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Marilyn Armstrong — Seeking Intelligent Life on Earth

Category Archives: Postaday


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Daily Prompt: Goals – None are so easily achieved!

I started blogging because people kept telling me I should. All my friends. My husband. My family. I’ve always been a writer, professionally and personally. I’d been sick a lot and for a very long time. A decade of being on the edge of dying is a lot of dying time and I was finally beginning to be a person again. The siege was lifting.

Facebook never did it for me. I never liked the format, the scattershot nature of posting. I have so many connections that aren’t friends, just people with whom I played various games. Even my circle of “friends” wasn’t a natural audience.

I had been following a WordPress blog for some months, ATMTX PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG. Every time I wanted to comment, I had to go through an annoying identification process unless I registered. One day, I registered. I picked a name for a mythical blog I might want to write. I chose Serendipity because I’m a serendipitous kind of gal. I had absolutely no intention of doing anything with it, but it made following other peoples’ blogs and commenting easier.

That was January 2012. In February, I put up an “About Me” page and posted a photograph because as an enthusiastic amateur, I have a great many pictures. Thousands, though many are not good enough to post anywhere but a family album. Still, there were some I thought someone besides my husband might enjoy. It was more than a month before I posted anything else. In March, I posted once, maybe twice. In April, not at all. In May, I found myself posting a couple of times a week. It was like writing letters. I wrote about whatever was on my mind or had caught my interest in the news. The presidential campaign was heating up, though it wasn’t red-hot yet.

Summer was slow. Vacation kept me away a lot. I posted, but it wasn’t particularly interesting or exciting material and my numbers reflected the ho-hum quality of the work.

And then, it rolled into August. Political hell broke loose. America became engulfed in a civil war of words on the Internet. I jumped in too. My numbers soared overnight. When Sandy, the Monster Storm, hit in September, it gave me plenty to write about. October was all-out class warfare. November. Election and aftermath. A tsunami of opinion, violence. Craziness everywhere. It was my biggest month, bringing in numbers I haven’t matched yet.

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By then, I was posting daily, more than once a day. I was reblogging other people’s work. I had found friends and colleagues on the Internet. We used each other as sounding boards and still do. The sense of community was not theoretical. I was part of it and I loved it.

The months have rolled on. I still have no goals. The question keeps coming up and I really think about it, but no matter how long and hard I ponder the question, I can’t find a reason better than my original non-goals. I love to write. I have a lot of opinions. And blogging gives me my own space to post photographs where people other than my immediate family can see them.

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I’ve achieved much more than I ever imagined because I never imagined anything at all. I’ve gotten close to 73,000 hits and although I’ve never been Freshly Pressed, apparently there are people who think I’m interesting enough to follow. I’ve made a difference to a few lives.

To know I’ve actually made a difference is a great feeling. Addictive.

Apple Blossoms

I have a focus for my time, a way to use the words roiling around in my head. In my working years, I always wrote for a defined goal and was paid for it. Now, at last, I can write about anything. I have no boss, no word limit, no corporate guidelines. Sadly, I don’t get the paycheck, but I have freedom. That’s worth a lot. And I’ve got a reason gear up, grab my cameras and go take pictures.

I’ve gotten much more than I ever imagined or expected.

Goals? What more could I need or want? Oh, I know. Send money? Please?

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Daily Prompt: Dulled Yet Seeing All

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Big Sky Superstition Mtns

To see so far the hawks will envy me.

To have eyes to reach beyond the trees, through the woods,  see the farms and orchards.

Would my camera follow my eyes?

Could I capture images?

Pixels are tiny, the sky so huge.

Navajo Big Sky

It would be as if I flew to see so far and so clear.

Would I see through the here and now to beyond?

I would be a creature of eyes only, hearing and feeling all else soft, subtle, hushed and dim.

Muted and far off.

My eyes reflecting like a bobcat at night, as if I had headlamps in my face.

Grand Canyon

For a little while.

Not forever.

How fine it would be … for a little while.

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Prompts for the Promptless: The Alter Ego

for the promptless

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Shadow Maggie

Shadow Maggie

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I am Maggie when Maggie is me.

In fictional times, I depend on she

Stepping into the breach

To give me what I need.

It’s her job, her reason for being. Indeed.

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She’s endured my loves and absorbed my losses

Suffered my marriages and two divorces.

Born a shadow I’ve brought her to life

Not once or twice but

Many times thrice.

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I love her and she loves me too.

Though her version of love’s a

Tres cynical view.

Maggie, my Maggie stay faithful, be true.

Without you I’m faded

Without me —  oops — no you!

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Daily Prompt: Unconventional Love – Strangely True

Today, tell us about the most unconventional love in your life. Photographers, share a photo that says unconventional.

Pandora’s box had nothing on this one. Wow. Sizzle. Smoke. Hot, hot, hot!!

Okay, this is a G-rated site, so I won’t go there. Instead, I’ll tell you a story and leave you free to fill in the details from your own rich imaginings.

At 18 I married my first husband. I was already in my senior year of college. Jeff ran the college radio station as Station Manager. My now and forever husband was Jeff’s second-in-command, that is to say Garry was the Program Director. The two men were best friends. Together with most of the people I still count as friends, we had a great deal of fun. Not just the usual college stuff. We were creative. Just our Fall of Sauron Day parties — scripted, costumed, with special effects — were the stuff of lifetime memories. And, because we were young and healthy, we could party all night and go the work the next day looking none the worse for wear. Try that nowadays!

I married Jeff in August 1965. I spent the next year finishing my B.A. and having my spine remodeled, so it was a few years before I got on with life. My son was born in May 1969. We named him Owen Garry, Garry being his godfather and all.

Fast forward through a non-acrimonious divorce. I later realized if you just give up everything and walk away, it’s easy to be amicable. It’s also a big mistake you will come to regret sooner or later.

Off to Israel with the kid. Not too long thereafter, a marriage in Israel about which I won’t talk, even under torture. One visit from the ex and current husband – exactly in time for the war in Lebanon. It ruined  our plans to see the Hermon and the Galilee, but created great anecdotes for another post. I have one picture that says it all: me, Jeff and Garry arm-in-arm by the Dead Sea. The picture taken by husband number 2.

Photo: Debbie Stone

Photo: Debbie Stone

August 1987. Back to the USA. Garry and I are an item. Subsequent to finalizing my long-distance divorce from husband number 2, we are wed. It’s the right marriage to the right guy. I declined to have my first ex-husband be best man at my third wedding. We did, however, have the “real” reception at his house. There was the official one at the church, but the fun was over at the old house.

Garry and I will celebrate our 23 anniversary in September.

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Daily Prompt: Fill In the Blank — 3 People Walk Into a Bar …

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Anyone can help you prove your thesis. Just ask.

Is it a bar? It looked like a bar. Well, we’re here. Let’s sit down in one of these booths. We can get something to drink, you think? Maybe something to eat, too. Those hot dogs look pretty good. Why not? Not like we have something else to do, eh?

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Daily Prompt: I Want to Know What Love Is — LOVE IS

Together

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Love is.

Love wants not to be defined.

Love defies explanations.

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Do you breathe? Live under God’s light?

Then you know love.

It’s in your bones, your blood, your soul.

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Love is feeling.

The more you try to imprison love in walls of words,

The faster it will run from you.

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Trust is the food of love.

Trust love, that you know when you give it, know when you get it.

Mated Swans

Embrace it when it comes.

Share it.

Bestow it freely, in joyous abundance.

Love given away never diminishes the love you have.

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Love is for sharing, not saving.

Is it love when unshared?

Then it is, I think, an idea only.

Love thrives in light, withers in dark.

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There is but one kind of love.

Its expressions and objects vary, but love is, of all things, the simplest.

Love is.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Pattern — River Runs

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A trick of the light … a strange play of reflection of trees along the banks produced these patterns on the Blackstone River.

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Daily Prompt: Landscape – No Man Is An Island

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I live in a forest. Not an allegorical or metaphorical forest. It’s the real deal, mainly oak now that the oaks have grown so tall they block the light needed by maple and other trees. We’ve had to thin them during the last few years because trees were growing too tightly and many had become unhealthy.

No one who lives in a forest can see it as a forest, but that doesn’t change ones awareness. Whether or not you can see it changes nothing. You eyes can see only trees, but your mind knows there are many more trees and any thoughts you might have on the subject are tempered by this knowledge. Inability to see an entire picture does not make one incapable of recognizing its existence.

Japanese Maple

With my house planted more or less squarely in the woods, how many trees I see depends on where I stand and look. From the back deck, I see more forest. I see fewer trees — less forest —  from the front or side of the house.

But what’s the difference between the forest and the trees? None! They are the same.

It’s like looking down and asking me if I see planks or a floor. I see both, because plank by plank or collectively, my mind understands its essential floorness and deals with it as such. Does it need sweeping? polishing? repair? I look at a floor, see planks and think floor.

One of the first signs of maturing intelligence (Piaget) in young children is their ability to recognize that the pieces of a thing are no different than the thing itself. By the time we are five or six years old, we have all made this leap of understanding. We know forests are composed of trees and trees are part of the forest. If we are regarding one tree , we don’t stop knowing it is part of the larger entity. Nor do we need to see an entire forest to know it’s there.

Things made up of many things partake of the spirit of the whole. This is how we understand our world and ourselves. No matter what piece you look at, unless you are literally blind, you are looking at the whole. We are individuals, but also part of our family, a group of friends and associates, and a member of our clan, tribe and humanity as a whole.

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No Man Is An Island

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

John Donne

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