Van Gogh’s Nap

Sewer Run Off better known as The Sewer Sprite: Photo by Noelle

Sewer Run Off better known as The Sewer Sprite: Photo montage by Noelle

The quilt is for someone else. A body that will fill the space that now lies empty. Not my room and yet it is all about me, so I come here often. Shafts drift through Grannie curtains I should’ve taken down, but there’s no more money in the coffer so lace dresses up the poor girl’s pockets. The cats purr on the sills marking the territory with sonar and fur. Nothing much here, except my heart beats louder as I step across the threshold and smell the coconut verbena candles. Something of me that is good and sound lives here. Paint brushes stick out of the overstuffed closet that holds my art. Spent tubes and coffee stir sticks are meant to look neat in cups on shelves. Neat and art are antonyms, really, but I need the order in the chaos to feel accomplished, if at nothing more than organization. If the closet door is closed it’s a lovely, pristine guest room waiting quietly for visitors. But open that door and it’s color and chaos spill into the room a garden of wild flowers. My mind couldn’t be better described and maybe that’s why I come here. To see myself in furniture, folded blankets and used up canvases. The cat stretches in the sun and I lie back on the day bed in the warm pool of light, too. It is right to nap in the light and chaos of one’s creative genius. At least until the guests arrive.

Hull and Seed

Dragonfly on Lotus hull: image re-posted from Enchanted Nature Facebook page

Dragonfly on Lotus hull: image re-posted from Enchanted Nature Facebook page

I am the hull and the seed
The stem and the flower
Dry creek bed and flooded field

Crushed by life I am
Forged stronger than bone
Delicate as web threads in attic room

That dragonfly wings should replace a heart
Thumping wildly as the quiet morn
Aloft with a love from the coldest of fires

I am nowhere in everything
All my sounds in a hum
On fire is my soul to sing as one

Beginner’s Mind

Image re-posted from The Mind Unleashed Facebook Page


Image re-posted from The Mind Unleashed Facebook Page

I thought I was at center. I felt as balanced as a ballerina in Swan Lake. At the place of nirvana where cherry blossoms float down and the world smells of nag champa. Where you aren’t wrestling snakes in the evangelic’s circus tent, but sipping honey from lily cups. One of those cool Zen-catching moments that Ram Dass and Kornfield talk about as casually as the goodness of roasted potatoes at Sunday supper. You know when the sky opens as to Moses and you’re blessed with eternal peace. Then the horns blared and I looked at the dashboard clock. Funny how certain we can be about things, until we’re not.

Time. The time to get from here to there. It haunts me like a wolf. If I can let the time go then I’m catching Phoenix feathers and dropping into downward facing dog, a hawk swooping Earth. Hourglass snatches me up, though, and she is a mean old, nanny demanding I learn my lessons. Feels like someone should have mentioned that time is a whip cracking in your head that’ll be your undoing if you aren’t careful. Instead we are offered lovely chimes to mark it.

I thought enlightenment was a place, like Intercourse, Pennsylvania where it was always funny to touch that spot on a map. That with the right amount of effort and time I’d be there, properly dressed and ready for congratulations. The fattest, blissed out cat, in full lotus that ever walked through the doors of the Ritz Carlton of the Tao Te Ching.

Oh, all of the thoughts you have thunk, little grasshopper.

A work in progress from The Writer’s Church in Boulder, CO. Hosted by Marj Hahne. Inspired by “Elegance” by Fleda Brown.

Sing

A study in the formation of frost: Photo by Noelle

A study in the formation of frost: Photo by Noelle

Who should sing the song of goodness and well being into the world? The Buddha? Jesus? Mother Teresa? Why are we waiting for a great leader when we each have a song of love in our throat? We sing our life into being through our thoughts. Offer anger and the world is dark. Offer tenderness and the world is soft. We sing by thinking and we are always singing.

The world needs simple lullabys as children need them for soothing and sleep. And like a baby the Earth does not know its mother’s voice as stage worthy, nor if it be heard by one or thousands. The Earth simply knows our voice as the voice of love.

There are no small acts of love and no common voices. You are Mohammed or Rumi or Osho. So sing. Sing as though the world were your stage and your heart should burst with the love it has to give out. For in truth, that is how it is.