Today's Flowers: Yesterday's Illusion

Here are some summertime flowers reflected in the dull and dirty mirrored glass of the arcade at Ocean Beach Park. I like this photo, though it's far from good. It reminds me things are not always what they appear and it's better to look on from afar, to play gently what you see rather than be played by it.

Today's Flowers

One Single Impression: Creative

I think of my favorite
Contemporary poets
Their gift for control
Just the right word
Minus a little

How I value
The understatement,

The not quite saying

I swim naked in the possibilities
Soaking them up, making them me

I step from that deep water

To run through
The tall grass of pure feeling
Deeper and deeper
Lost in the

Moist dark of a wilderness

(The trained meadow is gone now)

(There is no going back)

Every wild sound becomes my voice
Every graceful sway of every branch and leaf

Is me

Moving without thought or care
Deeper into the dark

I feel everything
I become nothing

In the space between
This breath and this breath
And this

There are no words
There is no need.

Nobel winner Nadine Gordimer of South Africa once said, "People make the mistake of regarding commitment as something solely political. A writer is committed to trying to make sense of life. It's a search. So there is that commitment first of all: the commitment to the honesty and determination to go as deeply into things as possible, and to dredge up what little bit of truth you with your talent can then express."

One Single Impression

Skywatch Friday: Water to Wine Somewhere Down the Line

Skywatch Friday

Wordless Wednesday: Voyeur

Wordless Wednesday

My World Tuesday: A Quiet Morning in Woodbury

Very early Veterans' Day morning, I took a little walk while the mechanics in town worked on my car. The day was so still, so tucked in, that the biggest sound seemed to be my camera. Every time I pressed the shutter, I felt like I was shaking our rural universe. Even my thoughts seemed too loud for the day.

My World Tuesday

Today's Flowers: Bittersweet....Life Is....

Reading today, I came across these lines from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd: "Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle ofthe human heart be what it is."

Yeah, I thought. Exactly.

Today's Flowers

One Single Impression: Reincarnation

What would you be if you could come back?
We asked the question as a game
when we were children.

I wouldn't ask it now;

I don't care about coming back,
Don't care about later.

Right now

If I could transform myself
I would not--

Though if I had to
I'd become that blend

Of sugar and sunshine
That makes a grape

A grape.

And I would wait for you
To break me open

Until the wine of so many summer days
Coursed through your veins,

Made you warm and open
And full of slow sunsets

And there was no difference
Between you and me.

I said if.

Right now
This theme for a dream is enough.

I will write it.

One Single Impression

Blog Your Blessings: Here is Good

The themes of this dream:

An origami rabbit left for me at my locked classroom door

An origami star folded by a boy who asked me in passing to show him how (In passing, I did.)

Matt the Reader looking for another book

My daughter putting the laundry away (I never asked her to.)

My mom watching a video I made at school in which a combat veteran talks about war

My daughter and I making an apple cake with an old friend's recipe

The janitor promising to sweep my room

Being up and out early enough to watch the geese prepare for winter the way they do when they realize there's no need to go. That here is good.

Blog Your Blessings

Skywatch Friday: Gonna Be a Long Walk Home

Out for a walk on Veteran's Day, I found myself enjoying the most intense daylight in the inky waters of the Pomperaug River. The sun seemed too tired and week to melt the haze around it and claim the day. It was a beautiful, quiet morning that felt like snow.

Skywatch Friday