Mental Restorations Foundation

This is a rare post unrelated to writing. Rather, it is a personal appeal:

We are all experiencing stress in this time of COVID, but the people charged with helping us, and protecting us - our veterans, first responders, health care professionals, and others – are now coping with truly harrowing circumstances. The suicide rate and the rate of mental crisis in these professions has risen to staggering proportions.

But there are now people in our communities rising to the occasion to help.

One such organization is being formed here on the Island of Hawaii. It’s called Mental Restorations Foundation, and it was founded recently by Micah Gauthier. Mental Restorations Foundation provides community and peer-support for those in crisis, through shared outdoor activities. These activities will include deep sea fishing, scuba diving, farming and more - as well as a supportive community of friends who can connect in person, and on the web, for both social interaction and peer-counseling.

Outdoor exercise and group interaction are among the most essential factors for the preservation of mental health. Other factors are a sense of purpose, a sense of being appreciated, and of having a recognized place in the community. MRF hopes to provide all these things where they are needed most, regardless of the individual’s economic circumstances. Will you help by becoming a member today?

Sincerely,
Brent Hightower
Mental Restorations Foundation

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/308092300087980/
Website: https://mentalrestorations.com/
Blog: https://mentalrestorations.com/
Phone: 1(808) 315-5594

A Note on Reactivating this Blog

Having concluded to reactivate this blog, I thought I'd say a few words about the reason for it's existence. The computer age is changing writing in ways none of us yet fully understand; so writers are in the position that they must reinvent the wheel. When I started this blog I intended it to be a place for myself, and other writers, to publish ther work; but it evolved into a place where I create, and also get work before the public.

Most of the writing I'm publishing here is in one stage or another of creation. Very little of it is finished work, and this seems to me to be a strange way of approaching writing.

How, or why, I ended up with this format I don't know. It simply seemed the best way to stay engaged with the work, while connecting to the energy inherent in reaching an audience, that my writing had a dynamic purpose.

The work you're reading here is work in progress. I realize that that has drawbacks, but I believe it compensates for those drawbacks with energy, the dinamism of active creativity.

Brent

Repairing the Ship

Life is a wave, at sea;
It takes you places.
And you have to let go,
Believing, at your core
That it will take you
Where you must go.

To hope is not enough,
Nor even to dream.
We must allow ourselves
To be the water;
We must allow ourselves
To be the sea.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2020 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

This Gentle Wind

From when comes this eco, this signal of the past?
From these tapered rooms, with their quiet sorrows?
Or from the long drawn out, half-smiles
Of our ancestral hosts, mad in the halfcocked night?

You who judge me, who judge such wreakage,
How has your bright heart been butchered?
When has the gentle wind of such a night,
Breathed so sadly into your quiet rooms?

Brent Hightower
Copyright Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

This Time We Truly are "All In"

I was on the verge of closing this blog, but a sudden, major increase in hits has made me decide it might be worthwhile to retain it, rather than start afresh on another site. I'll have to see if I can actually work with the new format here on blogger, which seems far worse than the old one. So, in spite of the personal battering, the losses, the disillusionment, the berievement of recent times, here we go:


To those of you who've sat on the sidelines in previous elections – who’ve taken the benefits of democracy for granted -- yes you! I see you there, sitting in the corner!

Thus far you’ve avoided participation without having to feel any deep, personal regrets. Well, that won’t happen in this election, because this election is nothing less than a referendum on civilization itself.

If Trump wins, or if we allow him to be "installed," America will never be the same again. The liberty Americans take for granted is being challenged by this self-avowed would-be dictator and his cohorts, and those who sit out this election may very well be consigning their children to slavery.

Western civilization was founded upon the principles of the enlightenment, including a belief in the inalienable rights of mankind. These principles have been chipped away at incrementally, but doggedly, in America for forty years and their very survival is now at stake.

There is no law of nature that says we cannot be killed by civil strife, or enslaved by despots. Only a set of mutually accepted founding ideas have saved us from that fate, and have done so for well over two hundred years.

Perhaps we need to be reminded, after all these years of greater or lesser degrees of democracy, that dictatorship is a nightmare. I hope we won't be reminded the hard way.

The Enlightenment brought us out of the Dark Ages, and the decline we are presently seeing in America isn’t due to following those enlightened principals, but to our slow abandonment of them; and we already see the looming specter of those infamous scourges of darker times - famine, pestilence, and war.

We have seen the outline of their thinking, and it is nothing but the reestablishment of that ancient axis of oppression this nation was founded to oppose – that of dictatorial power, coercive religion and economic enslavement! Anyone who would chose such a path through the mere fault of being too apathetic to vote is inwardly a slave and will, no doubt, soon outwardly be one as well.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2020 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Au Revoir, For Now

It's quite clear to me that the way Google has "fixed" blogger, their intention is to do away with the feature altogether. That would be typical corporate methodology, to attract people with "people friendly" services and then slowly do away with them!

I'm not certain now whether I'll create a new blog on Wordpress, or just devote myself to other work. I guess time will tell.

Thank you all very much for reading the hundreds of posts here, some of which later found there way into my books. It's been a pleasure.

Brent

Mental Restorations

Let’s get real: I’m sitting in my apartment on a beautiful day in Hilo. It’s sunny and there’s a fall chill in there air here on the ocean. I wanted to go out, but my auto-immune disease is acting up again, so I have to treat my skin, which is laborious, and depressing.

This damned illness has diminished my life for 15 years, and along with a minor heart attack, bleeding ulcers, sleep apnea, chronic sinusitis major depression, osteoporosis from taking prednisone, and other conditions, left me unable to work.

This host of problems is common with auto immune illnesses. They can’t be cured, are still little understood, and in my case only somewhat treatable. Maybe the worst of it is, I don’t appear that sick so I’m afraid people think I’m goldbricking, as I’ve had to bow out of life and retreat to this goddamned room.

From poverty and boredom, I started writing fiction on those days I was well enough and that’s helped - at least with sense of purpose - but it’s made no money at all after publishing costs, and it hasn’t gotten me out and engaged with life.

With the death of my wife, Lauren, on the 31st of July, I reached an impasse. I had to face the decision of whether to live or die, of whether there remains anything worth living for.

Yesterday, I went with a new friend, Micha, to take some needed items to a veteran living down in Kalapana, and when I got home, I came to a banal sort of epiphany. That is that I had to make the decision to live or die and get on with it.

Because I have a daughter I love very much, and my wife wanted me to live in order to be there for her, I made the decision to live; though my spirit would prefer to be where Lauren is, and I feel crushed and disoriented without her.

I don’t mean to imply that it was an easy decision, or to make light of the struggle with life! Not mine or anyone else’s. I know full well how hard it is to go on when faced with certain aspects of reality, and how the inevitability of our own mortality can cast everything in a futile light.

In my opinion those who condemn others for suicide need to walk in that other person’s shoes, and that isn’t possible. Yet I know that for myself, refusing to face the decision would be worse than either choice. Life would become nothing but ongoing anxiety and depression.

So. I’ve decided to live and to get involved (to the degree that I'm able) with the non-profit Micha is founding, called Mental Restorations.

The aim of this nonprofit is to restore boats and create a farm, so that veterans and first responders (as well as others in crisis) can have an opportunity to fish, scuba dive, garden, get away from the routine of their lives, and restore some sanity and optimism. Of equal importance, the goal is to provide a platform for peer-counseling among the community of those involved.

I can think of no more worthy aspiration.

So from creative writing, I’m going to change my focus for awhile to grant writing, peer-counseling, and whatever else I find that I can do to help this venture get off the ground. I’ve done this kind of thing before. In the early 90s my wife and I spent 7 years reviving a food coop in Marquette Michigan that was closing and put it on a sound financial footing. The last I heard it had 8,000 members, 80 employees, and was doing about 13 million in sales annually.

So here we go! It seems I was destined for poverty and these utopian adventures! Well, it may not empower my life, at least financially, but it beats brooding, alcoholism, or suicide! So here’s to the next quixotic adventure!

Brent Hightower

The Heir Apparent

With The Heir Apparent, I've completed the five books I've been working on since 1999. They are all available on Amazon, and digital versions sell for $2.99, on Amazon Kindle. I'm also running a brief promotion on some of the ebooks. These will be listed briefly at $0.99.

For various reasons then I'm now going to take a break from writing. How long, I don't know. Much depends on the level of interest in these finished works. I will keep this blog and my Amazon writer's page active, until I have some clear vision of what comes next in life.

I think that with 27,000 hits Riding on the Storm has been a success for a blog of this type.
Thank you all for making it so,

Brent

The Future

I don’t know at the moment how much I’ll be contributing to this blog in the future. One reason is that if Biden loses the upcoming election, I won’t see a point in contributing essays, or social commentary, anymore. When I was young there were a lot of us who thought we could change the world for the better. Now the question is whether we can hang on to some sort of recognizable civilization at all. If Trump wins we are done for, and there will be no reason to chronicle the inevitable decline and fall.

A storm of feeling is coming over me these days. I’m struggling to comprehend those feelings and get honest with them, in order to put them down. That’s always the difficult thing about writing, but at the moment it’s more so, through the sheer intensity of them all.

I am going through one of those moments that are life changing. My beloved wife died not two months ago, and right now, today, I’m completing the last of five books I’ve been working on for twenty years. The sign posts could not be more obvious.

Not only do I not know if I’ll be contributing to this blog in the future, I don’t know if I even have a future. The loss of Lauren is devastating, and I’ve put my remaining strength into these books, while writing, as an occupation, seems to now belong to a handful of corporate owned products, like Michael Creighton, and Danielle Steele.

Meanwhile, I struggle with a serious auto immune disease and other health problems, planetary extinction is off the charts, the ecosystem nears collapse. The world I’ve known and cared about seems to be dying. Whether there is a purpose for me in it, I don’t yet know.

Thanks,

Brent

My collection of poems, published digitally on Kindle

I published my collection of poems today, digitally, through Amazon Kindle. I don't particularly like publishing poems digitally, because I care about the whole esthetic experience of reading poetry. Yet it seems people read more books digitally now, because the price is right. In this case just $2.99. They should be available on Amazon within a few days. I can't link to Amazon here, so please go to Amazon.com and enter "Brent Hightower." These are not your grandmother's poems. If you don't want to read work that comes from the current world they may not be for you.

Thanks.

P.S. Along with my poems I finally managed to reedit my novel, Ode To Belladonna, which I now feel as proud of as The Broken World. Mali Dahl also helped me tremendously by reediting my collection of essays, Inner Demons. Both are also available on Amazon. My new novel, The Heir Apparent, will be coming out this autumn.