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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The Calm After


The whispers of vacation recede
remembered only in the near-silent poetry of dogs
dancing through the house on furry-slippered feet.

Frost weeps from the eaves and the trees wake
from icicle-like slumber,
one sun-filled drip at a time.

Words flow through the quiet,
tentative at first but soon humming with energy;
the vigor of creativity and re-creation.

Revisited.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

The Calm Before



The whispers of vacation have receded
remembered only in the near-silent poetry of
dogs dancing through the house on furry-slippered feet.

Frost weeps from the eaves
and the trees wake from icicle-like slumber,
one sun-filled drip at a time.

Words flow through the quiet,
tentative at first but soon humming with energy.
The vigor of creativity and re creation.

Revisited.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Spring Awakening

Author Beth Kephart has a fantastic blog, which I love to start my day reading.
Beth's spirit and her unique, lyrical voice shine through in her blog posts.
They remind me of the window I'm looking through as I write this, an old window, my office window, stained with thirty years of hard water and grime, and fogged up right now with cold and rain.

Beth's insights and musings offer me a different perspective, a clearer one sometimes, even if similar to my own. I'm awed by the simple beauty of the way she uses language to convey her thoughts.
Her words are the unfogged corner of my window, the small part that affords me an unblurred glimpse outside.

I sat down this morning and paged backward to the last post I'd read and found it was March 3.
The week before we moved.
Sounds about right.

Life has been blurred by chaos recently, but today, through the rain and cloud, I catch glimpses of spring through the unfogged corner.
Birds on the feeders.
A rose in bloom.
Secret passions springing awake underground. Turning fresh faces to the rain. Coming back to life.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Starting Over and Going Back

Right now I have the worst haircut of my life. (And I've had some regrettable 'do's, especially during the 80s) Perhaps I'll search out photographic evidence...

My daughter has taken to calling me "boofy", an unfortunate moniker from that aforementioned decade. It's embarrassing.

I keep toying with the idea of returning to the stylist who committed this crime and seeing if she can fix it. But I'm afraid she'll make it worse. If that is even possible.

I wish I had the balls to shave my head and start over. Clean. Bare. All the flaws of my skull out there for the world to see. Because I believe the new growth would be beautiful. Lush. Thick. Wondrous. Like a forest where all the tangled undergrowth has been burned off.

But it's cold, even here in California. And I don't have the stamina or the courage to start a new head of hair at almost 43.

So going bald becomes the metaphor for another kind of starting over, in both my writing life and my non writing life. I sense some of the changes will be huge, others barely perceptible. Yet sometimes the biggest changes we make seem insignificant to others, and the smallest steps appear to outsiders like a moonwalk.

Already I have tackled a technology I've avoided for several years, not blogging, though through my shell it hasn't ever been easy. No, I ventured into geekdom and forwarded my domain so that when people go to my website, for now, this blog is what they'll see.

And me. With my bald head. And my bared heart. Flawed and fearless.