poetic pause :: colored green

green as my apple
          as green granny smith.
celery, broccoli 
          and sometimes a froggy.
ocean azul turquoise
               laced around my neck, pretty.
shamrocks emerald isle green
                         james joyce, witty.
green with envy.
             not contempt. i am green 
                                    not yet ripe. 

april ends

I am trying desperately to bend myself back in time and rewind April. Oh April, where did you go?

May will begin and my list of things recently penned on the blog diminishes again as April becomes archived and the new month starts. So there May stands, a whole month unwritten with thoughts and adventures and little scraps of life poised to be woven and unstrung and rewoven anew. I am not sure what May holds in its heart for me. I am most especially looking forward to a wedding in the smokey mountains of North Carolina and a visit from my father. Here in the states, we celebrate Mother's Day. May is also a month seeming to burst with birthdays and anniversaries. So perhaps I am not dreading May at all. I am just already missing April. The art-ing around (and yes I know I did not link as I should have, but perhaps we will get to do it again soon). April and art and a chance to blot out blighted branches on the tree of my self. I think that in the lightening fast paced world in which we live, it is difficult to give ourselves a chance to heal from things, yet at the same time, marching forward seems to always offer up a cushion, a soft place where the raw newness of grief ends and the ever-after of things begins.

portraits: 17 of 52

fodder + folly

                               provender(food) + rubbish(waste)

playing favorites

hello there! meet our favorite child...

poetic pause :: the sea

i am Poseidon's daughter. 
at night, i lie on the beach and tuck the ocean in around me. my body, makes an angel footprint in the sand. my hair, long limbed strands of seaweed, spread out beneath the waves holds host to the creatures of the night and of the sea. my daughters, they weave in and out of the waves, interlocking limbs, tumbling flipped fins, sounding off rocks and crushed sea foam.

ripple effect :: smile

art, the humanities, poetry, science, physics, learning, gifted teachers, mentors, community. If there is anything that this last week's events has shown me is that we need more of the aforementioned. we just do.

back home

back home after a hike in the heat of the afternoon, i am sitting out on my back porch, luxuriating in the cool of the coming evening air. my shoes are kicked off, and i feel a sweet breeze lasso my feet and tickle my back; the sun bounces off the leaves of our camellia bush, hinting of the setting sun, casting shadows a bit longer than just an hour ago. it is mostly quiet. one of the boys went over to a friends to spend the night, the other two are inside wiped out from a day of hiking, from working their bodies and sweating out the muck of the week. i am wiped out, from the week, from the heat, from sweating out all the muck inside my heart. but it feels good to be on the other side of an adventure, of something outside ourselves.

portraits :: 16 of 52

these ones. they are more and more difficult to capture with a camera.

in grounding.

i love these crisp days, when the wind lifts my hair off my face and plays with the bare space across my neck.  delighted by the earthy scents and tug of the spring, i find that my mind drifts, too much it seems in this itchy playful spring time wind. my heart, she wanders too. she lingers out into the wind and longs to fly kites in the clouds. my restless body wants nothing more than to skip out across our neighborhood and dip my toes in the cold splashing spring watered ocean.

snippets of humanity, bright and fierce

There is no poem, no story, no string of slurred words across an evasive script that I could write this evening that would ever begin to help you, or me, or our children understand the oh so much discontent and violence in this small fragile world of ours. All I really have is a sing sung sob of emotions and small lanterns of hope floating down, on past my heart.

15/52 :: the sing song of week 15 of 52

oh you barelegged boy, climbing feet and clutching hands on branches, you smiled down at me from up high, couldn't wait to get away, away from the ground below and up into your dreams. scattering sunshine from your laughter. I could hear your imagination, stringing delight across this small patch of wild. 

to shelter is to protect

the house is a whirlwind of a mess. 
a colliding cacophony of messy needs and thinking minds. 
trumpeting and outstretched lanky limb-ed boys 
clamoring over couches and flying footballs through 
the front door. a mess is a mess is a mess.

wilderness first aid kit for the soul

midweek messiness, grateful lists and flowery-goodness come a little late this week.  life is busy with the balancing act of boys back at school, homework, dogs, a broken washing machine and the ever classic oven door handle falling apart. At first I thought the oven door handle was the least of my problems until I tried to bake something actually in the oven. well guess what? you need a handle to open and close the oven door! sigh. it feels like our home is perched precariously up on a balance beam, there are some moments we have just the right amount of time to play and work and do all the things that need to get done; & other days, most days, even some years, it feels as if we are slogging up hill through the mud in the pouring rain, only to find out we have carried our coals to Newcastle and our oven door is broken. 

poetic pause :: hidden

i am gone from this chair. all that is left is my jam. i am hidden. 

         i am gone from my chair, 

         from my bed. 

gone in silence. crouching and hidden. the ghosts of all the clothes i have ironed are still there. lying in wait. 

camping, april, creating, shorts, and thoughts

placing the cast iron pan at the bottom, then the tin plates, the scratchy stacked saucers clinking together, salt&pepper and olive oil, she slowly folded the top of the brown cardboard box; lifted it up, cradling the bottom (it was heavy now) she walked outside. A silt & sand grimed gravel echoed her steps on the driveway and she felt a certain satisfaction at placing the box into the back of the car next to the cooler, and the tent, and sleeping bags and a spare clothes filled bag to change in to. she thought of air in the quiet. and in the night. the air in the Away From Here. away from the din of cars rolling past the house, away from the chatty thunder of the constant freeway strangle.

she longed to have her soul up in the branches of a tree high above the traffic, air it out, sun starch its lines, then tuck it back inside.

14/52 & some notes

So here we are, a quarter of the way into this year. seems.just.so.unreal. 

winter leaves slowly sometimes

     oh you forget. you forget because winter seeps so slowly back
     into itself so high up there on the deserted mountain plain.
     you forget that equinox. of the explosion spring can be.
     of mud, and slogging, of giddy children drunk on the blooms
of the tree tops and sparkling nights. oh you forget.
oh you forget, because winter seeps so slowly back
into itself so high up there on the deserted mountain plain.

remember too, it is beautiful because it is your own. 

happy day.

xxoo

mid week gratitude (instead of monday), messiness and mothering

                     grateful. grateful.

 on this mid-week messiness of life, i have been stuck at home with a nit gnawing touch of illness. it certainly isn't awful, just enough to slow me down in all the wrong ways. just enough to make life quite messy. again.

poetic pause :: my twin, my soul. my anima. my animus

i.

peas in a pod. cleaved together. 

thick as thieves, these two. 

inseparable. separated at birth. 

same. so same. so.

april in passing, art in healing, & art-ing around

it was a night filled full of soulful dreams 

caught up in nets cast about the heavens. 

& then.my body woke.& here i am.

in this early morning quiet, i am very much thinking in thoughts of black and white and gray, the look of healing, and of my mother. i am very much thinking of this april anew of now, & of april's that have already yellowed in the pages of their past. i am thinking of Owls, strange as that seems, silent shadows, hunting & living & quiet as they fly past my shoulders, clutching my soul in their talons.
I am caught