The beginning...

This blog is something I've been interested in doing for a while and I am ridiculously nervous to sit down and write my first entry. What's my intention? Why Thirteen Ways? What is going to happen here?

I'll start with Thirteen Ways; it's from the title of Wallace Stevens' poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird , which is one of the first poems I ever loved. One aspect of the poem that is important to me and that I hope to generally convey here is that a blackbird can look like and mean and be many things. So can a poem. So can a life event. So can a person. So can mental health.

I hope this blog will be a vehicle to share, briefly, my own thoughts about - for lack of better words - "mental health," to sift through a little bit of media that I've found meaningful and that makes comment on the human condition. I'd like to encourage dialogue about the aspects of life that hold particular interest for me - creativity, compassion, working for peace, and spirituality.

In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki the prologue states, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." So, let that be about all I'll say. This writing project is full of possibilities and I hope you enjoy the journey with me.

To finish up this entry, I'd like to make a book recommendation: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman . It's a young adult book that won the Newberry Award in the past couple of years. It was given to my son as a Halloween gift and luckily I took a close look at it and realized it was too scary for a first grader, but just right for me. I love the hero's journey and this book adds to that tradition, creating a world that is full of magic, fear, kindness, courage. Hope you like it.