I melt with the sun
butter in a warm blue pan
the world spins, molten
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I drift to this place
where water turns to vapor
where the cold night melts -
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately, as I work (very messily, but steadily) toward deepening my writing practice and working past fears that keep me from bursting into full flower. Things that help me are daily morning pages and evening 11-minute fast writes, lots of long walks in any weather, taking photos, yoga, eating well, sleeping well–but it’s hard to be such a consistently good friend to yourself. Hard to find the hours in the day to create those “ideal conditions” with the pressures of life. Hard not to beat yourself up for falling short.
Still: most people don’t have ideal conditions. And some people bloom anyway. Amazingly. Like tulips in February, blooming inside instead of outdoors in May, under “ideal” circumstances. So can you. So can I.
Imagine if you could be your own biggest cheerleader instead of your own harshest critic?
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Steam
On the surface, all so calm;
moon rising, breeze unspooling
winter after-dinner walk
belly full, heart content yet
beneath: dreams simmer in wait
deep, boiling, unseen, building
escaping, lost, to the night.
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I’m pleased as punch to have had two stories published this month, and so am taking this moment to celebrate. As any writers out there know, the rejections outnumber the acceptances by a ratio I’d rather not think about. (Plus, I’m not good at math, anyway).
So—check them out some cold winter night (or warm summer night, to my friends in the Southern Hemisphere).
Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, Winter 2016 • December 24/Unsent (fiction)
Runner-up in Short Fiction Contest, Theme “The Heart of Winter”
http://kaaterskillbasinjournal.com/issues/Turk’s Head Review, January 2016 • Sea Change (flash fiction)
http://turksheadreview.tumblr.com/post/136387739109/sea-change -
Eyes open, heart open
Love more, fear less
Listen deeply, speak bravely -
Louisiana Acadian Flag On the day after Christmas, I wandered the French Quarter. Jazz and street performers and strollers and couples carrying beer down the narrow lanes. Christmas decorations and humidity and 80-degree heat. People from all over the country and all over the world, converging on a slice of NOLA like ants on bit of powdery-sugary beignet. As tourists, we needed to see this bit of New Orleans. The place people go to celebrate and revel and buy things. To gather.
Sitting in a cafe, with my daughter, eating a beignet and sipping a latte, I thought about a bit of history I read in New Orleans (Wildsam Field Guides).
From “Le Code Noir” 1714:
XIII: We forbid slaves belonging to different masters to gather in crowds either by day or night, under the pretext of a wedding, or for any other cause…under penalty of corporal punishment, which shall not be less than the whip. In the case of frequent offenses of the kind, the offenders shall be branded with the mark of the fleur-de-lis.Now, of course, the fleur-de-lis has other meanings, too–of NOLA’s comeback after Katrina. Of strength in the worst times.
It symbolizes the lily, and French royalty.
And I always just thought it pretty—symbolizing light, and life, and perfection. Like Jean d’arc. And lilies. I do love lilies.
How you view history, and reality, depends on seeing past what you want to see. Point of view, I’ve learned from writing fiction, is critical.
Like the carefully made-up, carefully preserved older white lady who squeezed past our table at the café and remarked, with (somehow) a bright smile and a simultaneous expression of repressed distaste, “My! Such a…diverse crowd!”
Perhaps if she only wants to look in a mirror, she might just stay at home. I say that as a recovering mirror-gazer. I think I’ll try, hard as I can, to wonder as I wander, so I might just begin to see past the fiction in the history I was taught.
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Think big thoughts
Relish small pleasures–H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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So many foggy mornings this December.
Fog always makes me think about how things are not always as they seem. How things that were clear just hours before can become fuzzy overnight, and also how truths that seem distant and unformed can become clear as the fog burns away in the bright glow of awareness.
And sometimes, I just look at the fog, and think how beautiful and unexpected the world is.
Focusing on the beauty of ordinary things gives me hope. -
November 14, 2015 Pining.
Wondering: where is home? What is home?Home is where you are safe. Home is the warm place.
Home is where you do not feel afraid.
(Maybe home can be anywhere?)Maybe home is the feeling of your baby falling asleep heavy in your arms,
or the feeling implanted into your consciousness
when you hiccuped in your mother’s womb, and she laughed
and then started talking to you, words a rumble of unintelligible love filtered through amniotic fluid.The world is an overwhelming place. Bad things happen. Evil things.
(Maybe home is nowhere? There are many without a home. Maybe there is no home?)No. Home exists. I’ve felt it.
Home is where love happens, any place you can unclench your jaw, relax, be unguarded.
Home is a friend cooking beans, home is a cup of lemon tea, a hug.
A place to seek hope, a place to dream, a place to find courage, a place to build strength.Home is the rustle of wind in the drying, dying leaves during a silent walk.
Home is in the wide-open smile of the guy at the car wash
and the have-a-good-one from the tired cashier at Kroger.
Home is the smell of sweet potatoes roasting in a hot oven.
Home is having an oven, and a sweet potato, and a knife.
(Maybe home is a story we tell ourselves, so we don’t give up?)Because the world is an overwhelming place, and bad things happen.
Every single day, somewhere. Bad.
Every single minute. Evil.
Things beyond fixing.
Things you cannot fix.
Things you have to try to help fix, anyway. Somehow.
(In the right sort of home, courage is born, change is born, hope is born?)I want to find a home like that. Make one. Somehow.
Maybe home comes and goes, waxes and wanes
like the sliver of moon shining over the parking lot
brighter than anything else in the vast sky above?Loading groceries into my car, I suddenly remember how it felt to be pregnant.
I was a home, then, walking.We all begin in such a home.
Maybe home is where hope hiccups, somewhere deep within,
waiting for us to laugh again?
eeo 