Moving Maine Missive Newsletter to Substack
Shifting my writing, photography, and fused glass artwork to Substack. Continuing informative, entertaining, humorous, and interesting writing with artwork and photography. FREE! What a deal!
Bailey Island, Casco Bay, Maine 2021, Joel D. Kallich
Bailey Island is located northeast of Portland at the end of Casco Bay. Having lunch along the coastline from our house is a wonderful hour's drive. But you can take the ferry from Portland with a bike or walk to the restaurants from the wharf. It leaves the Maine terminal at 10 a.m. from June through Labor Day and cruises two hours down the bay to beautiful Bailey Island. It is Casco Bay Line’s longest cruise, taking you past – Ft. Gorges, thousands of lobster pots, and Eagle Island.
Desert Sunrise, Anza-Borrego, California 2008, Joel D. Kallich
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, located a little bit east and south of Palm Springs is an amazingly empty space of humans and extremely quiet but full of life. The Mojave and Colorado Desert regions, which include Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, are one of the 46 Biosphere Reserves in the US designated by UNESCO. The name ‘Anza’ is from the Anza expedition of 1775-76 from Nogales to San Francisco.
Beginnings are hard, but endings are worse.
I started writing the Maine Missive in the EB White format when we moved from LA to Maine in 2013, sending emails out upon occasion to let you know from myriad perspectives one could take on how we were experiencing the transition as we moved from formalized work responsibilities to retirement in a new location so far from our previous day-to-day environment. LA County contains about 25% of California's population, spans over 4,000 square miles, and is home to approximately 10 million souls.
It was a relatively rapid relocation from LA, the most populous county in the US, to a town, with 10,000 people adjoining Portland, Maine, about 600,000 people - a state with Vacationland on its license plates, and the tag line - ‘The Way Life Should be.’ You know that there might be issues when a place defines itself by what it isn’t. But it turns out that Maine and Portland have more similarities to where I grew up in the Midwest (Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin) until I got my wish in my mid-20s to make my way to Boston to attend graduate school at BU.
Read on and I will elucidate more about what is going on now, and address the later part of the title above.
Why this? Why now?
Join me in this transit through virtual space to where new horizons beckon, including the event horizon that we all will traverse at some point (likely kicking and screaming I speculate). While the human condition is to keep growing, changing, and dealing with the change, there is but a limited time for it to happen. Thus, having a companion who laughs at the horrors, loves the beauty, and has a good mind to make it all entertaining certainly makes it more tolerable. So broaden your horizons, cross a few, and have a good time as we keep in touch through this new medium. Don’t forget to sign up - but you don’t need or should contribute any $$ - despite Substack’s capitalistic nudges that I cannot seem to remove so that you won’t see them. Capitalism is like that, an insidious and insistent virus that will likely kill the host.
I don't believe I am this old in my heart, as the world seems to be tottering on the edge of a series of apocalypses (at least, it seems apocalyptic to me). I will not enumerate, as the media certainly reminds anyone who is listening and paying attention to the world. You may subscribe, and it certainly is your right to agree with Javier Marias, the author, who said, “Your own life is most important to you only. To others, it is usually a terrible bore that you listen to (if you can’t help it) with polite disinterest.” If this is the case, then skip the next paragraph, or this whole endeavor for that matter, but it will be short and sweet, and then I will get on with the better stuff. But, of course, I hope that you are interested in hearing about my situation, as I am in hearing about yours. But really, skip along if it is not of interest, as it just feels to me like an old white man with privilege whining about his issues when there are many others who certainly have it much worse than I do.
My personal health has been a roller coaster of late, as on December 27th, I fell while exercising (doing sidesteps with a band around my thighs); add your eye roll & jocular comment; I have heard quite a few, including no good deed, goes unpunished (Every good deed brings its own punishment," has been attributed to British diarist James Agate in 1938). The result was a fairly painful avulsion fracture of the right foot’s 5th metatarsal. An avulsion fracture “occurs when a small chunk of bone attached to a tendon or ligament gets pulled away from the main part of the bone,” according to the Mayo Clinic website.
It has not been healing well (there is not good blood flow to the lower extremities in the first place (put your leg up above your heart to improve circulation)). In addition, I am 69 years old and do not have optimal circulation on my right side due to circulatory and neurogenic issues from a spinal injury when I was 20, which is why I had surgery last year and was attempting to regain muscle and functionality of the leg.
I was told not to put any weight on the leg, wear an air cast all the time, and ‘stay off it.” I just started driving again today and have been wearing the boot for about half the day. I moved from a DPM (Podiatrist) to an Orthopedic surgeon last week, and I find out next month if I might need surgery (a pin to hold it together) - and thus go through another bout of recovery (i.e., cause of my anxiety and melancholy).
But let us hope for good outcomes and speak of better days ahead no matter how long it will take to achieve it. Because goodness knows, we need to keep our spirits up and enjoy ourselves a bit before we dive back into the fray.
Therefore I will leave you with some beauty (I hope you agree). These are a few images of my fused glass vessels- for more see joelkallich.art.
The program, the project to capture the color and internal self-meaning of the Found Horizon. I will write more about the process at another time (e.g., trying to capture clouds above a horizon), but first is the theory which informs and structures the practice or crafting within the medium and the resultant ‘art object.’
It is what the mind’s eye sees and the brain processes as a Beautiful Horizon. The photographic image captures a portion of the visual experience of the horizon and serves as a reminder of its impression on us. The fused glass vessel is my artistic attempt to convey the visual experiences of the line, the light, the color (sometimes the perspective and other times the tactile aspects as well), and the emotion of the different overall experiences of what each of us sees at the time and our memory of it. I now want to do this for the rest of my time on the planet.
What to expect from me in the future
More of this. Hopefully, a lot more. More pictures of my artwork in process; half the fun is the process, and I want to share the joy and outcome of those experiences, too. I have been writing on art and will also begin to share those efforts.
Other topics as they occur to me, but if you want something, please let me know, and I will likely dive into it. While I am not the best teacher, I try to share what I know and what I do not with honesty and warmth. And I like to learn more about a subject; therefore, occasionally, in fact, frequently, I treat a topic like I have done my work, research from top to bottom & side to side, what others have written and said, what the evidence shows, and others know and don’t know.
Making glass is like this: a lot of design and theory, a lot of details, close assembly, programming the kiln, and then the transformation which happens overnight (a little like waking up and finding out you have been transformed). Glass shards fusing together either into something that pleases my eyes or leaves me scratching my head wondering how that hell did that happen.