Looking Out, Looking In

Posted on October 22, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 12

I have a bone to pick, but it sticks in my throat a fish rib I keep eating with no hope of digesting. There’s no point to the rant I offer you. That’s what makes me wring my hands with an emotional wash that still smells of fumes and rotted fish. I know the answers you’ll give me to every question I could ask. So why ask?

Knowledge is a devil if there ever was one. Gives you comfort while it steals your security in endless mind games you can’t stop tricking yourself with. I hate you for filling my head with the knowledge of who I am. Light and gold. Miracles and love. I look down at my costume and want to rip it till I’m naked. I can’t escape my frightened thoughts that burn me in a lava flow, erupting in my brain and filling my mouth with an eager malice. You could have told me in the beginning that ignorance was not only bliss, but a quaalude cocktail that would’ve left me sleeping; a contented mongrel, in a sewer heap that knows no better. Now a youthful, hungry anger boils in my belly and it’s more bitter than death no matter how many times I swallow it down. But there be the rub. Poison is best drawn out and all wounds must be opened to cleanse them of their infection. That is how I feel: raw, open, infected with my own awareness of thoughts that poison my spirit.

For the love of me, you say. It was my choice you announce and I could beat you within an inch of my own life if I weren’t plagued by the truth in it. It eats at my mind until I’m smashing the beds and tearing up my brakes in the car. You should’ve told me to leave when I came through the door. You should have said the price for awakening is sanity.

A work in progress from The Writer’s Church hosted by Marj Hahne. Piece Inspired by “Dear Corporation” by Adam Fell.

Wood: God and Man

Posted on October 18, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 6

The Embrace: Rock and Tree: Photography by Noelle

Mouth of the Storyteller: photography by Noelle

Whether God or man there is always a rich story and deep beauty in the grain, that calls my feet to root into the earth.

Fire Tops

Posted on October 15, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 8

I waited in the early morning darkness
Breath billowing out in long streams
Finger tips wrapped tight in fisted hands
Dug deep in pockets

The shift in light was so subtle
Suddenly I could see the higher branches
Two crows peered at me as though I intruded
Naked feathers, naked sight

Then it licked the tops in fire and light
My heart beat faster than the shutter
The moment was brief to catch with camera
Yet as quickly as I began, my hand was stayed

Sunrise is a communion I often forget
A flicker of awakening to the earth and the mind
In activity I am artist but a bit asleep
In stillness I awaken as part of the art.

Images from a Train: Town of Long Gone

Posted on October 9, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 5

A storm rolled in over a small midwestern town. Shops long closed from economies long gone invited the melancholy. Brick offered a break with its beauty, but few passed by to take in the charm. In the late afternoon, a brooding rain came to a dying village, watering stories long gone, too.

Disappointment

Posted on October 7, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 5

When I was younger I was easily angered by our species neglect and destruction of the earth and nature. It was a source of political debate and protest. Now a deep sadness comes, not merely for the bits of nature damaged or lost, but for humanity’s spirit that is damaged and lost, as well.

Images from a Train: Vacancy

Posted on October 1, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 4

Vacant were the eyes that stared back at me from rotting sills. A wave of isolation and loneliness pervaded my thinking and I pulled back a bit from the train window. I felt the desertion like oil seeping from toxic barrels sinking into my chest. Small town death, I mused and the end of the family farm.

Then the briefest flutter of something at the top window of a grain elevator caught my eye and the thought of a barn owl nesting in the eaves came to mind. How easily this lead to the sound of mice squeaking below the warped floor boards and the pondering of a raccoon sleeping atop an air vent. Bees work to winter in a broken tractor engine, as geese munched on the grasses growing from past year’s feed. My inner vision shifted, just a hair, and I looked more closely as the peeling paint rusting pipes. Something about the decay creating a curious beauty that was consuming all that passed before me.

I see now it was my own isolation and loneliness that I saw in the darkened windows. It was my own decay that pervaded my thoughts. As the pigeons left the rooftop of the silo and squirrels darted along the fence of the abandoned feed lot, I saw it was not life that was missing from these places, it was fear of death that was haunting me.

Images from a Train: Sunset in the Farmland

Posted on September 25, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 11

The sunset rolled in on long lines and parallel shafts of deepening orange. The clicking of the rails, with the steady rocking, left my limbs heavy in the seat. Tracters were rolling toward the barns outside my window and the swallows had taken up vigil on telephone lines. At day’s end even the birds know it is best to simply sit and witness.

Images from a Train: Motion

Posted on September 15, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 5

In the distortions and flashes I see my image. The bridge of my nose another geometry in a flashing landscape. Coal has already passed on the previous cars – strapped lumber, too. The rails are one of the few places in the country where a passenger goes last. Passenger trains stop for all the cargo that moves. Milk and oil tankers, flatbeds of slate and shale and bales of grasses for cattle lands. Graffiti is a color smear against the gun metal.

My reflection comes and goes between the cars and I realize this is true of all of me. I am what exists between each thought, as life exists, flashing between each car.

Little Girl Swirling

Posted on September 12, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 10

I attended my cousin Brent’s wedding in Chicago. This was the flower girl. I never got her name. She danced and twirled loving the feel of her dress and the power of her boots. When you are five everything goes together, because it’s never about the appearance, as how good you feel when you see yourself in it. So if you feel good about the dress and you feel good about the boots, well then, they must go together.

Boys, I’m sure, have their own thing, but for little girls it’s all about the dress. When I was her age I had a chocolate brown satin and velvet dress for special occasions. I wore it with black, patten leather Mary Janes. The skirt twirled deliciously when I spun. I’d stand in my parent’s bedroom where there was a full length mirror and dance and pose at myself. I wonder sometimes how it is we lose pleasure in our own beauty. As children it comes so naturally, but then as we age, we seem to forget. Maybe it’s the dress. Lose the swirling skirt and you lose your way. You lose the ability to be carefree and dance about for no other reason than it just feels good.

I watched her for sometime. It’s hard to turn away from that sort of magic.

Soar

Posted on September 2, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 13

Gulls at Johnston Lake: Photo by Noelle

What if it is all to get us to let go of the cliff ledge? What if we’re all being shaken off our belief we must have security, predictability and knowledge? Every hardship a challenge to the internal structures we create to define who we are, how everything works and what is true and real?

What if all of this is for our awakening? To encourage our understanding of freedom, rather than a lesson on imprisonment. To forget everything we think we know and let go of the ledge. Free fall and trust we will fly. What if it’s the reason we chose to live? We wanted every single moment to happen, because our spirit already knew it could soar.