Coming into focus

Posted on December 30, 2017 by Kim Kishbaugh

It’s Dec. 30, and I’ve just returned from a year-end ritual: my eye exam. My eyes have been dilated, throwing my vision off a bit and making me extra photosensitive. On top of that, I left my glasses behind to get new lenses placed into them.

The result? I can barely read my computer screen as I type. My world is out of focus and could be so for two weeks, until my glasses are returned to me with their new lenses.

I apologize in advance for any typos that might creep in as a result.

That said, focus seems as good a theme as any for the end of a year and start of a new one. Continue reading →

New Year’s resolutions? What’s the point?

Posted on December 16, 2017 by Kim Kishbaugh

Do you make New Year’s resolutions? I’ve never really gone in for them, though it’s possible I might have tried once or twice. To me there’s something almost superficial about pegging the promise of a life change on the occasion of a recurring holiday. It seems trivializing or insubstantial, maybe flighty. I don’t trust myself to commit to keep a promise that I’m making because it’s the time of year to make a promise.

But that’s me, and I wonder if other people have success with their resolutions. I do like the idea of “new year, new start.”

I’ve been reading Jeanette Winterson’s “Christmas Days,” a book of stories and essays and recipes that isn’t only about Christmas, and it has this to say about New Year’s resolutions: Continue reading →

Content to live—with Yeats, with myself

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Kim Kishbaugh

I spent the better portion of last night sitting around a table in a back room of a cafe/bookstore talking poetry with strangers. It was invigorating and enlightening and enjoyable, and a reminder of how important it is to tend my intellectual garden.

Intellectual discovery is an important contributor to emotional wellbeing. When we aren’t discovering new things, learning new things, we can start to feel stagnant, and that can lead to feelings of ennui and unhappiness. But as busy adults—parents, bread-winners, professionals—it’s easy to overlook our own intellectual needs. We might read articles or books related to our work, attend professional conferences, or educate ourselves about the latest best practices in caring for our loved ones, but fail to nurture our real intellectual passions. While we gain valuable knowledge, we don’t engage our emotions in the process—or at least not in the same way as when we just go learn something for the sake of learning it. Continue reading →

May flowers, mindfulness and Mother’s Day

Posted on May 5, 2017 by Kim Kishbaugh

As social media editor for Escape into Life, I’m celebrating an entire month of May flowers on EIL’s Twitter feed. Today, after reading and sharing poetry editor Kathleen Kirk’s spellbinding second installment of a multi-part essay she is writing as she listens to Lincoln in the Bardo on CD (yes, another book now on my must-read list—definitely not what I needed), I was reminded of the lilacs in her first installment – both in her own poem and her link to Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Continue reading →

Sustenance: Puppies and poetry

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Kim Kishbaugh

May is Mental Health Month and a good time to look for new ways to revitalize ourselves. Or just be mindful to make use of the old ways. As good a time as any, is what I really mean; this shouldn’t be a once-a-year special occasion.

Still, we all get caught up in the day-to-day and forget sometimes (many times) to nurture our souls. Continue reading →

Mixing memory with desire: Poetry and public schools

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Kim Kishbaugh

"April is the cruellest month, ..."

Nearly every year on April 1, I re-read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” It’s one of my favorite poems, and while I pay homage to it by quoting and requoting lines from it in conversation year-round, I also like to sit down and read it through periodically. The opening line, quoted above, is of course why I choose April 1 for this pleasure. (Also, April is National Poetry Month, so there’s another reason, though not the one that drives me.)