It’s Valentine’s Day this week, but I have never seen much point to it other than having an excuse to eat more chocolate until this year. I’ve had number of long time dreams coming into alignment in my life at last and I found myself full of grateful love for the many people who have …
How to Turn to Childhood for Inspiration
Thoughts on the Future, Looking to the Past The value of childhood lies not in the experiences the child hastily wishes themselves out of but in the years later, as the child stands with eyes toward the future and a grateful heart cast to the past. Long ago, if we pull back the vine of …
Visit London: Learning London City With Lists and Food
Learning London City Day One Breakfast, tentative, tiptoing into a corner of the chatting room. I toasted bread, find peanut butter and quirk a first smile. I will spend the next two years oscillating between amusement and exasperation that the British understanding of peanut butter is full of sugar and very little of peanuts. But …
Hello, Friend, Farewell: A Poem for the Solace of Nature
Hello, friends! Unlike with the Doors of Moria, when the Fellowship in the The Lord of the Rings seek to enter the mines, there is no secret pass code for finding peace, happiness, love, any of those things. However, I find all those emotions exist at once, in your grasp, if you step out your …
Visit London: Transform Dreams into Lived Stories
Visit London: An Introduction I lived in London for two years and I have endless stories from the experience. I’m in the process of organising years of descriptive emails into a series of travel memoirs. Before all that gets settled, I’d like to let you all into some of my experiences as I continue my …
Poem: Listen to the Walls Where Stories Talk
Listen to the Walls Where Stories Talk Sunlight whispers in eaves, hugged by leaves. Wrapped in green. Skylarks whistle to their Juliets. Who walk with eyes turned high, upon the blue sky. In this place, stars echo and stay in cotton shapes on blue paint. They swirl down the wave of tree top hands. Sunlight …
As the Morning Rises We Reflect upon Summer: A Poem for the Seasons
Summer Reflections
Summer
mornings rise
deep from a
pile of pillows.
The sun
blinks awake over fields of cherry trees
which
travel up waves of grass to mountain tops.
We shout
to clouds, our echoes dance with tumbleweeds.
On and up
til sky meets lake, meets blue mountains beyond.
Summer
twilight’s fill with firefly secrets
whispered
between the sparks of bonfire
catching
the stars. As we dive among them,
reflected
over black lakes. We float.
Counting
constellations and comet showers.
Maybe
we’ll catch the chasse-galerie tonight.
Summer
days taste of ripe peaches and sawdust.
New
projects began while lettuce leaves reach out.
We hike
with necks stretched, never quite spying the tops
of trees
while the bees buzz among our potluck below.
Summer lives in the music of stories remembered
for long
winter’s nights. To keep the future warm.
To make
hope, old, now newborn.
With
hands grasped, together we make dreams.
Hello, I Will Be Your Friend: A Poem Celebrating All the Best Relationships
Friendship It sits on the edge of your driveway A cardboard box covered in felt tip scribbles. And duct tape. Waiting for removal by Wednesday recycling. Even friendship exists on a social calendar. Made of institutionalised emotions. In blue and yellow. Unicorns who rampage and riddle a forest. They kicked the box down first. The …
Leftovers: A Memory Mused
I lost Life. Possibly down the side
between clock and computer.
Occupied scrolling photos,
making love to memories.
As if they made stretched
cirriform clouds.
That made overhead
personalized flurries.
Complete with lightning.
Ripe for paparazzi.
Nimbus clouds, too.
Whirling with baby snuffles
Rhyming to a mobile
Trilling Chopin.
Because babies need education.
In the Art of Angst.
I think Life might have dropped down the toilet.
Last week I lost my toothbrush.
My reflections fault.
I lost count of my pores. How many pixels
before I resemble sand?
I make up a tossed salad
Of halogen lightbulb dust.
A teaspoon of room temperature milk.
My body overheats to the taste
Of blue cheese electronics.
Blend and repeat.
Tie up the ribbons.
Dance with your childhood before
the grave drops life down the roots of a flower.
Character Study: Alice Alexandria Andrews of Kettle Universe Fame
When Stormy Kettle First Met Alice Alexandria in a Laundry Machine War (a chapter excerpt)
Students are, as I am well acquainted, (being one myself), masters at saving pennies in every possible manner and almost all students come with an annoyance toward anyone who deigns to waste whatever they are personally in a curious habit of saving.
Have you ever seen someone reuse yogurt containers, collect recycled paper for their note taking, or store ten different hair elastics safely on an arm? A girl I sat next to in one class always had the habit of arriving fifteen minutes early, so as to give her full range of the classroom, undisturbed by her fellow peers, to forage for all the manner of leftover pencils, pens and erasers. It caused her as much distress as it would an animal lover hearing of a cat abused, to see a pen missing its cap, lying forgotten between the corner desks of the back two rows.
Once she proudly showed me three yellow 2HB pencils, unmarred and unsharpened, which she had discovered earlier that morning. Before adopting them as her own however, she made sure to ask our class, when the room had filled with its learned occupants. Did these golden devices belong to anyone? Getting no reply, she kept them, and to this day she worships the sight of them in her pencil case.
You can always tell a student from any other individual by the way they stare down the spoons dishing into the cranberry sauce over a Thanksgiving dinner or the run-away peas which lay forgotten under a sumptuously endowed slice of turkey. Their hands itch towards their own silverware, bursting with the desire not let those peas be forgotten, or to lap up the last liquid dredges of cranberry sauce pooling by the mashed potatoes on their neighbour’s plate.
I for one conform to this mode of annoyance on quite a regular basis. Have you ever watched someone eat your most cherished cooking and then leave a field of crumbs and islands of choice bits they chose not to rescue with their utensils? As my mother always said, it showed no humane gratitude to leave enough food on a plate that could feed a whole family in Africa. That said; I do my utmost to clean my plate within range of propriety. I carefully strategize which portion will leave the most crumbs and which substance is a good mop. Only then will I begin to make inroads into my treasure box of provisions.
Currently my treasure box makes a motley crew of garden tools behind the brick storehouse of the backyard. Tomorrow my treasure box will make a modest marvel of pocelain dog statues from Avon. Yesterday was a treasure box of leftover toiletries from my massage-therapist housemate.
Alice Alexandria counted socks. She believed you could never have enough, and the infernal washing machine down the hall was not to be trusted. The most important rule of life, she always told me, came down to have a superior brace of matching socks. After each load of laundry she routinely married each couple of stripped socks and then she would slip off her boots, roll up her denim, and slide on a fresh pair; lest she come across an acquaintance.