Cocoon

 

Everything inside me is quiet. There’s plenty to do, and I’m busy doing all of it, but inside…stillness. It’s a very strange thing to be feeling as I dash about, throwing myself into one creative project after another. This silence is probably the reason that I’m not writing, not for my blog and not for my novel, and it’s especially odd because even though I’m not writing I am thinking about writing almost constantly. I stir fragrance into a lovely peach-colored candle and think, What will Cassie find in Puzzlewood? And what is Jeremy going to do when he finds out she’s going to stay at Oxford for the rest of the term? I rip up brightly colored papers, test ink colors, and make tape transfers for Carmen’s art tag exchange and wonder if I have anything to say, anything at all, to the universe at large. I am still researching the 1,001 details and ideas that will flesh out my novel just as frantically as if I needed to know those things right now because I am writing about them right now. I pop over to my WordPress umpteen times daily to browse through old photos and stare at the blank screen, trying to spark words into being. And at night, I tell myself stories until I fall asleep, spinning out other worlds and other lives in endless variations, trying ideas on for size and then discarding them into the void because none of them seem quite right. And I wonder where in the world this sudden silence has come from–only a week and a half ago I was writing so much that I was doing little else. Is it the weight of winter’s cold and colorless oppression? (Which I thought I was avoiding pretty well this year) The problems in my extended family filtering through the lens of my heart? Or perhaps I am too distracted by…what? I wish I knew. But hopefully, somewhere within the stillness I don’t understand, something is germinating, and I will wake up one morning and discover that my words are blooming once more. Until then, if I am not around much, don’t worry–I am fine, I promise…just hibernating in my cocoon, waiting for spring to find me and unfold me into the light.

In the quiet

Today is a day of quiet. Sometimes, I don’t do so well in the silence, and sometimes it is exactly what I need. I am determined that today’s quiet will be calming and healing. Because this wasn’t always a problem for me–it is one of the things that came with the pcos, and it is one of the things I hate the most about  being sick. So I am gathering up my weapons to fight off the evil voices in my head: there will be art, and beautiful music, and a ramble in the blogsphere. And fun toe socks, and retelling fairy tales, and prayer. Because the world is still here, and it is still beautiful; God is still here, and He is good.

From the ashes

Stark, savage beauty in the wake of destruction

 A craggy rock adorned with desolation

 The resilient earth reclaims its own

 And I, too, look forward with hope:

 the phoenix has always been my favorite bird

Like the phoenix, like the resilient earth, I rise from the ashes, I grow out of my scars

There is joy spun out across these days

Hidden

I love how the Inland Northwest is constantly surprising me. A drive down a road I’ve explored many times before, and still I discover something new and wonderful. There is magic hiding in this land, even in the flat treeless plateau above the Colombia river. And it is these small secrets, these unexpected wonders folded into the ordinary and drab landscape, that make me love my life here. I am so far away from what I still consider home, the green hills and wildflowers of Central Texas that my heart never ceases to yearn for… but there is joy here also. And I love finding that joy, anticipating it and letting it surprise me all at the same time, because what I discover is always beyond my expectations.

Priest Lake

A place of quiet and stillness at the water’s edge, shimmering in the bright, sweet sunshine. This is where I want to be today, where I am in my heart. The world spins on around me: there are chores to do, promises to keep, and old hurts clamoring for attention. I will clean the house and keep my promises, but all the while I will stand at the shoreline and cast all the bitter and angry thoughts into the bright silverblue water, let the lake wash them away. I have fought long and hard not to lose myself, and I will not falter now.

And all my words come back to me…

Skimming through my poetry to select a few things to send to a friend, I was struck by how relevant some of those poems still are. I guess it’s the old saying: The more things change, the more they stay the same. And here I am, at the end of a very rough weekend and a very rough start to week, with a crisis in the family and more things in my heart than I can fathom, reading the words I have written in the past to draw hope and strength for the present.

 

 

please remember me

lend me your scarred soul awhile: there is more than you know

I sing in the silence and ashes of the years

I will not lose this bright diamond hope inside myself

Things seen wandering through Spokane one evening

Snapshots of Downtown

 

the scar of crumbling bricks, dangling
slabs of wood, pipe, and rebar
dirt smoothed rough and uneven
over the city’s secret doorways
into passages into
nothing,
the pigeons packed tighter than life
on ledges so thin they fade

only one street north, another building
hollowed out and spilling infrastructure intestines
sad trails of steel and concrete
echoing the mute pain of this vacant lot

at my feet, a single white feather
floating haphazardly in a clump of dead autumn leaves
when I touch them,
they crumble with a brittle snap
but the feather
remains

a camo cowboy passes me without a pause,
smelling of cigarettes and stale tortilla chips
dressed like that, he must be
a hero to someone,
even if only to himself

when I step inside,
the women speaking loudly and pompously
of Art suddenly whisper

dimmed stagelights: waiting
to be filled with sound and substance; for now
the room is holding its breath in silence
as a single candle wavers between life and death
on an abandoned tabletop, tossing the reflection
of light
onto the windowglass
in the reflection,
the light is steady

two trains crash by at once,
their thunder extending much further
into the distance than their own length
crushing the night
with cacaphony

everybody on 1st Ave speeds

empty tables of romance,
candlelit for two and begging
for purpose

an older couple in leather jackets leave
the restaurant to
dance a few turns on the sidewalk
beneath the streetlamps, the
stars, the towering night

Beloved

 When Sean and I explored the cemeteries at Fairmount Memorial Park a few months ago, we saw dozens of beautiful old headstones and monuments dating back centuries, lovingly carved with intricate motifs. Each one was a masterpiece, a testament to a family’s love and grief, but it was this simple marker that captured my heart. The dried husks of once-vibrant flowers arranged in the plain glass jar, slowly beginning to molder in the damp autumn weather,  spoke more eloquently of love and loss than the most stunning mausoleum. So many people leave artificial flowers for their departed–even my father’s grave rarely sees a living bouquet–and I understand it, the desire to leave something that will not die, that will remain pretty and colorful for months on end. But even in their decay, these gathered flowers were so beautiful, so powerful and evocative in their beauty. The bouquet had a handpicked look to me, and even though there aren’t many wildflowers here in Spokane, it reminded me of my family’s tradition of going bluebonnet hunting in the spring, the wildflowers that streaked the Texas hill country with vivid color, and how that tradition died with my father. But this April I am going home, the first spring I will spend in Austin in 6 years, and I will drive the old country roads of my childhood, gathering Indian paintbrush and winecup and queen anne’s lace and primrose, to lay at his stone.

 

Hill Country

for my father

 

I will never forget

 

Endless oceans of living color:

blue, white, yellow, red

the lake, the dam, the cove no one else can find

where the flowers bloom in colors

as bright as your life

You did everything for us—

stabbing your fingers to bring me a prickly poppy,

searching endlessly for wine cups, my

favorite flower

—a guidebook to Texas wildflowers, a picnic

on the hillside that changes color

each year, first white poppies, now purple verbena

You did

everything for us

 

How do I tell you, now

that you’re gone,

how much it meant to me?

How do I tell you

April is my favorite month and I miss

this hillcountry spring

almost as much as I miss you?

 

I tried to disown it all my life,

these gentle rolling hills, but

you made me love it.

 

How do I

tell you now

the bluebonnet is my favorite flower?

 

You did

everything

for us.

Welcome back, sunshine

Yesterday was the last day of snow in the forecast for the next ten days. I am giddy with the promise of sunshine and warmer temperatures to melt away the snow and the monstrously huge ice stalactites that have  formed in imposing columns around doorways and porches across town.

And with two (or three, or even four) months of winter left ahead, these will be days to cherish, to drink in fully and hold close in my heart. Days when I will roam the flooded city streets and find magic in the simple things, or drive north out of Spokane like I have been longing to do for weeks now. Days when everything is bright and magical.

Random things about me

I’ve been tagged! Thanks to Carmen for giving me the chance to participate in this. Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

 

My random things are…

1. I am being very brave and planning a trip to England in the next year or two. Not very many people know this yet, but I’m so excited I can hardly keep my socks on, even if it is rather far in the future. The main motivation for this trip is research for my novel, so I will be spending alot of time exploring Oxford, the Cotswolds, and the Forest of Dean. With some sidetrips to Bath, Avebury, and a few castles. Hooray!

2. I got a stuffed llama for Christmas! I have named her Hattie, and I love her very much. The llama is my favorite animal, and I have a small (but growing) collection of stuffed llamas.

3. My husband is 12 years older than me. This seems to run in the family–my paternal grandparents were 11 years apart, and my mom was 9 years older than my dad.

4. I have eaten squid. It was rubbery and very chewy, but otherwise okay. Sometimes, I am still surprised that I was brave enough to do this.

5. I am related to Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis. It doesn’t get more Southern than that!

6. I hate soup, with the exception of a good clam chowder and the cheddar potato soup at Marie Callendar’s, which I am constantly craving.

And now, who shall I tag? I always feel weird about tagging people–I worry that they won’t want to participate and consider it annoying that they’ve been tagged, but I also know that I worry way too much about that kind of thing, so… I tag Deirdra, Leonie, Susannah, Amy, Sara, and Joan (in the hopes that Joan is feeling better, if not, don’t worry about it).