Empty Spaces

Empty Spaces  

By John W. Vander Velden

 

In what is lost, something must be found. 

How can we endure, if piece by small piece

Things slip away from us, leaving but a void unfillable.

For in life there is the gathering and the losing.

It is the way of things. 

But when we lose what matters,

When love or hope or those precious that

Were once near are stolen,

It rips from us part of what we are.

Tosses aside a portion of our heart. 

It is then, we, the broken, need to seek

Though have no desire to do so.

It is then, by enduring, a bit of life seeps in.

A small piece that moves about the soul’s cavern.

A flicker of light within the dark

That wishes overpower us. 

Though pain remains, slowly, unnoticed, it fades.

Never gone, but at last manageable. 

So strength and courage grow,

And perhaps that is the greatest thing that we can find.

To help us endure….the empty spaces…

Facts and Knowledge

Facts and Knowledge                 

By John W. Vander Velden

Facts and knowledge are not the same things.  Facts are like the stacks of brick on a building site.  They are an important material for the project at hand.  Knowledge is like the finished structure, made up of the bricks properly arranged, bound together by mortar. 

There is a skill set needed to turn the brick into the building.  The man that has those skills is the mason.  It takes a skill set that turns accumulated bits of information into usable knowledge.  Not everyone has gained that particular set of talents.  You see it is not enough to regurgitate things we have been taught.  It is not enough to go constantly seeking new facts to memorize.  To fill our heads with data but not with the ability to turn those facts and figures into…something.

Years have taught me a great deal.  My head is filled with facts innumerable.  But I have also learned how to sift through all those bits, and where to search for the truths to add to what I know, and gathering and assembling those pieces I need, put together the package that might get the job done.  It was a hard learned skill that even at my age I have not perfected.

Knowledge is more than facts, it requires seeing things from other sides.  Using my own eyes to see how the facts fit, or how they do not.  It comes from using patience, open mindedness, even compassion to be the mortar that binds together the sharp edged facts into a beneficial product that helps me and those around me.  I understand that knowledge is not something to be hoarded.  It is not something I might greedily keep for myself.  True knowledge makes the world better.

There are those that demand the memorization of facts.  Those that believe that facts themselves are the end of all.  “Follow the facts and rules carved in stone,” they say, “and everything will work out.”  But it generates an existence without thought, for thinking is not required to follow a memorized list.  They do us an injustice, by closing our mind.  They live by facts and facts alone and expect everyone to do the same.  They point their fingers and condemn any that have forgotten one of the rules while bragging in their own ability to remember.   

But wisdom comes from knowledge.  And knowledge come from the conscious assembly of truth.  It comes by asking the right questions.  For truth never fears questions, and questions cannot change what is true.  So for us, that wish to add a bit to the world that surrounds us, we take the things we know built upon the facts we trust, ask the questions that clarify, and teach those willing to learn the things that make up the hard won knowledge we have acquired.  But perhaps the most important lesson we have to offer is that facts and knowledge are not the same thing….

(490 Words) 12-19-2017

All the Pieces

All the Pieces                    

By John W. Vander Velden

 

Life is not like putting together a scrapbook.  It’s not like filling a photo album either.  You see life doesn’t give us the ability to pick and choose what things we would like to include in our days.  No, life is more like a jig saw puzzle still in the box.  It is for us to take all the pieces and fit them together…

It takes all the pieces to complete a puzzle.  When all the pieces are arranged in their proper places we can see the whole picture.  In the winter of 1962 we returned to Indiana.  We found a puzzle in the house, left behind by those that had lived there before us.  I liked puzzles…then.  But my childhood puzzles had just a few large pieces and could be put together in a matter of minutes.  I remember the box, an image of a basket weaver surrounded by perhaps fifty examples of his work.  It must have contained 500 or more pieces, a challenge for any ten year old.  But worse, not all the pieces interlocked.  Many just butted against its neighbor with a wavy edge that matched no other.

I remember working for days, and as in all puzzles the more I assembled the easier it became.  But what “burst my bubble” was that three pieces were missing.  Now in the grand scheme of things what are three pieces out of 500?  Nada. I mean there was enough to see the whole of it.  But those three pieces left a hole…an incompleteness…

Perhaps I should have been pleased that I had found the “right” place for the 497 pieces.  That I had used my determination to finish a difficult task.  But in my mind it was not finished.  Those three missing pieces made completion impossible.  I never worked that puzzle again.  In truth, I have done very little puzzle work since the early months of 1962.

It seems to me that life is like a box of puzzle pieces.  And we are not allowed to pick and choose which pieces we will place on the table of our life.  The pieces that are sunny days and happy times are mixed in with other pieces we would choose to avoid.  But it takes all the pieces to finish the thing we call life.  It takes the dark days as well as the bright.  It takes the difficult times as well as the easy.  It takes sadness to contrast with the happy parts of our living.

So on those days when I face frightening dark painful times, times of illness, times of loss, all those days I would wish I could place in the box and forget, I will do my best to remember that I cannot.  For life takes all of the pieces…and I must go on.  (470 Words)  1-8-2018

 

 

Looking Forward

Looking Forward

By John W. Vander Velden

It’s early January and it seems a time when we wonder about the year in our wake.  First we are astonishment how the days have flown passed, and deposited us here in another year.  As we look back, we question our actions, wondering if we did our best last year.  There are times that stand out in our memory.  Happy moments and disappointing ones as well.

The calendar has rolled over and it is fitting that we examine these things.  How else can we hope not to fall into the same pitfalls that ripped us up last year…or the years before?  Those lessons were hard learned, but in learning…well, we grow. 

But we must not dwell only on the dark days, feeling that they foretell a bleakness before us.  No!  Now is the time for optimism.  A time to see that, overall, sunny days are ahead.  Yes, they may be blended with overcast days of rain or snow, but we need to look forward to the sunshine.  Cherish the special hours and days, and use them to fuel us when things are harder.

Winnie the Poo’s friend Eeyore stood in his “gloomy spot” swallowed by a darkness he carried with him, and we loved him for it.  But it would be an unpleasant life if we all shared his view.

So looking forward, I see possibilities.  I expect failures, but remain steadfast that those failures are but stepping stones that lead to successes.  I try to be optimistic.  It is not an easy thing, for it seems simpler to brace ourselves for lesser circumstances.  But optimism gives me hope, and hope gives me energy, and energy will be needed every day, as I march onward.  So I look forward and cast the blankets aside I might wish to hide beneath, stepping out into another day…another year.  I hope you will look forward too….   

(316 Words)  1-3-2018

To Journey Via a Keyboard

To Journey Via a Keyboard                 

By John W. Vander Velden

 

Being a storyteller and a writer are not EXACTLY the same thing.  I am a storyteller that at times uses words to share that story.  Or a storyteller that writes.

But I have a problem.  You see I never understood the mechanics of language…completely.  I tell my writing friends that grammar is a foreign language.  Perhaps it is in my upbringing.  Perhaps, during my more malleable years, I didn’t give it sufficient effort.  Perhaps the papers returned drenched in red ink closed the door.  Who knows?  And at this point it doesn’t matter.

When I shed the fear of rules I did not understand.  When the stories within me screamed to be released, unbound from the chains of the fear of failing.  Then I began in earnest.  That would have been in 2000.

I wrote my first story, “Tree in the Meadow”, out of a need to tell that story.  I wrote accepting that I would have to hire others to clean it up, to correct the thousands of mistakes in grammar I knew I would make. 

I shared the first draft of that yet unpublished story with a trusted friend.  I was told that “it showed talent”.  That was enough to put the keyboard in gear.

So I began 411 Apple Street and the nearly seven year journey to the completion of the first draft.  Work’s demands changed in 2007 and pages progressed more swiftly.  I fell into a rhythm.  A book draft from September till March, a short story perhaps in the spring, some revising during the summer.  A large quantity of work came out of those five years. 

Then I felt I had a body of work sufficient that publication began to seem a possibility.  Things began to change.  Building an internet presence became another task to learn.  Blogging…. I knew very little of blogging when I set up my blog in March of 2012.  What I learned was it takes time…lots of time.  And often I wonder if it is time well spent.  How many times I considered ending Ramblings…Essays and Such…and yet each week I post another short.  Ramblings is a literary blog, if that makes any sense.  For nearly six years, week in and week out, I post an essay or what I call a micro-story.  Typically under 500 words.  There are more than 300 in the archive.

Rambling’s following is, even after all this time, a small number, but has grown in the last year.  Again I wonder of the value taken from other writing projects.  But I have learned a great deal from blogging.  I have learned how to distill to the core, to simplify a concept to a small enough bite size piece that can be covered sufficiently in a few paragraphs.  In other words to be concise.

Another side effect that has come from the experience is the volume of material written.  I have assembled forty some into a small book called Glimpses from the Window of My World which I have given as gifts.  Nearly each month my local paper prints one of my blog posts.  More than 50 have found their way into the Plymouth Pilot News and in that way I have reached many more than my weekly jaunt in cyber-land.

I have crossed 500 words and so I will, my friends, squeeze the closing.  Storytelling.  Now I stand on a new threshold.  My book Misty Creek will soon be published.  I consider the book a success just by reaching this point. 

There are other stories.  If God gives me a chance, I will tell those as well.  But each day, I will strive to be the storyteller I am.  It is my hope you will come along for the ride.

(624 Words)         12-15-2017

Snow

Snow                                 

By John W. Vander Velden

                       

All around color dulled the day dimmed by thick sky.  Even midday the sun can not be seen as we move more out of obligation than joy.  The wind biting cold as we hide flesh beneath gloves, scarf and coat.  Suddenly a small bit of white visible, sailing the breeze.

 

Can it be? 

 

For surely there must be a first…the first flake…like no other.  The leader for many follow.  

The heavy sky laden, unloading its burden as all around the white flies.  At last the flakes reach their destination.  Soon many join their brothers covering the drab world with pure whiteness.  Soft they stack.  Time passes as they form art…drifting into soft depth shaped by the winds will.  So all around the world is changed…before our very eyes.  

The drab now gone replaced by the untainted…such is the power of snow!!!

(143 Words)                1-10-2012

2017 Christmas Letter

December 5, 2017

As the year winds down, time comes to consider what 2017 has been.  It is also a time to reach out to friends and family, those we only hear from once a year, and those that come in and out more frequently.
Where to begin?  The winters in Northern Indiana are certainly not the worse, weather-wise, to be found, but offer challenges none the less.  Last winter was not unusual.  But we have learned to deal with the snow, and the cold.  Having somewhere warm to hide is always good, and a furnace with plugged heat exchanger meant that for a few days things were cooler.  It only reminds how many things we take for granted.








 

An emergency run to Chicago to help Nick and his stranded Jeep reminded us that our vehicles, all of them, were getting old.  Or do you say mature.  Our Malibu, the newest, had 120K, while Nick’s Jeep had more than 180K.  Had hoped to postpone an auto purchase until Nick graduated, the university has its own financial thirst, but “the best laid plan of mice and men” fell to the wayside.  In any case a Jeep Renegade came to our garage.  Jackie named “her” Pearl.  No argument from the “peanut gallery”.  Winter…four wheel drive…seems like a match to me.

But a new vehicle was not the biggest change of the year.  For after all it was the first year I didn’t put in a crop.  Retired is too large a word for the change.  I am in transition from farming to something else…it won’t be leisure to be sure.  But though I’m still busy the biggest change is that the stress level.  So it’s raining…big deal.  That kinda’ thing.  But it also offers me more flexibility.  So we pushed back our spring escape into April.

A road trip to the Florida Panhandle, a first.  If you live in Indiana, the Panhandle is the closest Florida.  And in early April the weather can be delightful.  The sugar white beaches and emerald water at Fort Walton Beach must be  more than seen…a sensory experience that is beyond words.

 

Our week was filled with sunny days and warm breezes and hectic times.  We managed to see a few lighthouses…no surprise there…an aircraft museum…while reserving time for shopping, walking on the beach, and experiencing things beyond our everyday normal.

In May Nick finished his fifth co-op rotation at Zimmer-BioMet.  It has been a learning experience to say the least.  Dealing with real life situations helped him understand better the world he would enter.  But the semester breaks from classes made dialing in those skills more difficult.  The summer began his race to graduation.  Three sessions back to back, the longest straight through at PU will strain him but the end of the tunnel is in sight.  And there is an end of that chapter or a beginning of the next.  In October he accepted a position at Altec in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.  So next summer he will be leaving his home state and starting his own career, his parents proud but sad that he goes so far afield.

With repairing storm damage and mowing yards, plural, and all the ordinary things of summer, kept us hopping.  Yet between it all we made our way north to the great U.P. of Michigan.  Our last trip across the great bridge left us yearning.  And so we went to see a part of the Upper Peninsula we had not seen before, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  Of course our trip included lighthouses.  We saw six new ones.  At least they were new to us.  The weather was fantastic for hiking, shopping, the boat ride among the rocks, and lighthouse climbing.

 

In October I was able to share with Jackie a place I’d experienced three years before when I attended a writing conference in central Ohio.  A five day escape to Yellow Springs and the surrounding area a getaway we will remember.  Walking was a big part of that trip.  Hiking in Clifton Gorge, Glenn Helen, and John Byran State Park, walking miles each day of up and down over rocks and streams filled our days.

But life is more than vacations, even great vacations.  Jackie is on her third year as a pharmacist at Martin’s Supermarket in Plymouth.  Like all jobs there are good days and…well…others.  She enjoys the people she works with and the patients that have come to her for years.  But her life is more than the hours in the pharmacy and she enjoys her flowerbeds, shopping and long walks. 
Nick nears the end of the semester and will look forward to a couple of weeks of slower pace.  January begins the final months of his Purdue career and so we look forward to graduation in May.  He works hard at his studies and the long hours have taken their toll.  But a few days should recharge the batteries and fuel the race toward the end.
Though I have turned the “farm” reins over to my nephew Justin, I remain as I said before busy.  Among the things that keep me occupied is my writing.  Even now I anxiously await the proof of Misty Creek the first of my novels to be published.  I expect it to be available after the first of the year.  
So you see that the Vander Veldens of Marshall County remain busy in many ways.  But we are not so busy to forget all the people that make up our lives.  Those nearby and others scattered around the globe.  We take this time to remember YOU! And to say to each of you, may Christmas be the special time it can be.  That you feel GOD’s love each day.  That you recognize the blessing that come.  That love always exists in your heart and your home.
We wish you a very Merry Christmas, and that GOD gives you good things for 2018.
 

The Vander Veldens…Jackie, John, and Nicholas too!!!