A Lark

    Time to fly!  Well, not really, but I am taking off in a manner of speaking.  That is keeping a promise I made to submit work once a week to traditional and on line publishers.  So, up, up and away...(upload that is as this week I'm submitting via email.)

   At the End of the Pier

    Juliet Clancy recently wrote a piece so devastatingly rich that I realized I was holding my breath as she read.  Of interest, we had both brought pieces about our fathers to the writers group.  Mine was written on Halloween and tells of a dream I had of my father the night before, on All Hallow's Eve.

    Juliet's piece was titled All Hallow's  Eve as her father died that very night many years ago.  She traverses time and space and the scenes she writes breathe and you can taste the whiskey.  She fearlessly dives into the stormy past and emerges strong, integrating the past, repairing it, preparing her future in the moment as she writes.

    I'm at the end of the pier, daring myself to dive.

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Photo of Crome Pier, Norfolk, Gale Force Seven, October 2009 by Chris Taylor.

    Homemade soup and tea sandwiches followed by freshly baked apple crisp topped with real whipped cream and just brewed coffee...and then to the work at hand...writing.  But not alone.

    Again quoting Gail Sher,  "Part of  deliberately doing anything is creating an environment that supports it."

    Paramahansa Yogananda is emphatic:  "Environment is stronger than will."

    Thich Nhat Hanh says "Sangha building is so crucial.  If you are without a sangha (kindred*), you lose your practice very soon.  In our tradition we say that without the sangha you are like a tiger that has left his mountain and gone to the lowland--he will be caught and killed by humans." 

    Thanks to the writer Juliet Clancy for feeding the sangha today.  And to Melanie Dewberry-Jones for snapping the photo.

*kindred -- I am on the hunt for a word to replace the word, community.  Suggestions welcomed.

    Can you project a story based on this image?    Could you employ a vocabulary with such intent that I understand directly and exactly what you intended me to understand?

    I once wrote and read aloud to a group a poem about a tightly woven humming bird nest nestled in a Red Japanese Plum tree.  One woman thought the poem was about cooking and serving the humming bird eggs!

    I have a dear friend who wants to create a sacred language.  I think we need to work with the proper use of the language we have on hand...but she might be on to something.

    I found this quote from an unknown, Native American ceremony and it so intrigued me as it describes a sacred way of using language so that it portrays an exact meaning and communicates its sacred intent.  The quote is:  It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way.  That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku'oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love.

 

    Autumn color reflected over and over, the same leaf''s image repeated in the droplets on the thin branch.  Photographer Sue Grief said that with her next breath the breeze shook the drops free and the composition was lost.   

    What comes up for me with this image is a quote from Henry David Thoreau:  "The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.  Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly."

    In Gail Sher's book, One Continuous Mistake, Four Noble Truths for Writers, she writes in a chapter named "The Gentle Cycle," that writers need to be emotionally and psychologically ready to receive feedback."  But this means that the writer must be prepared to receive the feedback constructively.  Not from the psychology of the ego.

    As a young advertising copy writer, you loved me and you loved my copy and we were one and the same. That was an incredibly pain-filled existence. A real suffering?  Not at all, I suffered like a dog.

    Later, working as a publicist, the formulaic was a guide to tighter writing.  News releases had a specific format as did opinion editorials, while advertorials were another animal altogether.  And the bibles were on hand, that is the AP Style Guide, the Chicago Style Manual and the great-grandfather of them all, Elements of Style.

    Which brings me to my next breath...an idea for a contemporary picture book for children.  I think the timing is right on and if I don't act...well, like Sue said, with her next breath the breeze shook the drops free and the composition was lost.

Wisdom traditions transmit knowledge of a certain type from generation to generation by use of a wise old man, a grandfather, or a wise old woman, grandmother, speaking to a child.  Usually the child has to seek out the older person.   

    Yesterday  I heard an example of one such transmission.  It is Native American and the grandfather is speaking to his grandson who has sought his advice.  The grandfather tells the child that within him, the boy, are two wolves.  "Which one is the strongest?" asks the boy.  "It depends," says the grandfather, "On which one you feed."

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    Photo by Jose Luis Rodriguez, supplied by Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards

This is our lovely St. Anthony, patron saint of the lost...so it is St. Anthony that I let go and let you take care of my friend.

This dismal shot is another winner from the Take a View contest.  It's a shopping trolley abandoned in Aberdeen Harbor.  Pointless as a fish on stilts. 

    I know that we all feel abandoned in some way by parental love; that is, unless we are feeling we suffered from engulfment, smothered by parental love and protection.  At any rate, an ongoing response to a stimulus no longer present in our environment is neurotic.

    We are adults.  Our parents did the best they can.

   But the pain still feels real, right?  Can I see that it is an echo of injury, suffering, that I won't release?  That the habit of addiction has so masked the initial, perhaps even the original loss, that I have chemically  blinded myself.

    If I think of life as an artist's palette, addiction is ash gray, dust on the wind, with the individual literally blown away, scattered by the gentlest of breeze.  Ash to ash, dust to dust...

There is an interior landscape I hardly know at all.  I might say that I explore it with poetry or collage.  It bubbles up in dreams and then often I ride astride my old black horse through foreign lands.
    And then "I" wake up.  It's morning and their are bills to be paid, errands, family needs to be met, hardly time to scribble the dream of another midnight ride in the bedside journal.   And yet there is a yearning to be like Jung and take the time to sit on the lake's shore with a pile of stones and play.  Annie Dillard might say this was a way to 'teach the stones to talk'  which they did.  And  Jung 'listened.'

    He built his sanctuary of stone on the lake's shore and in that house he wrote.  So this blogging away is an attempt, a tool, and one of many employed,  to explore that island within.  What sort of house would I build there?

Members of the Pilobolus Dance Theatre are pictured here rehearsing a new production, Shadowland.  The company is known for their physicality, zesty humour and risk-taking!
Good news for those in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pilobolus will perform Sun., Nov. 15, 7:30 pm at the Marin Civic Center, Veterans Memorial Theater, in San Raphael.