Warren Bluhm's Blog, page 30

From ether to planet

Here are the heroes of time immemorial
Locked in the struggle that lasts for all time;
Here are the questions and some of the answers
Waiting for someone to call them by name,
Here in the vault tucked away in Elysian,
Here in the hearts of the beings named poets,
Not asking, but asking, and serving as pages
To carry the message from on beyond here.
Here are they all, all the words and the music,
Raging and loving and seeking and found
Until they come pouring and flowing on pages
To find immortality or flas...

The sideways wisdom

I reach through the fog in search of something to say, some profundity to help my fellow human make progress along the way and fend off disaster, or if not disaster at least fend off inconvenience or a wrong turn.

But when you declare, “I shall write pith today, I shall crack the code, I shall show my fellow human the light,” it doesn’t come.

The miraculous wisdom creeps up on you sideways, catches you from the corner of your eye when you’re looking at the horizon, taps you on the shou...

The immortal part of man

I am reading Farnham’s Freehold, a somewhat dated Robert A. Heinlein novel about a family thrown 1,000 years into the future by a thermonuclear bomb. I was attracted to the book by this quote a friend posted on Facebook:

“The last books in the world, so it seemed. He felt sudden grief that the abstract knowledge of the deaths of millions had not given him. Somehow the burning of millions of books felt more brutally obscene than the killing of people. All men must die, it was their single ...

The choice that unblocks the soul

Writer’s block is too many “what ifs.” Not “I don’t know what to write,” but “there are so many ways this could go, which way do I want to go? I want to try them all, but I have to pick one, and which way is the best?”

So many potential twists and turns, so many choices. What if I choose wrong?

Just pick one.

Choose.

Embrace the choice.

And the words will flow again.

It’s not just a writer’s thing. Dwelling on the “what ifs” can paralyze a soul. So many choices, so many potenti...

We are the writers

We write our pain. We write our joy.

We write our anger. We write our fear.

We write our peace. We write our love.

Oh, how we write our love.

We write to think. We write to feel.

We write to understand. We write to comprehend.

We write to figure it out and we write to be nonsensical.

And oh, how we write our love.

We write to remember. We write to forget.

We write to dream. We write our nightmares.

We write to predict. We write to preserve.

In other words, we wri...

She taught me joy

As the author of a little tome called Gladness is Infectious, I decided to look inside my grief and be glad for the just shy of 12 years with the beautiful golden retriever I have told you about, Willow The Best Dog There Is. (This Sunday, March 28, would have been her 12th birthday.)

If you’ll indulge me for one more day, I want to recall the life I celebrated here just last week, not realizing everything would change the very next afternoon.

Long story short, Willow and I were outsid...

I’ll be OK. Eventually. I guess. Someday.

On the 233rd day, he decided not to rest

On the 233rd day I thought about just skipping a day and saw Dean Wesley Smith’s blog post declaring a “filler” to keep his 3,101-day streak of consecutive posts alive. Not wanting to start over from 1, I decided to post this at 2:30 p.m.

I think you may have forgiven me for my absence. We are coping with a sudden setback in the health of the beautiful dog I’ve been writing about in recent days, and Monday will bring a decision, depending on what the vet says. I am encouraged by this fact...

Happy first day of spring

“I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.”

— from “you shall above all things be glad and young” by e.e. cummings

Maybe the squirrel is not the problem

I started to write something along the lines of “Quit whining about everything that’s wrong with the world and set your mind free,” and I caught myself up short.

Who am I, after all, to tell other people how to live their lives? When I’m thinking straight, I refuse to “tell” other people how to live their lives, and I am no good example anyway.

All I can say — all I should say — is that when I turn away from dwelling on the stuff that alarms me and outrages me — and let’s be clear, the...