Today I made a conscious effort to change some of how I do things rather than fixate on what I do and be all crabby about not doing enough, being disciplined, etc. (my usual state). I tried to focus my morning journal pages …
Today’s Baby Goal…
Today’s baby goal was to spend some time reflecting and synthesizing just what, really, is bugging me about the way I feel I’ve disengaged with my writing and the daily writing practice. Below is an updated artist’s prayer to…
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guide me through the next phase
Rain
I was surprised to hear and see that it was raining tonight. OK, it’s only March and this is the Pacific Northwest. But somehow all the blooming, the bulbs up and showy, the fruit trees, the camellias and almost the rhododendrons, had convinced me that winter was over which means sun instead of rain.
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Blogging through the Blues
Finally today, the clouds over my psyche, my perception of what is now my life, lift for a host of reasons—hormones shifting, new allergy drugs working, sun returning even if only for fifteen minutes to light up this morning in my life. The weekend is an artist’s date of sorts—heading to Medford/Ashland with a friend and the matinee of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival on Saturday. A break most welcome, a cultural outing sorely needed…
Harkness Sunday Night Supper
I will never cease to be amazed how memory, well my memory, works. Yesterday, getting ready for the dinner gathering we were hosting, I was cleaning this and that in the refrigerator. The glass pan of pasta that was our leftover dinner a few nights back was ready to find a new home…
Go Deeply into Fewer Things
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Since last week, this phrase, almost like an excavated mantra, has been echoing in my head. Something with the sense of time running out, or the preciousness of days, with this turning 50 and daring to be realistic and not pretend I’m not likely more than halfway there, my life halfway gone.
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Roger Housden’s Ten Poems Series
A friend turned me on to the four-book series of poetry collected by Roger Housden. Seems the first volume, Ten Poems to Change Your Life came out in the middle of 2001, with the others, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart and Ten Poems to Set You Free, following close behind…
150-Year-Old Words to Live By
Words to buoy the soul on a sunny February day of snow slowly melting from the winter-green grass and the drip-drip accompaniment from rain gutter eaves:
Walt Whitman in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass—
“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men—go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families—re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”…
A Dream, Only a Dream
Monday night. Rain gone for a bit, well, the past two days. Which translates, predictably, to colder temperatures here. E-heat just kicked on in spite of the wood stove in front of which two blue-eyed, half-Siamese cats lounge on Presidential rockers…
Alone, Quiet, Night, Dark, Cats
Here I am. Back to my life. C. gone, back to Ithaca, his home, the sense of home I gave him, all those years living there, I guess…
