Typically when I start a blog, I have a fairly good grasp of what I want to write.  Usually there is a starting point, a middle theme, and a neat as a bow tied up ending.  I do this out of consideration for the few readers I have, because any of you who know me, know my brain works on several topics at once, and were I given a podium at which to preach my knowledge to the world, I would probably perform a feat of unending blabbering that Rand Paul would envy.

Tonight is different; tonight I don't know for certain that I will publish this entry when I finish.  The critic in me is hardest on myself, and would destroy my thoughts before making them blatantly public.  It's my disdain for self-centeredness and vanity.  I guarantee you I will count how many "I's" I typed in this diatribe before I post it.  

Lately the radiant heat of summer in Wisconsin has me appreciating every little bit of the world I experience.  Thankfully the rain hasn't been as scarce as last year, so I'm privileged by the grace of Mother Nature to have a very lovely garden on display.  There are days that it's beauty and peace are exotic enough to me that I can feel balanced, undisturbed, and content.  Each day the sun breaks through the tall pines and illuminates the edges of my garden boxes, sets alight the petals of my flowers, is a good day.  The cluster of birds begin lining up for their morning feeding; swapping spots in the bird bath and poking at each other playfully.  Some days this is enough.  Some days, this is a paradise anyone would envy.

Do the infinite possibilities of this world pull so strongly at other people as they do at me sometimes?  How is it possible to feel so completely at peace and settled in one corner of this globe, and yet still want so urgently to drop everything at a moment's notice and set out to see the unseen?  Travel bug you say?  Possibly.....

Few people really know me.  I guess I've never felt it necessary to explain myself to the world.  The world and I have always understood each other.  It's other humans that are often a puzzle to me.  Too often my blunt observations have gotten past the barrier of my lips and I've regretted it.  It happens to us all, but I can honestly say that I don't feel bad about it.  I guess my opinion is that you need to be strong enough in your sense of self to not let those things get to you.  

Why do so many people go about set on propelling themselves into the social abyss of trying to be something that in the end will be nothing but a pile of dust anyway?  Embrace mortality and discover the freedom that comes with it.  I can't remember the exact quote, but I believe it came from an excerpt written by the late Roger Ebert, and had a similar theme.  He wrote about how few people understand what it means to really live an enlightened existence.  He said, and I'm paraphrasing, that people die all the time, every day, thousands and thousands of them.  However, the way to go on living after you die is to have ideas that stick around.  Don't waste energy on trying to preserve your looks, or your possessions - instead work on preserving your ideas.  Share them with people.  Communicate.  Change the world in a small way.  

I like that thought.  It's not practical, everyday living.....it's above it.  It's being unselfish.  It's being truly grateful to just breathe everyday.  It's setting an example of a full life, and a life well-lived.  

The Sugar Shack

Days like today, when the sun finally seems risen from its lazy banking along the horizon to announce the arrival of Spring, and the only clouds in the sky are wispy jet contrails smeared in every direction matching the thick blotches of snow still left covering the ground, remind me of a tiny old shack standing in a bit of woods with smoke piping happily from its tiny metal chimney.

When I remember the happy times of being a kid, there are specific images that immediately pop into my head; the local village fair with its carnival rides and sugar-smelling thick hot air, or the old timber train bridge that ran over the crick behind my cousin's house where we would spend hours fishing and exploring.  The Sugar Shack is one of these as well.

Late winter and early spring have some magic about them.  The clean beauty of the snow still blankets the countryside, but the sun is out longer, making it easier to be outside.   It is when nature is truly in balance - light and dark, warm and cold, beauty and ugliness.  

As I walked today, the tree branches above me were different.  Their buds were starting to swell.  Life was starting to course through their veins.  Like most things truly delicious, maple syrup comes from collecting this life from nature and adding a little extra energy.  The Sugar Shack was our source of energy. 

The melting snow made the ground in the woods between the trees and on the trail very soft and muddy.  I can remember my boots getting stuck a few times and having to flail like a wounded bird to free myself.  The sucking sound that came from the brown mud always made me laugh.  The parallel lines of the tree trunks were dotted by white pails hanging everywhere.  On a warm day, those pails would fill with sugary sap.

It was something so appealing to the senses - the charred smell of the burning wood heating the vats of sap, the candied syrup coming off the pan in thick caramel strands, the freshly carved hole in the side of the tree leaking the wet sweetness (sometimes in steady streams) down the metal spouts.  Freezing toes from collecting the pails in the woods were easily warmed by a few minutes sitting inside the shack.  It was a simple wood frame with corrugated metal walls sitting atop some stone.  Couldn't have been more than 15x15, with thin windows on the south and west sides.  A shelf above the windows held an array of various tools, a spoon hung off a hook (for tasting of course) and scratched on the beams framing the sliding door were the yields from the past years.

Sat in the far chair away from the door was Elmer.  A tiny waif of a man, puffing on his pipe, his brimmed hat sitting just askew over his crinkled brow. For some reason I can't remember him having teeth or not, but he was nearly always smiling.  I think it's because he smiled through his eyes more than anything.  There are only two places I picture Elmer when I try to remember him:  on his orange tractor seat bouncing happily as he drove the trailer through the woods collecting sap, or sitting on that corner chair in the sugar shack, tending the fire and giving his predictions on the weather.

In reality I'm sure my brothers and I were only in those woods for a day or two each spring, but remembering it makes it seem almost like a special vacation.  As though it lasted for weeks, with no school in between. I remember it as though those woods were our home until the life in the trees had reached its climax and could no longer be tapped into our little pails.  What a vacation that would be - collecting life from trees and turning it into candy!

Thoreau and Emerson

Lately I have been becoming more closely acquainted with some writings of the aforementioned Transcendentalist writers.  I feel as though I've stumbled upon a group of old friends.  Nelson Mendela once said that there is nothing like returning to a place that remains the same to see the ways in which you yourself have changed.  That about sums it up for me and Emerson.  I remember my college English professor pushing a wide variety of literature on our first year impressionable minds.  

I've decided to brave it and lay out a few of my own attempts at expressive poetry.  I've always held an appreciation for the Iambic Pentameter crowd, however, as much as I've tried I do not think that is my medium.  So here is the first one, and appropriately it's about Spring:

The old, brittle, useless stems
damp with the still morning air
are brown.
The type of brown that looks dead,
and dry
and hollow.

They are a snapshot of time, frozen in their attempt
at reaching above the saturated ground.
A mere etching of the lush greenery
they used to be.
Last summer,
When they were alive.  
When nature's nectar flowed through their bodies.

Nearly buried in the black muck,
at the base of the dead steams, 
protrudes a green head, born of the deep soil,
crowning through the mangled bush of old growth
reaching for the sun,
for the light,
for the life - the life that began in the ground
and now will spring into the air,
bearing it's fragile body to the elements.

All in the hope of living another Summer,
blooming another Fall,
and becoming frozen stiff, preserved in death, another Winter.