyche, my interests, memories, my pursuits and passions with whomever cared to read about them. The number of readers was rarely high but I do believe I brought a bit of light and joy to some people, some of the time.

My friend Kate who has made several wonderful scrapbooks of and for her children once told me that my blog was like a scrapbook for my children, of our adventures together and of my thoughts on many topics such as marriage and motherhood, the arts and nature. I like to think that is true. At some point, perhaps, I will have a book printed of some of my more interesting posts for them.

If you are reading this last post I want to thank you for providing me with a treasured audience, whether this one time or all two hundred sixty times. I have thoroughly enjoyed writing to you, wherever you are, and send you all my best wishes. Please have a listen to this lovely song, for it sums up my thoughts so well:

The Parting Glass

Sincerely and with love,

Rebecca

Sunset on the Fraser River

For the Love of Poetry

 

I  thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes. ~e.e. cummings

A fellow blogger posted the above bit of poetry on his blog recently, and it perfectly epitomizes what I have been feeling about this time of year. Despite the weather being a bit confused lately, the earth really is pushing forth with the idea of spring. The crocuses and snowdrops are blooming, choice shrubs are greening and leaf buds on the trees are beginning to swell, needing just a bit of steady encouragement from the sun to gain the confidence to open up.

I suppose the beauty of poetry is that the poet succeeds, with a few well-chosen and intuitive words, in expressing what we lesser mortals cannot. I can't say that I read a lot of poetry, but I do read enough to know its power.

I have been so busy lately, preparing for this weekend's events which I have helped to organize for the community, and my husband is just winding down a few weeks of work in which he, literally, spent more time on the job than he spent at home. The other day I had so much to do, yet in my tiredness I could not find my rhythm, nor create any real flow to the day. Another blogger expressed in one of his new poems exactly what I had been experiencing that day, and I was comforted by the fact that someone out there had been able to put form to my feelings, simply because he had felt the same way.

the day is passing too fast, forward, but jerky, stop motion clay-mation in the hands of an amateur. ~Brian Miller

When I was a child, I read plenty of junior poetry: A.A. Milne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dennis Lee, Shel Silverstein, nursery rhymes galore, and various illustrated collections, but it was not until I was introduced to adult poetry in my English Literature class in high school that I began to appreciate and understand poetry as an art form (although I am sure all that children's literature paved the way). Our teacher, Mr. Stephani walked us through Shakespeare, Pope, some Milton, Hardy, Wordsworth, Blake and Byron. I found I could understand and often relate to what these poets were saying about the world around them, and I was encouraged to carry on with my studies, which included Canadian and American literature, in college and university. 

I'm not sure if all college kids go through the same poetic phase, but I know I did. I remember another very romantic e.e. cummings poem which I had heard quoted in a movie. I was in the beginning stages of my first long-term relationship at the time, and after hearing the poem, I rushed to the college library, looked it up, copied it out and gave it to my boyfriend. I won’t quote the entire poem here, but the last stanza still takes my breath away, in a laughing, slightly cringing 'I can’t believe I gave him that poem' kind of way. In all honesty, I'm sure the poem described not how I felt about him, but rather, how I wished to feel at the time.

(I do not know what it is about you that closes

And opens; only something in me understands

The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

I never did find a poem that fit 'us' until after we had broken up. Perhaps that was a sign.

When I met and fell in love with my husband, I wrote him a poem. It had one line in it that I remember:

Our love is as light and unusual as feathers on the moon

My husband, a practical and steady sort of man (thankfully) was impressed that I had even written him a poem at all, and was deeply touched. Finally, for me, poetry and reality had met. I was happy.

Our lives read more like a to-do list now than a love sonnet, much of the time, but that's only natural after nearly twenty years of marriage. The important thing is that we write those lists together. As for poetry, well, it will keep popping up to help give shape and to make sense and beauty of this human experience. That is its special magical gift to those who are tuned to hear it.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

~Shakespeare~

The photo is of the walnut tree in our back yard.

A Blog Challenge...Pass it On

My good friend Alistair from Crivens, jings, and help ma Boab, (a great blog, by the way, which includes several adventures with The Lovely G and a cat named Jess) tagged me in a challenge earlier this week. It was a good thing, for he gave me a blog topic for a week when all my creative energy was being sucked into an onerous vortex of grant and report writing. Workwise, it was a week from, as we say here in Canada, H-E-double-hockey-sticks, but I have begun to surface from beneath an Everest sized pile of papers. The Report was delivered yesterday morning and the grant application, completed with no time to spare, put into the hands of the fine folks at Snail Mail Incorporated (Canada Post) for its journey to the British Columbia Arts Council headquarters in Victoria. A lot of other things happened this week as well, but I won't bore my friends with the details. Instead, I will get on with answering the following questions before I tag five more friends.
 Nominated blogs have to create a list of the following:

What's your most beautiful post.

What's been your most popular post.

What's been your most controversial post.

What's been your most helpful post.

Which posts success has surprised you most.

Which of your posts do you feel didn't get the attention it deserved.

Which post are you proudest of

My most beautiful post? I'd have to say A Week Away because writing it was a beautiful, multi-sensory experience the result of which nearly equalled my vision for the post. That does not happen very often!

My most popular post? Well, this answers the next question as well. My most popular post, according to my stats anyway, was A Trip from Bountiful about two Fundamentalist Mormon young women I went to college with. This post garnered a lot of attention and some heated debate between myself and a friend. I was glad to move on to the next topic after that!

My most helpful post? I would have to say The Turning Point because this post seemed to reassure some parents, and give some others something to think about regarding their own children in a positive way. It also served to help me articulate some of the deeper thoughts I have about parenting children in what can sometimes be a callous world.

Which post's success surprised me the most? One of my earliest posts, "I Had a Farm in Africa", brought comments from people all over the blogosphere and beyond. The post is about my friends who did, and do still, have a farm in Africa, but its title was what initially attracted so many visits and shows how well loved the book and film Out of Africa is around the world. I had never had a post gain so many comments and it was a delightful surprise way back in 2009 when I had only just begun as a blogger.

Which of my posts didn't get the attention it deserved? Gosh, that sounds a bit like sour grapes. However, if I have to pick one, it would be The Dancer who Rattled the Boards, because when I posted it, not many people knew I even had a blog, let alone were following my posts! This post is about a dance I went to once, and a very special dancer who cleared the floor.

Which post am I proudest of? I'm going to go out on a limb (pardon the pun) and say, at least for today, I am proud of my post Tractor Yoga, because it was funny, well received, informative...and I dearly love to be funny if I possibly can.

Now it is my turn to tag five friends for the blogger challenge! (Thanks to Al for the Calvin and Hobbes pic.)

1.  Anita from Beyond the Diapers and Spills because she's always making her readers think by framing every post as a question, and now it's our turn to return the favour!

2.  Lucille from Useful or Beautiful because her blog title says it all. Lucille manages, with a few crafted images, words, borrowed or original, to evoke a life worth living. She takes beauty very seriously, but there is always an underlying whimsey to her posts. And she can be very funny, too! (see her 'Cow Patty Cake' post)

3.  Brian from Waystation One because he has a huge variety of posts to choose from, and I'd like to see what he comes up with as answers to each question...maybe some poems I haven't had the chance to read?

4.  Tracey from Unos dos Tracey because she needs something to challenge her after her recent ten-day Alaskan cruise. And because she has some very, very funny posts!

5.  Vince from Reeds because he is interesting, provoking, thoughtful, and wacky by turns. His blog is like that friend you don't always agree with but can always be counted on to liven things up.

So, I hope these friends take up the challenge. If they can't be bothered then I won't be offended...these tag things are supposed to be fun in any case, not a burden.

Cheers, all! And happy reading.