sheltering in the arms
of an old spruce
watching the rain fall
as the pine cones grow
and the new growth of spring
ablaze in its verdancy
bows towards earth
Beginnings
Early morning sunlight
Slips through the blinds
An offering of light
It looks, it smells, it feels like springtime. The air is warm and moist, not cold and dry, with a green and earthy scent instead of the odor of decaying vegetation usually present during the fall and winter months. The daffodils have sent up green shoots, responding to the sunshine and the unseasonably warm temperatures. The birds are twitterpated, but skeptical. I bet even Punxsutawny Phil was confused and confuzzled in his prognostications.
The Great Groundhog has predicted 6 more weeks of winter. What winter?
Lately writing has felt like hitting a brick wall.
I sit at the table staring out at the darkness waiting for the pond to appear and listening to the rhythmic patter of the rain on the roof, avoiding today’s writing topic of “Shapes like stars,” and wondering how anyone can come up with such prompts. What does that mean? A car whizzes by and the house heat kicks on with the usual drone and hum, warm air swirls around my feet. I put the pen to paper, to the brick wall, seeing the worn rusty color of each brick, the mortar that holds them together, the nooks and crannies and dings. I think about the brick wall we built last summer. Mortar, made with cement. I write: “Marilyn Monroe was shaped like a star and has a star on a sidewalk to show for it.” The bricks begin to crumble and fade as I write about those posing as the shapes of stars, and somehow journey in writing towards the miniature suns that appear on the waves of the water on a sunny day, and find my words in the shapes of stars.
I’m occasionally using writing prompts from A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves. I think the one I used this morning (“shapes of stars”) is for the 10th of January or thereabouts. I haven’t been using it daily as there are mornings when I prefer to empty out with morning pages or I spend time working on my small stone for the day. I don’t want to skip any of the prompts so it is going to take me more than the usual year to work my way through the book and prompts. I’ve noticed that those I find challenging and/or like the least tend to be the prompts that make me dig deeper.
The sun rises from behind the neighbor’s house,
revealing and warming the trees at the back of the pond
in a blaze of golden-orange light.
Darkness lurks in the woods.
*The title for this post is courtesy of the spam I cleared out this morning. One of them referred to my blogs as “merely magnificent.” I love the contradiction in terms.
Winter falls silently across the morning,
a blanket of snow stretches over the dreaming earth.
Unmarked paths of white wait in quietude.
My January 3rd small stone, tossed into the river.
I found this difficult to do today, and had many thoughts about giving up. It is almost impossible, it seems to me, to capture in words or photos the beauty of the first big snowfall, when the world is hushed and the snowflakes waltz down from the sky, romancing the earth before covering her in winter’s white and sparkling jewels and clothing.
Citrus-y Morning
Peeling the clementine, fingernails digging into the bumpy skin
Orange-y scent rises up
My body POPS! awake
Caffeine for the nose.
I place a segment in my mouth
and smile at the burst of citrus-y pleasure
that washes across my tongue.
The scent stays with me for hours
Released from my hands and into the air with a gesture.
I joined a river of stones for fun and challenge. I originally thought I might post my small stones (if I posted them at all) over at Life in the Bogs, but now I’m thinking Bountiful Healing will be a good place for these little moments of life. It’s sort of a safe space, with fewer followers. I can hear a voice in my head calling, “Chicken!” This is a different type of writing for me so, yes… call me Chicken. For now.
Autumn light
Yoga is a light, which once lit, will never dim. The better your practice, the brighter the flame.
B. K. S. Iyengar
What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.
Your first parent was a star.
~ Jeanette Winterson
Celebrate each season, for you too, are transformed with the turns of the earth.
~ Arthur Dobrin
Bountiful Healing 