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A unique community supported cultural magazine exploring Quality of Life and Spirit of Place in our bio-region, with extraordinary photographs, 22 regular columnists plus feature articles, galleries & essays, new articles and photos every day. 100s more articles in the Archive.

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PHOTO OF THE DAY

Haiku: Phil Innes

Photo: Phil Innes

they make haiku from

the words though i like pictures
showed mine, say you?

PASSAGES

Harold Wilson

Text selections by Vermont Views

Given a fair wind, we will negotiate our way into the Common Market, head held high, not crawling in. Negotiations? Yes. Unconditional acceptance of whatever terms are offered us? No.

The ambition of the present Labour government is that every worker in the country will have a greater than average income.

"The main essentials of a successful prime minister are sleep and a sense of history."

"A week is a long time in politics."

"One man's wage increase is another man's price increase."

"The monarchy is a labor intensive industry."

"I'm at my best in a messy, middle-of-the-road muddle."

"I'm an optimist, but an optimist who carries a raincoat."

"Whichever party is in office, the Treasury is in power."

"Everybody should have an equal chance - but they shouldn't have a flying start."

The labour party is like a stage-coach. If you rattle along at great speed everybody inside is too exhilarated or too seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.

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WRITE WALK

The Glimmering Tail of the In-Between

Susan Cruickshank

When the candle’s lick of fire was put out, no one jumped up to begin the next thing in the day. In fact, no one moved at all, instead, they continued to sit. And they waited. All eyes were on the candle, as the smoke began to waft upwards, meandering like a belly dancer in a leisurely sway, the wick still glowing with orange heat, until what for me was a ‘FINALLY’ moment, the smoke evaporated entirely. Only when the wick completely emptied of fever, turning charcoal black, did eyes begin to leave their resting position on the honey-yellow taper and look around the table to find others’ eyes with a nod of recognition and a smile. Only then did they say in unison the customary “Good Afternoon.” And then the busyness of the day’s frantic energy would once more descend, as chair legs began scraping against the brick-red squared linoleum floor, pushing away from the old oak table as people began to clear away the traces of the afternoon meal.

There are tiny pockets of time that most of us never realize are there; so fleeting that we miss them as we move quickly through our day. I too was unseeing, missing the places that separate one activity from the next, where for an instant there is stillness and expansion.

Yogis and mystics spend their lifetimes pursuing this emptiness, but for me, the first time I really noticed the glimmering tail of the in-between was sitting around a table, crammed with eleven others, all full after a mid-day meal, waiting for the candle’s wick to grow cold.

The table was at Camphill Village, Copake, an agricultural community that works with developmentally delayed adults in Upstate New York (https://camphillvillage.org/volunteer/). The environment was unique to be sure, far removed from skyscrapers and concrete, but the lessons I learned there have made a lasting impression and have caused me to look at so much of my world in a different way.

THE FIRST GLASS

POOL

Vincent Panella

Sharks he calls them, this one swimming in the lane they’re about to share. He sits on the deck with his legs in the water to let her know he’s there and she moves over and flip turns at the wall. He‘s never mastered the turn, never converted speed one way to speed in the other. She pushes off with a dolphin kick and comes to the surface where she attacks with a stroke rate that’s fast and even angry.

He slides in, the water is cold, he jumps up and down, presses in his goggles. Her backpack on the deck is open to a water bottle and a collection of gadgets designed to build strength, hand paddles, flippers, snorkel, pull-buoy to lift the midsection and strengthen the arms.

By the time he ducks under and pushes off she’s lapped him already. At the far wall he comes to a stop and turns, surrendering his speed and starting from zero. His legs sink from the weight of his prosthetics, a pair of alloy hips heavier than his missing bones, or so he’d like to think. He strokes three times between breaths, head down to reduce drag but never able to keep his body parallel to the surface. Swimming is like pulling a wet log.

So effing what. He’s old and she’s young, and even when younger he was never that good, slow on the bases, whiffed at bat, couldn’t throw a ball over the plate or into a hoop; later in life he found single sports, handball and racket ball, slow jogging , and finally biking. When his hips went south he replaced them and came to the lap pool. Swimming is low impact, the last stop on the train.

They stop at the wall together but there’s no greeting. This is protocol for serious workouts. While he catches his breath she snaps a hobble around her ankles to stop her from kicking. She starts out ahead of him and even with dead legs she knifes through, elbows high, smacking at the water.

Our Man In

Marrakesh

by Doug Hoyt

I have to say: it’s not my favorite place. But for January, the weather is BOSS. Sun, sun, sun.

Last year in January was Seville. Now THAT was fab. Temps in the 60’s during the day, and skirting about freezing at night. Tapas to die for. Total charm. Marrakech is kind of ‘exotic’, but once you scratch the surface, it’s really kind of dirty and monotonous, and lots of side hustles and ripoffs (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The Moroccan people are very gracious, and everybody speaks French, which is great, because just a few words of high school French make you feel like a native, kind of. Ultra kind of.

<Extract> Click below to see more of this photo essay

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VERMONT DIARY

Wurz that?

Phil Innes

The latest addition to Northern Vermont Public Radio is a fellow called Chris Kurzak who unfortunately reports on the weather with more than the usual New England swallowing of vowels, in any long sentence, above 5 words, he dispenses with them entirely, and even spaces between words, rendering his pronouncements incomprehensible. Seems strange to have a reporter with a speech defect.

It is usual for the weather station to report on Route 2, which if you live down here in the Deep South, is the relatively close road to us to Boston, but have no idea where the northern one is. Today we received notice that snow levels could be particularly high in the northern mountains and also on the Massachusetts border, without mention of Brattleboro, Wilmington or Bennington in particular, as if this might bore northern listeners — or those north of route 2, I should say.

As with the weather, it is an open joke that NPR doesn’t know where southern Vermont is, has been so for 35 years. Even a State senator told me so! And I did meet with their management corporately one day at a Brattleboro event held in a field, and they were all clustered together smiling and joking, and I mentioned I published an on-line magazine about quality of life and spirit of place with some 15 columnists. This was disconcerting to the group who continued their jovial but inert celebration together, and not only was there no promised follow up after exchange of business cards, I noted that I should not take this personally, since they ignored everyone else at the event too.

But isn’t Vermont the place where we achieve a realization of Jefferson’s Bill of Rights, not just in its potential, but in the actual manifestation of it? How about some stories from our vocal community to substantiate both its practice and its’ famed progress which the entire contry might hear? I had fondly thought that I could contribute substantial material to that prospect written by my columnists — and that it might be more compelling than Tales of Lake Wobegone and Norwegian White Man Farmers.

Nope.

Not just me neither. My opinion here is same as sentiment by senior organizers of the Strolling, as well as widespread in the arts community in Windham county, and especially about written material, a majority art most suitable for the radio.

We don’t get that from Northern Vermont Public Radio, we get slurred like Chris Kurzak’s weather report. All that gets reported is that the state’s dumping of certain psychiatric cases to the Retreat as occurred after the Waterbury facility literally went under during Irene, thence to be released ‘to the care of the community’ when their insurance runs out causes financial and other distress here, emphasis on local financial burden, rather than quality of life. It wasn’t just a flood of people then, it’s a river flowing south.

Are we like poor cousins in a banana republic run out of bananas, will turnips do?

Nope.

There is something far more lively going on here in terms of Planetary Consciousness than is reported by the fat cats up north who only identify with us since they are forced too, since we are also ‘Vermont’, and need mention now and again, perhaps even as a ‘gateway’ to the Real Vermont waiting tourist dollars and offering the best retirement homes?

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How I Write

Vincent Panella

THE CHANNEL

These journal entries center on a fragment written forty-odd years ago. I recently found the pages typed on carbon paper, yet through all those years I mulled over the story and its possibilities – a confined setting, clear situation, very few characters, maybe a one-act, maybe a short story, but still no desire to get back in. This summer I re-entered the typescript and came up with a story line that might work:

A young man named Larry heads for Hollywood with a copy of his first novel soon to be published. The premise of the novel is a young man’s affair with his father’s lover. Larry’s car breaks down in the Mojave just outside of Barstow. He ends up in a radiator shop and there he meets a Samaritan type called Fenwick, also a writer, and they talk about his novel, what he invented, what he remembered – what was ‘true to life - and that blurry line between art and lived experience.

The dated entries here are edited for clarity. The original fragment was page after page about his car breaking down on a long hill.....almost nothing about substance, character, motivation, etc. Forty years ago – like now – I’m still learning. It’s working title was Barstow, but gradually a theme emerged, and the title Hill of Dreams helped me shape it. The entries span two months of this year but I must have worked on the story twice as long as that. In most cases the journal entries prompt the writing of actual text, which is done on screen, on paper, and sometimes with an Olivetti.

7/21/19 - Took a look at what I did to Barstow - still on the opening, how I chopped it to s - - -. Now all the car details are almost gone – the old V-8 burning oil, the crankcase ventilation valve, oil gauge idiot light, the retread tires because the character has so little money.

7/22 - Woke up thinking Bartow was f----- - that the whole gambit is a cliche - Larry writes a novel based on life, sort of – the premise being that his main character has an affair with his father’s lover. Larry has rendered a real life experience into a novel – his novel is within this story. The story is that that Larry’s heading for Cali with a novel in which the central action is drawn from his life and a threat to his family’s privacy. And his car breaks down on the long hill outside of town.

– and where a movie producer is interested in the novel as Larry imagines famous actors playing his family members and what their reaction might be.

Then his car breaks down on the Hill of Dreams. Fenwick (name borrowed from a Boll story) takes him to a hotel while he waits for a new radiator. They have some yet to be written convo about his situation, what he's written about his father etc. In the end Larry drives off into the sunset, back up the hill of dreams. End of story.

Scene: "I call it the Hill of Dreams," Fenwick said, They were sitting in the hotel lobby at a small bar and tables with a view of a garden and a raft of Eucalyptus trees.

Fenwick points out the similarity between Larry and the Okies generations back - heading for a new life out west, beaten by the hill, or not beaten....Fenwick there to pick up the pieces.

Larry felt a little buzz from the whiskey, a comfortable feeling, the big room with its open windows along the wall was cool and comfortable without any air conditioning as was his room where he'd slept well and long, realizing that the past four nights he'd been sleeping in the back seat of the Pontiac.

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IN BETWEEN

How Very Rich and Deep our Lives

Julia Ferrari

When we think about our own significant and varied personal history, it can seem as if our lives are the contents of a movie reel, unrolling…with glimpses of some particular event —events that are remembered and treasured, many forgotten … and some better off not remembered in detail, at all. The good ones, those memories we remember with fondness—those are the moments we can hold close. Those moments become a place we can return to in memory again and again, even though as they were being lived they were just ordinary moments passing beneath us. Indeed, there are likely many such moments in which, at the time they are happening, we are unaware that they will eventually become those precious ones.

Remembering and revisiting positive or special events in our lives can make us feel very deeply, yet they were happening in moments that were fleeting, just like this moment. I remember one December when I was a young girl, as winter school vacation was out, we travelled in our camper down to Florida for Christmas. My mother was the traveller in the family, so she influenced us all and bestowed on me a deep love of traveling. We were driving late into the evening hoping to find something still open and found a park just as dusk was closing in. That winter night I remember seeing the amazing sight of Spanish Moss hanging like ancient beards from old oak trees in this very different climate, and the feeling of welcome from the cheerful, tiny but bright, multicolored Christmas lights that were hung at the entrance to the park. I remember the child in me feeling the realization that this holiday was celebrated here (in a warm climate) with the same joy for sharing as from where I had just come, many miles north. Being very young I had not yet spent that holiday in a different place, and the physical fact that it was celebrated here in a warm climate instead of a place that was cold was expanding for my young mind. I remember it like it was yesterday, and feel its essence still.

Another remembered essence was one afternoon, working with my partner, Dan Carr in our print shop. I was working at the composing frame, correcting and justifying type for the book we were working on and Dan was in the casting area, casting type when I suddenly, distinctly felt the moment in time. It was, I believe, in the mid to late 90’s, and we had been doing letterpress for quite some years on a daily basis, five days a week for at least 8 to 9 hours per day. So we were perhaps producing along the order of what a professional metal letterpress print shop might have been doing in the 1930’s or 40’s when the technology was at its prime. (Our equipment is still that of a modern 1930’s-40 ’s shop with the exception of a few much older pieces.) I remember knowing that Dan and I were at the top of our game, that we could do the work with skill and precision, and in a fluid manner. There was a sudden realization, with the sun coming in the shop windows, that we were in that place, doing what we loved…what our hearts and intuition had guided us to, and we had embraced it fully, without reservation, despite all the pitfalls (like no health care, only one [used] car, and no paid vacations. That moment became felt in me as an encounter with the essence of my life and vocation…of the totality of my choices.

Extract Read more Julia Ferrari

OLD LADY BLOG

Two Pieces

Toni Ortner

For the 10 year old girl from Syria

The mirror stopped laughing when the bullets shattered the window.

Shards of glass flew through the startled air.

Familiar voices stopped when the wires were cut.

Description fled in dust.

It was the end of metaphor.

You huddled on the floor

in the dark arms of morning.

For Earl Thompson (Yakima Indian nation)

He tried to see red and blue horses galloping across a plain, but the horses would not come. His wife was crying by his side. He thought if he saw them he would live to see another day. It was a full moon night in April, and the willows were about to bud. He tried to see red and blue horses, but something else appeared instead.

He was in a room without walls. A door opened into light. He stepped across the threshold into air. He had lost his arms and legs and feet. He floated without wings. He turned around. In the distance was a woman weeping by an empty bed. <extract>