Category: Art

Art, Change, community, Relationships, spirit

Fishing for Plenty

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Before I Die 4

The line between. A light spilling through. The friend dressed in flowers gazes up at a ceiling of filigreed wood. She describes her new love of colored pencils, writing one word across a page over and on top until the word is laced into a web of color. The expression carries her to tears. She folds her sorrow into a page stitched with threads of graphite and pigment and calling.

She can hold the prayer on the tips of her fingers. A weight anchoring her to the dark place breaks free. She lifts toward light. Continue reading “Fishing for Plenty” →

Art, Creativity, Poetry, Writing

Like Riding

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Valenti VeloTykes

How to write a poem
is one thing you thought you’d never forget
but after a while even the wobble escapes you.
Wheels warp, refuse to align.
Months of days passing the place you stashed it
before you notice it’s gone.
Stolen? At first it seems so, a ragged hole
the size of your fist
in the door just below the lock.

Continue reading “Like Riding” →

Art, Creativity

Sometimes The Owls Are Exactly What They Seem: The Banality of David Lynch

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black lodge 2

I loved it. Identified with it. Bought the soundtrack and made copies for all my friends.

Even so, something about it turned me off.

Every few weeks, my fellow freaks and I gathered in a friend’s living room to marathon-watch taped episodes of Twin Peaks on Betamax. We buzzed over Laura Palmer’s diary and even tossed around the idea of dressing up as the show’s characters for Halloween.

When they tapped me to wrap myself in a plastic drop-cloth, I balked.

Because something about it turned me off.

Continue reading “Sometimes The Owls Are Exactly What They Seem: The Banality of David Lynch” →

Art, Creativity, Writing

Dear Blank Page

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gorey-page

My Dear One,

It’s possible to ignore something for so long, it slips from awareness.  This happens even with the things we need to live.  By accident or luck, one of these lost things might tumble across our path.  We trip over it and pause to pick it up.  Oh, you!  I remember you!  We’re stunned that we’ve managed without it, yet skimming back over the time apart, we see, with absolute clarity, how its absence has hobbled us.

Continue reading “Dear Blank Page” →

Art, Determination, Purpose, Writing

Core’s Correction

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ascent-of-the-spirit

We frame resilience. . . as the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.

– Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy in Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back

Having hit all the deadlines for Phase 1, I steered eagerly into Phase 2.  Blocks of writing time for the season ahead peppered my calendar.  Accountability buddies jumped on board.  To celebrate the milestone as well as the momentum, My Mister dipped into the Treat Jar and agreed to host a game night.

Then on the second-to-last day of the first month, my project ran aground.

Continue reading “Core’s Correction” →

Art, Writing

Listen Now

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starry-night

Itzhak Perlman was riding shotgun when the October moon slid out onto the horizon. The soloist’s strokes teased from the slimmest strings the opening notes of Beethoven’s violin concerto.  Other players followed and a rumble rose from deep in the bouts of cello and bass, swelling to a roar and thundering through my ribs, pressing out the tears.  The stoplight was seconds from green so I pressed back.  It took some effort.  It took my breath.

The moon lay herself down in a hammock of treetops and followed us with her sleepy gaze.

Across town, a young writer of mysteries saw her too.  What echoed across the dusk to his ears was Don McLean’s “Vincent,” at least the opening verse.  His song reached in through the passenger side window and wound around the Berlin Philharmonic.  I pulled into a jammed parking lot.  They grabbed their instruments by the neck and careened off together, streaking light across the purple sky.

Continue reading “Listen Now” →

Art, Writing

Write Any Way

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the-girl-in-the-wood

He asks me, “What are you writing?”

Should-be-simple question.  Nevertheless.  WritING and What suggest a singular focus towards an identified goal, and if only.

Of the half dozen projects begun in the past dozen years, I am WritING exactly zero Whats.  To complete that sentence: half dozen projects begun and abandoned because (– excuses dolled up as reasons –) keep damming the river.

The biggest boulders of debris may look like procrastination, may feel like avoidance, may clang like doubt

May choke like syrup even as it caulks the leaks where the hunger seeps through

Continue reading “Write Any Way” →

Art, Creativity, Writing

Draws the Eye

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Paul Heaston Sketch

For the past year at least, I’ve been struggling with writing.  The struggle is against a sense of futility about words that begin in my journal as reflections on my own mind and experiences.  Who cares about my son’s bedtime, the trees leafing out along a bus route, the music the metro escalator makes as it howls and sings along its rusted track?  My words are outdated vehicles for tired ideas, or so my jerk-brain tells me.  I “should” be writing well-researched pieces about student development.  Or finely crafted poetry.  Or even fiction.  But I don’t.  Instead, snapshots of this little corner of the world (and my bumbling interactions with it) fill my journal and eventually make their way into my roughly drafted pieces.

Continue reading “Draws the Eye” →

Art, community, Relationships, Writing

Follow These Where

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Changing Water

#62 of the first 100 blessings is this right here.

This circle of bloggers and readers.

The blessing is you writing in a voice all your own — meditative, manic, academic, vibrant, raw, irreverent, sweet —  and moving your readers to strike their own singular chord.  And you who reads, you who lets the words snake in with your breath, who may even follow one whispering trace to its source. Continue reading “Follow These Where” →