Dangerous Intimacies

<p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Author James (Jim) Ralston</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Inspired by Thoreau's </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Walden</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> especially by the second chapter Where I Lived and What I Lived For I live in the country on three and a half acres between Rocky Gap and Evitts Creeks eight miles outside of Cumberland Maryland.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Across Rocky Gap Creek is the rarely used but nicely kept up Union Grove Campgrounds and equally rarely used outdoor pavilion/church as if they're extensions of both my front yard and spiritual life. Many mornings I sit in the pavilion alone meditating contemplating writing in my journal. Above the sanctuary a sign reads YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN and Thoreau and I couldn't agree more. We don't see it as an order from above rather as something necessary.</span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Three houses up the creek from my small home is a one-room schoolhouse like the one in Michigan where my Grandma Nora used to teach. I never walk by it without remembering her and Aunt Emma who generously shared their small house with me in 1961 so I could afford my first year of Alma College a Christian college where I lost my little boy faith I now know in retrospect to give myself room for something bigger thanks Grandma Aunt Emma and Alma. </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>What I have lived </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>for</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is harder to condense but can be found in my publications which include </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Choice of Emptiness</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> a collection of essays and reflections that also reads as a novel; numerous essays and poems published in </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Sun: a Magazine of Ideas</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> over a span 35 years; and fifteen years of columns published between 1990 and 2005 in the Charleston </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Gazette</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> and in this book of poems and an earlier one </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Lyrics for a Low Noon</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> both published by Blue Light Press out of San Francisco. </span></p><p class=ql-align-justify><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Along the way I also directed many plays in several theatres but primarily in the Apollo Theater in Martinsburg West Virginia. Several of the plays I wrote myself including Many Mansions The Lone Star League and Divine Madness.  </span></p><p></p>