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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Everyday Canvas
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte
This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts.
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March 31, 2015 at 12:27pm March 31, 2015 at 12:27pm
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"Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits," said Carl Sandburg.
Since April, the poetry month, starts tomorrow, what does poetry mean to you?
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Poetry is distilled feelings without problems or pride, the highest carat of gold, deep roots where ice cannot reach, and sunshine that warms. Poetry is softer than silk, sturdier than stone, sweeter than honey, bitter than jalapeno peppers, and more fluid than a waterfall.
Poetry is something I carry in my heart, sometimes as open as the skies, at other times as closed as the deepest secret nobody is aware of. Poetry can paint without brushes or paints, what cannot be seen--like love, like pain, like internal scars.
When I write poetry, I can marvel at being alive, loving what I see on faces or in nature, or feeling the wrongs as if they are lumps in my throat. When I write poetry, no matter how I try, my masks slip, and I find out how far I have come and how far I can go. Through poetry I can rebel against life or look death in the face, and if or when I can find the words, I can always find the way to express all that matters.
Poetry gets me drunk, but doesn’t alter my mind. Instead it opens me up to beauty or to agony. Poetry spreads my wings over the awe and wonder of consciousness, perpetually and forever.
Poetry has immense proportions; yet, it is without limits, and it has a voice that rises above all voices. Poetry is everywhere, and it cannot be silenced.
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FYI: in WdC, we celebrate the poetry month of April, in "Dew Drop Inn"  , under the experienced and enlightened leadership of Katya the Poet. This is not a contest and no gps or anything unnecessary are involved. Just the love of poetry. If you wish, take a peek.
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March 30, 2015 at 11:51am March 30, 2015 at 11:51am
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Do you believe humans and animals have a spiritual connection that isn’t necessarily dependent on the language? Have you had any incidents of this with the animals in your life?
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I definitely do believe that, because at times, animals have understood my thoughts and feelings, with or without verbal commands. I don’t know from where their understanding comes; is it because their antennae receive input that we are unaware of, kind of like a radio, or is it because they have learned to read our stances or personal expressions and gestures? How they do it is a mystery.
Almost always while growing up, I had cats. Those cats knew if I had a bad day at school or if someone did something nasty to me, and they would try to comfort me more insistently than their usual show of affection. At that time also, my uncle had an Irish Setter who thought I was his best buddy pal. When my uncle and aunt moved away to another city, they said the dog knew when I was going to call on the phone, even before the phone rang, although I called at irregular intervals. He would sit by the phone, bark, and keep pulling whoever was in the house to the phone. Then, when I called, my aunt would put the phone to his ear and I would say a few things to him. After the phone call, they said, he would act all excited and happy. This same dog had cried real tears, while putting his paws on my grandfather’s shoes, after the day he had passed away.
After I got married, I didn’t have dogs or cats for a long time because of constant traveling. When our children were a little older, about seven and four, we adopted a Newfoundland, who became the love of our lives. This dog understood language. No kidding! I can’t tell if, at times, he sensed everything through language or through spirit. He knew our kids’ names. When I told him to go call them from their friends’ house from across the street, he would. He would let me know if someone or a car was coming up the driveway, even if I would be at the far end of the house and hadn't heard a thing.
After our Newfoundland passed away after a very long life, we didn’t get any other animals, as I had developed a serious case of allergies and the kids had grown up and left home. Soon, we moved, too.
Now, where we live, sometimes, a family of Sandhill cranes come to the porch door and knock at it with their beaks. I go out and feed them. They stay at an arm’s length and are not afraid of me. If my husband goes instead of me, they fly away.
So true is this quote by Anatole France! "Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened."
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March 28, 2015 at 11:49am March 28, 2015 at 11:49am
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Prompt: Which way is better: getting all of our news at a single point or two in the day, or the birth of the 24/7 news cycle, with news being reported all day long?
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I like getting the news as soon as possible, provided it is real news. Most of the time, what passes as news is conjecture, or worse, fake news. Journalism used to be an honorable profession. In the earlier days, newscasters and commentators were separate. At that time, even commentators tried to be fair. Not anymore. Gone are the ethics of reporting, together with the Walter Cronkites, Chet Huntleys, and David Brinkleys of yore. These honorable people have turned into legends, but they left their seats to incompetent, partisan narcissists.
Even during the nineteen sixties and seventies, getting the news from the newspapers felt too late to me. I always favored the TV or radio. Today, the TV news has gone haywire, and the radio is in the hands of the anarchists. The only radio I trust is NPR. On TV, I prefer the PBS channels, but they don’t really give the news.
If so, how do I get the news? In bits and pieces, from the trusted sites on the internet, even from those in Europe, and still from the TV, although not believing anything I hear fully. Our local NPR radio gives the news in a nutshell, as if in headlines, but it is much better than any other deceitful medium.
In the same vein, NPR has an ethics in reporting the news handbook. It is well worth reading for journalists and news lovers alike. Here is the link:
http://ethics.npr.org/category/b-fairness
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Prompt: Surrealism means writer, author combines unrelated images or events in a strange dreamlike way. Have you ever had this experience?
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Always...
Although I don’t necessarily enjoy surrealism in any art.
Sometimes I take liberties with what I write, even if it is a serious piece, even after editing it. Such are my blogs, but then, what are blogs for if I don’t jump all over the place? The trick is, to do this in such a fluent way that the reader won’t be on to me immediately. I am not always successful, but yeah, I can be surreal. I am even more surreal with things I write for me, things I don’t post. As long as I can keep the stuff real enough.
Dreams are surreal, too. Still it is not a good idea to tell a character’s dream in a story or write stories with too many dreams in them. Henry James said, “Tell a dream, lose a reader”; and some editors and publishers take his idea to heart.
What I go by is this: No matter how random or sounding pretty or shocking a writing is, even its random details need to connect to the main idea in some way.
The above prompt says, “Surrealism means writer, author combines unrelated images or events in a strange dreamlike way.” Even so, there has to be some linkage during the combining process. Maybe that linking factor is a social commentary or a specific theme, like Vonnegut sometimes did. A totally scrambled writing is exactly what it is: scrambled, which doesn’t lead to any appreciation by the reader.
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Mary Oliver- continued
Continuing with Mary Oliver from yesterday’s entry. Here are a few of her quotes that relate to writing and poetry:
“I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life.”
“To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.”
“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.”
“Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.”
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.”
And another poem:
Black Oaks
by Mary Oliver
Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,
or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance
and comfort.
Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays
carp and whistle all day in the branches, without
the push of the wind.
But to tell the truth after a while I'm pale with longing
for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen
and you can't keep me from the woods, from the tonnage
of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.
Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a
little sunshine, a little rain.
Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another -- why don't you get going?
For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.
And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money,
I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
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Prompt: Have you ever had a "Goldilocks" experience? It took you three tries to get it just right?
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As I have a few decades on me, I don’t think I got anything just right, as the “just right” criterion is a changeable one, depending on the century, decade, year, and flavor of the times. For that reason, let’s rename “just right” as “acceptable.”
Aside from the semantics, it may take me more or—if I am lucky--less than three tries to let anything turn out satisfactory enough for me not to play with it anymore. For example, yesterday I baked a pumpkin cake. It was all right, I guess, because hubby loved it, but in hindsight, I want to add to it walnuts and raisins. That will be for the next time I bake it. Then, who knows, I may even add pickles to it. No, just kidding. Pickles won’t do, but the thought of them in a cake was amusing to me.
Fact is, I never counted the number of tries for anything I muddied my hands to make. Probably because, I don’t have golden locks but plain black hair, now turned grey, which is turning to white. But then, when my hair turns all white, it will be three tries, won’t it?
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Reading Mary Oliver
Now that April is near, *hint, hint!*, I started trying to inspire my ever-so-maladroit poetry muse. Who else can I read but Mary Oliver for that purpose, as I have always admired her seemingly simple but subtle and poignant diction and lyricism taking off from the imagery of the nature around her. It was only fair that she won the Pulitzer and other prestigious awards.
I have in my hand the small volume, Why I Wake up Early, new to me because I have it only since Saturday, but I have a few of her books, also. Inside the volume in my hand, I love all but especially, Breakage, Snow Geese, and Many Miles. This will change of course for each time I read her, since I'll be thinking that, at that moment, I love the poem I am reading the most.
Still, one of my most favorite poems of hers is When Death Comes, although her poems of appreciation for what is in the nature, I also adore.
Here is: When Death Comes
(I can post it here because it is all over the net, anyway.)
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox:
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
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March 24, 2015 at 12:25pm March 24, 2015 at 12:25pm
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Prompt: Although present justice systems depend on punishment, do you think a restorative justice system--in which the criminals are healed of their ills, educated, and uplifted as to their outlooks on life--might work better for our societies?
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From time to time, many questions are raised about the fairness of the justice systems, since more often than not, whereas small crimes get huge punishments, more serious ones are let off easy.
According to Howard Zehr,in his books and articles, traditional criminal justice operates while asking these questions : Which laws are broken? Who did it? What is the deserved punishment?
Restorative justice, however, asks: Who is hurt and what are their needs? What are the causes? Who has a stake on either side? What is the appropriate process to bring together victims or victims’ loved ones and the criminals in an effort to pinpoint causes and make things right for both sides?
I think severe punishment works only rarely, but then should we let a heinous crime go unanswered, especially because some criminals have a way of escalating the severity of their crimes? Yet, when we are bunching people with lesser crimes and hardened criminals in prisons together, aren’t we, in fact, helping set up schools for crime?
On the other hand, most of the time when a terrible crime is committed, I hear the victim or those on the victim’s side ask for closure or justice, and I suspect both of those terms are used as synonyms for revenge. My question is, why do we let punishment stand in for revenge? Maybe if we said the emperor has no clothes and we called such words as what they are in gist, revenge, most of us would stop and think about how we are conducting our justice systems.
I agree that those who are incorrigible and a menace to others should be kept away from the society, so they can’t do any more harm. On the other hand, being human, people falter sometimes, especially if their teaching and background has been faulty or if they had a momentary lapse for any reason. Those people can be re-taught and emotionally uplifted, so they can become positively contributing members of society. This will be costly for sure, but isn’t keeping up the overcrowded prison systems costly, as well?
I also ask: What about the victims? Restorative justice emphasizes repairing the harm caused or revealed by criminal behavior. In other words, it operates from the standpoint that while crime hurts, justice should heal, as forgiveness also heals in spiritual practices, but can we expect all victims to forgive? And what about in the case of murder? Isn’t repairing the harm difficult because the trouble is: Who can bring the dead back to life?
I think, however, as an idea, restorative justice is a highly civilized concept. What I am wondering about is this: Are our societies ready for it? Shouldn’t the societies and nations be highly civilized themselves to deserve such action? After all, it is a fact that, in the current punishment systems, minorities receive the hardest slaps and, in their societal life, most difficult living conditions. Then, aren’t some criminals broken people to be fixed rather than wrongdoers to be punished?
While many questions hover around inside my head about the likelihood of restorative justice, or rather, how the practice of it should be conducted, I suspect that it works better than the extreme punishment systems. Case in point, many countries in Europe and especially Norway practice this type of justice to one degree or another. There is even a forum for it for the people working in social and justice systems.
http://www.euforumrj.org
Yet, another argument surfaces. Yes, restorative justice may work well in small nations like those in Europe, but would it work in a highly complicated country, a melting pot, that the United States is?
Still, given all the complexities, true justice can be gentler and may ask both the victims and the criminals to re-examine the masks they are wearing, even when restoration to the original state of calm may not be possible immediately. Then, for a kinder and more humane justice system to work, don’t we all need to ante up our understanding and acceptance of one another?
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Prompt: John Barth said, in a Paris Review Interview, “I start every new project saying, “This one’s going to be simple, this one’s going to be simple.” It never turns out to be.” Do you find it to be true for you as well? Use it in regard to writing or any other thing that you wish.
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Yes and no, for me. Once I start a project, if the project is to my liking, I get so engrossed in it that I don’t feel its complications.
On the other hand, with some writing projects, I find out that a lot more research is needed than I have originally planned. Although this complicates the work, the research is fun, nevertheless.
As to other things, well, take cleaning a room, for example; I sometimes find out that more than the usual attention is needed, but isn’t this due to my sloth in some way? So I try to get on top of anything that happens to eat up more of my time, or I let it go in favor of those things I’d rather do.   I think it is up to us to complicate things or not by believing any project to be simple or complex before we have even started it.
By the way, starting any project with the idea of it being simple can be undervaluing that project, in any area. This idea is also limiting, as well as being self-imposed. Nothing in life has defined limits. The way we believe about things, however, do. I look at limiting oneself as to ideas and action to be similar to pushing oneself into a small box that doesn’t have air holes.
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Non- Prompt
I came across this article on the web, titled Reboot Your Life.
Based on Buddhist beliefs, it gives a list of things we should let go to be happy. Under each item in the list, there is an explanation of that item.
Then, while I was reading the article, I thought maybe we shouldn’t let go of those items, but use them in our writing. Now, not every item would apply to every individual, but just imagine, while writing fiction, those things in the items festering inside our characters. From this point of view, this list is more valuable to me than what its writer intended it to be. So I thought of sharing it with you.
Here’s the list without the explanations:
1. Let go of attachments:
2. Let go of guilt:
3. Let go of Negative thinking:
4. Let go of self-criticism:
5. Let go of prejudice:
6. Let go of compulsive thinking:
7. Let go of the need for others’ approval:
8. Let go of limiting beliefs:
9. Let go of grudges:
10. Let go of the “I’ll do it tomorrow” attitude:
11. Let go of anxious thoughts:
12. Let go of past heartbreaks:
13. Let go of bad memories:
14. Let go of useless things:
15. Let go of bad company:
16. Let go of the idea that you are a product of your past:
17. Let go of identifying yourself with your job/role:
18. Let go of counterproductive habits:
19. Let go of taking things too personally:
20. Let go of the ticking clock:
If you wish to read the article itself, its link is:
http://myscienceacademy.org/2014/12/16/reboot-your-life-20-mental-barriers-you-s...
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On page 37 of Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says about her students:
“But Write about what? They ask next.
Write about carrot sticks, I tell them.”
Then she takes her own advice and writes about school lunches, her piece taking off from carrot sticks. Here are her first three sentences or so.
“Code carrots had to look machine extruded, absolutely uniform, none longer than the length of the sandwich. Your parents would sometimes send you to school with waxed-paper packets of uneven cuckoo-bunny carrots, and your carrot esteem would be so low you couldn’t even risk looking at the guy against the fence. Bad juju.”
Really, writing about carrot sticks! Well, I can’t resist a challenge, although I might skip the lunch-box part.
You know how it is. When dreams fade, love’s a barren land. In spite of this, and so that you don’t forget me, I’ll put a carrot on a stick and hold it in front of you. You get the picture? I’ll even give you long ears and a big voice for braying. But you’ll never take the bait and I’ll end up becoming more cold-hearted than you have even been.
Now you may think I am long-gone and mad…What a way to treat a lover, right? Right, and so deservedly; therefore, next, I’ll lift my arms and fly, taking off to a distant land, my roots dangling beneath like carrots to be cut into sticks.
While I am away, I bet you’ll forget me, because you do that forgetting thing real well. In that moment, I’ll never gaze at the empty distances between us, and being far off and far out, I’ll un-invite you and cut all my dangling carrots into sticks or, better yet, shred them into a carrot cake, which I will offer to someone else who doesn’t have the word forget in his vocabulary.
This drivel took about six minutes…I clocked myself, but I did write about carrot sticks, and no one can blame me for not bolting away from the carrot stick challenge.
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Prompt: Do you believe the adage that bad news sells better than good news? Do you find yourself getting more response to negative posts than positive ones?
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That “bad news sells better than good news” adage is something Winston Churchill believed about his nation, when he said, ““The British nation is unique in this respect: they are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.”
I don’t think, however, Churchill’s words apply to me, exactly. Good or bad, I like to hear the news that tells the truth, not the kind we have been getting lately by partisans who pull the news to their advantage and those unethical journalists who exert a titillating edge to any kind of a news.
As to my posts, I don’t know, since I haven’t kept a response log. All I care about is that I’ll keep on writing what feels real to me.
No matter what I think, in some instances, it might be a fact that negative anything makes more waves than all the positives that go unheeded. In my opinion, bad news may have longer legs, but good news has heart. Better yet, truthful news is a whole entity, and as a plus, it is a moral, ethical being.
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Prompt: Do you think we are currently living in a good time for women in history? Will we look back at this time period in the future and say that there was equality?
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I think the time we are in is the best time in history for women in USA. I can’t say the same for every place in the world, while ISIS, Taliban, and other rotten groups are creating hell on earth for women. Little do they know that acts against women and children are assaults against any potential positive future for the world, for women are not and should never be treated as subplots in the entire human story.
As far as humanity goes, while I hold USA and the western world above all others, I doubt if women are getting and achieving what they deserve, still. At least, forced marriages and other nasty stuff are rare if not extinct. In regard to equal pay and reaching the professional ceiling concept, that is still iffy. As Sheryl Sandberg said in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, “We must raise both the ceiling and the floor.”
Then, if I were to live fifty years more and look back to today, who knows, we could be further ahead or may have taken a step or two back, since future is tough to predict. As is, we in the western world are better off than in the past but not as advanced as we should be, only because I don’t think any civilization on earth is an advanced one…yet. If it were, everyone’s basic needs would be met, while our lives would be without wars and with understanding and acceptance among all groups.
As to gender equality, I wonder if it is or will be at all possible. Science finds, everyday, small differences between genders. Although those differences shouldn’t hold us back, perfect equality may not be possible unless we default both genders on things they come short of, like in handicapped bowling, and if we were to imagine ourselves in bowling leagues, right now, even in the winningest nations, women’s wins depend on spares but not on strikes.
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March 19, 2015 at 12:20am March 19, 2015 at 12:20am
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Prompt: What things in life take too long?
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For me, anything medical takes too long, or it feels like it. To start with, doctors’ waiting rooms are at the top of the list. The only place I wait the least amount of time is my primary physician’s and dentist’s waiting rooms.
The most waiting-time-Nobel-Prize goes to my ophthalmologist. For that reason alone, I ask for appointments around 3 PM. That way the wait will be no more than two to three hours. Funny, but I have seen people go berserk in that place. My husband wants to go to a different ophthalmologist just for that reason, but I resist because this office is so near our home and, should push come to shove, and one of us would have to drive with dilated pupils and alone, it is better to have the eye doctor’s office nearby. Right now, we drive each other. When it is hubby’s appointment, I go with my Kindle in my purse. Several times I finished reading two books in one sitting.
But enough about doctors’ offices. The next worst thing can be getting in and out of airplanes, but that depends on the country and the airport. Where I am, PBI airport is very efficient and customer friendly. I can’t complain.
Another thing that used to take too long were the traffic jams. It took troopers several hours to open up a freeway especially after an accident, but where I live now, it doesn’t happen at all or maybe not as much. I know this occurs quite often in other more active cities, however.
Sometimes, lectures and conferences take too long. Once upon a time, my hubby fell asleep. At his first snore, I punched his leg, so we wouldn’t look like two fools. We may be two fools for attending such things, but at least, I thought then, we should save face. Yet, talking about snoring and such, falling asleep at night may take too long, but that, too, I learned to come to terms with. I make up bed-time stories for me inside my mind, and that problem eventually evaporates into dreamland.
In the more universal arena, government agencies can take too long. That is why I try to avoid them like the plague. Then, there is that big, dome-topped building in Washington, where congress takes too long to do anything, or rather, nothing. Anyway, this doesn’t bother me as much, since inside my mind I regard that place as a low-grade museum where nothing and no one can move, kind of like the Egyptian pyramids with mummies inside.
After all is said and done, I trust what Dalai Lama says, more than the acts of mummies and some people who make me wait too long. “Don’t let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.”
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Prompt: What does "Heaven on Earth" mean to you?
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Heaven on earth is not a place but a grace.
It is not where but when:
When two opposites agree, at least agree to disagree,
When all basic needs are met,
When children feel loved and properly cared for,
When everyone receives the respect they deserve,
When armies drop their guns and pick up paint brushes, musical instruments, or pens instead
When people everywhere feel good about themselves without stepping on one another
When each person is independent and free to do what he or she likes to do without disturbing someone else
When we all get together to make this earth a better place.
As for me, I find heaven when I feel compassion for someone I expected to dislike or hate.
I find heaven in watching the full moon, a colorful sunset, ocean waves at the beach, a beautiful scenery, flowers, plants, and the antics of animals.
I find heaven in losing my sense of time while being completely enraptured and caught up in what I am doing and working on the many possibilities of the task at hand.
I find heaven in the mystery of a sudden concept, which I might not recognize where it came from--especially a writing idea--possibly after seeing it in a word, a phrase, a picture, or a sound, and then making it my own. Heaven, then, becomes being so saturated with this work, this idea, that past, present, and future meld into one with a passion and excitement so powerful that I keep jumping ahead of myself.
Then, when I am tired, my heaven emerges again when I take refuge in the healing touches of my family and loved ones inside my quiet, humble home.
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Prompt: “Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?”― Friedrich Nietzsche
In how many ways do you dance?
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I am always dancing, at times with others, at times alone. The music I dance to no one can hear but me. The way I dance, you’d think I am not sober, but sobriety--with or without a drink--was never my intention ever since the day I was born, and if dance is the language of the soul, then my soul dances all the time.
Ballet, moonwalk, cha-cha, pasa doble, tango, snake-dance, or minuet or something else that I invent--even if no one wants to watch my floundering, my strange dreamy moves, my steps in dark turmoil--I always look for something to give in the effort to save myself, to dance in my imagination, even when the freedom to dance is too expensive, too risky.
No matter what, I dance, not holding a red rose in my teeth, but an olive branch, for when I dance, I don’t want anyone’s head on a dish, like Salome, though I dance whirlwind through all that matters to me, while I read, write, paint, take photos, walk, talk, sing, cook, or go about minding my business.
I may dance on the dance floor or inside myself, smiling, caring, sharing, learning, forgiving, laughing, hugging, helping, accepting, wondering, marveling, healing, loving, and still more loving. I practice my moves over and over again in the face of all obstacles that I may gain a few acts of vision, of faith, of passion or that I may discover some buried treasure within me. I try not to leave any area empty, any path not taken.
On a lucky break, sometimes, I glimpse others’ dances, too. I see people dance with joy or through tears. I see them whirling and twirling to kind words, or when harsh words or cruel deeds seep into their insides, I might witness them holding their chests to keep their hearts intact, while they rise and dip in circles and waltz away.
Everyone is dancing a cosmic dance together with the planets, suns, galaxies, universes into space time, and all expressions of our dances are unique and magical. Facing toward Heaven, we dance to the spirit within, through creative ways and choreography, unparalleled, in style, and divine.
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Prompt: Pick a fictional place (in or out of our world) from any story, novel, or play. Imagine you are visiting that place as a tourist, and write about it as if you are a travel writer. Don’t forget to tell us your source.
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“Whoa!” The tour guide stopped his horse and patted its mane as a reward for its obedience. All three of us imitated him. “They still say Faulkner made this land up, its maps, too, however based on his stomping grounds,” he said. “But in Chickasaw language, Yoknapatawpha means split land. According to the author, the word means slow water running through the flatland.”
“So did he make up the word or not?” I asked.
“Some people still think he did,” the tour guide answered. “We'll soon be near the Yocona River, and early maps of the area called this river ‘Yockney-Patafa’ so make up your own mind.”
I glanced at the top of the pamphlet with a Faulkner quote about the land:
"Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha co., Mississippi. Area, 2400 Square Miles. Population, Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313. William Faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor."
Why not? Don’t all the writers own a good amount of real estate, be it in their universe of thoughts?
We moved on. The landscape was slightly hilly with valleys in between the hills and a good number of Cedars here and there. As Darl said in the novel, “Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.” That was exactly what we were doing, riding down. On my left, I saw the forest, woods could be a better word for it, but the guide referred to it as the forest. This had to be where Lafe made Dewey Dell pregnant, who later uttered, “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” Hot blind earth had to be the host for scurrying and slithering animals like rabbits, squirrels, and snakes that populated the terrain.
It was a hot late afternoon in July, just like in the novel. “The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.” Long hot days were good for cotton.
A couple of hours later, we were riding by the river. A severe cold front across North Mississippi with an unusual heavy rain must have caused the Yoknapatawpha River to flood, then. The copper and the bloody egg color had to be the result of the dust in the upper atmosphere from the northern Great Plains. I recalled the dust-bowl stories, which must have affected this area with clashing colors of the sky and erosion. The erosion was controlled with the introduction of Kudzu and Loblolly pine, both alien to the land. They were planted in unnatural rows parallel to property lines. Kudzu still hung from the trees, giving the place an eerie feel. The threat mostly came from the river, though.
I remembered Darl’s words describing the flood. "Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again...
Above the ceaseless surface they stand—trees, cane, vines—rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water.”
The tour guide pointed to the skeleton of an old apple tree, where the sign said Gillespie’s place. The Bundren family had spent the fourth night of their journey here, where they had put Addie's body "under the apple tree."
We were by the cemetery now. The cemetery to where the Bundrens arrived days later due to the difficulties they encountered on their journey. By the gate, my horse snorted, attracting my attention to a wagon standing, exactly as Darl described Tull’s wagon, "hitched to the rail, with the reins wrapped about the seat stanchion. In the wagon bed are two chairs." Some things never changed here.
The cemetery was only three acres with a beautiful burial ground inside a gently sloping landscape filled with majestic old trees and tombstones. It put the period to the end of the journey for the Bundrens and a story of a dysfunctional family, misery, disappointments, pointless acts of heroisms, and interior monologues by several family members, even that of Addie from beyond the grave. If this wasn’t Southern Gothic, I don’t know what is.
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Blog City Prompt: In this time with the internet so easily accessible, how do you determine what is worth reading when it is so easy for people to publish whatever? What criteria is important to you when you read online articles, stories?
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Before the internet became the white-elephant sale of writing, we were at the mercy of the publishers. Granted, the works were better polished, but we had to contend with what was offered to us. It took me a long while to learn how to skip all those bimbo and VIP memoirs and muddle through the publications to find my niche as a reader, while I kept wondering how many writers’ good works were dumped into the slush piles in favor of the pockets of the publishers.
With this background in place, it is not too difficult for me to find what fits my taste and what to avoid in today’s markets. Now that the whole thing has become a jumble and most of the works are not as polished with the lack of good editors of yesteryear, I still think this trend is better than what we were force-fed earlier. At least, every writer gets an equal chance at being read.
The way I look at it, the ideal situation would be a combination of the ethics of good publishing practices plus the internet. I am hoping, against all odds, that at least the book publication will head in that direction sooner or later.
As to online reading versus printed matter, if anyone thinks the printed books and magazines and newspapers always gave the facts, besides the Brooklyn Bridge, I have a few other bridges to sell them. I know for certain that even the schoolbooks have had some wrong information in them, here and there.
On the other hand, some online articles on the internet are better than what we come across in the printed media. It doesn’t mean that whatever we read online is trustworthy, but then the printed stuff by the established publishers isn’t, either. This, of course, presents a serious difficulty for writers who need to do research, but then good writers can form their own opinions on what sounds true and what doesn’t.
Fact is, then or now, we readers can never be sure of anything, except our own good sense.
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"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift from God which is why we call it the present.” Bill Keane Do you agree with this? What does tomorrow mean to you?
Yes, I definitely agree with it. Tomorrow is tomorrow. I’ll see it when it happens. Let’s look at it this way. Remember my yesterday’s blog entry, "I Not So Humbly Accept…" ? If I knew what would happen the day before it, even the burden of the thought of it would have given me a heart attack, and I wouldn’t be able to receive such an honorable award. I love my creature comforts and I like to stay in my comfort zone. If there is any threat to those, I don’t want to know about it. This, way I’ll have, at least, today.
This doesn’t mean I am not hopeful; the hope of living another day the way I desire urges me to go ahead, but if I knew exactly what would happen in the future, my hope would be clouded and the anticipation of it, good or bad, would ruin my today. So why not keep the hope and live today well, so I can also live tomorrow as well as I can, when tomorrow becomes today?
The past is a different story, however. I can learn from all my yesterdays. They show me what I can do and where I have failed. This way, they propel me to go ahead and hopefully grow as a person.
The only problem with any one of yesterdays is if we get stuck in it emotionally and through our obsessions. It doesn’t matter who did us wrong and where we have failed or how we shone or was so successful. That is past history. If we use it to boost our morale or to refuse to repeat our mistakes, then that past has value.
I truly do not think knowing what’s ahead will help us to live through our todays. After all, by worrying about the days to come, we may mess up our todays in a huge way.
By the way, I recall that there was a movie during the sixties in which Sophia Loren starred called, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. It was three stories about the three very different women. I think the name of that movie would make a good title for this entry, although its plot or rather its three little plots have little to do with what I have written, but then this is me with my thoughts jumping all over the place. Besides, I like the musicality of the Italian language.
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March 11, 2015 at 11:26pm March 11, 2015 at 11:26pm
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Prompt: You have just received a special Award. What is the Award for? Write your acceptance speech
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Funny, Princess Megan Rose  should come up with this prompt today. I think she’s psychic and she wished a disaster upon me so I can answer her prompt. Just kidding Megan… You’re the sweetest.
Here’s my acceptance speech:
Dear Committee Members who so graciously granted me this Brave Lady Who Didn’t Lose Her Cool Although She Busted her Butt Award,
I not so humbly accept it because not only do I deserve it, but also I believe I should be getting a purple heart.
First, let me fill you in on the events that led to this moment.
We woke up this morning to a fridge disaster. First thing I did was to empty the fridge to see if anything was blocking something. Just the day before I had shopped and filled it to the brim, so I could spend the rest of the week writing or reading or just fooling around. When else would a fridge conk out on you but when you’ve filled it up or just before your party? I don’t think it is Murphy’s Law, but I suspect there’s a mean streak built in refrigerators.
Next, neither of us being fridge-surgery savvy, hubby called the repairman. By this time, I had the freezer stuff in a cooler topped with icepacks and had emptied the milk down the drain. All the stuff out of the fridge that could last out for a few hours had our living area as their waiting station. I have to say, I might have discovered a new angle in interior design.
The repairman arrived, took out some screws I didn’t even know existed, and shook his head. “Not worth fixing,” he said. “The compressor is dead. It’ll cost you more to fix it than get a new one.”
“But it is only six years old. Most of our refrigerators lasted at least fifteen years,” I said.
“So odd, you should remember that much, at your age,” he said.
Jerk!
My eyes must have frightened him or something, for he added, “They don’t make them as they used to.”
“Mother had hers for over twenty years and she was still using it when I left home,” I said.
“Too long ago! That must be an icebox.”
I swear his eyes gleamed.
Double jerk. No. Triple, quadruple jerk! I gritted my teeth.
Right after he left, we did too. We drove to Jetson’s to get a new fridge. I must say I felt me succeeding as soon as we stepped into the store. The saleslady was a doll and I managed to appeal to her human side. She got on the phone and sweet-talked whomever, and would you believe, they delivered a brand-new fridge within two hours.
So, up until this award ceremony, I have been wiping up the newbie and arranging my stuff in it. And I did all that by shooing hubby from underfoot, although he, in helpfulness delirium, wanted to be in on this award, too, but I couldn’t let him, as my kitchen is galley-shaped and no two people can crisscross it without bumping butts even if they are not as endowed as the Kardashians.
Yes, I must say I did keep my cool. I neither complained nor shed tears. Neither did I bite anyone’s head off, although every bone in my body is aching now.
Now, when am I getting my purple heart?
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Prompt by Lyn's a Witchy Woman  Create 2 stanzas of a rhyming poem... that begins with Ode. Each stanza must be 4 lines, you choose if all lines rhyme or if you want create couplets. I hope you'll be able to make us experience your favorite food just the way you do...
Ode to Gluten
Ode to you, my staple
from oven to table
muffin, bread, and roll
Cheers to cholesterol!
Cookies, buns, cupcakes
I’ll do what it takes
for this dizzying array
in my diet to stay
Prompt by Joy  : Clouds
“Clouds are thoughts without words.” Mark Strand.
What do clouds mean to you?
Clouds are the refuge to where the full moon flees, so I can’t catch its image in my camera.
They creep mysteriously over me, sometimes pure white like belly laughs, other times like sorrows in gray shadows. Lightning, their sword, cuts through to earth to issue threats with a drumroll of thunder.
Yet, clouds may show a tender response using their fluid charm because, after a rain-dance or séance, they imagine to become ghosts that shed tears over flowerbeds to send them life. Next, as photogenic actresses, they begin to flirt with the sun by letting it glimmer through their arms.
Troves of feelings allow me hold a few fugitive clouds in the wells of my eyes, akin to white cocoons incubating, to be let loose as words when I take the pen in my hand.
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Prompt 1 by Joy : J. G. Ballard, the author of Empire of the Sun, said: “I quite consciously rely on my obsessions. In all my work I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession.” What do you think about this? Do you use your or another person’s obsessions in your writing?
We all write for various reasons, some mostly for living, others for the love of it; yet, all writing ends up becoming subliminal, since the subconscious finds a way to connect to our hidden depths, as if we are channeling ourselves like mediums. When we do this, consciously of subconsciously, we dig up dirt, which partly means our obsessions.
For example, author Martin Amis, obsessed with video games, wrote Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict's Guide to Battle Tactics. Edgar Allen Poe was obsessed with fear, especially fear of insanity, the death of beautiful women, and alcohol. He has put all these into work, as many of his stories and poems are fictionalized and exaggerated forms of his obsessions. I also think, since so many novels have protagonists or other characters who are writers or journalists, this shows we writers’ obsession with lliterature and writing.
To help us with our work, it is a good idea to make a list of our obsessions, although they may change or become forgotten as time passes. The items on our lists can be things that keep popping up in our minds as good memories or haunting ones, or even pieces of other writers’ stories that we keep recalling. They can be visual things like the images of damage after disasters, faces of monsters, or people who have been like monsters to us. They can be our backgrounds, our family rituals, members of our families, loved or hated friends and lovers, what made us deliriously happy or cracked us, etc. Do you stop to pet dogs or cats even if you don’t know their owners or smile at babies at the mall without even looking at their parents? Do you like haunted houses, planting, photography, keeping your floors clean, or starting to wash yourself from your head or from your toes? All these qualify for writerly obsessions.
The items on our list are what we can base our stories upon, possibly time after time. As our subconscious doesn’t discriminate between the good, ugly, odd, or evil, it is important to silence our internal critic while making the list.
Whether we like them or not, since our obsessions exist, why not make use of them knowingly? As Natalie Goldberg says in Writing Down the Bones, "Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.”
Prompt 2 by Princess Megan Rose : What would you put in this year's time capsule to channel the essence of our current moment for future generations?
The photo of the astronauts in space repairing something on the Astrolab
A video of the Amazon jungle before it’s ruined by men
A video of the North and South poles “ “ “ “
A video of the plants and animals about to become extinct
The snapshots of WdC as soon as P15 is made public
My WdC portfolio page’s snapshot
The Apple Watch
Zula pocket printer
Sony a7S Full Frame Mirrorless Camera
My family’s photo before we all become extinct
The list of daredevils who want to go to Mars to colonize it
A list of crazy diets that women put themselves through
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Yesterday, we watched, however briefly, a movie made in the 1940s. It was George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. My husband remarked, “Is this a farce? Look at how the characters are so fake.” What was on the screen was like a joke to us, not because of the lack of technology, but the way the characters spoke and acted. At first, we thought, this was because, when it came to physical looks, people depended on word of mouth or pen without the discovery of cameras. Although at times, representational art helped some, it wasn’t enough because even that depended on the painter’s vision.
Afterwards, we guessed that, in those earlier times of the cinema, the movie industry focused more on fanciful settings, costumes, and adornments than what the movie meant or if the characters showed at least some depth. The way they looked could be close to the truth, but who could be sure of that without them showing their internal beings?
In written stories and especially good ones, the readers feel closely acquainted with the leading characters, as if they knew them in real life. Yet, the portrayal of such characters usually lacks a full pictorial description. What they look like is only sketchy. Even those authors who are better at physical description offer us stray body parts, but does this really matter?
As an example, let’s take Hemingway’s Catherine Barkley in Farewell to Arms, as she is one of the most visually described Hemingway characters: “Miss Barkley was quite tall…was blonde and had a tawny skin and gray eyes. I thought she was very beautiful.” To Frederick Henry, the protagonist and her lover, Catherine’s hair is important, as he talks about the feel of it in detail. As to its physical description, he says she had wonderfully beautiful hair which was very shiny. She also had a “lovely face and body and lovely smooth skin, too.” If one had to draw a word-perfect portrait of Catherine from this description most of her physical assets would have to be left blank. Yet, what made Catherine real in the story was her strong character and personality.
Literary characters are vague, physically speaking, and that’s the way it should be. I recall a teacher saying this about character description: “Characters are like cryptograms made richer by the partial omission of their physical traits.”
If I saw the character as flesh and blood in front of my eyes, would I be able to see what he or she is like inside? After all, I see lots of people in real life whose internal lives are a mystery to me. There is a big difference between seeing and understanding, and I think in writing, understanding has to be more important. Even in everyday life, a real person becomes more beautiful (or uglier) in proportion to our knowing their true nature.
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