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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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Prompt: Well behaved women seldom make history. Do you agree?
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I don’t have the actual data on that, but based on what I notice on the average and from what I remember in history, that idea seems to hold true. This is because the term “well-behaved” has to do with women’s accepting and adapting to the society, civilization and the time they are in.
Take Amelia Earhart for example. What she did in her time, I am sure, made many people cross their brows and shake their heads at her, but she did make history.
Only very few of these history-making women, such as Madame Curie, are standouts in their time of the collective consciousness of a group, family, or nation. Other women, however, had to break barriers, get into mischief, or do the unthinkable. Their stories are full of adventure, romance, loss, and victory.
The history of the well-behaved woman is often a secondary history, a backdrop to a man’s successes. We see the well behaved women serving tea at document-signings, caring for the wounded men, staying home to care for the children, and standing off to the side at men’s election victories. Even today’s women, whose famous husbands have cheated on them, stand by them at the news conferences to support them through their mischiefs and ordeals.
On the contrary, the so-called misbehaving women excel and create new horizons when threatened by personal, economic, political, and racial obstacles. These are radical women and they inspire radical concepts to mankind. That’s how they make history.
For me, both types of women are fine women, as long as they are happy with their choices and comfortable in the lives they choose for themselves.
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Prompt: On February 16, 1923 King Tut’s Burial Chamber was opened. How would you feel at this time if you knew that your grave would be opened and you would be put on exhibit in the year 3599? Do you agree with this practice, be it in the name of historical research?
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Although I cooked up this prompt, I couldn’t care less about what happens with my body. After me, it will belong in the earth or with some element of the earth. I would like it to be used in science or in scientific teaching in some way, but I don’t think anyone wants old bodies anymore.
And if they put me up in exhibit in the year 3599, so be it, but I doubt it will be so, for I am not sure where the human race will be by then.
If the human race were to decide to stay alive just to view my long-dead body, it’s their problem, isn’t it!
I’m all for research, historical or otherwise, and if this creates some problem for the divine, being the divine, the divinity will handle it.
And if I am now sounding like an escapee from an asylum, don't go blaming G.O.T games and Gaby  ; there is another very good reason.
I just listened to this whole thing on YouTube: 7.83 Hz PURE TONE - Schumann Resonance Brain Tuner - HD – ASMR
It sounded as if aliens were rounding up in and around the earth, and if that is so, who cares about my dead body, at all?
And if you think my brain is tuned or is in tune now, I have a few bridges and tunnels for sale. A white elephant sale, in fact.
Still, poor King Tut! Not because he is being viewed now, but because he is separated from his treasures.
And for a blog entry, there goes nothing!
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Prompt: From a book description: “In the belief of the Gond tribe [in India], the lives of humans and trees are closely entwined. Trees contain the cosmos; when night falls, the spirits they nurture glimmer into life. Have you ever watched the trees at night, and can you imagine if they have a night life and which secrets they are hiding?
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Once upon a time, which was about until twenty-five years ago, we lived in a house with a two-acre backyard and a half acre front yard. It was covered with trees, mostly oaks but other trees, too. We had, by a very rough estimation, more than 200 tall trees. I know this because the tree-man said so, while he was charging us an arm and a leg.
While we lived there, for more than twenty-two years, we had wind storms, ice storms, and three category one hurricanes. Not one branch fell on the house. Yes, we lost some trees to the storms, but the trees seemed to take care of us like kin.
They held back the bodies of the winds like ninja warriors. They held back the onslaught of the heat. They were like soldiers guarding us, huddling over our ranch-style house. Even if they became rotten inside and were broken, they never even gave us a scratch.
At nights they swayed to the wind, their branches touching each other as if dancing, while the strobe lights of the moon and the stars squeezed through them. In the winter, their dark forms created wonderful silhouettes against the bright snow. And they never blotted out the sky totally.
I am sure they had secrets, but they only whispered them, and their whispers were hard to hear. I can only guess they were communing with the cosmos in our behalf.
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Prompt: Tell me about TROUBLE that resulted because you did a GOOD deed.
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Hahaha! I’d need an accountant to count those “good deed” troubles. One good thing came out of all those, though. I became inured, toughened, and acclimatized to them, so much so that I hardly ever notice them when they happen.
I could tell a few that happened in this site or maybe in my several decades of adult life, but I’ll take the fifth on those. See, taking the fifth comes with becoming inured.
Instead, let me go to one of the earliest ones when I was still green; that is, the time when my acclimatization was just about to begin taking its first baby step.
In third grade, there were two naughty boys who were at my table. When they didn’t pick on me, they fought with each other. One winter day, during recess, just before the teacher came into the room, they started fighting with each other with fists and leg kicks.
One of the boys was smaller and the other one looked like a wrestler. I felt bad for the smaller one that he would get beaten up; also, the teacher would get mad and would be cross with the rest of us if they didn’t stop. This teacher was a strict one who would fly off the handle easily. So, the dummy moi decided to separate them.
During the melee, one of them (the bigger one) fell and hit his head on one of the chairs. There was a gash to his head with blood all over. The teacher came in and was horrified. The smaller boy who I thought I was saving told the teacher, his friend fell because I pushed him. The teacher was so angry, she wouldn’t even listen to me.
She sent the hurt one to the nurse and his parents were called, and the other one and I found ourselves in the principal’s office. Luckily, I was a good, quiet student and everyone together with the principal knew that. Also, two other kids, after we left the room, told the teacher what really happened.
Before the principal--whose personality was the exact opposite of our teacher—decided on our punishment, the teacher came into the principal’s office with the kids who told the truth. Both fighting boys got a day’s suspension, and the principal advised me not to attempt stopping any boys whose sizes were bigger than me while they were boxing. Although I escaped punishment, my mother was notified as it was the school’s administrative duty to do so.
The moral here: It helps to have friends to watch your back and talk in your favor. 
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Prompt: Imagine a long coat, imagine the pocket of that coat, imagine what is inside the pocket... oooohh noooo...You are being followed aggressively...keep in mind all of the above details what are they going to discover when they get to you and grab your pocket.
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I can imagine in my coat pocket to find a check for a million dollars. That’s why I am on my way to the bank. But, no, someone’s tailing me. What the…
He does look like someone from the mob with an unusual bulge at his waistband. I must hurry and get to a more crowded street.
Oh no? He’s got me. He’s choking me, asking to hand him what’s in my pocket. I do as I am told. So what? Is my life any less important than a piece of paper, but he isn’t satisfied with that.
Now he has my hands up and checking me, my every pocket, and my purse, while I am trying to tell him that the most important thing is the check in his hand.
He shoves me away and throws the check back at me. “This is important? This is important? Are you a nut or what!" Then he mutters, "Why do they get me in such a mess?” Now his voice is much higher. “You idiot! This is no check. Someone must have imagined it.”
He turns back and flees.
I pick up the check and look at it. By God, he’s right! On the paper is the list of the items what my teammates reviewed for the G.O.T RAID.
Me and my imagination!
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Prompt: What books do you plan on reading this summer?
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Too many. I own too many books waiting to be read. I am more of a reader than a writer. It doesn’t matter whether it is summer or winter for me.
I have close to 2000 books waiting their turn in Kindle, not to mention the 135 in Nook. Plus, I have a little music playing I-pod like contraption, which also serves as a story-reading tool. Then I have print books, too, waiting for their turn. I also borrow whatever strikes my fancy from the local library.
Now, among them, I still don’t know which ones to choose, but it will be a mixture of classics, literary, general fiction, mystery, and woman’s genre books. On the average I read two to three books a week, but because of the GOT games this month, it is down to one short book a week.
Unfortunately, this life will not be enough to finish reading all the books I’d like to read.
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Princess Megan Rose  ’s Prompt: Life is strange. Like: Did the skipper of Gilligan's Island rescue when you wandered off from your mother when you were four years old in Tucson, Arizona? Did a big bright star hang around your house two weeks before Christmas every year for years? These things happened to me. Do you have a story like these? I want to hear about them!
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If such things that happened to you ever happened to me, Megan, chances are I missed them, due to inattention or explaining those kinds of experiences to coincidences.
On the other hand, I have had a few instances of dreams with the members of my family, either just at the time they passed away or a day or so afterwards, when they told me their goodbyes. The thing is, not all of them were expected deaths.
For example, I had visited with a younger cousin even before she had become pregnant. I had always loved her, but that day we had connected more strongly than ever before.
Then I went away overseas and stayed for about a year. She had written to me about her pregnancy, and I and no one else in the family expected any mishap. She was barely thirty years of age and was healthy. Moreover, she was a nurse, took good care of herself, and she already had a six-year old daughter. It seems she put on too much weight during the pregnancy and went into sudden eclampsia during the birthing process. They just couldn’t save her.
I learned of her death about three days later from another cousin with a phone call. When I asked what the date of her passing was, it corresponded exactly with the date I had the dream.
I don’t know what to make of things like this. I am not the kind that believes in superstitions and other imagined stuff. If I saw other signs for other things, due to my doubting nature, I probably missed them, but how could I miss something like the incident I just wrote about?
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Prompt: “When you’re awake, you know you’re awake. But when you aren’t, you don’t know you aren’t. The question is, how do you know you exist?” -- by Maria Popova in Brain Pickings—
--Write whatever you wish about this, through any form, style, genre, fiction, non-fiction or poetry.--
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I am—
whether aware, asleep, or awake
although no one may care.
My woes, my joys, my loves
are outlandish, together with my belief in
cogito ergo sum, (what a dish!)
but these are all proofs that I exist
until I am poof…no more,
and after that, what about my gist?
Who knows?
But you who are here in this site
will know of my jaunts
for I will still haunt WdC,
in any of my forms, and how.
---Do I scare you now?
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Prompt: May 31 is Walt Whitman’s birthday. He wrote: ““I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” And he also said: “The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.”
When it comes to writing or reading poetry or life in general what do you think about his above quotes?
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Walt Whitman’s voice is the voice for people. It is a human’s voice for the art of writing and poetry, as well as being the voice for life, every life, but mostly American life. As a poet, writer, and human being, he celebrates the human spirit and being human with empathy for all living things.
In the above quote where he says becomes the wounded person instead of asking the wounded one how he feels, we recognize the profundity of his empathy. If only we could all be like him! I am sure the events of his life, such as his volunteering as a nurse during the Civil War, helped deepen this side of him; yet, it is not just empathy he is showing. In my opinion, he is also referring to the oneness of us all, and that kind of appreciation for human life can only come from a lofty spirit.
The same sensitivity is evident in his notion of what a poet does. A true poet, too, shows empathy and sympathy to his subjects, as he covers them with his warmth like the sun and lets them flourish. Without treating his subjects harshly, Whitman’s poet provides descriptive, yet intriguing ideas pertaining to the essence of his poetry, while making it warm and desirable.
Aren’t we all so lucky, even more than a century and a half later, to be able to read him and appreciate his splendid voice, thoughts, expression, and dignity?
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