For a moment, I thought I was Alice, as its great maw gaped at me. Ah to tumble down into the dark and see where it should lead. Maybe to find Wonderland. One never truly outgrows the hunger for adventure and a new storyline, do they?
Tag Archives: letting go
Crack in Stone
Ancient the stone that cracks to slip my spirit free into an open sky.
Looking Out, Looking In
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
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.
Tree Line
There is no doubt I love to walk summer trails, but there is something about the wood in fall and winter that stirs me deeply. The shadow and light play differently at the longer light angles. There is a feeling, too, of all that once was and what will be hanging on each branch like flowering ghosts.
Remembering Summer
Cold and blustery, with dark clouds drifting down the Colorado hog backs in misty waterfalls is my day. With little resistance, my mind turns back to summer and the warm ocean breezes of July. Seashells and plastic pales full of crabs and snails and minnows whipping my ankles. Makeshift moats around lopsided sand castles built for love, not defense. I remember that hours of heat had left us all lazy, but for the surf and boogie boards with the kids. My father was not here, as he passed last year, but I am certain he would’ve liked to see us all together. Surely summer, more than any other season, moves with the speed of seagulls dashing for french fries on the wharf. I’d give anything to push my toes into that sand, rather than wrap this blanket about my shoulders. I suspect soon I will long for fall leaves as I put on my snow boots, scarf and hat. Ah, se la vie. Contentment, I guess, is as fickle as summer kites.
Images from a Train: Town of Long Gone
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.
Images from a Train: Vacancy
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
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: Omaha
We arrived at daybreak into Omaha. The station is under construction and there are pieces of its past and future, arising together, before the platform. Sleep came late, but the sun was welcome. Coffee wafted down the corridor from the dining car and few were up yet. Feet and arms littered the aisles as I slipped from the car to the fresh air of the platform. The stone and masonry were still wet from the night’s dew and the conductor pulled tight his coat. Passengers lit up for this brief stop and the long rays of the sun caught the smoke rising, as I turned to walk the station.
As I look at the images now, I wonder at all I did not photograph. Pieces of time and movement that still drift upon my mind, as if the cars were still moving in my head.
Meditation Travelogue 
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