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    Bathed in Abrasion: Poems of Midlife and Erosion
    Bathed in Abrasion: Poems of Midlife and Erosion
    Bathed in Abrasion: Poems of Midlife and Erosion
    Ebook115 pages38 minutes

    Bathed in Abrasion: Poems of Midlife and Erosion

    By N. Thomas Johnson-Medland and Richard Lewis

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    About this ebook

    If compromise and disappointment have a home, it is midlife. Here, suffering is like breathing. Longing is like dreaming. Standing midstream in the abrasive forces of life, author N. Thomas Johnson-Medland has learned to wade through the erosion and entropy of failure and incompleteness. And yet, in spite of these massive forces attempting to wear down the very vitality that sustains life, he has come to abide in the fact that life is amazing, wonder-filled, and truly awesome. In this book, Johnson-Medland teaches us that our place in the cosmos is full of joy. Our island is hope. Our vision is beauty. Let these forces do their best to wear us smooth. For in them, we can find refinement and grace.
    Bathed in Abrasion invites us swim among the abrasive forces of life: wilderness, war, suffering, water--they are all a part of the poems of our lives. Watch for the meter of erosion and decay. Listen for the sound of sloughing off. For just as all things decay, they are also changing shape into a new becoming. Nothing is lost; everything belongs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResource Publications
    Release dateOct 1, 2014
    ISBN9781498201285
    Bathed in Abrasion: Poems of Midlife and Erosion
    Author

    N. Thomas Johnson-Medland

    N. Thomas Johnson-Medland is an end-of-life specialist and doula. He is the author of Wayfaring Stranger; River Bending; Coming Back Home; In the Same Place; Bathed in Abrasion; Bridges, Paths, and Waters: Dirt, Sky, and Mountains; Cairn-Space; Entering the Stream; Along the Road; From the Belly of the Whale; Danse Macabre; Feed My Sheep: Lead My Sheep; Windows and Doors; For the Beauty of the Earth; Duende; and Turning Within. He lives a stone's throw from the Susquehanna River in Columbia, Pennsylvania-just outside Lancaster-with his wife, Glinda. Tom and Glinda have two adult sons, Zachary Aidan and Josiah Gabriel. Reach him here

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      Book preview

      Bathed in Abrasion - N. Thomas Johnson-Medland

      9781498201278.kindle.jpg

      Bathed in Abrasion

      Poems of Mid-life and Erosion

      N. Thomas Johnson-Medland

      Photos by Richard Lewis

      7344.png

      Bathed in Abrasion

      Poems of Mid-life and Erosion

      Copyright ©

      2014

      N. Thomas Johnson-Medland. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers,

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      , Eugene, OR

      97401

      .

      Wipf and Stock

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      Eugene, OR

      97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      ISBN

      13

      :

      978-1-4982-0127-8

      EISBN

      13

      :

      978-1-4982-0128-5

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Introduction

      Escarpment

      Strata

      Alluvial Fans

      Moon-Bow

      Across the River - Somewhere in the War Between the States

      Such Fondness in a Leaf

      One Is Enough

      Dendrites

      What Does the Water Wash Away

      It Wears Down Mountains

      Those Promontories

      Abraded by Glacial Drag

      Endless Reaching Darkness

      Particles and Waves

      Beauty Abrades the Harshness

      What Mark; What Groove

      Swimming in Rivers

      A Darkness Is Born

      There Is A Seed Of Emptiness

      The Haunting Memory

      I Know

      A Paper Ring

      Great Holes of Forgetting

      Up To My Knees In Me

      All I Thought I Owned

      The Smoothing

      The True Test

      I Think I Have Found

      Tears The Eyes Cannot Cry

      I am Having To Amble

      "It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us. Now, nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

      Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic like in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sound of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that fish will rise.

      Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river is cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

      I am haunted by rivers."

      —Norman Maclean

      A River Runs Through It

      University of Chicago press, 1976

      This majestic, ancient ice-flood came from the eastward, as the scoring and the crushing of the surface shows. Even below the waters of the lake the rock in some places is still grooved and polished; the lapping of the waves and their disintegrating action has not as yet obliterated even the superficial markings of glaciation.

      —John Muir

      My First Summer in the Sierra

      Tom’s Dedication:

      For Thomas Howard and Richard Rohr and their lasting literary influence on my life and pen. Thank you, both!

      Rich’s Dedication:

      To my wife, Vivian, who affords me far more patience than

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