Takeaways As Starting Points

As winter departs, spring's bright colors, roaring winds and fresh new life surge around us. The snow melts, overcast skies clear, the sun rises earlier. We adapt to new temperatures, weather, angles of light, and soon we forget an entire season of our life. It's lost to memory. Yesterday’s reality becomes history. So we rise to opportunity and break new ground.

When we recall yesterday, an image usually rises from our vague fragmented recollections to help us make sense of our experience. The memory might be of an action we took or didn't take, a friend’s wry expression, a flash of insight while driving to work, a discovery, a sound, a feeling of peace, fear or purpose. Did we connect with our goal? Most of us have fewer specific recollections about yesterday than we have unanalyzed feelings about that recent past.

Three Ridges at the Snowline | Mark Roger Bailey

As for seasons, what about the winter recessing in your rearview mirror will you recall next week, next season or next decade? What about this winter's short, brilliant days and long shadowed nights will define it in your memory?

Start there. Process what meant most yesterday, then tackle today. Don't overthink it, recognize what mattered most, and invest it in today.

Does your latest artwork-in-progress resonate?  Does it capture the meaning you intended? Probably not yet. It will come.

Next week, when a crisis emerges, what if anything will we recall about our response to this image?

Tomorrow, when we're getting traction on the next challenge, what should we think about our exchange today?

Start here, now, with your thought or feeling that rose above the others about our departing winter. Our minds retain ideas and events that intersect with emotional, physical or psychological needs in the folds of our brain as latent memory. Later, it can manifest unexpectedly. We may not recognize its origin, yet that dispatch from the front lines of our experience is telling us something that our subconscious believes is important. That conscious connection may seem random, yet in my experience, it is often a clue to a core concept. Yesterday's topline memory becomes a takeaway, a suggestion for a course correction if I am aware enough to act on it.

Takeaways are powerful starting points.

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View my Shoreline Collection and please stop by my Gallery Shop to consider a special series of signed and numbered limited-edition prints for the collector. A haunting perspective of shore life or a miniature print of a tall ship would make a wonderful gift for yourself or a thoughtful surprise for a friend. 

Between Shore and Sea

A Captain’s Time Ashore

The border between land and sea is clear. The village on the rugged coast is self-sufficient, a slowly evolving geology, an oasis of rest. The sea is an urgent universe of change, of violence, sometimes calm, often a cauldron of furies.

The captain, who knows that discipline is the border between life and death at sea, is a different sort on land. He quietly abides by Sunday sermons, listens politely to small talk and cherishes his child’s passing attentions that shine like sunlight through her maturing senses.

Every day, he walks the paths that wind from rocky shore to palisades and higher through woods where he sees the distant horizon hide lands he has seen from his quarterdeck. Usually, he walks alone, accompanied by birds, rustling leaves and all manner of land life. Occasionally, a stranger falls in beside him, talking as they walk about the mysteries of nature’s ordering influences around them, the season’s fauna coming to rest in sedimentary layers that build up over time to create the hills and cliffs over which they walk. The captain listens more than he speaks. He tries to be generous and add to the conversation, but his time ashore is short. The subject of geologic time engages his mind, he sees similarities between watery canyons at sea and their counterparts on the land, and he is about to express this thought, but it is too late. The stranger senses the captain wants to be alone and parts at a fork in the path.

Eventually, at some point, the captain looks up, reads the wind and changes course, and follows the bank of the river that flows from distant mountains down into the harbor beside his village. There, his home awaits. He feels the pressure of time gathering like the weather. Farther down the shore, the tide has lifted his ship’s shining masts and spars into changing skies.

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View my Tall Ships collection and please stop by my Gallery Shop to consider a special series of signed and numbered limited-edition prints for the collector. A miniature print of a tall ship would make a wonderful gift for yourself or a thoughtful surprise for a friend. 

The Woman-Haters: A Yarn of Eastboro Twin-Lights | Joseph C. Lincoln (1870-1944)

A short story evolves to become a short novel, and is published. The author achieves success with his modest yarns about life on Cape Cod. He publishes his tales in the Saturday Evening Post, enjoys a respectable living from his writing, summers on the northern Jersey shore, and dies in Winter Park, Florida. Through his stories, readers discover a Cape Cod populated by dreamers and doers, practical idealists who define success in terms of personal codes more than popular myths of the America’s 20th century success machine. Readers travel from afar to experience his Cape Cod, and residents help them realize the dream. Soon, the Cape becomes a destination, an ideal of a better time in America, and a vacationer’s mecca.

In 1911, Joseph Crosby Lincoln (1870-1944), 41, published his story The Woman-Haters: A Yarn of Eastboro Twin-lights (A.L. Burt Company, NYC).  He was a third of the way through his career as a spinner of popular yarns set on Cape Cod, in a part of the country that was invisible to all but a few thousand residents and their occasional visitors from nearby Boston.  It was a place apart from the nation’s rambunctious urban centers, a throwback to an earlier, self-reliant America.  Its people were taciturn, pragmatic, and passionate about life’s possibilities. Lincoln distrusted modern progress and so he kept returning in his stories to the childhood home from which he had been taken after his father died and his mother moved him to the mainland. Lincoln’s anti-modernist tendencies found expression in stories about this Yankee outpost on a narrow finger of sand so far out to sea that on especially clear days residents might fancy seeing their ancestors’ old country to the east. Here adversity was vanquished, justice prevailed, and romance was eventually, ultimately requited.

In The Woman-Haters, once-married Seth Atkins and Emeline Bascom accidentally reunite on a beach at the extreme easternmost tip of the nation.  In this fantasy realm between sand and sea, they see their past actions in new light, comprehend their lives afresh, and rediscover their former attraction.

In 2010, enter Daniel Adams, a veteran writer-producer-actor-director who likes the cut of Lincoln’s literary jib. Adams is one of movie-making’s working class heroes who keep the dream of movie magic alive by gathering friends, locals, and would-be filmmakers together to put on a show. He attracts popular stars to his troupe, works long hours, stretches a dollar to the breaking point, and captures moments on film that become movie memories for the rest of us.  Previously, he had directed an adaptation of Lincoln’s 1911 story, Cap’n Eri: A Story of the Coast into The Golden Boys (2009).  Recently, he adapted Joe Lincoln’s The Woman-Haters: A Yarn of Eastboro Twin-lights a full one hundred years after it was published into the small feature film, The Lightkeepers.

Whether The Lightkeepers is a commercial or artistic success is not at issue here. As of this writing, it has grossed an estimated 4.5 million dollars, which does not qualify it as a commercial success in 2010. The 1911 equivalent, by the way, would have been $193,500. Reviews are mixed. Some critics have faulted the language, the staging, and Richard Dreyfuss’ interpretation of former sea captain Seth Atkins. Positive reviews have cited The Lightkeepers’ grown-up love story, the palpable sense of place, and the distinctively Yankee knack for understatement.

What counts is that Joseph Lincoln lived life and wrote stories his way. He spun yarns that made readers feel good about themselves. And Daniel Adams is living his life and making movies his way. Hats off to both artists. Thanks for keeping the dream alive.

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Related Links

Joseph Crosby Lincoln (1870-1944), Author

The Woman-Haters: A Yarn of Eastboro Twin-Lights (1911)

Daniel Adams, Writer-Director

The WINDY DAY | Rick Bass

Wild Hearts

Bass mirrors the rush of life emergent in this story, The Windy Day, from his collection about wild hearts grounded in Nature entitled, The Lives of Rocks.

The narrator and his four-month-pregnant wife, Elizabeth, set out for town during a wind storm to learn the gender of their fetus.  Every hundred yards, they must stop to clear the road of fallen timber.  The father-to-be narrator fires up the chain saw and cuts and cuts and rolls, then gets back into the truck and moves on until they must stop again and cut, cut, roll.  It takes them an entire day (read lifetime) to reach the main road to town.  As darkness falls, the father-to-be is ready to keep going; he feels he is making progress and is intent on beating the odds.  Elizabeth says no, they’ll try again tomorrow.

Our father-to-be looks around him and imagines 16 years into the future when he and his daughter will ride horses through these woods, jumping over these fallen logs, or hauling the logs with his sixteen year old son…