A Lark

    "We don't see things as they are.  We see things as we are."

I'm reading something I read twenty years ago, The Empty Mirror:  Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery, the classic account of Janwillem ven de Wetering's 1958 foray into Zen.
I realize that it is an account of a hero's journey, the monastery is this knight's dark wood, which he enters of his own accord.
For other timeless titles exploring the esoteric, visit  www.usedesoteric.com.

I am a fan of Maureen Corrigan and have been for sometime.  Her perspective is thoughtful and fresh. Her memoir, pictured left, is testimony to her love of reading, life and family.
Corrigan's reviews are frequently broadcast on the Peabody Award-winning, nationally syndicated NPR program Fresh Air (90.9 FM-Philadelphia).
She is the critic in residence in Georgetown University's Department of English, where she also lectures on literature, and an expert on 19th-century British literature, women's autobiographical literature, detective fiction, contemporary American literature and Anglo-Irish literature.
She also is a scholar of popular culture and her reviews appear regularly in Book World and the Washington Post.
Her 2008 summer read picks can be found at:
 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/.php?storyld=90588540.

     Here he is, Mr. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who gave us Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, among other works of whimsy. He was six-feet tall, with brown curly hair and blue-grey eyes.
    What of the so-called nonsense poems and songs he wrote?  Were they really nonsense?  For example, the song the Mock Turtle sings in Wonderland, "OOh, it's all his sorrow he ain't got no sorrow!"  The turtle bemoaned  his fate as soon to be soup, but he wasn't even a genuine turtle, "not fit for the soup tureen."  So what was his sorrow?  That he was not made of the right stuff, that he could not meet his fate? 
    Was this a comment slyly inserted by Dodgson self-referential or a comment on mid-19th century colonialism, or perhaps a comment on the state of humankind?
    Dodgson, who wrote under the pen name, Lewis Carroll, was a logician as well as a mathematician lecturer at Oxford's Christ Church College.  He was also a photographer and took the picture of Alice Liddell, pictured in the last post, in 1858.
     Alice in Wonderland was published in 1865 with original illustrations by Lord John Tenniel, just below  is Alice with her flamingo cum croquet mallet, by Lord Tenniel.
    Alice in Wonderland was a publishing wonder and despite the windfall, Dodgson lectured at Christ Church for twenty more years.                                                                                              
                                                                                                          

Breath is time, I once read.
And breathing now, I recall  an afternoon in Northern California when I was compelled to pull the car to the road's shoulder and take this picture.
Cloud's breath.  So it would appear.
    "The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
                                                                                                                                                    - Marcel Proust

"Despite anxiety, humiliation and frustration, you can't stop writing, because you are doing exactly what you should be doing."  Adair Lara

To all my writing group compatriots, keep writing.  We are building bridges to the subconscious for our dreams to cross.

                                             

The first book my husband gave me was Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.   It is an exhilarating year-long meditation on Dillard's life in a house anchored to Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge mountains of West Virginia.   It thrums with life, read it, really!                                    

   The second book he gave me was The Little Prince, in French.  Decades later, dog-eared and underlined, the book rests on the shelf next to my Le Petit Prince eau de toilette, and cardboard lunch boxes featuring the ageless child on his timeless adventure of discovery.

    Written in 1943 by French aviator Antoine Saint Exupery, it tells the tale of a pilot crashed and stranded in the desert.  Enter the Little Prince, wandering the universe.

    My favorite quote from the book:  "On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur, l'essential est invisible pour les yeux."  It is only with the heart that one can see so rightly, the essential is invisible to the eye.

    Like Annie Dillard's book, The Little Prince, offers simple instructions on living a full, ordinary life; the life of a human being.  I am a  pilgrim, too, rediscovering life each day.  And as  I write this I realize that  my wish is to remain open, yes, even vulnerable,  a risk too few grown-ups take.

"Five Dollars," the  psychic said,  she could have the  tape recording of the reading.  It was best to buy the tape the woman said as she could see the young woman was stunned by all that was revealed.    "Buy the tape," the woman urged her client.  Listen to it again,  maybe gain insight, she said.
    The despondent wife bought the tape, made her way home.  She popped it in her tape deck and poured herself a glass of wine, listened to the tape, sipped, cried, napped.
    She awoke.  Edward stood over her on the small sofa, a love seat really, with the tape in his hand.
    The afternoon had lengthened into evening but not a light was on in the cramped apartment.
    She peered up at Edward.  "Well," he sighed softly, "What an interesting day you've had.  I guess I better tell you about Laura."
    In the end, they were friends.  How could it be otherwise?  They were felled by their own belief in the magic of infatuation.    She had been desperate, a princess in need of saving and he needed to believe he was a knight, a hero.
    In the end, it was all it was supposed to be said the young wife's second husband.  And now he said, we have the rest of our lives together.
                                                                                FIN

Her darling father, too good for the furniture business had  lost the business, and their family home.  That was two short years ago and two months before they lost their home, she had married Edward.  She knew she was fleeing her ruined family.  But grief-numbed, she married.  And now, on a whim, her secret was public.
    She was a coward and the psychic at the fair confirmed her fears with a dismissive, "Well, Missy, you jumped too soon.  You've married the wrong man."
    She had thought of Edward as her life raft, her miracle and now this Elmira bespectacled creature was speaking again, "Perhaps he was yours, but not for much longer..."
    Here's what happened...

    My writing teacher offered three questions to hang any story on.  And as micro fiction is all the rage, see if you can identify the three questions on which the story depends.
    Once there was a woman who had a problem.  She had married the wrong man. 
    How to say that, aloud, she wondered.  Security was everything to this young woman; because everything she had known, had been lost.