Living out in the country and spending a significant portion of one’s time outside, as I know you also do, certainly helps put things in perspective, doesn’t it?

Interesting. I hadn’t really focused on that, but now that you mention it I can certainly think of examples, and can see how it could be detrimental, though in general I guess it’s a question of “skillful means,” as the Buddhists would say (since so many haijin seem to be Buddhist): knowing when kindness and encouragement are needed, but being able to offer a good critique if one knows the poet can take it in the spirit in which it’s meant. Since so much communication is necessarily online, though, the absence of a Levinasian face-to-face encounter makes real critique a bit challenging, in my experience.

I hear that. Various roads not taken do present themselves to one’s imagination at this stage of one’s life. I have to remind myself from time to time that I have been in fact, as you say, inordinately lucky, all things considered.

Yeah, my parents were the primary role models for my iconoclasm, too, I think – both my mom in determining to have a career as a naturalist writer despite being a nearly full-time homemaker, and my dad for resisting the pressure to advance as an academic reference librarian, instead doing the whole back-to-the-land thing and getting involved in international librarianship issues, leading eventually to a second career as an independent peace scholar after taking early retirement from Penn State. I realize how lucky I am to have been raised by two such people, who encouraged each of us kids to pursue whatever weird interests we might have over whatever society deemed important. They were counter-cultural in the best sense of the word, and encouraged us to think for ourselves. So my older brother becomes a philologist of the first order, learning dozens of languages and making a huge contribution (in my opinion) to the extremely unfashionable science of epigraphy with his efforts to decipher the Indus Valley Script, and my younger brother becomes a geographer authoring widely cited books and papers on biogeography and ethno-ornithology, especially his work on cycads and Australian fire-hawks. I’m the normal one, LOL.

Looking forward to your post!

I got the impression that the British university system isn’t in crisis, either, but I might be wrong about that. Certainly they are farther along in the process of destroying the middle class.