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 …
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 …
Challenge: Keep Your Feet
The Challenge It’s been a while. So what’s the point in coming back? 1. Going full circle. 2. New perspectives of the beginning and where you are now. 3. Never leave something incomplete. Really, that’s three ways of saying nearly the same thing. Returning to the beginning always brings fresh perspectives which, when you’re …
Unpacking People’s Perspectives
“A philosopher once asked, “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?” Pointless, really…”Do the stars gaze back?” Now that’s a question.” — Neil Gaiman (Stardust) Haven’t done a quote of the week post in a long time so this is me getting back on that …
An Avalanche of Detour Signs
“You are not seperate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don’t have a life. You are life.” Eckhart Tolle I like to think I embody the pastel colours of the above photograph, taken on an equally pastel temperature sort of day, mid-February, three years past when some things …
The Lighthouse
Above the clouds, with the stars, sits a lighthouse full of books which wrap around the winding staircase until the tower’s peak hits the ceiling of the universe.
At this peak is a light which shines through a window. A long trail of gold which glitters brighter than any pot at a rainbow’s end. Those are just illusions you know. But this light, this light is real.
When you look out your window, in the corner of your house, or glance at the lamp at the end of the street, that light you see, flashing from the edge of your eye, that is the trail which tracks from every planet in every galaxy, right back to the small window at the peak of the lighthouse.
So when you greet the new year, the new day, the new hour, look up above the clouds, with the stars. You might just spot the lighthouse.
Note Left on the Door for a Hero: A Poem for Confidence
It is, if you like, seduction.
To feel flesh part
as a spoon through pudding.
Life. Blood. Sinking deeper.
Every lap of the dragon’s tongue
like a kitten’s caress. A kitten called Death.
So I want you to remember
as you stand.
During the rain of lightning
under the burning sun.
Time is ancient
in the eyes of young.
Long ago, we painted unicorns.
In a monkey bar imaginarium,
as red as ballerinas’ lips.
Bloody orange rinds
peeled back to an overgrown palace.
But then, you left. The sun is burning.
Buried beneath a million skins of paint.
A million molecules of sand.
Not a single one red. To mark your footsteps.
No more does the unicorn fly.
No more does the horn sound in the valley.
Shadows filch laughter into a iron chest
where deep below, the dragon whispers.
Why bother living when shadow
eats shadow.
The sun has burned.
Do you see me?
I stand here. Gaze reflected
on a world. Drenched in Rapunzels. Who drown in Shallot.
A Sisyphus world, where the children
of Fenrir walk the streets.
People sleep with open eyes.
Why bother
when the sun has burned
into a million grains of sand.
I am a waste of oxygen.
Counting eternity with every dance
between knife and flesh.
No. I want you to bother
because your blood drains
still. So still. Ever still.
It fills lakes, feeding dungeons
with drachma.
It is the metal which forged rings.
It is the lightbulb. Like a star,
that blinks and gazes from the window.
Calling you, oh foot-swept traveller, home.
When you hear the wind whisper
a dragon’s sweet nothings.
When the headless maid speaks
of posies and pockets.
When the raven cries blood
nailed to your door.
When the swan trumpets victory
bought with a thousand ships.
And you flee as a hopoe to the cloud
cuckooland.
Rise up, out of the ashes. Singing.
I want you to remember
as you stand.
During the rain of lightning
under the burning sun.
Time is ancient
in the eyes of young.
So when you next greet seduction
hear me call
We are all just stories
in the end.
Piano Concerto No.1 “African Wildlife”
Piano Poem Background
I wrote this during my eight hour practice days when I went all berserk toward my ARCT certification, on top of completing a degree in English and Greek and Roman Studies. Yikes. I don’t play near as much as I should these days. Writing has taken the place as my more serious pursuit. Sadly there exists not enough hours in the day for my writing and photography, let alone those plus piano.
Piano Concerto No. 1: African Wildlife in a Wild Key
Sagged, plush hippopotamus’
and worn eucalyptus trees of knowledge
shadow a flank of black and white keys.
Legato, I touch lightly
the keys too long silent
making grey clouds minuet under fingers
as a savannah reverberates in the parlour.
My right hand, counterpoint
to the thematic antelope
crescendos to a fortissimo,
my left hand, a cheetah sounds the coda
and success is celebrated. It savours a motif
as the rest thunder off, the final cadence rebounds, recalling walls.
After all
it is only furniture.
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.
Have a Good Life, They Said: A Drabble
Life, They Said, Only Has Colour if You Paint it
I grew up with practical parents, supportive, wonderful parents who did everything they could financially and physically manage for me and my siblings but they were practical.
That meant, work hard, work harder and aim for reliable jobs like doctor, lawyer, teacher, nurse. They supported my love of photography, giving my the camera I still own and use, fifteen years later to do all the photography on this site but running off and being a freelancer, being a travel blogger, an artist, starving even after the rice, bean and broccoli dues of university, any of that, unthinkable. Not practical. Terribly uncertain and unsustaining.
Their view of a good life did not match mine.
Then again, go ask anyone what a good life is. You’ll get as many answers as people, possibly more, if some of those people have multiple ideas.
“Have a good life,” she said.
What’s that mean? That I haven’t? What is a good life?
“Have a successful career,” she said.
What’s that mean? That I haven’t? Well, it’s true I haven’t started. I’m twenty-seven and have only just kicked my butt out the door toward using my creative insanity for something more than road trip entertainment while I traveled Europe for two years. And I wanted to be like you.
All the best started at least when they were a minimum of four and a maximum of eighteen. Or so society has taught me.
They had rough lives. Uphill both ways and sideways too. In sinking sand. To built character of course. They went like lawn-mowers toward their fantasies, not content to just dream them up in stories. They were bulls through the red silk sheets, roaring against the dying of the light.
They probably fought, disagreed and moaned at or about parents, partners, prime ministers and that panda they talked to at the zo once, just because they could. And it shocked the adults.
Or they might have had parents who were as obsessive as they, who supposed, bashed and pushed until the child lived the parental dream of superstardoom.
Whatever that ambiguous alphabet soup is.
Or they might have had parents who ignored them to pursue their own dreams and the children occupied themselves with their own imagination and brilliance anyway.
They were the sort who laughed in the face of offence and giggled in sending it back because the world needs less defenders and more offenders. You can’t win a footie match without them.
This is the match for life.
Even if they were awkward, easily embarassed, introverted or mad hatters, they had more than enough shine to not bother with or about other people’s suns anyway. Then someone loud would find them and helicopters would descend. Lights bouncing and beaming in the treasure trove of brilliance. Personality doesn’t matter so much then. Usually. Sometimes. Probably.
“Have a good life,” she said.
How are you supposed to have a good life if you don’t live said life with vigour, passion and enthusiasm?
Shouting from every roof-top, screaming from every cliff-edge.
Clawing, fighting, biting and bashing against the dying of the sunlight.
They won’t wait for the day a man speaks on a bus, to say, “nine-hundred and nintey-nine stars. The sun is burning.”
No. They will kick down the padlock. Crash the door. Poke their head through and bring on the foretelling by being the prophet of their own future.