Dangerous Intimacies

Author, James (Jim) RalstonInspired by Thoreau’s Walden, 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.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.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. What I have lived for is harder to condense, but can be found in my publications, which include The Choice of Emptiness, a collection of essays and reflections that also reads as a novel; numerous essays and poems published in The Sun: a Magazine of Ideas over a span 35 years; and fifteen years of columns published between 1990 and 2005 in the Charleston Gazette, and in this book of poems, and an earlier one, Lyrics for a Low Noon, both published by Blue Light Press out of San Francisco. 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.”