General

  1. Southpaw

    This morning I spent the first hour of my day practicing on the keyboard. I actually like starting my day out one of two ways. Either practicing the keys or working out. I know seems like very different ways to start a day out. However, it is what I enjoy. Anyway, so this morning it was the keys. :-) Since I had successfully played ' The longest time' at my friends, Let's call her Sarah, house Sunday night when we were hanging out without needing my sheet music. I decided I had at the...
  2. Yesterday

    openly saying what is on my mind has never been easy. I used to keep journals when I was younger. But haven't had one since I was 13/14. So, this experience could get awkward lol. Yesterday I was working on rewriting Dark, since I received so much good, helpful feedback from people on here. Well, my best friend was at work, and started texting me because it was extremely slow and boring. (she is a bartender) So, I suggested I come just sit up there with her, I could bring my laptop,...
  3. On Virgins

    Subversion is always shallow. Thematic correctness doesn't change when a trope is subverted, it only changes in satire. Satire subverts the theme, not the tropes, because it needs the tropes in order to signal its identity. For example, the virgin or child saviour. She hasn't yet entered society fully, so she hasn't yet been fully corrupted by it. Her perspective is quite figuratively virginal: "But stabbing other people is wrong." The two men look up from their knife fight, understanding...
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  4. Can writing be a meditation?

    This idea has been on my mind for a while, just as idle speculation, but now I want to run a bit of an experiment. I know drawing and painting function as active mediations for me, at least at times. It happens when you fall into the flow state, when time seems to stand still or you forget all about it, forget to eat a meal or two becuase you're so absorbed in the creative work, and when you do bring the session to an end you realize a lot more time has gone by than you thought, and you...
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  5. My Relationship with Nature

    Discovering Mary Oliver has brought some changes. I've always liked the Transcendentalist poets, but find their poetry sometimes difficult, and I feel very removed from them, since they lived in an earlier era, and were all long-dead when I first walked the earth. But Mary Oliver is a modern Transcendentalist, and also a powerful link to the earlier ones. She helps me understand their writing, their ideas, and their lives, and better connects me to them in ways I wouldn't be otherwise. She...
  6. Hard to Explain

    Describing a dream, no matter how moving to the teller, invariably brings feigned interest and stifled yawns from the most patiently listening audience. The magic of the dream, its spell, cannot be captured in the outside world; it comes from deep within the dreamer. Vivid imagery and intense emotion can't be easily, if at all, captured by words and the logic of telling. It's the same with my recent sojourn back to western Nebraska. Most people have no idea of what that landscape is...
  7. Aphantasia

    Just ran across this. Pretty good info, and it relates back to my earier post about the subject.
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  8. Cue the Eerie Music

    While reading cultural anthropologist Loren Eisely's autobiography, All the Strange Hours, a book that had mysteriously appeared on my bookshelf years after I thought I had given it away or lost it I came upon this entry: "In the year 1975 twenty-one people died in a air crash at the Mayan religious center of Tikal in Guatemala. Strange, is it not, that twenty-one tourists born over a thousand years after the fall of the Mayan Empire, and only aware of it because of the archaeological...
  9. Awakening

    Awakening I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t know where I’m going when I die. But for this brief interlude, I am here. My body is my home. I have a sense of home in myself. Each day brings new learning. I awaken to being wrong, I awaken to being right, I awaken to dawning truths I had never considered. In sleep, there are limits. Blind spots in our perception. How can you answer the question – What if? – if your senses are not on alert, if you are not fully awake? Did you even...
  10. Amen, Sir.

    Coda from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles. But, she added, wouldn't it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women's characters and roles? A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why...
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  11. Murdering the world

    It's an amazingly beautiful day out, and I decided to take the bus up to Subway to get dinner. Walking across the parking lot on the way back, at first I was just thinking to myself in words and ignoring my surroundings, but I happened to glance down. In one sense, it's just a standard parking lot, but if you shut off the wordstream (essentially go into meditation) and allow yourself to experience the moment more purely, it's a vast expanse of incredible textures and colors (the picture...
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  12. Figuring Out My Relationship with God

    Figuring Out My Relationship with God Don’t know what’s got into me but I want to go back to church. I used to go to mass every Sunday with my mother and it felt like going home sitting beside her in the pew in the same church in which I was baptized, confirmed and got married. But then Covid hit and we stopped going. And then we entered the worst part of my husband’s battle with MS which ended with his death in September of 2021, and my faith was shook up bad. There was no God in what...
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