They finished taking down the 100+ year old oak today. Most of it was dead, its brittle limbs threatening roofs and wires and hoop-shooting. If it had grown in the middle of the woods, it would still be standing there, biding its time. But our houses grew around it, and so it was only a matter of time.
This is the year for me to really start paying attention.
Creativity emerges from paying attention. Problem solving requires paying attention. Connections thrive on paying attention.
Until the middle of November, my mother’s fatal dementia, by necessity, was the focus of my attention for the past decade. It feels strange, in a way, not to feel that pull any more — to have no excuse for not paying attention.
Writing well depends upon paying attention.
And so I begin here, tomorrow, participating in a month long project, A River of Stones.
A small stone is a polished moment of paying proper attention, and the challenge of the project is to write a small stone every day.
I will start tomorrow. One small stone. And, stone upon stone, I will try to set a solid path out of the stress and sorrow of the last decade and into a more focused future.
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I was starting to feel guilty about not posting frequently enough on this blog. Then I read what my son wrote on Twitter about his blog:
I write for me, and then stop writing for me. Anyone who reads in the meantime? Cool.
This is my response to Magpie Tales visual prompt #43. Go there to find the responses of other writers.
THRESHOLD
It is here, before the old doorstone
that you stop, listening for life
simmering behind cold panes.
The heat of hearth eases
through mortar cracks,
melting the cold of snow,
but you stand, still, on the threshold,
unsure of the tendering of welcome.
“Where Have All the Liberals Gone?” asks this site and answers that they’ve renamed themselves “progressives” and are doomed.
I still call myself a “liberal,” and, if the televised Rally to Restore Sanity were any indication, there are a lot of concerned people like me out there (“CBS, which hired professional crowd-counters, put the number at 215,000“), despite the efforts of some to write the event off as mere “entertainment.” Every good teacher knows that education works best when it’s “entertaining” — as the MythBusters specifically demonstrated.
Liberals seem more likely to understand how real learning takes place, and even my 8 year old grandson got the message when he commented, as Ozzy and Yusef walked off the stage arm-in-arm: “Finally, they agree on something.”
I wonder how many of us liberals couldn’t make it to the rally but were watching on television. Lots of us, I’ll bet. Even though the event probably wound up teaching to the choir, it nevertheless, through technology, will stay out there in the internets for anyone curious enough and open enough to learn something new.
Meanwhile, we liberals will go out and vote tomorrow. We will teach our kids and grandkids by example and shared experience. Some, like my daughter, home school and share their successes with others. Some, like me, blog. Most of us just live our lives by the values we hold dear: tolerance, equality, free speech, peace, accountability, transparency AND most important, education: learning that takes place every day because we encourage curiosity, creativity, and active participation.
If it turns out that reactionaries win this election, we will still be out here, “teaching” our values in ways that are most effective and meaningful.
The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #21 visual prompt. More responses can be found here.
fabric, paper, twigs, and twine
in fullest moon this spell will bind
shape your fullest heart’s desire
free its truth in earth and fire
The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #19 visual prompt. More responses can be found here.
Sometimes the softest silk,
the smoothest grain,
hide danger, sharp,
compelling beyond trust.
Beware of costly knives
riddled with history.
The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #18 visual prompt. More responses can be found here.
We called him Uncle Albert before he was the king. He was a sweet, shy man, you know. Stuttered a bit in stressful circumstances and always deferred to his more dashing brother, who was supposed to be king but gave it all up for love.
I remember sitting at a corner table with the rest of the kids in the family during his coronation celebration. It was quite an pompous affair, and poor Uncle Albert looked so uncomfortable. I thought he was going to vomit right then and there. No one paid much attention to us kids, so I swiped one of the commemorative pottery pieces from our table just to see if I could get away with it.
It’s been in the family since, and my granddaughter has it now. Keeps sharpened pencils in it.
She asked once if my Uncle Albert was the one the Beatles sang about. I think my Uncle Albert would would get a big kick out of that. And the pencil holder, too.
I’m a writer. I’m a writer. That’s what I am. I’m also a cutter and sewer and looper. I want to do it all. I’ve always wanted to do it all.
So I’m writing. Mapgie Tales for one (a new one in the works). Entered an essay contest about death for another.
Pinned on my wall are pieces of what eventually will be a wall hanging for an online craft exhibit.
Maybe it’s because I started in therapy again, and that always gets my juices going.
Or maybe it’s because I’m cutting down on my anti-depressant.
Or maybe I’m getting manic in my old age.
Or maybe I’m avoiding thinking too much about the awful state my mother is in.
Or maybe all of the above.
So much to create. So little time.
The following is a piece I wrote in response to this Magpie Tales #17 visual prompt of a female head. Go here to find other writers’ responses.
She was my sister before she was Lot’s wife – Irit, my older sister, who was special to the goddess, although that was a fact only known to the women of Soddom. For it was the men who ruled our town, our lives, our destiny, burrowing into the soils along the edges of the town, along the shores of the salty Dead Sea, bringing up the dark thick substance that held together our walls and our dead. “Mumiya” it was called. You call it “asphalt.” Sometimes a man would fall into a firey pit and drown in it. He would become mummified – forever preserved in a column of stone.
Irit was a good wife, and Lot was one of the better husbands, although that is not saying much, given the place that the new god of men designated for women. That is why many of us kept to the old ways in secret, gathering over our shared cauldrons of stew, rich with the yieldings of the fertile lands we also shared beyond the smokey shoreline. We would give our thanks to the Mother of All, ask for her blessings and prophecies, look to her priestess for guidance.
And that is how Irit came to be caught in the fires finally sparked by the greed of some of our men. She had a vision, Irit did – a vision of the earth quaking and burning, a vision of a darkness billowing out from the underworld. And she told her husband, who was one of the better husbands, who respected the wisdom of women and their ways, and often took his wife’s counsel. But when Lot tried to warn his fellow townsmen to watch for signs, they would not listen, for it was not their god who spoke, and they coveted their riches.
And so when the earth began to tremble and red fires erupted along the shoreline, when the land began to melt and fold in on itself and stony shards shot up into the air, Lot and and his wife, Irit, gathered their family and began to flee north to the olive groves — until Irit heard the screams of a townswoman whose husband held her down on the ground so that she could not run. And so Lot’s wife turned to help her friend.
“No!” I cried to my sister. “No!” cried Lot to his wife.
“No!” cried Lot’s wife as a great dark wave erupted from the earth, engulfing her and leaving her hardened form to withstand the next rain of sulphur-spewn stones.
And that’s when her head broke off and rolled toward me down the slope, landing with her face looking into mine and still calling “No!”
I carried her hardened image with me through all of our long journeys north to the land of Hatti, where I finally settled with a band of women who called themselves “ha-mazan.”
We kept the mummified head of Lot’s wife, Irit, on the altar where we sought the guidance of the Great Mother, whom we all knew by different names – Ishtar, Astarte, Innana, Lilitu — to remind us of Irit’s last word.
I don’t know what happened to Lot and his children. But I do know that what everyone thinks happened in Soddom is not the story I know about Lot’s wife.
[writer’s note: details about Bronze Age towns along the Dead Sea gotten from here.]
The book, which contains free verse and reprints of prayers and bits of prose, features lots of Corita’s collage art, which contains lots of cut-up words from ads and headlines, sometimes reconfigured, sometimes not.
The description above is from a post on the site from which I won the book — Killing the Buddha. It’s a site that I find always stimulating.
I never win anything. I mean it. I think that this is the first thing I every won. Well, I came in second in a Swing Dance contest once. Even got a trophy. Usually I don’t even make an effort to enter any kind of contest. Never play the lottery. Because I never win anything.
But this time I did. And I did because I remember the 60s. I didn’t remember Sister Corita, who created the book, published in 1967. But I did remember the Berrigan Brothers, and I remembered that Daniel Berrigan was a Jesuit.
I recently read online somewhere (can’t find it again) that the story was that Daniel Berrigan kept a photo of Sister Corita in his shower with a note that said “no one should shower alone.”
Thinking of Berrigan, I am remembering another activist ex-priest who was a good friend at one point in my life. He has grown immensely as an artist in those past 25 years, although he was good even back then. His paintings, as he is, are larger than life. I just love his new stuff.
I have been fortunate in my life to have had some closeness with some truly unique men, who have inspired me and moved on and left me with the kinds of memories that will keep me smiling someday as I retire to a rocking chair in the sun.
(And I’ve been just as fortunate to continue to have a group of close women friends whose constancy and candor, humor and heart, help to keep me smiling — well, most of the time.)
So, now I wait for my prize, a book by a creative woman, to arrive.
It’s a good day.