drmstream[writing]

Matt kept the books apart on a spe­cial shelf in his writ­ing room.  It was hard to say which one he val­ued the most.  There was the copy of On the Road.  He didn’t know if it was a first edi­tion, but he’d found it down in his grandmother’s base­ment, so he fig­ured his mother […]

Beach sky, taken with an iPhone4, retouched with pho­to­gene In between see­ing and not see­ing, there is a large space of not being aware. When you are see­ing, you find focus points, and skip from point to point as if you were rac­ing on stone out­crop­pings on a stormy beach. When you are not seeing, […]

I want to assure you with all earnest­ness that no writ­ing is a waste of time — no cre­ative work where the feel­ings, the imag­i­na­tion, the intel­li­gence must work. With every sen­tence you write, you have learned some­thing. It has done you good. It has stretched your under­stand­ing. I know that. Even if I knew […]

A human being is part of a whole…[but] he expe­ri­ences him­self, his thoughts and feel­ings as some­thing sep­a­rate from the rest…This delu­sion is a kind of prison for us, restrict­ing us to our per­sonal desires and to affec­tion for a few per­sons near­est to us. Our task must be to free our­selves from this prison […]

These young men are wav­ing good­bye as they start the 1000 mile trek from Pitts­burg to New Orleans. They’ll skirt the Allegheny Moun­tains, pass into Ten­nessee and pick up the Jack­son Mil­i­tary Road for the final 400 mile descent to the Mis­sis­sippi Delta and the bay­ous and great swamps sur­round­ing New Orleans. They are following […]

Most men lead lives of quiet des­per­a­tion and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau The enemy of our soul is the expe­ri­ence of anonymity. Thoreau was mis­guided in his instinct to sep­a­rate him­self from the peo­ple around him and to envi­sion their lives as empty and use­less. The […]

The con­cep­tion of the library in Stock­holm has wormed into my imag­i­na­tion. Then I stum­bled upon a curated sam­pling of book­shelves from Desire to Inspire. Here are two of my favorites. Just like the Stock­holm con­cep­tion, these images cre­ate kine­sis in my imag­i­na­tion. I grew up sur­rounded by books — lit­er­ally, sur­rounded by books, in […]

I don’t like shar­ing writ­ing here that’s ill-considered and unformed. The excerpt below is an excep­tion. It’s a recent note from my work­book. I’d seen a pic­ture of T & me from Mother’s Day and was dis­cour­aged by how swollen and weighted down l looked. My phys­i­cal real­ity had sep­a­rated from my self-perception. That kind […]

Last night I made a start at writ­ing this down, then fal­tered when I saw how late it was, real­ized that my mind wasn’t nearly quiet enough to go to sleep and ques­tioned whether the first few phrases that had formed in my mind were going to lead to any­where. This morn­ing I got out […]

When my great-great-great grand­fa­ther William Can­dlish was born in Vir­ginia in 1804, there were 1 bil­lion peo­ple in the world. It had taken thou­sands of years for the world to reach that mile­stone of human sat­u­ra­tion. When my father was born in the 1930’s, the num­ber of peo­ple in the world had just passed the 2 […]