Now what? Six years into this book project in a dubious effort to somehow express a lifetime and now-it’s done. The book is published and I’m starting this blog today with little idea of where it will take me, except maybe to just start writing something. Entangled was a modest effort at best and difficult to write for a variety of reasons. The initial idea was to be a letter to our children. It took on a life of it’s own when I realized that to convey to our kids the kind of life we (Janis and I) had, it would take a book. I didn’t like that idea; in 2014, I was not in a good state of mind. I was only starting to accept getting older and then tossed into a world of dementia, struggling with guilt and grief losing Janis to a locked unit. I needed to understand all this myself, never mind trying to express it to our kids-it seemed daunting. And that in itself presented obstacles. Would our kids even want that, especially if I decided to go public? What is the point in such an endeavor? How intimate do I dare to be in such a project? I am not a public kind of person. I tend to be private. This changed my outlook on things. (Blogging, for instance.) All of a sudden I felt a need to open this up for my own understanding and maybe in that context it could result in something that others might find, if not interesting, at least addressing some understanding about their own lives, or the life of someone else that they know and love. Annie Dillard wrote: “If we may learn to know, may we not learn to understand?”
Are we just dust in the wind, or is there something else we might be missing? I don’t subscribe to any particular organized religion. I’ve been there, done that. I realized that religions were really ‘a finger pointing at the moon’. I wanted to know that moon they were pointing at-I wanted to know it directly. Religion didn’t respond to my personal search. So at a young age I started to look into many forms of religion that served as a kind of research. I took courses in college related to philosophy and comparative religions and sought out opportunities to be involved in any services that were available to me. I traveled around a little (including while posted overseas in the military) and attended different religious services, read anything I could find, tried out different forms of meditation and settled in my early 20’s on zazen meditation. Zen is not a religion, though it is often viewed as, and associated with Buddhism, Zen is considered more as a tool/method to a way of life, (Shikantaza) and can be attached to any religion, or to none at all.This led to a hobby of sorts in theoretical physics and more recently an interest in the ‘new physics’ and quantum physics that has a comfortable relationship with some of the experiences that came out of my personal quest for a cohesive sense of understanding why we are not just dust in the wind. While writing Entangled I did not plan on getting into my own philosophical quest, but it seemed so much a part of what explained to me this connection of events from my youth up to today that it couldn’t be ignored in Entangled.
I’ve mentioned along the way recently that Janis is my life’s koan. I mean by that that my life has always been about this relationship. Even long before we met. I’m not going to expound on that too much. It’s too complex and is indeed a koan-a paradox, a riddle that defies logic and/or exposes the limits of logical reasoning in understanding the inexplicable. Trying to explain any further than that is not reasonable in this text, and requires some self-study that meditation can assist one with.
So I suppose that beyond promotional stuff I still need to do, Entangled is a closed book.
I’m hoping to get through 2, possibly 3 more books before joining the walker-crowd, wearing Velcro-laced white sneakers, and living on Progresso soup and PBJs. (Wait-except for the walker and the sneakers I’m already halfway there.) I’ve learned from experience that I don’t do well by finishing one book and then jumping too quickly into another. In this case, maybe a little longer given the investment of emotion and time I spent on this one. I’m kind of thinking about another non-fiction work. But, can’t decide what that would be. I am in the early stages of getting A Certain Fall, republished with an additional, added text to the work. I have the rights to the contracted book back and some ideas for adding/updating it. Other projects that I started years ago but left undeveloped are also still interesting to me. One of those has some elements of a work of fiction based on actual events that occurred during my work in the military. I like this idea. The other book I started and still have interest in is a straightforward work of fiction. A novel set in a small fishing community located in coastal Maine. This one would be another attempt at a character-driven novel similar to my earlier effort at this genre in Mother, Night, and Water. I’m looking forward to both of these as possible next projects, and another educational experience/training in writing, especially because I have them both started and moving me into the next phase of their writing. On the other hand, I always enjoy starting fresh. I love the work. But, also now after 4 books, have enough experience that I understand the words: “If your writing comes easy, you’re doing something wrong.”
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