It wasn't long after I started working in advertising and publishing that I would set at my drawing board or desk and in later years at my computer, daydreaming that I owned a publishing company. I suppose that everyone in every job has that daydream of, "what would I do if I owned a company like this?" I suppose if a huge recession hadn't come along and the company I worked for hadn't seen their best days pass by, I would have kept working for the same publisher and daydreaming while I waited for a picture to scan or a copy of an ad or an article to come out of the laser printer. But times weren't all that great for some newspapers and I took the opportunity to retire early. I really had no plans at all. My daydream was a daydream. Once I thought it might be nice to start a newspaper for civil war re-enactors. An old time paper that looked appropriate for folk dressed up in itchy, wool, civil war uniforms to read around campfires next to their tents while waiting for it to be their turn to "die." The idea didn't last all that long. I'm not a civil war buff and I don't even know any civil war re-enactors. I didn't know much what I was going to do.
But I do have a niece and she had an interest it salt lamps. Salt lamps are supposed to do something with charging the air and keeping it clean. We went looking around for salt lamps and found them in two very different shops. One was a place that gave massages, had yoga classes and also did this "thing" called Reiki. The other shop that had salt lamps also sold books about astrology, tarot, and psychic mediums, they had jewelry with five pointed star emblems hanging on them. They also sold incense and some tiny caldrons in which to burn the incense.
Neither shop knew that the other one existed. They were around three miles apart.
My niece and I decided to meet again a few days later to go back to one of the shops and look at salt lamps again. Now, I must have been pretty bored or lonely or it was just a nice day and I wanted to take a drive. I don't remember. I do remember daydreaming a little while I was driving. What the hell am I going to do for the next forty years?
I got to Cicero, NY and was waiting for a very long stop light to turn green and had my own personal "Aha moment."
I was totally free and could do any damn thing I wanted to. I could be a publisher. I could publish all the different things I always day-dreamt about. I have eclectic taste and I could publish stories, articles, essays,poetry, photographs, artwork. I would not be chained to somebody else's business plan. If I liked it, I could print it.
I sat at that light. Now, really, it wasn't a busy time of day and there wasn't anybody behind me and I may very well have sat there for more than the 90 seconds that would have been one turn of the light. The word "metaphysics" came to mind. It would be a GREAT umbrella for just about anything in the world or the cosmos. Even the study of salt lamps.
By the time I finally did make the left turn down the road. I thought of the names of other newspapers that were still going strong, "The New York Times," "The Chicago-Sun Times," "The London Times," yeah, "The Times,"
"The Metaphsyical Times."
A place for talented people with the work that I found intriguing.
Okay, so that's how it started.
Just a "Day Dream."
It started out as a newspaper. I needed money to print. I needed advertisers. I needed writers. All differnt types of businesses were interested in my umbrella word: "Metaphysics." My friend who threw herself in the ocean on the Jersey shore and rode the waves back to the beach as if she was a piece of driftwood was my first writer. The advertisers were there, Yoga or incense, Reiki, hynotherapy for smoking cessation, psychic fairs an auto dealer who was introducing a hybrid car. They found a place to put their ads. I found a place where I could look at interesting things.
The company has gone through some changes and has grown to be more than a newspaper. In 2011 Sue-Ryn Burn's book, "Hillwoman's Herbal Kitchen Recipes" and Georgia's "Nature Spirits are Vegetarians" the natural transition to book publishing began.
In 2012 David S. Warren joined the company as partner and co-editor, the newspaper took on more of a magazine format, became a digital publication, his novel "Dog's Plot -The Book of William was published. The company expanded the scope of authors, Georgia and Oren Pierce created an oracle deck: "The Skull and the Stone."
We are happy with our transitions and changes and hope to continue to keep growing and adding more to our "biography" in the future.
The Metaphysical Times
is a journal for readers, writers, and artists capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without having to reach after fact and reason; a place for the open minded, the undecided, and the uncertain, for those willing to step outside themselves, away from preconceptions, dogmas, beliefs, and the refuge of smug skepticism or science as religion, into the world of imagination, awe and wonder … into a world beyond |language itself, where we know only
that truth is beauty,
and where that is enough.
Our subject is not another world, not an afterworld, and not a spirit world, but the world of here and now:
our subject is the nature of nature;
our truth is human.
To contact the Metaphysical Times
email: gc@metphysicaltimes.com
or mail:
Metaphyical Times
P.O. Box 64
Aurora, NY 13026