Jean Ryan, a native Vermonter, lives in Lillian, Alabama. Her stories and essays have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. She has also published a novel, LOST SISTER. Her short story collections, SURVIVAL SKILLS and LOVERS AND LONERS, are available online. STRANGE COMPANY, a collection of short nature essays, is available in paperback as well as digital and audio editions.
I am beyond thrilled to announce the publication of my poetry collection A Day Like This. A printed edition of A Day Like This is now available through the Kelsay Bookstore or Amazon. For those who prefer an expedited (and more budget-friendly) version, the ebook will be ready in just a few days and I will make another announcement then. Ratings and comments, however brief, are deeply appreciated. https://tinyurl.com/27w32z27
“In the title poem of Jean Ryan’s luminous new collection, her speaker sees swallows slicing the air, observing, ‘Short dark arrows, they never miss, their flight too swift for error.’ I can’t think of a more apt description for A Day Like This, in which poem after poem so vivdly penetrates to the core of lived experience. Ryan’s poems have an ease of movement and transparency of structure I find most enviable. She has a special gift for finding what remains fresh and particular inside the ancient stuff of poetry. This is a gorgeous book, powerful and assured, written by a poet who is elegant, concise, honest, and warmhearted in her approach. I can’t recommend it enough. A quietly masterful work.” Erin Belieu, author of Slant Six, Black Box, Come-Hither Honeycomb, and One Above and One Below.
Thought it was time I posted more of my acrylic paintings. I still do many pet portrait commissions and look forward to the surprise and happiness they bring.
For book recommendations, all you need do is head to Shepherd.com. There you will find lists of book favorites (read in 2023) from participating authors, as well as listings of all around favorite books in a searchable database. What are you interested in reading about? Ben Shepherd has you covered.
For a list of my favorites books read 2023, here is my post. Enjoy!
It’s not only that they leave us too soon, it’s that they leave us alone with our imperfect selves. We will never have their grace, their capacity for forgiveness. We will never be as good at being alive.
The last time I cried was a year ago, when I was informed of the passing of a woman I cherished. Death, it seems, is the bar for my tears. Sad movies, stranded polar bears, the plight of children in war torn countries—nothing else brings me to that threshold. Sometimes I try to coax the tears; the closest I get is a slight pull in my throat. I assume that I still can weep, but someone must die to prove it.
At first I thought it could be a side effect of Paxil, which I take for anxiety. I asked others who take this drug and they all said no, they can cry just fine. Given this testimony, the low dosage I require, and the fact that I started on Paxil years before my tears dried up, I doubt my problem is drug-related. In any case, it doesn’t matter: no way am I going back to living with my default mode stuck on panic.
So what did happen to me? It is not uncommon for people to become more jaded as they get older, and I am in fact “older.” Did I glimpse one too many photos of oil-covered seagulls? Have I hardened off in the past few years, turned numb to sadness and madness? I do not feel numb. You know those videos on social media where a dog is drowning, or a baby elephant can’t pull itself out of the mud? Even aware these clips end well, I cannot bear to watch them. And then there’s the minefield of current events. Each morning I open my iPad and tiptoe through the news, avoiding the climate section entirely.
Maybe my body is protecting me, operating on a level beyond my understanding, the way traumatic memories sink into the abyss of subconsciousness. In stemming my tears, my body could simply be trying to survive a little longer by withholding emotions that might undo me. But if this is so, why do I still feel despair and sorrow, and what about the reputed benefits of a good cry, how it detoxifies the body, clears the chakras?
On the scale of human afflictions, not being able to cry wouldn’t even move the needle, and really, is it a problem? Not being able to laugh—now that would be unfortunate. Humor is a stronghold, maybe our last.
Still, this dry-eyed life makes me feel lonely sometimes, and self-conscious, as if I am missing a measure of humanity. Watching some heartbreaking movie, I’ll look over at my wife and see tears streaming down her face as the closing music swells, and something close to jealousy climbs up my chest. She is experiencing something, fully, and I am shut out.
The internet probably clamors with people like me. There must be chat rooms, support groups, therapists who specialize in this disorder, if it can be called that. I wonder how listless I’d have to become to seek such support. My life would have to shrink to the size of an atom. There could be no plants to feed, no backyard birds to watch, no meals to plan, no partner to laugh with, no cat to cuddle, no coffee on the patio, no luck to ponder.
With all this—more than I ever hoped for—maybe there’s just no room left for tears.
Last week I enjoyed a video a friend sent me of gorillas romping in heaps of fallen leaves. Riding the exercise bike a few minutes later, I turned on the television and landed on an enchanting nature show featuring animals at play—lion cubs, penguins, puppies, dolphins. After that, on my way up the stairs, I was ambushed by my spring-crazed cat. He had been hiding behind a door, waiting for me. I took these events as a sign, a reminder that I had a whole day ahead of me in which to have fun, or not.
At the plant nursery where I work there is an arching wooden bridge. In the winter it spans a river of rainwater; in the summer it turns whimsical, serving no function other than to delight the children who are compelled to run over it, again and again. Another attraction are the fountains. Children are charmed by water and will head for it like baby sea turtles. Their joyful shrieks carry across the nursery as they thrust their hands into the basins and splash the water this way and that. Color enchants them, too. They always make a beeline for the water wands, which come in an assortment of delicious colors. Product designers understand that color is fun, and even adults can’t resist that rainbow display. We sell a lot of water wands.
Children are masters of play. I’ve often wondered why this is so, why we lose the capacity for fun as we get older. We have our grown-up games of course—Scrabble and poker, Wii and Xbox, tennis and bowling. But these are games with an end point, a goal. Even individual sports like hang-gliding or cliff jumping require planning and risk assessment, a competition with oneself.
Children don’t pause to consider themselves; they just plunge into whatever catches their attention. They do not know that being alive means being in peril. They have no idea that their chances are slimming, that summers are not long, that one day they won’t be here. When they start skipping, when they make stone soup, when they build forts out of chairs and blankets, they are living in the only realm they will ever own. Running without reins, they are free because they don’t know it.
While we may no longer feel the urge to build forts or splash in fountains, we adults still lose ourselves now and then. Alone in our homes, we might break out in dance, or grab a spatula and start singing into it. In quieter moments, we can disappear into our passions: fossil collecting, product design, painting. As a writer, I lose myself not only in composition, but in research as well. There are many way to escape the tyranny of time, if only for a few hours.
It is said that a person who is living well makes no distinction between her work and her play, and this is certainly true for those lucky enough to love their jobs. Most of us can’t make that claim. We labor to pay the bills, and then we labor at home, and what free time we have is spent driving from one store or business to another. After a few months of this, we reward ourselves with a vacation that never feels adequate because we have leveraged too much on it.
I’m wondering if we can trick our stodgy selves by wringing more joy out of our daily lives, if, like children, we could make our own fun? We could start small, maybe with accessories, adding a scarf, a lapel pin. We could pour our coffee into china instead of a mug. Taking a cue from Martha Stewart, we could decorate the dining room table with fall leaves and fruit. We could smile at everyone we encounter and see what they do. We could make it a game.
There’s a woman in town who drives an old Cadillac on which she has glued hundreds of tiny toys. There is a couple down the street who have turned their front yard into a fairyland of handmade stone castles. The woman next door takes photos of neighborhood dogs, then turns them into Christmas ornaments she gives to the owners.
How hard could it be to have a little more fun each day? A child can do it.
I give my deep thanks to the editors of Woodlands nature~magic~mystery~myth for including my poem “Lichen” and my essay “Lyme Ticks and Ladybugs” in this wondrous new anthology. A perfect tonic for the busy holiday season, Woodlands is now available on Amazon. Stoke the fire, curl up your sofa, and enjoy this treasury of nature writing.
When I am not writing or painting, you can often find me hunting for fossils. I found this specimen in Northern California. 3″ long, 2″ wide and high, it is extremely dense and partially agatized. Several fossil enthusiasts have weighed in but it remains unidentified; it may not be a fossil at all. I would greatly appreciate anyone’s guesses.
How we view time can be a source of comfort or pain. Many people, particularly eastern cultures, adhere to the belief that we live any number of lives: time is seen as cyclical and forgiving. Westerners tend to see time as linear, something we use up, something we never have enough of.
Whatever our beliefs, we all know that the lives we are living now will one day end. This knowledge is the ultimate spoiler, the price we pay for having a neocortex. Other animals are not saddled with this awareness—at least I assume, I hope, they are not.
In 1777 the British explorer Captain Cook gave a newly hatched tortoise to a royal family in Polynesia, who kept the creature as a pet until it died of natural causes 188 years later. That turtle pulled its heavy self across the ground, presumably the same well-worn ground, for 68,620 days. Was it weary by then? Bored? Might it have opted for a life half as long?
On the other end of the spectrum is the mayfly, a creature whose adult life amounts to less than a day; in some species, just a few minutes. The larval versions, naiads, can live up to a year, during which they hide in aquatic debris and progress through several stages—instars—before growing a pair of wings and becoming immature adults. The winged juveniles last no longer than the final version and are not sexually viable until a few hours later, when they emerge from their last molt with features unique in the insect world, paired genitals: two penises for the males and two gonopores for the females. They do not feed: their mouths are useless and their digestive tracks are filled with air. This day, their first and last on earth, all they do is mate—little wonder our creator doubled up on their genitalia.
Like locusts, mayflies “hatch” in stupendous numbers, trillions at a time. The males begin swarming over a river and the females fly into this mass. With specialized legs, the male grab a female and copulation takes place in mid-air, after which the female falls to the water’s surface and lays her eggs before dying. The spent females cover the water, providing a feast for the fish below. The males fly off to die on land, a boon to local birds.
Even the waiting wildlife cannot keep pace with these mayfly windfalls, and in some municipalities snow plows are deployed to clear away the mountains of corpses. While Americans consider mayflies a nuisance, tribes in Africa make nutritious patties out of them.
It would seem that a mayfly’s fleeting life amounts to nothing more than sustenance for larger creatures. Mayflies, all 2500 species of them, are designed as sacrifices, put here for the greater good. Twenty-four hours is all the time they are given and all the time they need.
The ancient Greeks had a saying:
“There is not a short life or a long life. There is only the life that you have, and the life you have is the life you are given, the life you work with. It has its own shape, describes its own arc, and is perfect.”
Jean Ryan 