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Category: post

The Farmer

I was on a flight to Washington DC. This was the first leg. Minneapolis to Milwaukee. I was rushing out, last minute, to be with my father. A medical emergency. His heart had decided to fail. The doctors were unsure why. He had been admitted for further testing and, well, to keep him alive. Not my best day at all.
My row mate was an attractive young lady. Early thirties would be my best guess. Long dark thick hair pulled up and back to keep it out of the way, lest the strands have their way with the frame of her face. And that face! Sturdy. Midwestern. A lesson in beauty through strength. I could see the glimmer of stories unfold before she even began to tell them.
Small talk ensued. I told her about the reasons for for my trip to DC. She offered her heartfelt concern. I wished not to dwell and asked her about her trip — as much out of distraction as interest. I’m glad I did. She too was headed out to DC.
“What is bringing you out to DC?” I asked.
She explained that she was a Farmer. Had been all her life. Like her Father. She lived in a small town she was certain I had never heard of. In the northwest corner of Iowa. She worked a piece of her father’s five hundred acres. She belonged to an independent farmer advocacy group and was going out to DC as part of this to talk to legislators about ious issues. This was her first time doing so. She was excited about the trip and experience.
I said, “Wow. That’s awesome. I never would have pegged you as a farmer but I have tremendous respect for it. What do you grow?”
She explained they had decided to start experimenting with organics on her portion. They had some preliminary success with a couple of crops and were expanding this year to more. She explained in laypersons terms the ious challenges and why it is so different yet exciting. That her father had even started experimenting a bit with the animals he raised too.
“I don’t pretend to know much about farming but I have read a bit and know what tremendously hard work it is.”, I stated. “I mean, especially as an independent family farmer. From Big Agra to diminishing returns you must be beset on all sides. What keeps you doing it?”
“You gotta love the land.”, she said. Her whole tone of voice and body language changed when she said it. There was an unassuming yet palpable passion behind every word. “Not just the way it looks. The way it feels to be in it. To be a part of it. I wake up before sunrise every morning just itching to get up to my neck in it. The smell too. I smell like shit all day but that shit is part of the land and the land needs it as much as it needs me. I go to bed each night broken, exhausted, yet thankful. Not just thankful for the three showers I need to wash it off me but for the chance to do it all over again tomorrow. I love the land and my place within it. You have to.”
“You have to love the land…”
This farmer realizes that the relationship with her work, like any good relationship is, and should be, reciprocal. That the work, the land, would not be as good without her commitment to it. And, in turn, it returns that commitment to her. And, because of her intimacy with it, it returns that much more.
This. This passion. This love for what we are born to do. Whatever that is for each of us. Like her, our days should be filled with it. Every moment. We should wake up each day inching to get up to our necks in it. To be covered with it. To be a part of it. To be intimate with it.
As a writer, I have to love the words. I desire to wake each day and get up to my neck in them. I want to be covered with their stench. I want to end each day broken and exhausted from them yet anxious in the anticipation of my return to them tomorrow. And, by loving the words, they return that commitment to me. I have to love the words…
How about you? How about your land? Do you love it? Do you need it as much as it needs you? Why? Why not?
Want to know what you should be doing with your life? Find the shit you want to be covered in. Start there.

My New Book — enough


I’m pleased to announce the launch of my new book, enough. It is available starting today in Paperback, ePub, and Kindle format. (iBooks coming soon, Apple willing. ePub works great on iPad though)
This series of original essays help to answer the question, “What is enough?”.
Enough is a very personal metric. Like our center of gravity, each of us must find what is enough by swaying from less to more until a comfortable medium is found.
The goal, then, is not to find what is, or will be, enough forever. That is impossible. The goal is to discover the tools and strategies you need to find what is enough for you right now and provide the flexibility to adjust as the conditions change.
The essays in this book explore many of the methods, practice, and strategies needed to meet this goal and discover what enough means to you.
This book represents years worth of work exploring this topic and writing the book. For those not in the know, that the first draft of this book was written entirely on iOS. So, to some, that may serve as invitation alone to purchase a copy and check out just what is capable on a post-PC device.
I know you will enjoy it and walk away the better for it.
I should also mention that, in celebration of the new release, the price of my first book, Keeping It Straight, has dropped for a limited time. If you have not read it yet I would be humbled if you bought both.
Finally, a heartfelt thanks to Randy, Penny, and Aaron at my publisher, First Today Press, for once again taking my words and turning into something worth reading. If you have a book in you I can think of no better group of people to help you get it out.
Once again that is…
Paperback  • ePub • Kindle

Clean Kitchen

My Great Grandmother Handy always kept her kitchen clean. Despite the fact that it seemed she spent most of the day within it in a state of constant activity.
She would awake early to start cooking breakfast for my Great Grandfather “Pa Pa” Handy and whomever else was staying over at the time. Eggs. bacon, biscuits, potatoes, fresh squeezed orange juice, and half of a grapefruit for Pa Pa. Just as routine, not a single pan was waiting to be cleaned by the time any of it hit the dining table. The kitchen looked just as it did before it all started. And, one could be assured, it would be just as clean only minutes after the dishes were cleared.
She often would tend the garden and start the laundry following breakfast. Which, in my child mind, never seemed to take that long. She would return to the kitchen with a full basket of figs freshly harvested from the tree in the yard. These figs found their way swiftly into a pressure pot and then into mason jars for preserves. The kitchen remained tidy the whole time. The only evidence to the contrary were the tools of task being actively used. Once their job was done they always swiftly and effortlessly returned to the place from which they came.
Lunch and Dinner seemed to be a blur of a single meal in her kitchen. As soon as one was served, preparation for the next was already underway. There was never a time in that span of hours that a pot was not on the stove, a pan was not in the oven, or a serving bowl or utensil was not being used. But, as I’m sure you can surmise, by the time it was all served, consumed, and cleared, the kitchen was spot free and ready for its business the following the day.
Even more amazing was that everything else got done as well. The laundry, the gardening, the grocery shopping, the cleaning of the rest of the house, and tending to Pa Pa’s growing list of needs as his health began to turn. One woman against a mountain and she managed to plant her flag at the summit each day.
It was many years after she passed that I was able to truly appreciate any of these minor miracles, let alone care enough to dissect how they were achieved. But age, passing time, and having the responsibilities of maintaining a family and household of my own has made me ponder my Great Grandmother’s deft skills regularly. How did she manage to do it? How did she juggle all of those tasks? The demands and needs? No matter the day or her own health or conditions?
I don’t have all the answers to these questions but I have some clues — especially in the kitchen cleaning department.
Before she started cooking she filled the sink with soapy water. Whenever she used a pan, as soon as she was done with it, she washed it, dried it, and put it away. Instead of saving up all of those ten to fifteen second actions until they added up to an hour of washing after the meal, she learned in her years of experience that it was better for her to do them right away. That the time following a meal could be better spent on the next task than having the detritus of one create another. Remove pan from oven, plate food, wash, dry, put away, serve.
This memory lands home for me these days when I go to add yet-another-task to my list. More often I find myself thinking this — Would I rather add it to the list or would I rather add it to my journal? One is a record of things to do. The other, a record of things already done.
I know what Grandmother Handy would say.

Chairs

As I write this, I am at Mall of America, the largest enclosed shopping mall in the country. I’m sitting on a chair that is right between the Apple Store and Microsoft Store. Yes they are, literally and not accidentally, right across the hallway from each other. The Apple Store was here first of course. For many years. I was here for its grand opening. Now that Apple has proven great success in retail, Microsoft is seeing the potential and opening its own similar stores as close to the Apple Stores as possible all across the country.
The cultures of these two tech behemoths could not be any more worlds apart and that gulf is easily apparent when contrasted by such short distance.
In one you have the clean minimalist designs that Apple is long famous for. Whites walls, blonde wood tables all designed to accompany and highlight the brushed aluminum iDevices for sale within.
In the other, bright reds, blues, greens, and yellows. Wrapped around the length and inset in the walls is one long giant video screen that is constantly changing with stock photos of cheerful people, screen captures from XBox games, and Metro UI suggestive tiles.
In one, you have a bustle of activity. People getting help in a iety of ways from young hip folks in matching blue shirts. No employee, far more than I can easily count, is want of anything to do Each has a customer they are attending to and it looks like others are waiting for their turn. Everyone is standing as there is nowhere to sit and, in any other environ, one might mistake it for a really cool party full of conversations you’d be tempted to eavesdrop on.
In the other, there are more employees than customers. You can tell who they are simply because their shirts are the same yellow, or green, or red, or blue of the Windows logo outside. The customers that are inside are sitting and surfing – perched upon on the stools that are at each demo laptop and desktop. I can see over the shoulder of the few from the other side of the glass. They are mostly on Facebook. The employees don’t seem to mind. One might mistake it for an internet café if one did not know otherwise. The customers seem to be treating it as one at least.
It is the chairs or lack thereof that really pique my interest the most. I wonder if they, more than anything else I see, speak the loudest to the differences between these two stores and these two companies. The existence of these chairs seem to me to be a symbol. Not a wholly negative or positive one. But a mark of something deeper all the same. Certainly an important distinction between how these two companies want you to engage with the products they have for sale in the places they have built to sell them.
In some ways, the chairs could be perceived as symbol of hospitality. But, looked at another way, they communicate inactivity and complacency. Standing, even when still, looks like activity more so than sitting does to me. Perhaps when a customer enters a store such as this, and can sit down and use the equipment without interference or engagement with the staff, they become less motivated to do anything more than that. Why buy the laptop when you can have the surfing for free? Perhaps when they enter a similar store without chairs, and are engaged on a regular basis by friendly but determined staff, there is a sense to take some action, even if that action is to leave empty-handed.
I wonder how much the Apple Store experience would change if there were place to sit at every station. Would the customers still buy or would they check their Facebook for free? I wonder how much the Microsoft Store experience would change by simply removing them.

The Californian & The New Yorker | J. D. Bentley

The Californian & The New Yorker | J. D. Bentley.

I’m greatly dis­ap­pointed that the web allows medi­oc­rity to be so eas­ily dis­trib­uted, but I should not over­look the fact that it also offers this cheap, world­wide dis­tri­b­u­tion to the thought­ful and the tal­ented. If you work hard to learn a craft and even harder to mas­ter it, if you put great thought into what you say and who you want to say it to, then there’s no bet­ter place to be pub­lished than on a web­site you your­self own.

I wish I could give you a full and accurate account of how many days I think to myself that I should stop publishing anything I write online. That, perhaps, it would be better to pour all of these essays into a book and release a new one whenever I felt I had compiled enough of them.
Or that, despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback and kind regards from readers, no one is actually reading or, even worse, that my words are simply scanned and forgotten. Then there is also the fact that so much of my work is in places I don’t really own or control.
Then, I’m reminded of the fact that my work, no matter the quality, has the privilege to be in the same vast library of data as a writer of J.D. Bentley’s caliber. It is then that I can see few better reasons to press “publish”.

Other People’s Must Reads

I recently put a call out to my friends on Twitter asking for links to the smartest writers they ready regularly. I purposefully put no restrictions on the request in order to promote diversity of subjects, styles, and context. What follows is this list.

I have added all that had an RSS feed to my daily reading list. I’m not sure all will remain but there are at least a few real keepers here and feel already the better for having done this.

They are not in any order and are offered with no further comment then what was in the title bar of their site. If you had suggested one that is not here and I somehow missed, please feel free to let me know.

Also, I know this begs the question about what people I would have added to this list. Not to worry, that is forthcoming soon.

Grandmother Clocks

My Grandmother had a funny thing about clocks. When I was growing up, all of the clocks in her house were set a few minutes ahead. Not a specific amount ahead either. They were random increments ahead. Two minutes on one, five minutes on another, etc. Therefore, you were never really sure exactly what time it was. There was a reason for this.
You see, there is a long held, and too often justified, stereotype about African-Americans in this country. That being, that we are always late. In the Black community it’s referred to as “CP Time” — Colored People’s Time. My Grandmother was not the type to ever allow herself to fall into the trap of proving such a stereotype. Thus, the clocks.
But, one may be compelled not to leave the story there but to ask why it was then that all the clocks were set early instead of exactly on time. Good question. I asked the same thing as a kid barely old enough to tell time. Here is what I learned…
She told me that, as a Black person, despite education, despite abilities, despite accomplishments… Despite the sit-ins, strikes, acts of civil and non-civil disobedience… Despite the hard work of all of those who fought and died, those jailed and bailed to be jailed again… Despite all that was done to grant us our “equality” in the eyes of the law… This equality did not exist in the eyes of man.
In fact, simply because of the color of my skin it meant that being as-good-as was not good enough. Because, that very fact made me less so in a real life comparison with someone who was not so colored. Therefore, just to be considered equal, we had to be better. It was not enough to disprove a stereotype by meeting the standard, we had to exceed it. Therefore, it was not enough to be on-time, we had to be early.
Thanks to this, today all of my clocks are just a little bit ahead.
By how much?
I have no idea.

Bespoke

A few years back, while on a business trip, I bought a corduroy sport coat on clearance at a J Crew store in Scottsdale, AZ. I can’t remember the exact price but I remember it being so low that I couldn’t justify not buying it.
It was slightly too big but not so much so that it looked horrible on me. I imagined the slightly oversize fit would be perfect for wearing with a chunky sweater underneath. The ideal business casual outfit for late fall in Minnesota. Not so much for late spring in Arizona. Hence the price, I suspect.
I brought the jacket home and it served me well for a couple of solid years. Especially at first when I was just a tad bit heavier. It was still big but not enough for me to care.
This year, as the first chilly blush of fall came, I put it on and it seemed not quite right. A bit too roomy in too many places. Even more so than the past. I had lost a little weight but not too much. Enough to make a difference though. It did not look bad but it did not look its best. I finally had to care.
It took this realization to spark my mind to the idea that I could take it into a tailor. We have a really great one close by. One who takes tremendous pride in his craft. One who learned the trade through apprenticeship and years of study. One I’ve taken other things to in the past.
I felt sheepishly dumbstruck that this had not occurred to me before. Perhaps it was because I paid so little for it that I felt I had to accept the jacket as it was off-the-rack. Perhaps, in my mind, I thought (correctly as it turned out) the price of having it tailored would far outweigh the price I paid which stopped me from even considering it as an option in the first place. No matter the reason, I’m glad I got past it.
The price to have it tailored to fit me perfectly was still less than I would have paid to buy that same jacket at full retail. Doing so would not only made the jacket look better on me now but allows it to continue to be a mainstay of my wardrobe for many years to come — perhaps even a lifetime. Well worth it. Should have done it right away. And, if I ever need to, um, let it out a bit again I now know I should take it back to my tailor and he will make it perfect for the me yet to come.
I believe there is a place for this is the world of technology. I think there is a need for a Software Tailor. For instance, you have a text editor that works well but could use just a few changes to make it work perfectly for you. You take it to the Software Tailor and they do that for you. Or perhaps you go to one to build the perfect task management app to fit your specific working style. In my mind, many who program are crafts people and I think there is a growing opportunity and need for such a service by people with these skills.
Of course, this would mean we would need to have a culture in place to support this. Those who make such products from the beginning would need to “leave a bit of extra fabric” in their products to allow for such growth (or to take it in a little in the middle). Just like a tailor can tell much about the manufacture of a garment from the threading and seams, and make adjustments accordingly, so too would code have to be clean and well commented. But, once again, if a culture and system to were support this, those that take the software trade seriously would excel from builder and tailor. Those that did not would be revealed and expelled.
Can you imagine a future where, for a price, a key software tool that you rely on can be bespoke? That programming would be a trade craft passed down through apprenticeship and study. That when you want a piece of software to fit you just right, you can take it to someone to make do that?
I can and I wish it so.

Buying Philosophy

When we purchase or use any software, or hardware, or thing, or craft, or product, you are in part giving yourself over to a philosophy. All products have one. Some more obvious than others. Those things we build for ourselves are guided by our own philosophy. Those things built by others are guided by theirs and through our use we accept and adopt these.
The recent controversy and numerous arguments and counter-arguments around Apple’s mute switch is really arguing about philosophy. Apple clearly has a philosophy about the way the hardware and software should treat the mute switch. Basically, mute means mute except in the cases where the user has asked it not to be. When a user asks for an alarm to sound or a video to play, ignore the switch. You don’t have to agree with this philosophy. There are several ways to get around this philosophy (one being to turn the phone off entirely). But, regardless, when you bought that phone part of what you were buying was this philosophy and any others Apple has decided to imbue.
The discussions back and forth about comments being a good or bad thing — philosophy. If you go to a site with comments enabled, the site’s owner is making a philosophical statement about a belief that comments from, and discussion with, others are an essential part of the ideas expressed. By your participation, whether it be reading them or participating by adding your own, you are buying into this philosophy. There are options to opt-out of this philosophy, one being not to visit the site at all. But, make no mistake, there is a philosophy being expressed and you are being given the opportunity to agree with and participate in it.
The solution is simple, if you are not willing to agree to or buy into someone else’s philosophy, learn the skills required to build something that closely matches your own.

My Daily Pens

My Daily Pens from Patrick Rhone on Vimeo.

One of the best things one can say about a pen is that it is pocketable. For a pen that one can easily pocket is a pen that is likely to travel beside you. And a pen that travels is a pen that get used.

These are the pens I carry on me daily: