Decide for Joy

I invited a self-proclaimed ‘Old Soul’ with gifted pen to take a peek at DP to see if she’d like to join. What she saw inspired her to re-start her own blog – ripple effect in motion! Visit Flutterby at www.flutterbysarefree.blogspot.com. Also, I’m posting a poem of long-ago in her honor, some of you may have seen it already. Within moments of composing the line “The ones who greet me now will help decide” Flutterby 'fluttered by' with words of comfort and encouragement. A kindred spirit revealed, synchronicity at its finest. As opposed to Homecoming which I wrote years after the events and had an 'assigned' measure of time to include a sprinkling of wordplay, this poem seemed to write itself at the time with immediacy, only needing the most minor of changes. You all are 'great ones’ . . .

Decide for Joy

And so I face the blackness once again
A result of words and deeds by mortal men
Seeking to destroy the light within
This time those words and deeds will not win
This time the light in me may not be dimmed

So let the dollars from the conversation drop
Soon see all verbal use come to a stop
Let start then all forms of ‘be’ instead of ‘do’
Flowing all possibilities for me of knowing you

And so I face me now but once removed
Burnished anew by those I hold in love
Sparks of faith add to the inner glow
Speak volumes for the words that may not show
Speak volumes for the me I’d have you know

So are the tears of sadness or of joy
Is the hope, new-found, ready to employ
The ones who greet me now will help decide
And great ones who have never left my side

Who is up for choosing the NEXT TOPIC?

If we're going chronologically, Somescallsmetims is up. Tim? Are you out there? (Maybe he has a heavy semester at Purdue.) If someone has a topic brewing inside, that needs to come out, this is the time to sing, shout it, tell the world about it....!

Caught in the moment between How and Why

I'm freaked out. I'm writing this one hour before deadline, and I don't know what has happened. I never expected to procrastinate to this point. I don't know if it's the full moon...or....

I'm still freaked out, even though I've finally begun to write. What I'm feeling is a medley of mixed emotions all linked to the assignment we were given. It shouldn't be this difficult, yet ever since father Marc posted it I have felt such apprehension...

As a youngin I had horrifying hallucinations, and I've up until recently, dealt with many ghoulish apparitions and messengers of Satan. Ha ha. You can laugh, really. It's quite hilarious. (I believe the "Satan" of which I speak, was something within me, and the apparitions? They have manifested physically i.e. breathed on me, sat on my bed, etc. To which I say, "WHA?"). I have and will always have the memories of these psychotic and spiritually grueling episodes but I'm confident when I say that there is no scar tissue! I felt like father Marc's post was confronting me...personally. Singling me out, pressuring me to reveal the demons that I've kept so quiet and unfed. I, replete with rumination, now have the courage in my fingers...but sense already within me, disquiet and regret at going outside the doors of the assignment only to turn and throw stones at it.

That's not my intention, and I admit to my weakness'. But you must know, this is a far a better choice than what I had considered writing two days ago...

The past few nights I've been browsing YouTube for claymation films and banned cartoons. I came across a handful of gems, some of which scared me to bits with their unapologetic dementia. I was impressed especially with those made in the 70's where the music was just as frightening, if not more than, the deranged masses of personified clay. I thought, "I could write my Ditalini Press assignment, based on the premise that one of these videos saw me through the most difficult time yet in my life: watching eight entire minutes of monstrosity in animated form! The REALM of claymation!" Then I realized adding a video post to our blog was a cop-out. It would prove I hadn't the capability to support my writing solely with words, that I needed another medium to fill out my story and bring life to it. I also considered that our blog is laid-back, that whatever goes, goes. But it still felt incomplete.

So now I'm here rereading father Marc's assignment details, left to answer how I dealt with my most difficult challenge. And to that I have no answer, I could be dealing with this for some time to come.

I look at the clock. 2 minutes til deadline...

I leave you with...

The woman at the Chicago painting workshop

She finally told the group what she did for a living. We were all chewing soaked-grain and yellow-split pea soup around a picnic table. She put on her straw hat (the sun was coming out.)
"I'm a nude model for the Art Institute of Chicago."
My husband asked me what she said. He's learning English. And I didn't want to tell him. I didn't want him to look at her, be captivated by her. But I did.
"elle est un modèle de nu." I said. He smiled.
The tan, concerned-faced mother from Madison asked her who she worked with.
"Floyd Berryman, Barry Hastings, Clive Constance-Wells, Anika Kravitz, all of them," she said, "I've been doing it for ten years and I'm really good at it."
"I'm sure the professors appreciate working with someone that knows what they're doing," the watercolor animal artist commented.
"They do. They tell all the younger models to come see me work and to take notes. They say I'm the best. I know how to move. I've got it."
She took a spoonful of soup to her lips and paused.

Her hair was starting to gray. When I stood behind her, I could see course, white hairs sweeping around her tumble-down bun. It wasn't her white, pore-less skin, her classical Grecian profile, or the lipstick applied to her little mouth that told me she was used to others' eyes on her. It was in her eyes. They reflected years of approving glances from men artists (after all the experts on beauty!) and a total self-confidence that came from seeing her exposed body manifested thousands of times in smudged charcoal sketches strewn on florescent lit floors. It was in her forced feminine posture that hinted, "I am my body." It was in her bawdy jokes.

"She's like a cat on a hot tin roof!" The instructor crowed as she perched one foot on the bedrail, the other on a windowsill to reach a spot on the wall that needed paint. She put her arms around him way too much.
"What color would you call this?" He asked the group, holding up a swatch of orange paint he blobbed on a board.
"Cantaloupe?" he suggested.
"What? she asked coyly, "we 'can't elope'?"
"Well, I still have three weeks left in the country," he shot back.
She let out a laugh of pure pleasure and touched his back.
When she was idle, she kept a large, unused, rectangular brush in her hands and caressed it like a cat.
The second day of the workshop, she came in very late. At five. The workshop ended at five. But the instructor was delighted to see her. The third day, she was on time and we took a tour of a Waldorf-Steiner school where she helped out with a mural.
"I added the mice," she said.
I looked closely in the salmon and pink grapefruit swirls and found little gray mice hiding in corners, under windowsills, stealing tiny pieces of cheese.
I watched her put on her straw hat again before we went out into the sunlight and she told me her favorite color was white. She said she looked good in white and that she couldn't stand to wear red because it reminded her of all the bleeding she'd done in her life. And I was wearing red.


p.s. How does this story relate to my greatest challenge? Freud could maybe find it somewhere in there, but I don't really know myself!

Greatest Challenge

Greatest challenge - mute affliction
On the bright side - learned to listen!

My Challenge

This assignment kept turning over in me.
Little voices spoke up and said, "pick me."

I guess I don't have any daunting challenges that stand out.
I can recall how I gave myself the resolution at the start of 2008 to
stop complaining and lying. This has turned to become a real challenge.

I intended to tell a wild bike racing story and my heroic efforts in this
physical trial. How I was handed a reversal of the glory I was seeking.
Challenges are as big as we want them to be.

Becoming unconditional love might be a challenge, but then again, this suggests
an opposition of some sort. I have been undergoing some tense and serious family
difficulties lately, but I have learned to realize that there are greater objectives
than what is visible out on the horizon. Being able to relax is a challenge, and a
worthy one. Trusting the divine plan without further apprehension remains
a stinger of a challenge. I occasionally find myself cursing the heavens
in mistrust. Self honesty is another huge challenge I find for myself.

I am facing the challenges I have before me and am not concerned about what
is coming next. Regardless of win or lose, wisdom and experience is gained.

Marc

The Unseen Gift

Jaguar 8, nobody with me
Sliding a pass under the bedroom door
Finding a home while climbing a tree
Finishing ditalini and asking for more

Swinging and sliding and digging a hole
Adding to Smallville day after day
Eating Special K from a Corelle bowl
Hoping 4:30 was still far away

Rolling down the hill while giggling with glee
Playing freeze tag and making mud pies
Building moss covered bridges in the magnolia tree
Thinking about next time as we said our good-byes

Yum yums, popsicles, and alphabet soup
Chasing rainbows as they flew across the wall
Throwing apples to watch them roll off the roof
Running and jumping for the attic chain in the hall

The Spy Club, A.B.L.E., Angel Heaven, too
GEEP / VEEP and the Scientific Scene
Gazing in awe when the club house was new
Flying our kite using Grampa's good string

Walking to Hills for Jurassic Park cards
Going to Kroger to cash in our change
Trying to keep our games out of the neighbor's yards
The smell of pasta sauce simmering on the range

Playing TI Invaders, Parsec and Munch Man
Alpiner, and Hunt the Wompus, too
Memorizing The Secret Garden and Peter Pan
Arriving in the morning in time for Family Feud

Two pats after every flip of a corn pancake
Cream cheese and bagels, toasted rye bread
Filming a commercial in only one take
Marching through the field, the corn well above our head

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a tiger by the toe
Inky pinky ponky, daddy had a donkey
Engine, engine, number nine, going down Chicago line
Bubblegum, bubblegum, in a dish, how many pieces do you wish?

Oh what I must have already forgotten, it is too early yet
Looking back at those days
I fear there are more things I am bound to forget
I seek to trigger my memory in so many ways

Such a special gift, these memories of childhood
A challenge to never forget or underestimate those days
My challenge to confront what I thought I understood
And pray my children's youth is as wonderful in their own ways

****()()()()()****()()()()****()()()()()****

Explanation for my post. I was working on the theory that 'everything happens for a reason', but we may not know why until later. I wrote my story because it came out of me suddenly...so, this is sort of a personal ongoing, interactive kind of take on the assignment. Thank you Luke, I liked your idea a lot. Great posts guys! They all made me....emotional. Love you all to bits and pieces, under the sun.

New Assigment for October

Assigment due on Oct. 14, (full moon)

Topic:

Describe or illustrate, elaborate or portray the greatest challenge you have ever faced in
your life at this point in your existence.

This can be physical, mental or psychological, spiritual. In any realm of your choosing.
How did you deal with it? or, otherwise?

thanks.
Marc Anderson

Birds of the Season

"Tomorrow, which never comes but already is, I'll be here again, and still. You can meet me - if it's meant to be" -a bird of the Season

How many sentences were still in the night, but which she heard clapping, on leaves and against stones. "Throw! Throw!" the clouds sang to the breeze that went through her sun woven hair. Early fall, and sweet apples hung from starlike branches. Orchards running among lanes of sunset colored rivers and tall feathery trees, the ones that monitor the world quietly when the snow makes them into blue giants under the moon. You could fill your basket and feed your horses with the textures of this place. Her home that she knew, with the birds of the Season.

And she heard music - like the kind that chimes in and out - weathered with joy but held by Sadness. And short small drums of sound mixed up with her footsteps there outside the cabin. Kicking leaves and saying sorry. Acknowledging her belly becoming a womb. The music was Sounds and they were empty to the World, yet still, somehow by magic, always somehow, encompassed her entirely. Timpani, forest rustling, laughter of someone's mother, and the same smiling sun that hung there day after day. She was wild - held onto her own free will like the trees labeled in bark, and picking off scabs like wounds that never cared. The Season hastily awoke in the East and she was the curtain it held open long after the bow.

Two large hogs had been murdered openly and she wanted only one thing - To demolish the presence that it had left behind. It stuck to the surroundings, an Orange Persistence...an unsettled continuous cry in the night. The babe inside was making its way in its own world. The forests it knew - vessels. The skies - her fluid. The air - the blood. Opening into new space she had somehow known to prepare for it, she itched and grew faster with the Time it became, then slowed. There were ringing feverish birds relaying messages between them. Things like, "Hold tight" and "Momma is here". But real birds - blue birds - with gentle beaks, known to sit atop those feathery trees near the orchard, the shed of the neighbor, the room where she slept, denying the hoarse cries of the wetlands and of the restless hogs, would write - scribble down on the page, what she was to hear next. The message of the Season and who she could become, she read: "It's Me"