Hold this Thought - Personal Narratives

The Sun Magazine: Karen Greenwood

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

Sy Safransky, editor and founder of The Sun Magazine, writes of perseverance:

"When I started The Sun, passion was all I had. I was young and broke but determined to keep the magazine alive, so I welcomed the challenge of staying up all night to finish an issue.... Thirty-three years later, ... I try to be fully present, whether I'm reading a stack of submissions ... or recycling my trash at the end of the day. I try to remember that the innumerable details involved in publishing The Sun are no less a part of my spiritual path than sitting cross-legged in meditation or getting on my knees to pray. I also try to keep in mind something the spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti once said, 'I do yoga every day' -- he meant every day for fifty years -- 'but I've never made a habit of it.'"

The Singing Wilderness: Lucian Childs

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In The Singing Wilderness, Sigurd F. Olson's first book, he describes the onset of spring for residents of the North.

"To anyone who has spent a winter in the north and known the depths to which the snow can reach, known the weeks when the mercury stays below zero, the first hint of spring is a major event. You must live in the north to understand it. You cannot just come up for it as you might go to Florida for the sunshine and the surf. To appreciate it, you must wait for it a long time, hope and dream about it, and go through considerable enduring."

A Sand County Almanac: Sarah Hanuske-Hamilton

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

This reading in A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold is especially meaningful to me.

"One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.

A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges."

Gathering Berries: Aleesha Towns

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In "Gathering Berries," biologist Aleria Jensen describes picking tart, Alaskan berries.

Gathering Berries

"All we do is show up. Wake up, drink our coffee, jump in the car, head for these boggy slopes. Expect the land to provide. And it does. Despite the soggy ones, there are plenty of good berries. Plenty for us, for bears and birds and insect larvae. Plenty for muffins, pancakes, and smoothies. ...

I find myself feeling a huge gratitude, not only for what the land shares, but what it endures. ...

Within it, each fruit holds what I hold: an accumulation of place. The tangy explosion of these northern berries on the tongue is the landscape communicating itself, an expression of its essential wild character. Taste me -- here is your peat moss, your snowmelt, your glacial till. Here is your hemlock root, your jack pine, your overwintering bee. Taste me."

A Guest of the World: Dave Keller

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In his book of meditations, A Guest of the World, Jeffrey Lockwood describes how insights can lurk in the most ordinary of objects:

"I don't enter raffles believing that I'll win. ... But being something of an unwitting connoisseur of raffle tickets, I've come to realize that often they include an unexpectedly compelling insight. On one side is a string of numbers, reflecting the utter arbitrariness with which the world seems to unfold. There might also be a list of prizes, the items that can be won with a bit of luck. ...

But the real insight is printed on the back of the ticket, where few people bother to look. Raffle tickets warn us, "You must be present to win." In life, showing up is often the battle. But of course, simply being somewhere physically is not the same as being present. I don't know how many drawings I might have won if I'd been present. But I do know that if life is a raffle, you can't possibly win if you're not there...."

The Translator - A Tribesman?s Memoir of Darfur: Sarah Baird

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0700

Daoud Hari grew up in the Darfur region of Sudan. In his book, The Translator, he describes the harrowing ordeal that followed his capture for associating with journalists:

"I watched the commander's finger pet the trigger. The gun muzzle was hot against my temple. Had he fired it recently, or was it just hot from the sun? I decided that if these were about to be my last thoughts, I should try some better ones instead. So I thought about my family and how I loved them and how I might see my brothers soon.
...
The two commanders talked at length. I watched his trigger finger rise and fall like a cobra and then finally slither away. ...

To not get killed is a very good thing. It makes you smile again and again, foolishly, helplessly, for several hours. I was not shot -- humdallah."

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: Linda Duck

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

Dang Thuy Tram was a 24-year-old doctor from Hanoi working south of the demilitarized zone during the Vietnam War. She kept a diary, which was recovered from her body after she was killed. In Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, she writes:

"Rain falls without respite. Rain deepens my sadness, its chill making me yearn for the warmth of a family reunion. If only I had wings to fly back to our beautiful house on Lo Duc Street, to eat with Dad, Mom, and my siblings, one simple meal with watercress and one night's sleep under the old cotton blanket. Last night I dreamed that Peace was established, I came back and saw everybody. Oh, the dream of Peace and Independence has burned in the hearts of thirty million people for so long. For Peace and Independence, we have sacrificed everything. So many people have volunteered to sacrifice their whole lives for two words: Independence and Liberty. I, too have sacrificed my life for that grandiose fulfillment."

The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sarah Mouracade

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In her autobiography, Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes the genesis of her personal philosophy about religion:

"It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. 'They all eat one another!' he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb, said, 'They all feed one another,' and called it good....

As to pain--? I observed that the most important continuous functions of living are unconsciously carried on within us; that the most external ones, involving a change of activity on our part, as in obtaining food, and mating, are made desirable by pleasure; that just being alive is a pleasure; that pain does not come in unless something goes wrong. 'Fine!' said I. 'An admirable world. God is good.'"

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska: Charles Money

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In 1918, Rockwell Kent and his young son spent a long winter on Fox Island near Kenai Fjords. In his Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, Kent describes the isolation:

"These days are wonderful but they are terrible. It is thrilling now ... to reflect that we are absolutely cut off from all mankind, that we cannot, in this raging sea, return to the world nor the world come to us. Barriers must secure your isolation in order that you may experience the full significance of it. The romance of an adventure hangs upon slender threads. A banana [peel left] on a mountain top tames the wilderness. Much of the glory of this Alaska is in the knowledge I have that the next bay -- which I may never choose to enter -- is uninhabited, that beyond those mountains across the water is a vast region that no man has ever trodden, a terrible ice-bound wilderness."

Letter from Franz Kafka: Jerry Covey

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:00:00 -0700

In a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, Franz Kafka wrote:

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy...? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief."

Painting as a Pastime: Gunnar Knapp

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 01:00:00 -0700

We can take inspiration from Sir Winston Churchill, who took up painting at the age of 40. His delight at his hobby shines in an essay he wrote on Painting as a Pastime:

"Just to paint is great fun. The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. Matching them, however crudely, with what you see is fascinating and absolutely absorbing. Try it if you have not done so -- before you die. ...

I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours, which will delight the celestial eye."

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska: Robin Crittenden

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:00:00 -0700

The following is an excerpt from Rockwell Kent's book about his 1918 sojourn in Alaska, titled Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska.

"Right and left we saw deep vistas, and straight ahead a broad and sunlit space, a valley between hills; there lay the lake. It was a real lake, broad and clean, of many acres in extent, and the whole mountain side lay mirrored in it with the purple zenith sky at our feet. Not a breath disturbed the surface, not a ripple broke along the pebbly beach; it was dead silent here but for maybe the far off sound of surf, and without motion but that high aloft two eagles soared with steady wing searching the mountain tops. Ah, supreme moment! These are the times in life -- when nothing happens -- but in quietness the soul expands."

The Art of the Impossible: Paul Maguire

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 01:00:00 -0700

Václav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic, describes what living under totalitarianism meant for him:

"... unintentionally, of course -- it has given us something positive: a special capacity to look, from time to time, somewhat further than those who have not undergone this bitter experience. Someone who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way.
...
The specific experience I'm talking about has given me one great certainty: ... the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility."

Parker Palmer, in his book Let Your Life Speak, takes it one step further: "Authentic leaders in every setting -- from families to nation-states -- aim at liberating the heart, their own and others', so that its powers can liberate the world."

Band-Aids: Chloe Miller

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:00:00 -0700

This is Chloe Miller. I've been a finalist in the Letters About Literature contest, sponsored here in Alaska by Alaska Center for the Book. This is part of the letter Hannah Boyer of Fairbanks wrote to Shel Silverstein for the 2008 contest.

"Dear Shel Silverstein (somewhere up in heaven),

I really enjoyed your book entitled Where the Sidewalk Ends, and my favorite poem in the book is "Band-Aids." ...

I always have a spare band-aid or two in my pocket in case I need one, and as my family knows, I need one quite often. ... Sometimes my parents get mad that I am always using up all the band-aids in the house for no good reason and I always leave the peel strips in the drawer or on the counter. This drives my mom nuts. But for me, there is ALWAYS a reason to put on a band-aid! I like the way the band-aids look and feel. They remind me that I am hurt in some way and my parents need to treat me like I am actually hurt. Sometimes I am lucky and I get hurt on my left hand and I get out of violin practice for a week or so. This is a good thing for me, but not for my parents. Sometimes I put on a band-aid just because I feel special when I have one on."

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska: Helen Nienhueser

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 01:00:00 -0700

Rockwell Kent describes his stay on Fox Island in Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. This entry occurs in October 1918:

"We have reached late fall -- for northern latitudes. The sky is brooding ominously, heavy, dull, and raw. Winter seems to be closing in upon us. We're driven to work as if in fear. Hurry, hurry! Saw the great drums of spruce, roll them over the ground and stack them high. Calk tight with hemp the cabin's windward eaves so that no breath of wind can enter there and freeze the food inside upon the shelf. Set up the far-famed air-tight stove.... Patch up the poor, storm-battered paper roof, -- two or three holes we find and we are sure it leaks from twenty. ... Outside and in the last is done to make us ready for the winter's worst, and just in time!"