Sally Ballard was born in Maine and now lives again in Maine on an island in Casco Bay. She and her husband Sam retired to Maine from New Hampshire, where she worked as Bereavement Coordinator for Home Health and Hospice Care in Nashua.
That is where I met Joan, who one day appeared at my desk and invited me to a newly forming group. I was delighted. Writing poetry has always been an outlet for me. It comes especially at difficult times or when I am awed by the beauty of the sea or island life. I read fiction all the time and we have a small book group on the island to share during winter days. Other activities include a women’s singing group called The Whalers, volunteering in the library and being an active volunteer and organizer of volunteers for an Aging in Place facility on the island. I believe in the saying “I intend to wear out instead of rust out,” health permitting. I have two daughters and four step children, plus two grandchildren and five step grandchildren. Life remains full and challenging at the age of seventy-one!
Sam Ballard
The youngest of seven, born to my parents in their forties, growing up in a large, formal and well-ordered home, near Chicago, I existed apart from the others. I am now 72, with my parents and most of my siblings gone. I recall my sister, the eldest of the family, whispering in my ear, “You were a mistake.”
Conversations at the dinner table had a certain order. Political arguments were the standard fare. Not encouraged to participate, I watched everyone else partake of the verbal jousting, giving it out as well as getting it back. Though they disagreed deeply, I could see that Popsey admired my mother’s mind. She was a worthy adversary, mannered, well-dressed, coiffed and always in control. If either was ever angry with the other, I never saw it. Most of the time I referred to my father simply as “Sir,” occasionally as “Popsey.”
My parents ignored my education. They paid for the best (Andover and Harvard) but then sent me alone on the train to begin my freshman year at Andover. They never visited me nor did they attend my graduation. Still, at Harvard, I earned honor grades in advanced calculus and physics. After three years in the army, I was awarded a medal for my work in rocket design, working with Werner Von Braun. I had passed the threshold of manhood into achievement. This led to a successful life in engineering—predictable, not an arid landscape, but little worth recounting.
But my life with women—ah, this is where my existence was upended. Being a nineteenth-century Victorian, I married them all —and so began the odyssey of the four marriages, now a memoir that has absorbed me in the writing for more than ten years.
“My story is not told by me as a self because the core of me is only born as this story is told, within the story itself. I exist when primordial stories are being told, and only then I am the music while the music lasts.”
Isn’t that a remarkable observation; originating not with a writer but with the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. His picture is nearby, with the quote “I feel, therefore I am,” thereby putting Descartes’ dictum (I think, therefore I am) appropriately aside.
Damasio poses the question: “What could be more difficult to know than how we know?” If I am unable to answer this question, I remain in the dark, unable to find significance, know the nature of myself.
Damasio’s thoughts may be viewed as a handbook for writing, especially when the focus is those who have affected our lives. Recalling emotional turning points, they come to life for me as I carefully describe how the muscles in the face changed, how my mouth dried up, the skin blanched, a section of my gut would contract when dealing with crisis, in short how my mind-brain and body responded.
“Having feelings is of extraordinary value in the orchestration of survival.” I wrote to bear testimony to this process. “Emotions are useful in themselves, but the process of feeling begins to alert the mechanism to the problem that emotion has begun to solve.” Responding to these alerts, under these constellations in my night sky of dreams, I stand with a deepening sense of the magnificence of this mind-brain as it continually expands, seemingly on its own.
Jeanne Bartlett was born in Deering, New Hampshire in 1929 and moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts with her family when she was a teenager. She attended nursing school, married and eventually returned to her birthplace, where she and her husband raised their five children. If you inquired from a local person where to find their small farm you might be told: “It’s at the far end of Deering and the near end of Weare.” In 1969, Jeanne opened a shop in the old barn there and named it: “The Far End,” which has often been described as “a trading post of culture and ideas.”
For thirty years she ran this business and watched her children and her garden grow. Scraps of paper and pages also grew that held verses small and sometimes larger—written to describe or to “sketch” the world she lived in. Jeanne found encouragement in the Weare Writers Group at the local library and later wrote a monthly column for a small newspaper that asked for material about growing up in a rural area. She titled it: “Being Present with the Past.”
The family farm along with the shop was sold in 2000 and the scraps of paper went with me and my husband to a smaller home near an old mill site on Dudley Brook where I now read and write, drawing inspiration from many sources: poetry workshops, meditation, and the meeting of the All Souls’ Day group, that gathers annually to plant bulbs for yet another spring, to witness the birth of a new poem, and to share dreams.
Charlie Felsenthal was born in Boston in 1946. He attended Stanford University, graduating in 1969 with a B.A. in German Studies and a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. He served as an Air Force intelligence officer in Thailand, Laos, and Germany.
He worked as an AFDC eligibility worker in the district welfare office in Simi Valley, CA (the office that issued food stamps to what turned out to be the Manson Gang).
He attended Yale Law School, graduating with a J.D. in 1980, and served as editor-in-chief of Yale Studies in World Public Order (now known as the Yale Journal of International Law).
He has been employed as a tax attorney at Lourie & Cutler, P.C. (Boston), State Mutual Life Assurance Company/Allmerica Financial (Worcester), and Manulife Financial (Boston).
In 1998 a very dear friend lay dying, and my need to write (or at least to attempt) poetry erupted out of a desperate grief that I could voice in no other way. The All Souls group, having arisen out of loss and a desire to reconnect the living with the dead, was a natural fit for me. I’m not a charter member, but I’ve felt very much at home from the beginning of my participation. My writing is offbeat, sometimes Delphic (or maybe just obscure), and formally I’m an utter naïf, untrained and undisciplined. Nonetheless my All Souls comrades have always been an attentive, gentle, and generous audience. And they write some truly wonderful stuff that I love hearing. After reading we unwind over dinner, with passionate talk and much laughter. I always leave feeling consoled and fulfilled, and I always look forward eagerly to our next gathering.
Sidney Hall Jr. was born in 1951 and has lived most of his life in southern New Hampshire. He is a graduate of Reed College, where he studied Greek and Latin Classics. He has been a publisher, editor, columnist, teacher, and conservationist. Now he specializes in fine book design, typography and production. His poems have appeared in literary magazines and in several poetry anthologies. His book reviews have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He is the author of two books of poems, What We Will Give Each Other, and Chebeague; and a book of memoirs, Small Town Tales, a collection of newspaper columns.
My children and Joan Weddle’s children attended the Pine Hill Waldorf school together, a wonderful alternative school in Wilton, New Hampshire with a very tight-knit community of children, parents and teachers. When Joan’s son Jonathan, who had been a Pine Hill student, died, I shared the loss with the community. I wrote the poem “A Tree Planting” (p. 68) for a ceremony at the school. My father had died unexpectedly not long before, and when Joan invited me to participate in her All Souls group I joined. As usual, it took me a long time to figure out what it was all about, but after several years I understood the value of our annual meetings. They are powerful celebrations of language, loss, humor, sharing, and homemade soup. I look forward to them every year.
I have always felt that poetry and language have a transforming power, and that art is our only hope in a world that is miserable as often as it is beautiful. However, I never felt the depth of that truth, or the possibilities inherent in it, until I joined this group of friends. I hope that A Thin Time will allow others to participate in this mystery.
Melody Zahn Russell
I am still working on my prebirth intention to become fully human and to contribute toward a better world.
Born on September 30, 1947 in New Hampshire, taking the second World War to heart, wanting no more wars, I am a baby boomer.
Educated in New Hampshire schools from kindergarten through masters degree (University of New Hampshire), my interests have all to do with people, nature and art.
Motto #1: Act locally, think globally.
Travelled through Canada, West Coast of North America, a touch of Mexico, expanding my perspective.
Immersed myself in the work of Rudolph Steiner, living and studying at Emerson College in England. Added immense spiritual dimension to all work with people, nature and art. Here was my spiritual birth, during three rich years living with others from 23 countries who all had same quality prebirth ideals.
Discovered Eurythmy, which combined all my loves. Lived in New York for five years during Eurythmy training. Met my husband . . . married. . . . returned to New Hampshire, to family, to granite, to four strong seasons and the best of all, became a mother!
Next came challenge and crisis in marriage and in community. It was the time of darkness and failures. The new theme became the wounded healer.
Motto #2: Be the change that you want to see in the world (Ghandi).
Starting over. Roethke’s poem, “Beginner, perpetual beginner . . . ” healed me.
Still people, art and nature, still new social forms and always aching for Peace on Earth, no more war, new solutions.
Founded Eggshell Studios, art classes for all ages.
Motto #3: Hatch out the artist in you . . .
The baby boomer is still in progress, maturing, deepening, persevering. Through all of the adventures and misadventures words have been actual nourishment. Poetry the medicine. In the hardest days of death of community Joan became a true friend as she also survived her most devastating challenges. Our shared words in conversation and poetry united us.
June Strickland
I was born in Central Newfoundland in 1952, and was raised in a deeply-connected and loving logging community, with a forest and two rivers, the Exploits and the Red Indian, in my back yard. I thank my lucky stars for that good fortune. A life-turning point for me occurred in Aberdeenshire, Scotland in 1973, where, while working with the Scottish Youth Nature Conservation Corps, I met the work of Rudolf Steiner through the Camphill Movement. I owe a depth of gratitude to Dr. Karl Koenig for this opportunity. I am the mother of two boys, Thomas and Ewen, am a graduate of the Spatial Arts Institute and am a practising child, adolescent and family clinician. I live in Peterborough, New Hampshire in an 1870s house on the Contoocook River.
Over the years I have come to see the cyclical meetings at Joan’s house as mysteriously powerful in their effect of engendering the life of poetics in the lives of poets. In hectic and confusing times Joan perservered to this end. In its own way, for me, the preparation for the meetings is very demanding, but the fruit of the work is the existence of the All Souls’ Day group. This small community is a potent seed for the future.
Joan Weddle grew up in a coastal village on Long Island. From an early age she knew that she would leave New York for a more rural life. After living in numerous places her path eventually led her to New Hampshire.
Currently a resident of Amherst, New Hampshire she continues a long career as a clinical social worker, primarily in the field of geriatrics. She is also the owner of a garden design business which provides ample opportunity to feed her passion for gardening. Her poem “Planting the Bulbs” (p. 70) was written after an afternoon of preparing the ground for the group’s annual bulb planting and was partly inspired by recalling an introduction by E.B. White to a collection of gardening articles written by his wife Katharine. As part of this introduction White described his wife’s final days in the garden.
For the past 24 years I have been first and foremost a mother. It has been the most challenging and rewarding pursuit of my adult life. My daughter Callan was responsible for inspiring me to write my first piece of poetry. One night as I was putting her to bed she suggested that we forego the usual bedtime story and write poetry instead. In my mid-forties at the time and never having written any poetry, I was amazed at what appeared on the page when I put pen to paper. My poetry continues to be an undisciplined expression of an inner process but has been a consistent source of nourishment. The group has created a wonderful opportunity for me to sit with others who write and is a constant source of support.