March 6, 2009
Poetry
Braided, spun, coiled in ritual
Silk, Yucca, Willow, Wool
Strand by strand
Earth-stained fingers and fibers bind
Pattern, art, story, function
Strand by strand
Vessels to carry and celebrate
Swaddled newborns, elders’ tales
Strand by strand
Shouts, tears, and laughter snagged
Woven moments
Strand by strand
December 8, 2008
The power of defining oneself as “not a morning person” struck me once again at 4am, mountain time as I clung to my covers, twisted and turned from one sleepless position to the next and tried to convince myself that I was not awake. How could I be? It was 4am. Five layers of blankets separating me from the 50 degree house, the warm sleeping cat curled into the crescent sleeping on my side creates, the absolute darkness, the 3 hours my alarm still had to count down before screaming, counting my breathes – none of these things soothed me back to sleep. Something was wrong. At quarter to five I eased myself from the layers of quilts and conceded to wakefulness.
To my surprise the morning hours before sunlight tints the sky are not that bad when not forced to approach them by a relentless alarm and an ever encroaching deadline to leave the house.
I enjoyed a productive, caffeine-free morning. Any other day and the words “productive” “caffeine-free” and “morning” could not truthfully be put together in a sentence that applied to me. But by 5:30am I was dressed for the day with the pets fed, the dog let out and back in, and the dishes from last night’s meal done. By 6:30 I had finished breakfast (with water rather than coffee or tea!), wandered around feeling as though I should be rushing to something and after several minutes of finding nothing to rush to, realized that on this particular Monday morning there was nothing left for me to do but relax. I gathered a couple of books to choose from and started toward the couch; it was then that I heard it. I noticed the sound of no music, no clattering from the other room, no one talking, no pets scampering over the hardwood floors. It was – I believed – quite. Every other living being was asleep behind a closed door. I was alone in a quite house with hours to fill. An excitement I had not felt in months closed in resulting in a giddiness akin to seeing an old friend for the first time in years. I opened my computer and began to write.
And so – after months of neglect – I have a new post for the blog. On the horizon is a break in my busy schedule when I hope to be able to ramble more frequently. Also new today is a posting on my photoblog at: eyewonders.wordpress.com – check it out and check back here soon!
September 30, 2008
After a thorough search of all the obvious and not so obvious places I thought the cord for my camera’s battery charger might be; and several weeks of waiting in hopes that it would turn up on its own – I’ve decided to face the harsh reality that I am and will continue to be cameraless until I can afford to replace my point-and shoot camera with a DSLR set-up. (I won’t bore you with my reasons for not buying a new battery charger, but trust me, I know it’s an option and I’ve decided not to opt for it). Knowing that I cannot capture the spectacle of the Colorado Rockies in the Fall on film (or pixels as it would be) I will have to fall back on the time-honored tradition of words to tell their beauty. After all, writing is an art. For weeks, the mountainsides have been taunting me with their intricate color-blocks – daring me to blogg about them without a camera to back me up. Today, I’m taking the challenge.
The mountains always have an assortment of color on display if you know where to look for it. Aspens’ bright green leaves and long, lean trunks of off-white bark splice the dense hunter green boughs of the evergreens. An occasional blue spruce adds yet another hue. Further down, the rough reddish brown bark of pinon pines add yet another variation in color as their branches display their own hue of green needles – sparser than the evergreens further up the slope – they spread their needles in thin dangling clumps off their long branches so that patches of grey granite and the lighter greens of the mountains’ shrubs peak through. Closer to the forest floor, the flora are greatly varied from grasses to shrubs to those precious flowers that remain sparse but present until the harsh frosts set in- purple Columbines, red Indian Paint-Brush, blue and white Western Blue Flag. In all but the spring season, the color these small plants add to the mountain are a gift for those eyes who venture into the forest and walk under the trees. From mid-summer to early Fall the granite caps of these great mountains touch the sun emitting a steel-grey appearance or are lost in the white and grey of passing clouds. Iron-rich cross-cuts of rocks sliced by the glaciers of the ice-age, tower above tree line adding their own mark of color to the mountain. The rest of the year, these peaks on down to their basins are a bright white. But again, these colors are seen only when you look for them.
In the fall, the mountains put their colorful quilts on display; hanging blocks of yellow, red, orange, and green on their great slopes. It starts slowly – a patch of green turning to gold on a single Aspen branch, a scrub-oak exchanging its water conscious green leaves for the efficiency of orange and red. Then suddenly, the mountainsides catch on fire – gold, orange, and red dominate but they cannot subdue the dark green patches of the evergreens who hold their ground. A single tree or shrub stitches an array of color to make its block on the grand display. Patches of snow begin to fill-in rocky grey peaks. And slowly, the sun rises later and sets earlier, the air becomes more temperate but with a chill, and brown begins to take the place of color in all but the evergreens.
September 5, 2008
I settled myself amidst the dirt and dust that clings to the hard wood floors of the living room like a fleas to a dog despite my best efforts at cleaning (which I must admit has led to overall less sweeping and mopping thus fortifying the layers of filth). I crossed my legs, placed a notebook and pen on the floor beside me, and used the palms of my hands to inch myself forward. The order I had tried to keep in the bookshelves – alphabetical by genre – had deteriorated to such a point that any hope of finding a book quickly was lost. Between the merging marriage brings and the callousness that develops after moving seven times in three and half years, my obsessive-compulsive tendencies surrounding such matters have eased. I allowed myself a few more seconds to lament the loss of order, then moved on to more enjoyable pursuits.
First came James Joyce’s Dubliner’s, then What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, followed by Hemingway’s In Our Time. The rest of the books tumbled from the shelves onto my unsteady piles with ease. When I finished, I sat in a sea of paperbacks – broken bindings stacked precariously upon one another, uneven colored tags flagging stories I’d previously found exceptional or that I’d been assigned to read at some point or another in my undergraduate years. I savored my piles, flipping through the tables of contents in anthologies, reading notes I’d written in the margins at a time when making such annotations made me feel smarter (and to be honest, those notes proved to be time savers while writing many a paper for Kenyon’s renowned English department faculty to scrutinize). And so, I passed several hours reacquainting myself with the authors who had introduced me to the remarkable craft of writing short stories.
You see, I realized that I was getting back into writing a few steps ahead of myself. While writing regularly on the blog is a good, habit-forming practice and keeps the dust off my fingers – I was a bit presumptuous in thinking the prose would start flowing into beautiful story lines rich with character development when I brought up a blank Word screen. So I’ve decided to start at the beginning. This means reading the stories written by my role-models: James Baldwin, Rick Bass, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce Carol Oats, Flannery O’Connor, Annie Proulx, and John Updike – to name a dozen.
Amid the reading, there will still be writing. After all, I have an entire collection of short stories swimming in my head; characters whose personas have been simmering for years, plot-lines that are begining to take shape. I have started to put some of it on paper – okay, not paper per say, but the Word documents have been opened and saved to a folder on my hard drive that says “Writing,” as well as a memory stick for safe keeping. Flipping through the stories I aspire to as a writer just gives me that much more motivation to slog on. Oh what fun the reading process of writing can be!
To end, I’ll leave you with my top four writing inspirations- yes, four because I cannot figure out which one I would not include to make a tidy three and I cannot decide of a fifth that I should like to add. The following all concisely tell of a fleeting moment in life which captures basic human emotions and relations at their finest – the definition of what I think a short story should be:
(I may not have my bookshelves organized these days but I can still alphabetize with the best of them!)
August 25, 2008
That’s how long it’s been since I’ve sleep. It’s not insomnia (despite the slightly depressed sound of my previous post, which I intended to end on a positive note – don’t know if I pulled that off). Rather, the day-long vigil sprung out of chain of unforeseen events fed by my soft-spot for puppies and (unrelated to puppies) a need for money. Having not gone through the joy of an infant waking me in the wee hours of the morning, I had no idea how much I’d suffer from three consecutive days of being woken by wimping and yelps at 3:30am followed by early rising at 6am. A bit of lost sleep while puppy sitting wouldn’t have been too concerning if I hadn’t gotten a call from work at 3pm asking if I might be available to cover a graveyard shift for a co-worked who’d called in sick the day before. I agreed, begrudgingly. When I hadn’t heard from work by 7:30, I had begun to think I was off the hook but decided I should call in to make-sure they were covered . . what a mistake that was. So here I am, pushing 25 hours of wakefulness. Kind of gives the day a surreal feel.
It certainly has given me time to think – both focus and wondering thoughts. Strangely enough, the wandering thoughts kept chasing around plot-line and character sketches for new stories and those that have been on the back burner. And by back burner, I’m talking years of simmering. Blogging has certainly helped get my mind back into writing mode. Maybe its time to see if I can jot down some fiction.
Mountain Town Rambles 