The Spruce Tree Journal
The essence of the spruce tree - resilience, strength, renewal, and peace - is infused in ancient Greek myth and in Native American legends. In its most basic element, the spruce tree represents hope.
The writing within these pages, my personal writing, is a mixture of older pieces taken out of the files and dusted off, new pieces fresh from the keyboard, and some previously published pieces. This is only half the project though.
The other half of this project is you, the reader. Perhaps one of these pieces will resonate with you. Use it to start a conversation with your friends, family, or with me. Take up journaling and share your thoughts. Wherever this project leads us, may it bring resilience, strength, renewal, peace, and of course, hope.
Tim Loftus
It all started almost fifty years ago when for the first time in my life I voluntarily put pen to paper. No forced school assignment, no obligatory thank you note for something I didn’t want for my birthday; just me, a pen, some paper, and an idea. This eleven-year-old me was going to write family stories and personal thoughts in the same lyrical prose style that John-Boy Walton, of the influential TV series The Waltons, did in his journal.
Over the ensuing years I never did capture John-Boy’s style of writing, as his style was never mine to have. Nonetheless, John-Boy’s character helped fuel an unquenchable desire in me from that early age to write, eventually filling volumes of notebooks with family history, descriptions of life’s events, thoughts, travel writing, and personal essays.
During the past several decades, I’ve had a number of gigs as a freelancer writing mostly science and nature pieces for Highlights for Children, Nature Friend (before they went fundamentalist), the local rag, various Mensa newsletters, technical mumbo jumbo for professional newsletters in the water and wastewater field, and for numerous other magazines.
I work as an environmental chemist and live in Central Massachusetts with my rosemary plant. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.