"Once upon a time Atalanta went too far astray looking for apples and gathered far too many to digest or to carry, so had to content herself with sitting on a hill she'd made of them just so she could see where she was and find her way back."
That could be the beginning of a fairy tale or simply an extended metaphor for beginning a litblog with great enthusiasm then finding that life had somehow become too enlivened with too many doings to maintain the level of bloggery that has been set by other people posting, for example the likes of Bud Parr of www.chekhovsmistress.com with his copious & intriguing links. Having found myself absorbed and inspired in the rich world of virtual book-gab, my juggling abilities became unbalanced by giddy over-stimulation as well the intricate dance steps from one event/place/activity/book hunt/forest exploration, visiting friends, and friends a-visiting. As usual my response to having far too many things demanding my attention, was to add yet more things: another storytelling course; balalaika acquisition; involvement in a local initiative to save some endangered trees; volunteer work on a nature conservancy site; and not least, beginning yet another blog, greengates, which will be the posting place for encounters with writings in the realm of ecology, and what has been dubbed "ecosophy" (Arne Naess?), as well as what some call "nature writing", and also an area that John Anderson has written about, "the mythology of language" (in his article, "Unknown Gods: the Mythology of Language", Mythosphere 2[1] 1-11 -- that fine quarterly now defunct alas). And of course whatever else seems to relate, or overlap, and spill over from the apple basket.
The word-horde has grown to monstrous proportions defying my efforts at intellectual organization. Although a librarian by profession, my specialty is the contents of the books themselves rather than the practice of arranging them in logical categories on shelves. There is moreover an equation, yet to be perfected by physicists, that describes the phenomenon of the quantity of bibliographic material expanding being constantly in inverse proportion to the available space to store it. Poetry books continue to accumulate: Story Hour: Contemporary Narratives By American Poets, ed. Sonny Williams (from Storyline Press); David Hinton's new translations, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (New Directions); and Jan Zwicky's Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences (Gaspereau), at the opposite pole of the narrative poems of Story Hour. Non-poetic writings galore: just now, in a recently acquired second-hand paperback edited by Graham Harvey, Shamanism: A Reader (Routledge 2003), an essay by Piers Vitebsky of import for every level of my reading & doing: "From Cosmology to Environmentalism," with the sentence that first grabbed me: "Epistemologically . . .environmentalism is correspondingly badly placed to constitute a core form of knowledge for any substantial section of the public." -- mostly because of its fragmentation across social planes and as a body of knowledge. This connects back to the issue of Mythosphere mentioned above, and another article there by Daniel Deardorff, "Bright-mind, Strange Companions", dealing with what the author calls "mythopoetic intelligence" as a way of knowing the world, as illustrated by a tale in folklore form, "The Companions", by Michael Meade.
Varieties of knowledges and knowers, and trying to find one's place on the shifting continuum, both by "second-hand" mythopoetic means or direct perception of the local, with flashes of recollection of prairie summerfallow harbouring grasshoppers on August afternoons, sound track by crows. Writing as vestiges of the real, and the real always interrupting the written.
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