I love to write. But I've always had the need for some sort of project to get me started, and I never seem to have time to write about what interests me at the time.
So now my project is to write about whatever interests me, and post it here. I'm going to write about whatever I want: grand philosophical adventures, short stories, essays on the beautiful sounds of rivers, frustrations with public education, reviews of music and movies, wilderness adventures, and lots of musings about books. The title of my blog comes from a poem by Mary Oliver, called "Sleeping in the Forest". One night many years ago, while backpacking in Sedona, I camped quite literally in a riverbed and struggled all night with regrets and my own identity. My grappling was far less gentle than Oliver's, and my thoughts were far from floating moths, but I was struck by the impartial mirror that the wilderness provided, and I, too, had shed an old self several times by morning. A Luminous Doom is my reminder to myself to embrace the dark wilderness of myself, to embrace the scary destruction of false or temporary identity, and to strive toward the illumination of that which is truly me. Heady stuff, I know. Poetry tends to do that to me. I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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