The Alphabet Backwards: Vampires

There's no accounting for the strange roads my mind will take me on. Why today for the letter "v," when there are so many possiblities - violets, virtue, vulgarity, vanity, voice, vice, valor - it has lit upon the word "vampires" and stuck it's little brain teeth into it like a dog with a bone is beyond me. But vampires, apparently it is.

There are many kinds of vampires, I guess. There's Buffy the Vampire Slayer's campy, hip vampires, some good, some evil, some really hot and hunky. There are Anne Rice's wonderful, complex soul-searching vampires. I highly recommend her books - The Vampire L'estat, Interview With a Vampire and most of the series are dark, consuming, and make you explore places in your psyche that aren't altogether comfortable, but are good to gaze into from time to time. I think they are profoundly philosophical books, incredible explorations about the complexity of the relationship between good and evil - and they are entertaining good reads as well. Then there are vampires like the Bush administration - evil people who suck the blood and soul out of a nation, its constitution, it's economy and it's spirit without a twinge of remorse or conscience.

But I want to talk about another kind of vampire... The energy suckers. The kind of people who suck the life out of you pretty much just by walking into a room. I'm sure most of you know the kind of person I mean. I tend to be highly empathic which makes me especially vulnerable to such things. My brother was very much a vampire in my life... on many levels. It took me almost 38 years (I'm such a slow learner) to figure out that he was toxic to me and another 7 to extricate myself completely from the web of habit, duty, guilt and love that kept me tied to him. It's now between 15 and 18 years since I last spoke with him at all and 20 since I formally severed our relationship. Before that I was his devoted fan and slave. The rest of the family, who secretly found him at least as intolerable to be around as I did, were quite content to have me do the dirty work, while professing their deep devotion to him. But I'm getting ahead of myself, I guess.

My brother, who I will leave unnamed, is seven and a half years older than me. I adored him for all of my childhood and much of my adult life. He was handsome, very literally a genius (IQ of 163 or something like that), could be wickedly funny and charming. Alas, he had a mean streak that was as wide as it was subtle. He was probably as empathic as I am (very), but his way of using his intuitive knowledge about people was to hurt them with it. I was one of his favorite targets.

I've never written about him before. I'm not terribly comfortable doing so and yet it feels important at the same time. I always thought I'd wait until he died - or maybe forever... the old if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything syndrome.... And of course because I am inclined to err on the side of being so fair that I should be institutionalized, I will herewith make the following disclaimer. It's possible, I suppose, that I'm wrong about my brother. Maybe he's the nicest guy in the world and I have simply misunderstood his behavior towards me for my whole life. Maybe my therapist (who had the misfortune of meeting him in a last ditch effort on my part to either avoid or validate my decision to become estranged from him) misjudged him too. I don't think so. Casting my older brother - my very sick older brother (he has Parkinson's Disease) - out of my life was not a decision I came to easily. It was one I agonized over. It was one I fought. It was one I still occasionally question. Certainly looking at the little boy in this photograph, you would not think he could have wrought such havoc in my life. But he did.

So that's my disclaimer. Here's a small fragment of my experience. As I said, it took me 40 years to wake up from the web my family had sewn me into and to start struggling for escape. I don't know how many people who will read this are old enough to remember the old Sinbad movies and the giant evil spider in the cave. That's how my brother feels to me. Like a giant spider who had me and wanted to keep me in his web, not necessarily to kill me, but to feed on and live off my suffering. I haven't seen him in almost 20 years and I'm still afraid at the mere thought of being in his presence. There are tomes to write on the subject of my brother and I am digressing from the topic of the day - the vampire part of my relationship with him.

I am forever grateful to a pastor I met in 1978. He was an awesome human being who turned my life around in many ways. One was by saying the following words to me: "Katherine, your brother is drowning and he wants to take you with him." My first reactions to those words was to think he was crazy, to ignore them, to fight against them. But really, I must have immediately felt the truth of them, because I never forgot them. They remain burned into my brain. That I have any sanity at all, any life at all, traces back to those words and Pastor Rick's gently nudging me towards reality and therapy. It took me ten years and a great deal of physical and emotional agony to take my life back from this messed up man who was - still is, I guess - my brother. As if to underscore the depth of his power over me, as I lay in bed this morning, thinking about this essay, by back stiffened up and I am in fairly severe pain. Every cell in my body is twanging with anxiety. And this is just a shadow of how I lived for the ten years and beyond during which I tried to separate myself from this family vampire, who sucked the joy and life out of the air around him. Just trying to begin writing about it has put me closer to a panic attack than I have been in 20 years. I don't know how I lived this way. I guess I was younger and more agile. I guess we just live because we do and because life is precious.

The original brother as vampire story that triggered today's post was how when I had not quite solidified my estrangement from him, I went away for ten days to an amazing workshop in the desert. It was an awesome experience. I came home rejuvenated, full of love and peace and compassion for all people. Maybe brother wasn't so bad, I deluded myself. I don't know if he called me or I called him. In any case he came over for a visit. Within 15 minutes of his being in my home, all the energy and enthusiasm of those wonderful ten days drained away. I was exhausted again, having difficulty breathing. It was a rough lesson, but it drove home to me the truth about his impact on me. And this morning as I type this out, in pain and shaking with anxiety, I am stunned by the power of memory and the human mind.

I suspect almost every one has encountered vampires like my brother in their life. One of the things that made my brother's impact so powerful is that he was so charming as he twisted some knife in your back. He was the master of the poisoned apple. "I'm so concerned about you.... I'm saying this for your own good... you know you're old and never going to marry." "Dad used to love you, but since you confronted him about his drinking, he's afraid of you." "I don't want you to worry, but..." (Just a general observation: Anyone who starts a sentence with those last words really does want you to worry. They want it very much. It's Vampire 101. It was one of my brother's favorite sentences. I would add that the motive of people who tell you things for your own good ought to be carefully studied. Look for their fangs and make sure they have a reflection in the mirror.)

There's so much more to write. I don't know if I am even making sense or why it seems so important to put this out there. I just know I must. I ask your forgiveness and your prayers.


*I could not not use the Bush vampire picture, which I found on google, even though I couldn't find an attribution for it. I hope I'm not breaking any copyright laws and that the artist will forgive me and let me know his/her name... and be pleased to see this portrait synopsis of the Bush administration shared with more people. I will regretfully remove it if asked to do so.

One Single Impression: Laughter

This week's prompt from One Single Impression is Laughter. Great prompt and I just had a really hard time with it, so I decided to try and be "artsy," in hopes that nobody would notice...

Wishing us all much joy and laughter.

Saturday Wordzzle Challenge: Week 6

Well, I think I'm going to post this early... Friday evening.... because I'm bored and restless this evening and I'm going to try to add a Mr. Linky and I want to know if it works. So....

Since this is week 6 of our challenge, I'm going to just get right down to it without any introduction. Two people - Jay and Michael - sent me email submissions this week. So, with a reminder of the words, I'll post their offerings and my own and hope that Mr. Linky takes care of the rest. (I'm not sure why the Mr. Linky isn't showing the links up front - probably because it's the free kind - but if you click on it, I think it does work.)

Words for today's ten-word challenge were: arbitration, music, salamanders, frankinsence, trojan horse, balderdash, bottomless pit, fantastic, pugnacious, Trivial Pursuit and for the mini challenge: maniac, video store, telephone pole, flute player, windy day

From Jay Cole Simser I received the following mega wordzzle:

It was a bright and windy day as I walked down the street to the video store. I was watching the clouds in the sky as they danced around the sky like a maniac in a disco.

As I walked past the store I noticed a flyer attached to the telephone pole. Missing: Pet Salamanders, it said Reward, Inquire within. Music was playing over a speaker attached to the door frame of the store as I entered. The not so subtle scent of frankincense filled the air with a fantastic aroma.

A flute player with a pugnacious attitude was seated behind the counter playing a game of Trivial Pursuit with an assistant. A picture of the Trojan horse hung on the wall behind them.

“I have come to inquire about your missing pets. I would like the reward.” I stated succinctly.

“Balderdash” replied the flute player, “There is no way you could have found them.”

“Oh but I have,” I said as I took them from my pocket and placed them upon the counter.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said as he examined them. “Where did you find them?”

“I was on my way to an arbitration hearing when I noticed them on the edge of the bottomless pit over by Hastings General Store. They were about to fall in.”

Losing his attitude he took the pets into his hands and kissed them gently on their moist backs. “The reward will be forthcoming” he stated and then turning purple and green from the chemicals on the salamanders he fell over writhing on the floor. His assistant opened the cash drawer and took out the reward money.

“Will he be all right?” I inquired.

“Of course,” replied the assistant. It is just his colorful way of saying thank-you.

****

Michael submitted the following - also a mega wordzzle.

"ANOTHER FINE DAY"

"It was a fantastic, trojan horse of a windy day... one you woke to and welcomed but afterward felt as if you'd fallen into a bottomless pit with a maniac flute player whose music was pure balderdash. In a word... pugnacious. A day you wind up fighting through like a game of Trivial Pursuit up a telephone pole, trying to maintain a grip on reality while your opponents insist on submitting every bone of contention to arbitration. Salamanders slithered in my brain as I stumbled to the video store... overdue again. Another 'fine' day for me.... I should have had the frankincense to stay in bed."

****

My contributions are as follows:

Ten word challenge:
Pugnacious and the Salamanders , rock group extraordinaire, were happily celebrating their hit single, "Trojan Horse Comes Riding." The flip side, "Frankincense But No Myrrh," was doing really well too. They were euphoric. Their music was finally taking off. "This is beyond fantastic," Pug was giggling, "finally we can pay off that bottomless pit of debt that's been stifling us and start living like the moguls we were meant to be. Just as he said that, his cell phone rang and the others could faintly hear the voice of their agent on the other end. "Bloody F***ing Balderdash!," Pug screamed into the phone. "Those songs are ours. Ours! We wrote them ourselves and Trivial Pursuit, those wanna be hacks, know full well it's our music. They couldn't write their way out of a paper bag. Stinking phonies. "What do we do next? Arbitration? What's to arbitrate? I wrote Trojan and Jay Cee wrote the other one. We can prove it. Well how much are these lawyers going to cost us? Bloody hell... Well, do what you have to do, I guess." The Salamanders, who, of course had heard only Pugnacious's side of the conversation, were sitting crestfallen, shaking their heads. "We never catch a bloody break, " one of them muttered and then noticed that Pug himself seemed oddly untroubled by this terrible turn of events. Just as he was about to comment on this, Pug - who never tired of practical jokes, even bad ones - shouted gleefully, "April Fools! We're still rich! In fact the album just went platinum!" Lucky for him, his companions were already too drunk to wring his neck.

Mini Challenge:
Crazy Louie who owns the video store hired some desperate, broke flute player to climb the telephone pole outside the store and give a concert. He thought it would bring in more business and it might have except they chose to enact this little stunt on a very windy day. Even before the poor guy blew off the pole and broke his leg, you couldn't hear a thing over sound of the wind whistling. Crazy Louie is such a maniac that first he tried to sue the flute player for breach of contract and then he went after the phone company for not making their poles wind proof. After that, people pretty much started avoiding the store. Now that's what I call a publicity stunt gone bad.


I got brave and tried a Mega challenge this week:

So I'm heading to the video store and some maniac in an old VW van painted all over with salamanders and those Native American flute player guys - Kokopelli, I think they're called - well, he runs me off the road right into a telephone pole, if you can believe it. It's an awful windy day. I was already running late and now I'm stuck dealing with some car accident that will undoubtedly waste more of my time with arbitration down the road. Of course I'm grateful that I'm not dead. There is that. And my car seems reasonably unhurt. I get out of my car and this antique hippy guy come up to me all, "Peace Brother," like some vision from the past. "The Trojan Horse here," he says, pointing the the old van, "gets a bit pugnacious at times and develops a mind of her own. So sorry. I hope you're all right." Now this is so surreal and fantastical that I'm torn between shrieking at him and laughing. And then it starts to rain. "Come on in the back," he says. "No point negotiating in the rain." So I think, "why not," and it's like stepping into an sultan's palace... all purple cushions and smelling of incense - he said it was frankincense - and there are these two incredibly beautiful woman sitting there... It was pretty amazing... "Have a seat," one of them says, pointing to a huge cushion. I'm so stunned by everything that I do - and then they offer me a cup of coffee and some brownies. Amazing brownies. What happened next is kind of a haze of food and smells and music. I remember being so hungry that my stomach felt like a bottomless pit. Seems like they had tons of food... all kinds of things... and at one point someone (was it me?) went out for a pizza. We played some kind of game. I forget whether it was Balderdash or Trivial Pursuit. Next thing I knew it was morning and I woke up in my car. The strange hippie and the van were gone. I'd say it was all a dream - that I must have bumped my head or something - but I still smell like frankinsence and I'm ravenously hungry.

And of course I have to add my vanity (stuff I wrote years ago that nobody would ever read otherwise) wordzzle from my collection. Feel free to use these words yourself if you prefer them: Ebullient, bonanza, Bambi, geyser, carpet, goose, turnover, Taos, aquarium, fun

Bambi Bonanza, as she had renamed herself when she left Pittsburgh and moved to Taos, was ebullient. She was free! She was loose as a goose and twice as happy. Life was fun again. Bambi Bonanza was no middle-aged frump like Agnes deBono. Nope. Bambi knew how to live. The day of her father's funeral, Agnes had baked her last apple turnover, and closed and locked the door of the family bakery forever. A week later, bakery and house were sold and she was on the road in a new station wagon, with a new name, a new wardrobe and a new profession. In Taos she had bought the small house on Cactus Creek Road because she liked the carpet and the view and because the owners had agreed to let her keep the aquarium. Besides she had just had a good feeling about the place. Two weeks later, trying to plant a tree, she had found the geyser. The reporters who came to cover the geyser story had noticed her paintings and liked them very much. Fascinated by her story, they had written a Sunday Supplement article about the lady who moved from Pittsburgh to paint fish and wound up with a geyser in her back yard. Now her paintings were selling faster than she could do them. She was rich and happy and suitors were asking for her hand. Life was very, very good.

NEXT WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Anyone who wants to emulate the amazing megawordzzlers can try merging both challenges and make another megawordzzle. I finally tried it this week and it was fun.

Next week's words are a mix of suggestions that came from Jay, Michael and Richard. I mixed their suggestions together just to make it more interesting. I would LOVE to have more suggestions for words/phrases from other participants.

Next Week's Ten Word Challenge will be: fruitcake, necromancer, gibberish, marshland, Lone Ranger, hog-wild, effluvia, plaintiff, phonograph, fern

And for the Mini Challenge: frozen, history, myrmidon, Shylock, incapacitated


Thanks for playing. For those who are new, here are some guidelines to make the process more fun.

Enjoy! See you next week.

And this week, if all goes well, I don't have to paste all your links in because there's a MR. LINKY! Yippeee! Let's hope it works.

Fable of the Month:An Agoraphobic's Romance

Once again it's time for my "Fable of the Month." Items from my unpublished works that would probably otherwise never see the light of day. I actually published this one once before when I had my agoraphobia column. It's silly, but hopefully amusing. And I guess that's enough of an introduction.

AN AGORAPHOBIC'S ROMANCE
by
Katherine E. Rabenau

I met Frank at OA the one time I got up the courage to go out of the house. Let me tell you, my heart was beating so hard I could hardly breathe and my legs were like jello, all wobbly and weak. I thought I was gonna die or make a fool of myself, or both, and then I caught Frank's eye. He looked to be in the same condition and my heart went out to him, so I forgot about my own panic. "You ok?" I said, and he kind of gasped out "Panic attack!" I said, "Me, too," and it struck us both so funny that we started to giggle and forgot we were dying of terror.

Frank's fat too. And agoraphobic like me. Makes for an odd relationship. I suppose there's a mild sexual attraction, except we both have so many hang-ups. Me, I'm afraid of sex. If you'd ever met my mother, you'd understand why. Then add a hefty dose of sexual abuse. I have trouble being around when sex happens; I mean, I leave my body. I leave even when it looks like sex might happen. So it's really quite convenient to have a "boyfriend" who can't leave home and only talks to you by phone. For his part, he doesn't feel attractive, and to be honest, he isn't. I mean, he could be if he lost some weight. Isn't it awful, a big fat ugly woman who condemns other fat people. Or at least some of them. Frank just happens to be one of that group. I mean, he's one of the sweetest, kindest men in the world. Funny! He's got this kind of wry humor, slightly sardonic, but not mean. A tinge of cynicism, but also kind of a dreamer. Except that he's fat and agoraphobic, he's the perfect man for me. Or maybe he's perfect because he's fat and agoraphobic and I don't have to wrestle with the sex thing. I don't have to be afraid of him. He's so good at listening to me. I really love that and sometimes I wish I could touch him, you know, hold him and be held. We're both awfully lonely for touch. Sometimes he says he pretends I'm with him and he's got his arms around me and he's kissing my eyes and stroking my hair and just gently touching the softness of my skin. When he says that, I feel kind of comforted and tender and a little excited, and then I get scared and change the subject. I'm afraid I'd lose him if we ever got close, you know. Either he'd think I was cold or a whore, or both, and either way, he wouldn't want me and I'd be alone again, completely.

This way I can say I have a boyfriend and keep my mother's nagging at bay. All her, "if only's" and "you shoulds." "I do have a boyfriend," I counter. "Frank and I had dinner together just last night." And we did, sort of. We ordered food from the same Chinese restaurant and talked on the phone. We both got speaker phones so we could do things and talk, so sometimes we eat and sometimes we watch TV. We even rent the same movies sometimes and synchronize running them. Let me tell you, that's not so easy, but we've gotten pretty good at it. It's not perfect, I know, but I do love him.

We started therapy a few months ago. Found someone who makes house calls. Once in a while we have a joint session on the speaker phone, about, you know, getting together and touching. We've both lost a little bit of weight since we met and if I'm gonna trust anyone, it'll be Frank. Next month Jan - that's our therapist - she's gonna try to get Frank to come here for a visit. She'd have a session with us, then go out, and if he needed it, help him go home later. We thought we'd see how it felt to really touch. Sometimes I imagine it and it feels so sweet, I think it can't be possible. But who knows, maybe the times they are a changin'.

THE END

Poem of the Week: Ode to a Bat

I picked this week's poem because I happened to catch a conversation on Charlie Rose the other night about the troubling and potential environmental crisis involving huge numbers of bats in Vermont and upstate New York (not far from me, actually) dying of something they are calling "white nose syndrome," because many of the dead bats they are finding have a white fungus on their noses. Scientists have yet to discover the cause. This could have a serious impact on the environment because bats do a great deal to control the insect population. This is nice for those of us who don't like mosquitoes and flies, but beyond that, it's important for farmers and crops.

Anyway, thinking of bats took me back to my time working in the mammalogy department of the American Museum of Natural History. Except that it didn't pay enough for me to live on, it was a pretty cool job. Working in the big musty rooms beyond the visiting areas felt special. The museum is in an exciting part of the city - near Central Park - and in those days I'd walk either all or half way from 18th and 1st where I lived to Central Park west. It was good for my health. My office in the museum... I was a mere secretary - with three bosses - but I had my own huge office which I shared with the dead bodies of hundred of bats and rats from Indonesia. Because I worked fast, was easily bored, and could do it, I ended up editing manuscripts and (this was so cool) numbering and cataloging specimens. This entailed writing 8 to 10 digit numbers onto bones, some of them extremely small. It was interesting in a strange way and quite a challenge at times to fit all those numbers onto those tiny little bones.

But back to bats. One of my three bosses was the the late Karl Koopman who was at the time the world's foremost expert on bats. He loved bats way more than people. If some poor soul called in asking for help because his/her house was infested with breeding bats, Koopman told them they should learn to live with it or move. He sang the generic names of bats to the tunes of Gilbert and Sullivan songs. He even looked kind of like a bat. I didn't really know him very well, but he did change my peceptions about bats and I wrote this poem for him.


ODE TO A BAT
dedicated to Karl Koopman


Little bats, Bella and Boris

Winging softly through the forest

On your wings of silent leather

Unadorned by fleece or feather

Doing no one any harm

Yet driven off from hearth and farm

You who have since ancient times

Been the butt of unkind rhymes

You, who unlike men and birds

Hark the sound of your own words

You are not that nasty creature

Oft portrayed in double feature

Drinking blood and spreading fear

No! Gently do you twitch your ear

And listening for an echoed sound

Eat bugs and fruits which do abound

Then flutter home to cave or tree

And hang there, resting quietly

We're sorry for the fear-filled lies

That haunt your passage through the skies

And maybe as men grow less foolish

Our stories will become less ghoulish

And furry bats hung upsidedown

Will not be scorned in every town

Nor virgins wear a cross at night

To save them from your dreadful bite

And man, with realistic eye

Will watch untrembling when you fly

Nor will he pause this time to curse,

But knowing nature is diverse

He'll smile to think in yesteryear

Men looked at gentle bats with fear

Or thought you worked for evil ends

You kindly bats who are our friends.


- Katherine E. Rabenau


As long as we are on a semi ecological theme - I wanted to post a reminder that on March 29th there's something going on called the "Earth Hour." The idea is for people all over the world to conserve one hour's worth of electricity by turning their lights off for an hour at 8:00 pm on the 29th. For more coherent information on the subject check out Earthhour.org.

Wordless Wednesday: Tara Grace in Black and White

Tara Grace

five pounds - fragile but tough
talks like a gangster - moves like a dancer
she has suffered cruelty and abuse
without losing the gentle sweetness that is her essence
I am honored by her love and trust

You can Read Tara Grace's Story here.

Happy Wordless Wednesday

A Few Thoughts on Feminism

Well, I'm at a loss for something to write today. Hopefully the well has not run dry already. Anyway, I got an email today from The Feminist Majority with this little "What Does a Feminist Look Like? " video.

Kids today, said the old crone in me, don't realize how far the world has come. I probably didn't realize how far it had come even in the 60s when I was working. I do know that there are opportunities out there now that I didn't have. I know that salaries may not be completely equal, but they are more equal. What is best and most important, though, is that young women are growing up with more of a sense of themselves. I doubt any patronizing moron would pet either of my nieces on the head as was done to me on more than one occasion in my working years. I know they each have a level of self assurance that I'm still striving to arrive at. That makes me very happy. I doubt men of their generation think it's "cute" when their intelligence shows. (Can you tell I'm still pissed off about my experiences? Oh, the stories I could tell... )

Of course, to be fair, my problems with self assurance weren't just because the world I grew up in completely objectified women. I grew up with crazy damaged people who damaged me, not out of malice, but because they didn't know any better. Such is life. I'm working on it. But back to the topic at hand.

Even though our society has come a long way in it's relationship to women, I think we still have a long way to go. Strong, successful women in the public eye - women like Oprah, Barbara Walters, Hillary Clinton among many - are helping to reshape how we view women, but evidence of the double standard is still very clear. Whether you like Hillary Clinton or not, there is no question that she is reported on differently because she is a woman. Her laughter is assessed, her dress, her sense of humor. There are rumors about her relationship with her husband, her sexuality and her femininity. How many questions have you heard asked about whether male politicians love their wives - or sleep with them, about whether they are butch enough? How many news reports are there on whether John McCain's laugh meets some standard of worthiness? If a male politician sheds a tear, we ascribe humanity to him, if Hillary cries, we call her either weak or a fake.

We still judge men and women by very different standards. Men are allowed to lose their tempers without much being ascribed to it. A woman loses her temper and she's unstable, a bitch or "it must be that time of the month." Give me a break. I think things have improved, but I think we still have a ways to go. Certainly the world as a whole has a long ways to go. Women are still being burned alive in India and imprisoned in Arab countries for crimes like talking to a man. Women are being raped regularly in the Sudan and Darfur and all over the world. Young girls (and young men too) are being molested and incested and we still have very little clue about how to handle it or the depth of damage such actions cause to their victims.

Lots has changed. But lots still needs to be improved. I could be mistaken in this, but I think there is still a tendency for doctors to dismiss women's assessments of their bodies. I was "yes dear-ed" by more than one doctor and I paid a heavy price for it. So have many other women over the years. One of the blessings to arise out of feminism is that young women are more prepared and more apt to stand up for themselves at the doctor's office as well as in other areas of life.

To be a feminist isn't to be anti-male. To be feminist is to be pro human, to recognize that women are more than just pretty play things for men, more than "just" mothers and housekeepers. The idea of feminism isn't to diminish the gifts of men, but to acknowledge the many gifts that women also have to offer. As many men have discovered, when they open up doors for women, they open up doors for themselves too.

The biggest lesson we will learn when we truly embrace feminism (and when we move beyond racism and other forms of bias and hatred) is that improving the lot of any person or group of people in society, improves the lot of all of us. It's a win win solution. Or that's what I think.

The Alphabet Backwards: W is for Water and Wigs

Well, I was going to write something noble and wise - about how much I love water and what a blessing it is. I'm a water sign and one of the things I am most grateful for in life is the gift of abundant fresh drinking and bathing water we have here in the United States. Water is my favorite beverage and since baths are a bit too much of a physical challenge these days, my showers are sort of like mini religious experiences. I can't imagine living in a country where you can't just turn on the tap and have a nice glass of water or where you can't pop into the shower when you feel grubby and dirty. It's such a luxury for many people in the world and most of us where I live don't even think about it. If water were my subject, I could write about its dark side, about the floods we've had where I live for three years running, but it isn't my real subject and today the sun is shining, so I'll stick with my gratitude for clean, running water, a form of wealth many of us don't even recognize we are so blessed to have. Ok... so that's my mini treatise on water.

Anyway, while I was sifting through "w" words on my way to the computer - just to make sure there wasn't something better: Walruses, watermelon (another good subject), wolverines, winter, wandering... the word "wigs" came into my head and that reminded me of an experience from my college days that had a life lesson attached to it, so I'm going to say this is about wigs since a wig was the trigger and then write about the life lesson. It's only sort of cheating. Actually since I made up the Alphabet Backwards and am the only person doing it and it has, as far as I know, no format or rules, I'm not sure why I think I'm cheating. Because I'm a little crazy, probably. I'm just happy not to be writing about xenophobia or yearning or some subject that makes me anxious and stress ridden.

But back to wigs. During my second year in college, I went to some local place in Fredonia - yep, that's where I went to school SUNY at Fredonia - for a cheap haircut. Boy, did I pay a price for that decision. The woman hacked my hair with either incompetent or malevolent abandon. It was hideously short and since I have cowlicks in odd places - it stuck up all over the place. It might have been a big hit in the 80s, but in the 60s, well, not. Actually this haircut was so bad that I don't think it would have worked in any age. My self-esteem was already what you might call non-existent. This haircut felt like the end of the world. I think it came with a big pimple too, though that may just be an something I've added because it adds to how earth-stoppingly ugly I felt. I think there was a pimple, though. In any case, I just wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I'm not sure how long I hid in my dorm room. I knew I had to leave eventually and finally came up with the idea of buying myself a wig... well a wig thing - I think they are - or were - called "falls." It was long and pretty much matched my hair. It was synthetic. I couldn't afford a good one.

But here's the point of telling this story. Our minds are such strange creatures. I put that wig on and suddenly went from being (in my own eyes) a frumpy toad to a being a girl. I went from short hair to long flowing waves, from neuter to female. Alas, I also went from nice to obnoxious because suddenly I was getting attention that I wasn't used to and I was inhaling it. I was like the starving person led into a banquet room. I couldn't get enough. I was greedy for it and ready to push my friends out of the way to get it. At least for a few days. Luckily, I was reasonably self aware and after the first glorious flush of ego, I came back down to earth. It was probably less virtue than the fact that my friends - especially my female friends - were not feeling all that warm and fuzzy about me - but I eventually realized that I was not behaving very well. And once the big ego bubble burst, I realized that nothing had really changed about me but my perception of myself. That silly, ugly wig had made me feel pretty and because of that I had behaved differently - especially around men. It was a genuine life lesson. We really do create our own reality to a large extent.

I wish I could say that I had used this lesson wisely and gone on to develop radiant self esteem. No such luck. I went back to being insecure and pathetic and added those few days of blissful vanity to my list of things for which to judge myself. Still, it was a good lesson and has served me in lesser ways. I wish I had been wise (strong enough) at that early age enough to throw off the toxic shame my parents infused in me. I've made progress over the years in small ways, though that's probably not really as true as I like to think it is. Never leaving the house means I don't have to test my progress or lack thereof. I suppose I could don a wig and disguise and see if it made me more comfortable stepping out my front door, but I can't hide my obesity...

Which just makes me realize how close a call this "w" thing could have been. Thank goodness I didn't think of "weight," for my "w" word. Maybe there is a god. Now I think I'll put on some dark glasses, close the curtains and hide from even what I have just written.

One Single Impression: Spring

Here are my Spring haikus (and quasi-haikus) for One Single Impression. Once again I couldn't stop with just one or two once I started...

As you can tell I'm not an artist but I like to play with paint shop pro and I feel insecure with just the poems themselves. The flower pictures are stolen from the internet and manipulated until they are hopefully sufficiently different from their source that I'm not taking anything from their creators. The others are my own photographs given equally cruel treatment.


The bleak winter sky
Whets my appetite for Spring
It can't come too soon










Hidden in branches
Spring flowers lurk quietly
Waiting to surprise












They're intangible
Changes seen without our eyes
That whisper: Hope! Spring!












Age makes time move fast
While winter drags frozen feet
Crocuses still rise













Tall Cinderellas
Don magic fairy slippers
And dress for the ball













Every year I watch
Trying to catch the change
The magic surprise













I watch for Spring buds
But find myself always shocked
When blossoms erupt













Daffodilly-do
My eyes drink in your beauty
Ray of earthbound sun

~ Happy Easter ~ Happy Spring ~
Happy Anything that makes you Happy

Saturday Wordzzle Challenge: Week 5

It's week 5 of the Saturday Wordzzle Challenge and I'm delighted that a number of new people are planning to join in the fun. As I get the names I'll add them into the text of this post so that their wordzzles will be easy to find and enjoy.

As a reminder of what the words were for the current challenge:

Words for the ten word challenge were: horse shoe, antique chest, marigold, lunatic, science fiction, Oregon, previously, 10 billion, google, tree hugger and for the mini challenge: pardon me, feather duster, gathering storm, furthermore, magnolia blossoms

We've had another brave mega wordzzler this week - another email entry - this time from Rich. He sent me his submission in email so I'm not sure if he's planning to post it on one of his blogs. I'll post it here for now.

Just once in this Google world of 10 billion tags about tree hugger, science fiction, lunatic, horse shoe throwing, idiots from Oregon I'd like the previously drunken son's of marigold sniffing mothers to go to their antique chest and pull out the feather duster of all feather dusters and stick it where the sun don't shine. Futhermore if you will but pardon me for a moment I'll pull the windows closed against the gathering storm of thoughts and impressions which I can only liken to magnolia blossoms blowing through my mind.

Jay Cole Simser sent another offering this week. As the inventor of the mega wordzzle, I guess he felt compelled to wow us again this week. Here's his great paragraph.

The bouquet of magnolia blossoms and one marigold flower looked as if it had been arranged by a lunatic demon tree hugger. Previously 10 billion people from Oregon had been using google to gain information about the gathering storm. Pardon me, said the science fiction author, I have been looking for a horse shoe to place over the door to my wordzzle storehouse and furthermore I am in favor of using a green feather duster to clean the top of the antique chest which has become filthy with pollen from the marigold.

Others who have already posted their contributions - as I find them - this week are:

Snoopmurph
Dianne
Kim
Akelamalu
Jay
R.E.H
Pirate
Diana
Elena Jane
my aplogies to elena jane... I missed her post...
her wordzzle is wonderful and I hope people will discover it

Here's my 10 word wordzzle for this week:

Marigold Magnolia Morton (her lunatic tree hugger mother loved flowers) was born on a commune in western Oregon in 1969. She couldn't really complain about the names. It could have been way worse. Her parents, who had previously been Sandra Michaels and Larry Lutz had changed their own names to Starflower and Moonrider (can you believe it?) and were the kind of fanatical super hippies who had "gone back to earth." They grew their own pot and vegetables and lived off the land. Their particular commune had even eschewed motorized transportation and Moonbeam (she was not allowed to call him father) had been selected by the community to be their blacksmith. Some of her earliest memories involved sitting on a large antique chest in the corner of the barn watching him at the anvil, muscles rippling, sweat pouring down his body, horses wickering quietly as he attached horseshoes to their huge feet. The horses had responded to his gentleness. She remembered that too. Her parents may have been crazy wierdos, but there were worse ways to be crazy, she guessed. In her desire to escape her parent's odd, lonely world, she had run 10 billion miles in the opposite direction. Science fiction was her passion. Living in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, she had seen her share of UFOs and her imagination (without TV it was amazing what the imagination could get up to) had invented wondrous worlds in outer space. Eventually she had written them down into a dozen or more very popular books chronicalling the history of the planet Zamphoria which existed beyond the outer limits of the Horse Nebula. Google Venus Moonstar, her pen name (agh, she was her parent's daughter after all) and thousands of links came up. She had grown up to be famous, filthy rich and as urban as they came. Still, she had not escaped the hippy curse completely and she had spent part of her millions to buy her parents a small ranch (they refused to accept a big one... still hippies at heart) in the greenest part of Oregon. When city life and outer space got to be too much for her - as they sometimes did - Marigold Magnolia Morton went home to her past to feed her spirit and refuel her imagination.

And my mini wordzzle:

Franklin Culover stared out the window of his once grand mansion and watched the mangolia blossoms swirling around in the breeze that was the first warning of a gathering storm. Behind him, his daughter, feather duster in hand, muttered about the clutter and mess and the inconvenience of looking after him. "Furthermore, Dad," she was saying, you need to get rid of some of this junk. "Pardon me for living," he wanted to mutter, but it felt too close to the truth, so he remained silently looking out the window and his daughter never noticed his tears.

I'm adding this late, but I felt I had to try the mega wordzzle... here goes:

Marigold Swanson, Horseshoe Falls Oregon's famous lunatic tree hugger huddled nervously in the upper branches of the huge oak apprehensively looking out at the gathering storm. She was uncertain what to do. She was a proud fanatic, ready to give her life to save this tree - or she had thought she was until she saw the lightning and the dark clouds and felt the ferocity of the wind already blowing even though the storm was still so far away. She had begun to feel uncharacteristically frightened. Furthermore, at 60, she was not as young as she had once been and oddly life seemed more, rather than less precious. Previously (you could check this out on google), she would not have let anything stop her - not rain, snow, forest fires - even an offer of ten billion dollars, though that had one had been tempting, if unbelievable. Previously she would have pulled her slicker tight around her shoulders, and distracted herself from her fear with a good science fiction story. Today, though, the heart that beat in her antique chest felt less sure - like magnolia blossoms or a feather duster in the wind. And when she saw the loggers, sturdy fellows all, anxiously heading for their trucks, she crumbled at last. "Pardon me, Mr. Logger," she called out, "Do you think you could help me down?"

My vanity (old stuff nobody will ever read unless I share it this way) offering - whose words anyone can use as an alternative to this weeks if they prefer is: snowdrop, palate, boomerang, soft, mushroom, tongue, belt, oblique, fortuitous, lounge

Rich tastes of mushroom and spices and gravy and tender meat rolled across her tongue and boomeranged off her soft palate, caressing her taste buds, but more than that, touching something deeper in her being. This meal had not been casually prepared, nor was it just some fortuitous mix of fine ingredients well prepared. It was a work of art, a work of divine inspiration. She cast an oblique, sidelong glance at Antonio. He seemed such a puffed up buffoon as he lounged idly across the love seat, his overly simple clothes adorned only by the huge and ornate belt buckle, the little white kitten which he called SnowDrop nestled in his arms. She wanted to detest him - the arrogant fool - yet each bite of this glorious meal dragged her deeper under his spell, and by the time she had sipped the last drop of her coffee, she knew that she would follow him anywhere.

NEXT WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Words for next week's ten-word challenge are: arbitration, music, salamanders, frankinsence, trojan horse, balderdash, bottomless pit, fantastic, pugnacious, Trivial Pursuit

And for the mini challenge: maniac, video store, telephone pole, flute player, windy day

Anyone who wants to emulate the amazing megawordzzlers can try merging both challenges and make another megawordzzle. I still don't think I have the courage, but go for it if you think you can.

I would LOVE to have suggestions for words/phrases from other participants. Also any advice/suggestions on how to make the process easier would me much appreciated. I'm new to the blogosphere and still clumsy at navigating it in some ways.

Thanks for playing. For those who are new, here are some guidelines to make the process more fun.

Enjoy! See you next week.

Picture Fiction Challenge #2: A Life in Pictures

Ok... I think this is the second monthly Picture Fiction Challenge created by REH at his Ramblings of a Madman and my first attempt at it. The idea is to take the five photos below and write a story based on them. Each photo has an assigned role in the story. I thought this was REALLY hard. Needless to say my inner demons are partying their psychotic heads off as I post this. I was tempted to keep trying to fix it but I finally decided to just go with what I have. As I so wisely advise others about about the wordzzles challenges, this is about inspiring your creativity and having fun, not saving the world or writing the great American novel. So anyway, here are the pictures and my feeble attempt to meet REH's evil challenge. Not too happy with my title, but it's the best I can come up with at 1:30 in the morning. It will have to do.

And now I can go see what everyone else came up with and judge myself even more. Ah, the joy of being me.

A LIFE IN PICTURES

Even as a child, Carlotta Rodriguez had had dreams. Amazing, technicolor dreams, as exotic and vibrant as her waking life was dull and drab. She had started life on the wrong end of the poverty scale in a posh beach resort community where her mother worked two jobs - maid and waitress - and still barely earned enough to house and care for her young daughter. On occasion, though, Mrs. Rodriguez would bring home throw-away treasures, things that rich, self-indulgent tourists discarded as carelessly as you or I might toss away a used kleenex. It was one of those treasures that had changed Carlotta forever. For her daughter's 10th birthday, Maria Rodriguez had splurged on three rolls of film and wrapped up an old Kodak camera that someone had dumped unceremoniously into the waste basket in their room at the hotel. From that moment on, Carlotta had seen the world in photographs. She was a born artist with a gift for creating beauty from even the most unexpected scenes and objects. A wise mother, Maria had quickly taken note of both her daughter's passion and her talent and had encouraged her enthusiasm. They read books on photography and together explored all the potential aspects of picture taking - except color. This was not because Carlotta didn't want to take pictures in color, but because even baby-sitting for extra money and even with her mother putting aside every cent she could, it would have been a choice between a new camera but no film and no pictures at all, or continuing to work in black and white. All Carlotta ever dreamed of was a new camera. She saved every penny she earned towards that dream.

But then her mother died suddenly and Carlotta became a ward of the state, a foster child. The state - and, the foster parents to whom she was entrusted - decreed photography to be frivolous and expensive. Foster care was a nightmare. Her foster parents felt no compunction about going through Carlotta's belongings and "borrowing" whatever they wanted. When she asked for her precious old camera back, her foster father simply smirked and said, "not on your life. It's mine now." Later that night, he had come into her room, camera in hand and told her that perhaps he might let her borrow it if she would consider "entertaining," him. She ran that night without the camera, but with her innocence still intact. Luckily, neither social services nor her foster parents had found her hidden camera money. She had hidden it well. She ran with almost nothing. A few photos of her mother, a change of clothes, and steely determination.

Strangely, horrible and frightening as it was, it turned out to be the luckiest night of her life. When, the next morning, she stumbled, sleepy and frightened, off the train and into the crowded, bustling roar of New York City's Grand Central Station, she had no idea where to go or what to do. But as if led by an unseen angel, the very first thing she saw was a camera store. Hunger and tiredness forgotten, she entered the store as one walking into paradise. She saw and heard nothing except this world of cameras. Like the proverbial child in the candy store window, she was consumed with a hunger that pushed aside fear, doubt, even common sense. After train fare, she still had $180 of her camera fund left, nestled snugly next to her heart. She would worry about food and a home later. She had to have a camera. Nothing else mattered, nothing. And then she saw it. The camera of her dreams... the one she had read about, hoped for, pined for, dreamed of for what seemed like forever. She asked the clerk if she could see it and he handed it to her with an unnecessary warning to be careful with it. It felt like heaven in her hands. She pointed it here, there, checking the focus, the zoom. It was perfect. So lost was she in this world of her imagination, that she didn't notice the elderly man at the next counter watching her with a thoughtful expression. When she asked the clerk what the price of the camera was and he said $350, she couldn't believe it.

"But I only have $180," she said. "It's everything I have. Is there any way you can lower the price... or maybe I could work it off or...."

"Oh, sure," the clerk replied, "sarcasm oozing out of him, "I'm sure I can trust you for it. No chance."

It was then that the miracle happened. The old gentleman who had been watching her stepped in, whispering quietly,

"Give her the camera for $180, Fred,"

"But Mr. Candoza..." Fred stammered.

"I'll make up the short-fall, Fred. Give her the camera... and a dozen rolls of film. I've been watching her. She has the gift. Look how she holds that camera... with love... how she frames the world as she looks at it. I can see myself in her. She should have that camera... and I can easily afford it... but I want her to feel that she bought it herself."

Fred thought the old man was crazy. She looked like a punk kid to him, but as long as he got his money, he didn't care. Tony Candoza was a long-time customer and a famous photographer and Fred wasn't about to cross him over a $350 camera.

"Here, kid. This is your lucky day, I guess." And he was right. Because Tony Candoza did more than just help buy her a camera. He decided to take her under his wing.

"Excuse me, young lady," he said kindly. "My name is Tony Candoza. May I ask your name?"

"Tony Candoza! The photographer! I love your photos! They're so.... creative... and the way you get shadows, why... I just love them... I... I...," she trailed off, blushing. "Oh.. my name is Carlotta. I'm honored to meet you."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Carlotta. And always an honor to have my work appreciated so generously. May I offer you some breakfast? And maybe you can tell me about yourself - and who or what you are running away from. Come on, let's get some food into you and hear your story. I sense a fellow artist in you and us artists have to stick together." To her own astonishment she followed him eagerly as he led her to a surprisingly quiet little restaurant at the other end of the station.

Over a toast and eggs and bacon and orange juice, she told him the story of her life... and he told her the story of his... how he always seen the world in images, had drawn and painted from the time he was two. He had been lucky to have parents who were able to nourish his talent both emotionally and financially. He had gone to art school and during his time there had discovered the mystery and magic of the camera. It had become his life, his love, his mistress, his eternal passion. Watching her in the camera store, he told her, he has seen in her that same love. As she finished off her breakfast he said, "I have a proposal for you. Let's put some of that film into that camera of yours and see what you can do with it. If you're as good as I think you are, I'll make arrangements to become your legal guardian. If not... well let's not worry about that. I know you have the "eye." Let's go play. Today for certain you will have food to eat and a roof over your head in my guest room where you will be safe there, I promise."

They spent the next four hours exploring the city, taking picture after picture until all 12 rolls of film were used up and they were both happily exhausted. He watched her work, even as he took dozens of photos of his own. She watched him too, much as he watched her and picked up - even on that first day, little tricks she would not have thought of on her own. Then they ate sandwiches in the dark room and she watched him bring her photos - and his own - to magical life. She was in heaven. And just when she thought it couldn't get any better, they ordered Chinese food - which soon became her favorite - and he showed her many of his own photos. Her favorite was a strange photo of green M&Ms in a giant Starbucks cup. She didn't know why she liked it so much, but she did. He told her it wasn't one of his favorites and if he had to guess why she liked it, he thought it was because the colorfulness of it that appealed to her after so many years of being forced to create her work in black and white. She had realized that he was right. He knew her that well even from that first day. And she knew she was home in that moment. She knew that everything was going to be alright.

It was the beginning of a life-long (probably an eternal) friendship. Carlotta Rodriguez spent the next 15 years as Tony's adopted daughter and devoted student. He taught her everything there was to know about cameras, light and shadow, framing, developing film. He taught her about art and beauty, nurtured and nourished her talent, her passion and when she was ready, fostered her career. And he did something even more important; he wrapped her in kindness and love. He became the father she had never had, and his gentle generosity eased the pain of losing her mother at such a tender age. It didn't take long for Carlotta to become famous in her own right, but she became something better than famous. She was happy and fulfilled - in her life and in her work. Not everyone can say that.

Three months ago, when Tony had crossed gently from this life, he had bequeathed to her - among other things - the summer cottage by the shore where they had spent many happy days taking pictures and basking in the beauty of their surroundings. Even after she had married, she and her husband Tom (who loved Tony as much as she did) spent many weekends by the ocean with visiting with Tony - Tom drawing and painting while she and Tony did what they loved most. The cottage was full of Tony's love and his photographs and she studied them now, like journey through her own life. Her two favorites were very different. The first, surprisingly, was a picture of herself standing on the beach, wind blowing her hair across her face. It brought back a particulary happy moment on a particularly happy day. It wasn't very flattering, but it didn't need to be.

Her other favorite was taken on the last photo expedition she and Tony had taken together. It was her gift to him for his 78th birthday - the fulfillment of a life-long dream to photograph Siberian tigers of all things. She was surprised at first that he had never done it, but then she realized that he had probably sacrificed many dreams when he adopted her. That was one dream, at least, that she had been able to give back to him. It had been a wonderful trip. Their beautiful black and orange framed against white snow, those tigers were a photographer's dream. Tony had taken some of his best photos on that trip... and so had she. He had photographed tigers and she had photographed him, absorbed in his work and as young in spirit as if he'd been a teenager. She loved those photos. All she had to do was look at them and Tony was right there with her, laughing, pointing out some trick of light or color, pointing out some object of beauty or showing her the beauty of something most people didn't see as beautiful.

But there would be time to think about this later. The others were waiting for her on the beach now to give his ashes to the wind and rejoice in a life of a man they had each and every one been blessed to know.

Poem of the Week

In the moonlight
Dancing erotic, sacred paeans to God
Spirit and flesh somehow mixed
Holy, and wholly human
The ancients swayed.

When did we lose the glorious knowledge
That we are gods
Growing eternally into God
That hurt is learning to know what being is
That all things end
And yet remain forever growing in time
That everything we've done (wise and foolish)
Is simply part of who we have become
And are becoming

Will we ever know again
The majesty of belonging to the Universe,
Dancing splendid, slow and rhythmic praise
To the unity of all being
To ourselves
In whom we must find joy
Before we can touch the heartbeat of eternity

- Katherine E. Rabenau

Wordless Wednesday: Images of Angel Joy

Angel Joy

A kitty as naughty
as she is sweet
and as sweet as she is cute.

Happy Wordless Wednesday

Because I am a doting kitty "mom," who doesn't like to play favorites, you can check out Angel's sister/friend, Tara Grace here .

Still Crazy after All These Years

Oh, my... it is another gray, gray day here in Hancock, New York. Even though most of the snow is melted, what's left of the grass even looks gray to me or gray with a tinge of yellow. I don't why winter feels so horribly long this year but it does.

I've been trying to do the Heads or Tails Tuesday exercises - a place in your house - but somehow it was taking me to a dark place instead of a happy one. Don't get me wrong. I love my house. It's a sweet house and a miracle to me that I actually have a house of my own (well me and the bank are sharing it). For some reason the whole question got me wandering in the past. It's been a long journey to this house. Thirty-three years in my New York apartment ended by illness and the letting go of almost everything I owned. Eight years and six moves later I am settled in for life. There has been a lot of loss along the way - but also a lot of growth and gain. I want to write about it and I also don't. Mostly I just want to sulk, I guess.

And now I have figured out what's really going on. I'm mad at someone. I have a REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hard time being angry with people. As my therapist pointed out to me just yesterday, I turn it inward. I make myself wrong for feeling hurt. In this case someone didn't do something, didn't acknowledge a gift I gave them. Intellectually I know that it's nobody owes me love or appreciation for something I've done, but it hurt my feelings. I then turn that into something that I'm doing wrong. I seem unable to stop myself from this craziness. It goes back to childhood programming. My malevolent (really, no exaggeration here) brother would do some cruel thing that left me angry or crying and my mother would scold me for being upset, explain to me that he was tired or tell me that it was my imagination or... any number of things. So when I get angry or my feelings get hurt it immediately warps into "whats wrong with me." The bigger the hurt, the bigger the self punishment. This was a big hurt so my self-punishment must also be severe. It's not that I do this consciously. It's a reflex. My therapist on the phone yesterday, said over and over that I was turning my anger back on myself. I heard the words but I didn't hear what he was saying. I just got it now, writing this paragraph.

I am hurt and angry and I must be punished. I have no right to those feelings. They are selfish. Something deep inside me thinks (feels?) that my pain - even unexpressed - will harm the person whose action/inaction initiated it. A normal person would have said "caused" it there, but I can't do that because even though this person has been inconsiderate, I can't get around the idea that he had no obligation to receive or like his gift so he didn't "cause" anything. It's all in my head, it's all my fault. On some esoteric level, this is probably true, but it's a typical misuse of some of the new age philosophies. I remember "friends" back in the 70s who had hurt my feelings and when I told them that, they explained to me that this was my problem that because we are all "responsible for our own feelings." It's a little bit like telling the person who's foot you stepped on, that they shouldn't have put it in your path.

I've never gotten why someone can't be sorry that they've hurt your feelings without being to blame for it. But of course we live in a society that is big on blame. As a society we don't deal well with anger. I have a theory about that and it's connected to that whole concept of blame. I think it's because we've been taught that anger is a BAD feeling instead of just a human feeling. Well since it's bad, when we feel it, by implication, WE are bad. If we don't want to add being bad to being angry, then someone else has to be responsible for the feelings. They did it to us - infused this uncharacteristic badness into us and we (well I) get stuck there. Because of course the poor sap who inflicted - innocently or with malice - these nasty feelings on us doesn't want responsiblity for them either. The thing is that there isn't anything wrong (PLEASE can I hear this down in the secret depths of my wounded psyche) with being angry. It's a feeling. Like happiness. Only with anger, instead of letting it move through us we get stuck in it because we are trying so hard to not feel it. It's crazy.

And alas, even though I know and understand a lot about how this works. I still get stuck in what is one of the areas of my personal emotional quicksand. I'll get out of it eventually.

My thanks to anyone generous or unwary enough to have come across these words and read them. It's a gift you give and it is much appreciated. I sure hope the sun comes out tomorrow - both my inner "sun" and the one outside. I am really over winter and pining for some sign of Spring.

The Alphabet Backwards: Xenophobia

Week three of the alphabet backwards brings me to the letter "X" and the word xenophobia. Merriam Webster defines xenophobia as fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.

Unfortunately, we seem to be living in a time of hate and fear. After the events of 9/11/2001, there was a brief moment when I felt there was hope for a collective re-thinking on the part of the people of the world. I don't think it was my imagination. It was there. And then George Bush killed it. Oh, he said politically correct things about how all Muslims aren't terrorists, but at the same time he told us via military invasions, color-coded terror alerts, and a constant, steady drip of "be afraid" messages - that have been used to justify eroding our rights, our sense of decency as a people and our economy - that he didn't mean it. I guess it was a three for one sale. We could be destroyed from within while blaming it on those nasty foreign terrorists.

Mix massive doses of fear with profound financial uncertainty and you have created a xenophobe's paradise. Can't pay your bills? It's because those terrible foreign people have stolen your jobs. The fact that this isn't really quite true is irrelevant. We need someone to blame and immigrants are easy targets. It requires less effort than thinking through complicated truths like the fact that the so-called "tax breaks" - those acts of pretend largesse to the poor aren't actually "breaks" at all. They not only line the pockets of the rich, but steal basic services from the poor and sink them and the nation ever deeper into the abyss. The pennies given back to the poor don't help their real problems and the uncollected money from those who could/should have paid in aren't there to fund things like Head Start, Food Stamps, Unemployment, or work on the Infrastructure (which also creates jobs).

I don't know why it's easier to hate than to think. Maybe it's the bully syndrome that exists in all of us somewhere. Illegal immigrants are even further down the food chain than the poor (well they are part of the poor but with less access to what help exists), so they are easy to target. Could it be that politicians like focusing our attention on the problem of illegal immigrants as a good way to distract us from the fact that it's really them picking our pockets? And as a way of distracting us from young men and women giving their lives in an unjustified and unjustifiable war.

And of course the xenophobia attached to the war - a war on terrorism, which can be anything, anyone, anywhere, any time - is to keep people frightened of Arab terrorists so that we aren't mortified that our own and other people's children are giving their lives so Bush and the oil barons of this world can wrack up a little more money and hold onto their power. It is obscene and it infuriates me.

Alas, I could rant on and on, but it's almost 4 pm and I haven't posted this. I now officially hate my Monday Alphabet Backwards brainchild. My last Alphabet backwards (yearning) was also an angst-ridden exercise in self torment. I suppose I could have picked some other topic - like xerox or xylophones or so maybe the problem isn't the idea but my penchant for making myself miserable.

Next week's letter is "W" and hopefully it will inspire some happy gambol-through-the-flowers word to present itself to me. Meanwhile, I apologize for today - not so much for the rant - this stuff makes me really angry - but for the half-baked incompleteness of it. If I got out all I want to say, though, I'd still be writing at this time next week. This will have to do.

One last thing - a little bit of vanity... I was living in Arizona when the 9/11 attacks happened and I had my weekly agoraphobia column. This is what I wrote. I'm still kind of proud of it.

And I still pray for a world in which the voice of love becomes stronger than the twisted whispers of fear and hate-mongers. I think that potential is in us waiting to blossom. I hope so.

So much for the letter X. Whew. I'm out of here.

One Single Impression: Circle

Here are my circling haikus and quasi-haikus for this week's One Single Impression. I keep saying (at least to myself) that I'm going to ignore the 5-7-5 thing and then I keep trying to do it.





Dreadful circling rounds
Frantic thoughts that never stop
Going nowhere fast






I offer my love
my wide open, naked heart
but you won't close the circle







we came together
a circle of loving hearts
and the angels sang





Mandala


swift prayerful fingers
meditate with colored sands
ephemeral art
it washes away
and yet because it's fleeting
we remember it





circular thinking
thoughts ramble vaguely onward
ending at the start





I can't stop myself
circle, circle, circle on
one last silly poem


I guess this was a bunch of circular (and confused) impressions instead of one single one. Have a lovely week, everyone.

I'M NOT IGNORING YOU...BROKEN KEYBOARD

My keyboard died during the night...it was apparently a painless death (for the keyboard...not so painless for me)....thank you so much for Kim, for posting this for me.

Be back as soon as I can!

Keep those wordzzles coming!

Caught on Tape: Tara Grace Not Doing Anything

AGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Ok... if this works, it is probably video that only a "mother" could love. Tara Grace, who is so demure and quiet in this video normally barks at me like a longshoreman or like a gangster threatening a hit. Of course since this is her movie debut, she clammed up. She is sweet in motion, though, isn't she? I have some video that I took of Angel being naughty the first day I got the camera but it's kind of blurry so I think I'll wait until she's naughty again and see if I can get it in better focus. I apologize because this is way too long, but I haven't figured out how to edit things down yet. I've been trying to upload it since early Wednesday evening, have crashed the computer 5 times, finally figured out that I needed to download some additional thing and now hopefully will be able to get it posted, though it appears that it is still going to take hours and hours and hours to upload. Sigh. Pure stubborn, willful determination has now overridden good sense. I WILL post it even though it's too long and probably nobody will watch it. I will do it because. So there.

Here it is! Tara Grace's debut! Please don't become so enthralled watching this that you miss out on the Saturday Wordzzle Challenge...

Saturday Wordzzle Challenge: Week 4

Well, here we are at week 4 and things are picking up a little bit. I'm still working on the logistics. If we get enough people participating, I'll spring for a Mr. Linky, but in the meantime, please either share your links in the comments area or, if you prefer, email me with your efforts and I'll add them to the week's post.

Thank you so much to Dianne and Snoopmurph for your enthusiasm. Snoopmurph was so enthusiastic that she posted this wonderful response to today's challenge right away last Saturday.

My keyboard (see post above) had a miraculous recovery (yippee!) so I thought I'd add the links of others participating today.... Here they are in no particular order. My apologies if I have missed anyone.

Dianne

Kim
Akelamalu
REH
Snoopmurph
Karen

Another new player, Jay Cole Simser has created a new category for his first effort. I don't know how he managed it, but he created a Megawordzzle by combining the regular and mini challenges. Very impressive. Here's what he sent me. I'll highlight the mini and mega words in different colors. Way to go, Jay! Awesome.

(Just as a reminder, the words/phrases for this week's regular (10 item) challenge were: Bolivia, Green Goddess, virtual reality, laundry, ample evidence, matches, your mamma don't dance, sugar, saucy, sofa cushions and for the mini (5 item) challenge they were: olive groves, paraphenalia, sausages, moose droppings, store front)

Here's Jay's masterpiece:

Please pass the Green Goddess dressing for my salad”, I said with a saucy flavor to my voice. I was waiting by the virtual reality waterfall here in Bolivia while doing my laundry (and there was ample evidence that it needed to be done) when a small person (probably a pigmy) crawled out from under the olive groves, and handed me a plate of sausages which looked like moose droppings and upset my digestion. I looked at the little being and invited him to sit beside me on the sofa cushions while I got out my matches which I had purchased at the Your Mamma Don't Dance storefront and said “also, please pass the sugar.” I will need it for my drug paraphernalia. “Now, how about we party!

And here's my own offering for the main challenge:

It was Chauncey Smythe's worst nightmare. He wished from time to time that it was some virtual reality from which he could come and go, but it wasn't. It was real. The cramped, cluttered, dirty, laundry-carpeted hell hole in which he found himself was ample evidence that he had fallen through some rabbit hole into a parallel universe from his staid English beginnings. As if to re-inforce that thought, the radio in the next room started blaring "Your Mamma don't dance," so loudly that he was sure the deaf farmer a mile away must be hearing it. Hands shaking, he began fishing between the ugly, worn sofa cushions on which he sat seeking the matches that could usually be found there and was not disappointed. He knew he should quit smoking, but frankly, he didn't want to. It helped him cope with this life he was so ill-suited for here in Bolivia. All that said, Chauncy was not really all that unhappy. "Chauncey-wauncy, Sugar-baby, breakfast is ready" a woman's voice called from the kitchen. The sound of his beautiful, saucy Carmelita's voice was like sunshine in his heart and suddenly the room didn't look seedy any more but lived and loved in. It didn't hurt that besides being incredibly beautiful, his wife's cooking was so good that men fell in love and women wept when they tasted it. Heart leaping with the magic of love and hunger, he tamped out his unsmoked cigarette, leaped from his chair and headed for the kitchen. "Coming my precious Green Goddess," he called, feeling for all the world like a very lucky man.

and for the mini challenge, I came up with this:

Surrounded by the paraphenalia of short a short-order cook, Magnolia Rivington sat alone in her empty store-front coffee house, waiting for the first morning customers to arrive, the smell of coffee and freshly cooked sausages wrapping her in their homey warmth. Lost in thought, she sat leafing through the piles of travel brochures, dreaming of sunshine and blue skies. Snow and moose dropping might be piling up outside her Alaskan wilderness home, but in her mind she was walking through the olive groves of sunny Italy, exploring ancient marble buildings, basking on a sunny beach on the French Riviera. Startled from her dream by the sound of the cafe's door opening, and the "Hey, Mags, what's cooking," greeting of the day's first customer, she quickly slipped the pamphlets into her apron pocket. Back to reality for now, she sighed, but one day she would see Italy for real.

It's probably pure vanity (an unfulfilled writer's desire to be read), but I'm sticking with sharing an old example from my past. Anyone who prefers can choose these words for their weekly effort. (I really hate rules in case you haven't guessed.) Here's this weeks vanity toss in.

WORDS: Silver, having untied himself, language, disobeyed, careful, Lao-Tse, 7 million, tinkling, resistance.

Having untied himself with ease, Fred, who in this particular dream found himself to be the Lone Ranger, leaped gracefully onto his faithful horse Silver and rode in the direction of what sounded like the sweet tinkling of hundreds of tiny bells. Tinkling was perhaps the wrong word for the bells, as the sound was quite awesomely beautiful and rich, both small and enormous beyond imagining. Their call could not be disobeyed and any resistance he might normally have felt to heading so boldly into the unknown, simply faded away. The closer he and Silver came to the source of this music, the more beautiful the landscape around him became and he was overcome with a feeling of such peace that he felt he might very well float away. All around them were blossoms in every imaginable color and shape and butterflies in every color of the rainbow. "Careful, Silver," he whispered quietly in the horse's ear, "we don't want to disturb anything." And the horse seemed to understand, for he slowed to a delicate walk and nickered softly in seeming agreement. Moving on, they at last came to a clearing in which were seated at least a hundred beings of light and wise souls. Even at a quick glance he spotted Jesus and Buddha sitting in quiet conversation and at least a dozen angels and arch angels. Off in a corner in a pagoda of his own sat Lao-Tse. And the Virgin Mary smiled a warm welcome to him as a young cherub led Silver off to be fed and watered. This space was lit with what seemed to be 7 million candles, yet there was no glare. And though there were hundreds of voices speaking at once - the sound he now realized was not bells at all but the voices of these divine beings - all was quiet and peaceful. And although each being spoke his or her own language it seemed to him all one and perfectly comprehensible. He could have stood forever wrapped in the beauty and the peace of that place, but at last he asked, "Is this Heaven? Am I dead then?" And as they turned to smile at his question, there came another sound - as worldly as they come - as Max, a hungry kitty who cared nothing at all for mystic visions - swatted and howled him most unceremoniously back to his bedroom and the waiting day.

NEXT WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Guess that's it except for the words/phrases for next week's challenges: horse shoe, antique chest, marigold, lunatic, science fiction, Oregon, previously, 10 billion, google, tree hugger

And for next week's mini challenge: pardon me, feather duster, gathering storm, furthermore, magnolia blossoms

Anyone who wants to emulate Jay's amazing example can try merging both challenges and make another megawordzzle. I don't think I have the courage, but go for it if you think you can.

I would LOVE to have suggestions for words/phrases from other participants. Also any advice/suggestions on how to make the process easier would me much appreciated. I'm new to the blogosphere and still clumsy at navigating it in some ways.

Thanks for playing. For those who are new, here are some guidelines to make the process more fun.

Enjoy! See you next week.

The Cranky Blues

I have the blues this morning. Big time.

I think I forgot to take my sam-e for the past couple of days. I have a slight cold. I'm tired of winter. It's not so cold outside today but it's gray and gloomy and looks as dismal as I feel. I'm still trying to upload some stupid 5 minute video of Tara Grace looking pretty and not doing what I want. So far I have spent about 30 hours on this project and I'm back at square 1 this morning, irritable but determined. It was almost finished uploading early last night (about 24 hours and 5 computer crashes into the project) and then I opened up some other program and apparently the whole thing got dumped and had to start over from start. I'm giving it another try this morning. It's not that this is great video. It's not, unless Tara Grace is your cat and you love her and you think it's cool that your new camera makes moving pictures. It's that I started this project and I'm damned if I'm going to be defeated. I WILL get it uploaded.

Then there's the whole thing with Governor Spitzer here in New York having to resign. I don't understand the insanity of this country which is pretty much throwing another talented human being away for sexual stupidity while we allow thugs and criminals to roam the halls of the White House and Congress unchecked breaking the law and committing acts of profound violence at home and abroad. So they are mass murderers. Big Yawn. Did you hear that Spitzer saw a call girl? Well apparently Dick Cheny has a history of doing the same thing but I guess it's not a crime when a Republican does it. Arrrrggggggh. And the Democrats are busy eating each other's young and giving the press fodder to make fools of them while the demented John McCain gets good press for not dying 40 years ago. I give him points for courage but that doesn't mean he's sane now or that he would be a good president. As far as I'm concerned he sold his soul to George Bush 8 years ago and with it any respect I once had for him. He's not only claiming that our invasion of Iraq was a good thing, he wants to keep it going forever. Is this the twilight zone? It can't be the real world, can it? When do I get to wake up from this nightmare?

I feel so bloody (I really wanted to say something else) cranky that I can barely stand being in my own skin. And I feel depressed. (Aren't you glad you popped by for a visit?) I know this will pass. I'm going to practice some of what I preach. Going to focus on Angel and Tara Grace. They always make me laugh. Maybe I'll try reading a book. My niece Cindy sent me the Kite Runner a while back. I started it and it's beautifully written but then I got side tracked by a bunch of mini crises and I haven't gone back. I hate getting interrupted with a good book because I always feel like I should start over. Hmmm. Back to cranky, aren't I?

So anyway, when I wrote the Blues down for the title of this morning's piece, I though maybe I should look for some things that are beautiful and blue. Turn the meaning of the Blues around. I have a little figurine that someone gave me years ago. I call it the blue bird of happiness... it's rich dark - I think they call it cobalt - blue. Then there are blue bells. I have a picture of my youngest niece, Diana, sitting in bluebells with her dogs. It always makes me happy when I look at it. It cheered me up just thinking about it and she has given me permission to share it with you. I don't know how anybody - even if they don't love her - can look at that picture and not feel their mood lighten. They look so beautiful and happy and the bluebells are so bright and dramatic against the green of the grass. I love that picture.

Thinking about the picture reminded me of a gift that Diana gave me a few years back. It's called an Akua'ba and it's an African fertility doll. When I was way young and my sister's kids ranged from about 3 to 7, I think, I worked at the Museum of Natural History and of course I visited their gift shop with some regularity. Too bad they didn't pay me enough to really shop there. Anyway, I fell in love with the fertility dolls. I loved the look of them. I wore a gold colored replica as a necklace (to fertilize my creativity) all the time and my sister's kids were fascinated by it, so I bought big plastic ones for each of them. Seemed to fertilize their imaginations: for them they were everything from microphones to - who knows... They made me smile then and the thought of them makes me smile now. A few years back the beautiful Diana of the bluebells sent me the sweet black carved akua'ba pictured below. I told her - because it's true - that when I look at it, I feel like I'm getting a hug from her. And I do. And that always cheers me up.

So... I'm not exactly radiating sunshine yet, but I'm a tiny bit less grouchy than when I started. Thanks for listening invisible people out there.



I hope those of you reading this are having a better week/day than I am. Whether you are, or you aren't, the little fertility guy and I are sending out a big hug to everyone. It's our act of kindness for the day - to ourselves as much as to anyone who chooses to receive it. May your day be full of sunshine (even if it's only of the heart), bluebells, beauty, hugs and lots of love.

Oh, and don't forget that tomorrow is the Saturday Wordzzle Challenge...

Poem(s) of the Week: A Birthday Tribute

Today is my nephew Matthew's (age undisclosed) birthday. It still astonishes me that any of my sister's children are not still toddlers since I don't feel any (well maybe a little) older than the day they were born. I know exactly where I was when I heard the news that I had a nephew. I was a senior in college, having a very hard time on many fronts. And then a miracle was delivered. I sat right down and wrote a poem and waited eagerly for the day I'd get to meet him. He was - and is - magnificent. I wish I had all my old photos scanned into the computer but my scanner died on one of the 5 moves I've made in the past 6 years. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Alas, I'm so disorganized that I can't find the poem I wrote for him the day he was born. I know it began something like "Oh now I have a nephew... " so you aren't missing much, except for maybe a sense of how thrilled I was. If I can find it later, I'll add it to this post.

When Matt was about two, my sister told me he had a monster living in his closet. I think it was named the Booda Asooda. I wrote this poem for him. I don't know if it helped, but I had fun writing it.

THE MAGUDDA BOODA
for Matthew

The Magudda Booda, headless fellow
Is in my closet eating jello
Being naughty day and night
But sneakily, away from sight
He laughs and giggles, howls and shrieks
He makes the walls and floor boards creak
He jumps and runs and makes me scared
I'd get him banished if I dared
Or thought he'd really stay away
And not come back more tricks to play
Alas, I think he can't be chased
Nor from his closet home displaced
So I just close the closet door
And check it twice to make quite sure
He can't come out while I'm asleep
And round the bedroom wildly leap
To spend a night of wicked play
And disappear at dawn of day.

- Katherine E. Rabenau

Matt and I used to talk a lot. We argued politics. Much to my deeply Democratic, fanatically liberal dismay he is a libertarian. He believes in objective reality. I believe everything is subjective. We've had some pretty good discussions. I adore him. I'm so very proud of him. He's brilliant. A computer genius among other things. He probably doesn't remember this, but I always told him that he had an inner poet waiting to come out. About six years ago (I think) - he let his inner poet speak. Now he is - his sisters both wax poetic on the subject - a master chef, working to start his own restaurant. It's coming soon to Portland, Oregon and will be called The Fat Cat Bistro. When it opens, food lovers from around the world will be lining up to get in. I know this.

I wrote this poem as a birthday gift for him. I hope he'll like it and feel the truth of it.

FOR MATTHEW

beloved stranger
nephew
child of my heart
I treasure you
always and forever
my pride in you is fierce
awestruck as I was
by the wonder of your tiny baby self
I have watched you grow
baby to toddler
toddler to little boy
little boy to self-conscious teen
teen to young man
young man to talented adult
we've had our debates -
(that darn Republican streak you got from your father)
and even arguments
about silly things (as arguments usually are)
some of the life mistakes that trouble me the most
I made with you
I'm not an easy aunt to have
fat, a little crazy
an airy-fairy nut to your grounded pragmatist
my fear of the world kept me from being there
when maybe - even if you didn't need me -
I should have been, would have been if I could
If nothing else, I hope you know how much I love you
like your sisters, you are one of the wonders of my world
the laughing baby boy
has grown into a fine man
a creative, passionate chef
but more than that
a loving supportive brother,
a true friend, loyal to those he loves
no matter what else,
know that I love you
with a heart that wraps around you always
even if distance keeps my arms away

- Katherine E. Rabenau

Happy Birthday Matt.
I Love You.

Wordless Wednesday - Light and Shadow

Wordless Wednesday

Heads or Tails Tuesday: Anything Green

Ok. I'm up for my second adventure with Skittle's Heads or Tails Tuesday. Today's topic. Anything green. Hmmm.

Green is one of my favorite colors. Of course at any given moment almost every color is one of my favorites, but I am quite partial to most shades of green. When I've had carpet (that I bought for myself), it has always been green. One of the first things I did for my little house was to turn it green - I brooded, pondered, mused, and pored over the colors at Sherwin-Williams' cool color Visualizer thingy. They seem to have discontinued my beautiful color. It's a very soft, sage color. I didn't realize what a difference it would make. It turned my sad little house - the midget on the street - from looking to me like sort of like a shack - to looking sweet and revived. It made her mine too, in some way. The very kind young couple who painted it for me tried to get me to compromise about the color since they wanted to use a different kind of paint. For some reason it felt SO important to me to hold true to this color that I held true to myself for a change. Turned out their paint brand was a Sherwin-Williams affiliate and all I had to do was get the formula. Their conviction that it was impossible turned out to be mistaken. With her new green face, I think I really fell in love with my little house and truly felt for the first time that she was mine.

Other green things. I have quite a lot of rocks. I love rocks. Here's an interesting green one. I used to know what it was, but I have forgotten and I'm too lazy to look it up. It's pretty, though, isn't it?

Green art work. Here are a pair of water colors my mother got years and years ago. They aren't literally green, I guess, but they feel green and soft and cool on the eye to me. I'm not sure how to spell the artist's name. Aral Raj is what I have in my head. I know the Raj part is right.





























Even though I'm very fond of green. I do have my limits. I have never understood the idea of drinking green beer on Saint Patrick's day. Yuck.

Oh... I knew there was a really important aspect of green that I forgot. Trees in summer, of course, but right now, in winter, I am particularly fond of the green that comes through as snow melts. It gives me hope that Spring is on the way.

The Alphabet Backwards: Y is for Yearning

Who'd a thunk this would be such a difficult topic. I just erased about six frustrating paragraphs. Yearning is a natural human instinct, right? Not in my world. I think I need the length of the novel I will probably never write to explain how much difficulty I have with the concept of wanting or yearning. I started writing this - trying to write this - at about 11:00 am this morning. It's 3:17 and I'd be just as lost as when I began if I hadn't just talked to my therapist on the phone.

My mother meant well. I know she did. She was just very wounded and in her wounding - I won't go into details - I tried that in the first draft and it's too hard to explain - so let me just say that out of her own wounding she created in me a fear of wanting. Truth is that until my sister was murdered, I was totally disconnected from pretty much all human feeling except a kind of pseudo happiness. The smiling twinkie twilight zone in which I had protected myself from the insanity around me was already cracking at the edges before she died, but her death shattered it completely and though the journey has been painful, the murder which stole my sister from me, in an odd way gave me back my self... or at least opened the door to me finding myself.

What does this have to do with yearning? I don't know how to do it. It involves lots of forbidden and uncomfortable feelings. Well, my therapist - Hi, Dr. Jim! - says that I do, but that I'm so afraid of it that I stop myself. He's very wise so he's probably right. I associate wanting/yearning with guilt and punishment. He suggested that I yearn to walk without pain and to leave my house. I actually argued with him! But of course I yearn for that. And I also fear not being able to cope with it. Disability may suck but it's predictable and I can feel guilty 24/7. Another place my therapist suggested that I allow my yearning to leak out is my perpetual quest to win the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. That's true, but I detach from even that because I make a joke out of it.

One thing I am good at is surrogate yearning. I yearn passionately for the happiness of my nieces and nephew and my friends. I yearn passionately for a house for my friend who is struggling to escape a bad relationship and an unsafe situation. I yearn passionately for all my friends' wishes to come true. As I write this, I realize that I also am able to yearn passionately for things like world peace and Dennis Kucinich (or someone like him) for President. It's when it comes to yearning for myself that it feels as though that piece of my heart was cut out by my mother and my brother an eternity ago. As Dr. Jim pointed out, it's still there, it's just that my reflex to detach from it is so swift and reflexive that I disconnect from it almost before I can feel it. When I do feel it, I get pejorative and/or frightened. Who do I think I am? I don't deserve whatever it is - be it a camera, a house, enough money to pay my bills, freedom to walk out in the world without panic. Even love.

One of the early realizations I had in therapy was that - for whatever complicated set of reasons - I felt like my very existence was a crime against God, that I had somehow stolen a life and space that rightly should have belonged to someone else. Who, I don't know. The radiant me who lives inside, who craves love and attention, maybe even fame - learned to keep a low profile, lest God take back her forbidden life.

As I write this, I realize that she really IS in there. And she is yearning to break free.

I know this isn't my best writing. It is jumbled and disjointed. It's incomplete. I'm going to post it anyway because it's the best I can do on this subject. That I am talking about yearning at all is enraging some terrified part of me. I can almost literally see a hand with a bloody blade poised to attack. That's how intense my fear of my yearning is.

Which I guess is may be a sign that the part of me that yearns really is alive and well. And she really IS yearning to break free. And that scares me. But it makes me happy too.

One Single Impression: Kindness

Haiku is not my natural impulse, but I thought I'd try to write a few as part of the One Single Impression's weekly prompt. I'm fairly new (2nd week) to OSI. I don't think they hold participants too strictly to the haiku (5-7-5) form, but I decided to try that anyway. I'm not too happy with the results, but I'm posting them anyway. My inner perfectionist be damned. Still, I feel a need to explain them, which is always a sign that I don't think they quite speak for themselves.... sorry.

The first two are dedicated to two of my neighbors. I am profoundly agoraphobic and I have difficulty walking, so I pretty much haven't set foot out of my house for the past two years. As a consequence, I don't know my neighbors very well, though they are quite kind and sort of look after me. One neighbor in particular is also disabled. He is often in a wheelchair but is able to drive and get around. I spend most of my day sitting here at my computer and he and his wife wave as they come and go. It means a great deal to me. It makes me real. (Ok... I wrote the second not 5-7-5) based on that sentence and I like it better than the rest.... guess I'm just not a true haiku-er....

stranger and yet friend
you temper my solitude
and wave as you pass

***
acknowledging me here
you make me real
with your simple act of kindness

***
No explanation for this one... just what it is....

her kind word and smile
paused him in his quest for death
and she never knew

This last haiku is dedicated to my friend Dianne who wrote an exquisite post this morning on the subject of "everyday kindness." I hope you'll take the time to read it.

she did not strike back
the bravest kindness of all
to meet cruelty with grace

ok... one more... inspired by the kitty in my arms.... this is kind of addictive.

kitty in my arms
rumbling Angel hugs most pure
a treasured kindness

This is making me very anxious for some reason. Most of the poetry I've posted here at Raven's Nest is old and I have made friends with it over the course of time. These are hot off my fingers. I am awash in angst. I know you will (heck, it's the theme of the day), but please be kind.

Spiders and Butterflies

Well, I was going to moan about talking heads but my tiny collective of readers is going to be spared. PBS (which I pretend means I'm watching more elevated talking heads), is having pledge week, so instead of swearing at the TV and muttering under my breath, I'm going to listen to Wayne Dyer talk about Change Your Words, Change Your Life. Hmm. Message from the universe? Wayne's the butterfly (more on this later). The spider was, alas, real. I guess this means that Spring is in the works somewhere underground even though it isn't really showing yet.

I have a conflicted relationship with spiders. When I was very young a spider decided my face was a good place to land. I was not that good with crawly things to begin with and that pretty much sealed the door on my spider fear for a long time. Then, I was - very briefly - a camp counselor. Anyone who knows me, even those who knew me back then, will appreciate the ludicrousness of ME being a camp counselor, but I was one for a very brief two week span. I was probably 18 or 19. The campers were about 8, I guess. But I digress... back to the spiders. When we first got there and went into the bathroom cabin, it was my worst nightmare. It was crawling with (literally!) daddy long-legs spiders. The girls screamed. The counselors screamed. Terror was afoot. Desperate times, however, sometimes bring out the best in me. Something had to be done. What mysterious power moved through me, I don't know, but I walked over to a sink, picked one of these creepy spiders up by the leg (eeeeeeeeek!!!!) and said with as much conviction as I could muster: "Now look. There is absolutely NOTHING to be afraid of...." Miracle of miracles. I left, the girls cleaned the place up. Life lesson learned.

Since then spiders and I have a kind of truce relationship. In Native American and other traditions, spiders are creators, carriers of great wisdom and often represent creativity and the web of life. Here are some wonderful stories that may help some of us spider phobes (hi, Linda!) to shift our perspective on these amazing creatures. I especially like the first one.

This is a wondeful Choctaw story about How Grandmother Spider Stole Fire

And here's an Osage perspective on this odd creature, called The Spider and the People.

I found this very cool website on symbols and this is what it has to say about Spiders.

Another thing that helped shift my behavior around spiders is that I read somewhere years ago that spiders in your house bring luck. (I confess to being a touch superstitious - or at least to erring on the side of superstition - just in case.) If spiders around your house are any indication, I must be very lucky. This seems like the spider kingdom to me some days. I don't so much like killing them any more, so I try to negotiate with them. If they stay in their corner, I will leave them be, though I keep my eye on them. An area where spiders and I have yet to come to a true meeting of the minds is my shower. It is one thing for them to be off in some corner by the ceiling... quite something else for them to be hanging around taunting me while I'm wet and naked. That is a death sentence as far as I'm concerned. There are limits to my enlightenment.

Well, I guess this is going to be just about spiders. Wayne Dyer has a cool butterfly story but it's too complicated to talk about out of context. Butterflies are about transformation. Maybe the butterfly aspect of this little essay is the transformation in my relationship to my fear of spiders. Butterflies are pretty. I like them better than spiders, but spiders are fascinating in their own way. Their webs are so awesome and yet there is something terribly cruel about how they trap and feed on their prey. They do seem to understand patience and creativity, though. They are rich in life lessons if we can get past the fear they engender in our psyches. That said, I do wish I knew where that spider that inspired this mindless Sunday morning ramble has gotten to. Oh, dear.... Time to focus on Wayne Dyer and changing my thoughts...

Saturday Wordzzle Challenge - Week 3

Welcome to the next installment of my wordzzles game.

Thank you so much to Dianne for playing last week - and coming up with a positively brilliant solution. My incredible and clever niece Diana just posted responses for last week and this week in the comments section from my last week's post. Newcomers can also find additional information on how the game works and some hints for how to have more fun doing it. I'll let anyone who is interested check out what she came up with for last week's words, but I'll paste her solution for this week along with mine. Hopefully nobody will notice that the muse seems to have abandoned me just when I need her most because the muse is being very good to Diana.

The words for this weeks challenge were: Yowling cat, ink stain, fever, river bed, home improvement, laughable, motorcade, broken camera, crafty and bourbon
Here's my niece Diana's paragraph:

"Are you going to fix that damn broken camera? It's been sitting on the kitchen table for 2 weeks!"I didn't mean to lose my temper, but this is starting to wear on me. The list of home improvement projects is mounting. He wants to be more crafty and handy around the house, and I know I should encourage him. But it's laughable, really. The heater sounds like a motorcade every time it turns on, the poor yowling cat can barely get to his food bowl with the piles of kitchen tile laying on the floor. After last night's rain, our lawn looks more like a river bed from where he *started* to put in what was to be a lovely rock path. "Oh god, what have you done to the curtains!!! Is that an ink stain???" He tells me it's nothing that a little bourbon and seltzer can't take out. I think I need to lay down. Maybe I have a fever or something. I feel faint.

And here's mine:

The yowling cat stood proudly by the broken camera while the huge red ink stain spread slowly across the white carpet. This was his idea, apparently, of home improvement. Martha hoped desperately that the scene before her wasn't actually real, that it was an hallucination brought on by the high fever she was running. She could hardly believe that even Mandrake, the Governor's decidedly "creative" cat, could have managed such total mayhem in the brief five minutes during which she had sat down to rest her aching head. Now, with her head hurting far worse than if she had at least had the pleasure of drinking a bottle of bourbon to engender such misery, she would have to trap and lock up the crafty animal before it could do any more harm and then get the study clean and spotless before the gathering of dignitaries - due any minute - arrived with demands for food and drink. On some other occasion it might have been laughable, but not today, not with so much at stake from this particular meeting. Particularly ironic was the fact that she herself was responsible for introducing this four-legged nightmare into the governor's mansion. Yes, it had been she, nobody else, who had spotted Mandrake's then frail body barely breathing in the dry river bed and persuaded the reluctant governor to rescue it. It would be good publicity, she had told him, especially since they were struggling to get increased funding for mandatory spay/neuter and spay/release programs for their state. "For you, Mandrake, they should re-institute the death penalty," she muttered. At these words, with typical cat wisdom, Mandrake gave his sweetest "mew," looked up at her with the face of an angel and, purring loudly, rubbed his soft body against her leg. As though by magic, she felt her mood shift and her headache lift. "You should run for office, Mandrake," she laughed. " You know how to charm your public. Now get out of here so I can undo your art work before the governor's motorcade arrives. You are a love, you rotten cat. Now shoo."

One of Dianne's readers, requested a mini challenge so I have provided a 5 word challenge for anyone who preferred it. (Feel free to do both if you want. I did.)

Words/phrases for the mini challenge were: outer limits, Lucifer, automobile engine, monk's habit, peanut butter & jelly

Here's my mini-challenge offering:

Peanut butter and jelly sandwich in hand, Frank Jones was so completely engrossed in the episode of The Outer Limits blaring on his TV that he didn't hear his wife's angry good-bye, didn't hear the automobile engine start up, didn't see her drive away with their young son. On the TV, Lucifer, disguised in a monk's habit, was "compassionately" giving bad advice to a young husband whose wife was feeling neglected. "Come here, hon," Frank bellowed obliviously to the empty house, "this show is great. You'll love it." Perhaps she would have, but he had called too late and she was gone.

I said in my previous posts that I'd share an old words exercise from my past just because I had so much fun doing them and because anyone who wants to can select those words as a third option for the challenge. This week's golden oldie is the very first one I ever did: Jelly beans, bowling ball, Dolly Parton's brassiere, Easter Bunny, mysticism, ice cream, apple pie, life, sequence of events.

Margaret's bowling ball dropped with a thud, tottered slowly down the alley, and trickled feebly into the gutter. "Good one!" guffawed Blanche Smith. Margaret, smiling sweetly, whispered, "Stupid Bitch" under her breath. "Cow." Just because she had breasts so big she could wear Dolly Parton's brassiere, she thought she was some kind of beauty queen. And now she was a bowling critic. Bitch. Margaret hated her life of squalling kids, dirty dishes and laundry. She hated her Mom and apple pie husband and his nice 9-5 job. She hated schoolteachers, peanut butter, Christmas trees, and the Easter Bunny. She hated chocolate cake, hamburgers, French fries, frozen yogurt, and, oh, how she hated jellybeans. If she found one more jellybean in someone's pocket or on the floor or in the bed, she'd scream. There'd been jellybeans in her bowling bag, for God's sake! Pretty much, she hated everything about her life, Margaret decided. Except ice cream. No one, not even Margaret, could hate ice cream. Ice cream was love and serenity and inner peace. It was a religious experience. And again, she cursed the sequence of events that had led her to this frantic, empty, frazzled life where there was no room or time in which she could comfort her lonely, hungry soul with the food it needed to survive: art, writing, Yoga, an hour of meditation, the study of Eastern Mysticism, or even a moment or recognition in her husband's eyes of who she was. A person. Not a Mom. Not a wife. Someone with a self. Margaret! She was Margaret! She had rights. She deserved more than she was getting and it was time she demanded it. She smiled. Good old Chuckie had a few surprises coming. "You're up, Sweetie," Blanche bellowed. Margaret rose quietly and in a swift sure move, rolled a lovely, perfect strike. "Top that, Bitch!" she breathed with a deep, contented sigh. Yes! A new day had dawned.

Guess that's it for this week. I look forward to seeing what people have come up with. I continue to invite suggestions from participants for words/phrases so I don't have to make them all up myself. Here's what I came up with for this week. I try to just put down whatever comes into my head first. This week, that was not such a good thing. I dread coming up with a solution to my own puzzle. Sigh.

Next week's challenge: Bolivia, Green Goddess, virtual reality, laundry, ample evidence, matches, your mamma don't dance, sugar, saucy, sofa cushions

Next week's mini challenge: olive groves, paraphenalia, sausages, moose droppings, store front

Have fun!

Camera Junkie

Well a week and a half ago, Tara Grace apparently got tired of hearing me whine about how envious I was of everybody else's cool mega-pixeled cameras. My little HP was very old, dating back to the dawn of digital cameras - and cheap digital cameras at that. It had only 1.5 paltry little megapixels. It could zoom a little bit, but barely enough to make it interesting. It was really, really slow.

Everyone I know has a new or newish camera with lots of pixels. Their pictures are sharp and clear. Their cameras zoom as much as 15x. Gloryosky but I was jealous!! Even though I'm not normally an envious type of person. I have been struggling with serious covetousness. Not that I grudged others their cool cameras. I just wanted one too.

Tara Grace apparently decided that enough was enough and that all that whining - interior and out loud - had to be stopped. In an act very uncharactaristic of her, she pushed my faithful little 1.5 pixel HP to a many-small pieces death. One expects such things of Angel. But Tara Grace? I can only think there was divine intervention here. Could I have willed it? I tried to be sad, but truth is.... Anyway... My credit card, which I have been trying very, very hard to pay down is back up a notch, but I have a really cool new camera that I got for a really, really good price from Amazon.com. It's got 8.3!!! - yes 8.3!!! - megapixels and it can zoom to 10X!!!! It takes moving pictures. (They are awful and I can't figure out how to share them, but they move.) And it works fast.... and you can see what the pictures look like and save or not save with genuine ease. And it's got rechargeable batteries. I am in heaven.

I'm still trying to get a really good picture of Tara. She's difficult to get to begin with and very uncooperative. Unlike Angel, who happily poses for me, Tara sees the camera and turns her back, grooms herself, moves constantly or just leaves the room. But I ramble. Here are some first efforts with my new treasure. They aren't great art, but I'm having fun and I didn't have to move from my desk to take any of them. How cool is that?

Poem(s) of the Week

This week, I thought I'd post a few very short poems.... I suppose I could post just one, but they seem too short for that, like only one would be cheating.

I chose the first one to help honor my One Million Blogs for Peace commitment. The other two I chose because they are short and just because.... The third poem is my contribution for the theme of "change," this week's One Single Impression prompt.


ON LOVE AND WAR






The call to arms is deep

Strong

Lonely buglers

Trumpet sad melodies

Of unborn dreams

Into the bellies of weeping women.

- Katherine E. Rabenau



EAGLE








Such flight must surely be magnificent

Must loose the soul to higher worlds

It is too beautiful to be merely practical

Look how he dances, glides and swoops

Within the endless depth of sky

So certain of his power

So easy on the wind

Look how the heavens carry him about

Above the rugged spires of a dying world.

- Katherine E. Rabenau



AWAKENING
October 1, 1999










Live as big as the sky, she said

And I felt my heart awaken and take note

As big as the sky? it asked?

Can I do that?

I don’t know, I said,

Liking always to be truthful.

But we can try.

- Katherine E. Rabenau

Wordless Wednesday

Sunrise

Lake Huntington, New York

Wordless Wednesday

Heads or Tails Tuesday

Well, I was determined this week to participate in Skittle's Heads or Tails Tuesday. Of course since I'm new at this game, this week, it seems to have appeared on Monday and have no tail. This week it is list 7 things, (isn't it? is that right?). I browsed around and decided I'd list seven movies that I have really, really loved. So... here goes.

1. Babette's Feast - probably my favorite movie ever. I cry at the end every time. It's subtitled. The music is beautiful. I love the faces of the actors and the subtlety of the performances, especially during the dinner.

2. A Passage to India

3. The Shawshank Redemption

4. Bend It Like Beckham

5. Monsoon Wedding

6. The Dead Poet's Society

7. Chocolat

There are probably other movies that I have liked better than some of these. Babette's Feast will probably always top my list.

So this is my first tail-less (headless?) Head's or Tails Tuesday. Thanks for inviting us to play, Skittles.

Life and Death

Well, I was going to do a heads or tails thing today - and maybe I'll do that too - but a young friend of mine posted something about an experience she had with a grieving colleague who, having just lost her mother to cancer announced basically that her husband had better not get sick because she wasn't watching anyone else die. What can one say in such a situation? What emotions does it bring up in us?

If we've never watched anyone die, it probably sounds just mean and selfish. Of course we couldn't leave someone we loved when they need us most. How could you even think it?

But Linda's post made think of some of the secret thoughts I have had on the subject of the dying, the ones my better self likes to pretend never made their way through my brain. But they did. My mother didn't die with something like the agony of cancer, but she died over the course of 15 slow, pain-filled years. We didn't have the best relationship, but I loved her with an almost agonized love because she wasn't very good at loving back. I probably loved my mother more than I have ever loved anyone - and I love with fierce and unrelenting loyalty - but I will admit here that there was more than one time in those 15 years of grim ups and downs when I wished she would die, wished she and my father and all of us could be released from our misery.

Does that make me cruel? At the time I thought maybe it did, but maybe time has made me a little wiser. I'm human and like most humans I dislike suffering, whether it's my own or that of someone I love. The first time I prayed that my mother would die was a month or two after her first break-down. She had wasted away in three months time from about 140 pounds down to less than 90 pounds. Her clothes were falling off her but she thought they were too small. She didn't recognize me, my brother and sister or her husband of over 50 years. And they told us they thought maybe she had cancer. She didn't but they thought she might. That was the first time I wished she'd die. I didn't want her to suffer. But to be honest, I didn't want me to suffer either. Luckily, I didn't get that wish. A variety of tortured treatments later, a somewhat diluted verision of my mother returned to us. Over the years she had several more break downs, a series of physical traumas, each time fading further and further from the person who was my "real" mother. I'd like to say that my first foolish prayer for her release taught me the wisdom or leaving such decisions to God. It didn't. I wished it for her, for me, for my father on more than one occasion. God in his/her infinite wisdom, paid no attention to me.

Did I really want my mother dead? No. I wanted the woman in pain to stop suffering. I wanted me to stop suffering. I wanted my REAL mother back and the lost, fragile imposter who didn't recognize me or who said cruel - even by my real mother's standards - things to me to go away.

I also wanted my mother to live. I was glad that I had more time with her, even if the mother who came back from that first break down was kind of a "mother light" version of the real thing. Each time she would have a set back she would come back like a paler clone of the original. I though of the recovered versions of her as my "shadow mothers." In some ways they were a lot nicer than the real thing, at least in the middle phase of her illnesses. At the end, she was pretty much all mean all the time - at least to me.

At around the same time my mother was truly dying, a relatively new friend of mine, someone I had met at a workshop, was dying of cancer. Both of Ronnie's parents had died with cancer. She had gone through it with them. She decided not to fight. She had done some chemo. She was bald and bloated. She looked awful. She looked like death. She gave up treatment and kept on smoking. It was scary to part of me to be around her. Many of her friends disappeared. Many were angry with her for giving up. I had to fight the impulse myself to tell her - who was living with the pain and the fear - "why don't you just try this... why don't you..." She was my age and she was dying and it was messy and grim. Ronnie, who died three days before my mother did, helped me to process my loss and I like to think I was able to help her. Right before the end, she started worrying that she was failing others, that she was "doing it wrong." I told her that it was her death and she couldn't do it wrong. It didn't belong to the rest of us, no matter what we thought or wanted.

We aren't very good at or comfortable with aging and death in this country (USA). It's untidy. We as a society don't even have enough compassion to make certain that everyone gets medical coverage, so it shouldn't surprise us that we don't have very good emotional support systems in place either. Too many of us treat illness like it's a crime people commit. We assign the job of dealing with it, of tending to the mess, to some unmarried daughter and we pretend it's a romantic duty and not - as it so often is - ugly and painful and physically, emotionally and financially as deadly to the caregiver as to the patient. We expect these poor caregivers smile through their pain and not complain. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We all ought to walk a mile or two in their shoes.

My father was the primary care-taker for my mother until she went into a nursing home for the last year of her life and he visited her there all day every day until he died 3 months before she did. I was his support. I spent almost every weekend with my parents for the last 15 years of their lives. Even that was profoundly draining. Unless we have done it, I don't think anyone understands how consuming care-giving is, how difficult it is to watch your mother or husband or wife waste away, stop recognizing you. When people lived in a world of extended families, this kind of care-giving was a shared responsibility... shared by the family and by communities. That was a much better system in my view. I hope our society will start to find our way back to a world of more practical compassion than the failed system we are operating under right now.

As usual, I have digressed from my main point. Even though part of me reacts with a touch of judgment to Linda's friend announcing that her husband is out of luck if he gets cancer, I admire her courage in saying it out loud, because she was just sharing very human feelings.

I'm hoping to die peacefully in my sleep. I have no kids who might be tempted to spend their precious lives tending to me if I veer any further into dementia than my natural every day state of craziness. If I did, I would hope that the needy, neurotic part of me who can't ever get enough love no matter what, would be over-ridden by the part of me that loves enough not to want anyone I care about to make that kind of sacrifice. Oh, I hope they'd visit me at the home from time to time, but mostly I'd hope they would live well and happy. Truth is, I'd probably want it both ways and they - if they existed - would probably have days they wished me young again and days they wished me dead. And that would be ok.

The Alphabet Backwards: Zoos

I'll probably live to regret this, but I've decided to make Mondays Alphabet Days and pick one letter each week (starting from the back) and write on a random "letter-related" topic. (Couldn't think of anything to write about this morning.)

Anyway, I was going to write about xenophobia until I realized it was spelled with an "x" and not a "z," so I had to switch to Zoos, a subject on which I have mixed feelings these days.

My nieces and some of my closest friends are all very active in the animal rights community, so this is a touchy subject for me. They pretty much don't approve of zoos - and with good and noble reason. They are probably right. Still, it's hard for me to hate zoos. My childhood memories are extremely limited and most of them are not that happy... except for visits to the Bronx Zoo and the neighboring Bronx Botanical Gardens. These were bright spots in a pretty gloomy early life. These are the happy memories. I wish I could say that I was one of those sensitive children who was devastated by the sight of animals in cages. (In my defense, it's possible that I was more sensitive than I know - I spent much of my early life totally disconnected from any emotion other than happiness... real or delusionally manufactured. That I have a vivid picture in my mind's eye of a beautiful tiger pacing back and forth in a very small cage, may mean that I was not so insensitive as I think, just that I had no psychological vocabulary at the time for what I was feeling.)

Certainly those who offer themselves up as the conscience of our society are right: most zoos in the US and around the world leave a lot to be desired. Mercifully, in the past 60 years, there has been increasing recognition that animals are sentient beings who require more than just a few feet to pace around in and a bowl of food every day. Most "good" zoos keep their animals in habitats which attempt to simulate life in the wild.

Still, there are areas in which even the best zoos fail massively. While she was living in Seattle, my niece Diana was actively involved in efforts to free a troubled young elephant named Bamboo and send her to a magnificent new home called The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. (Gotta love their logo which says: "So they packed up their trunks and moved to Tennessee.") While the Seattle's Woodland Park zoo claimed it was working to preserve the species, it's elephants were dying at an alarming rate and seemed to be suffering. There was more than a little evidence that business interests had as much to do with keeping them as love of the species, though I do think that good people, with good intentions can sometimes still be very wrong about how to achieve their goals.

Certainly as a society, we need to look at our zoos and how they reflect on us as humans relating to our fellow creatures. It's hard for me to write them off because they carry the rare energy of something my family did together that didn't involve angst. I do believe that some zoos are doing valid work in conserving species that are at risk in the wilderness. It may be, though, that the day when zoological parks are good ways to entertain and educate has passed. TV and movies can now offer much more detailed and exquisite exposure to other species than was available when I was a toddler.... and no creature has to be imprisoned for adults and children to be aware of and learn about other species of our world.

So that's my half awake thoughts on Zoos and the first installment of the Alphabet Backwards. Next Monday, I can tackle xenophobia.... or xylophones or .... oops... xenophobia is in two weeks... next week I'll have to tackle the letter "y" - maybe youth or yogurt or yesterday or.... the possiblities are endless.

By the way, the zebra photo above comes from the National Geographic Society. I've linked it back to it's source or you can click here.

Healing Hands

I decided this morning to resist the sound of my own voice and just share some reiki. If you click on the hands, they will take you to a larger version on one of my websites. Hopefully they will speak for themselves.



Namaste. Have a lovely Sunday.

Saturday Wordzzle Challenge: Week Two

Last Saturday, I introduced the idea of a word game that I call "wordzzles" and offered up a challenge for others to play along. Just as a reminder about how it works, you are given between 8 and 10 words/phrases and asked to create a small but coherent paragraph using every one of them. I know that one or two people are planning to take up the challenge and I'm looking forward to seeing what the words inspired in others. Meanwhile, here's my paragraph.

The challenge words were: Ostrich, conga line, lucite, garish, pumpkin seeds, persimmon, autograph, naked truth, false teeth and merry-go-round

Hannah Hinckley sat back in her chair gingerly nibbling on pumpkin seeds with her shiny new false teeth, trying not to smear her freshly applied persimmon red lipstick. It was almost beyond belief she thought, that the line of customers waiting outside the bookstore were there to get her autograph. What a bizarre merry-go-round life is, she thought. Looking at the big photo of the slim young girl she had been - a sad-eyed, over-painted waif bedecked in ostrich feathers and those hideous, garish lucite earrings, she could hardly believe that her dissolute youth had led her here. Life certainly could be surprising and that Hannah Hinkley, an illiterate miner's daughter had made the journey from stripper, to chorus girl, to bit player in the conga line of a B movie, to starlet, to famous actress should have been enough miracles for one life. But it seemed the gods had an extra tender spot in their hearts for her, and now, still surprisingly beautiful at 75, she was also the author of a best seller entitled Naked Truth. If you had never heard of Hannah, you might think from the book's title, that it was one of those racy, ghost-written gossip books and that those eager readers were lined up for the usual Hollywood dirt. The opposite was true, however. It was the subtitle - A Story of Luck and Blessings - that told the real story, because despite her slightly sleazy beginnings, Hannah's real story was about the power of quiet faith, kindness and wisdom and the crowds came out of a desire to connect with that profound inner beauty and to take inspiration from a magnificently generous soul. And they were never disappointed by the experience. The naked truth of Hannah Hinkley's deep goodness was a blessing nobody who encountered it - even just for the few short minutes at a book signing - ever forgot.

I didn't realize until I posted it here, that technically, by the rules of the game, I could have left the last half of the story off because I got the words into the first half and it made sense. Since it's my game, I'll cheat if I want to and I welcome everyone else to do the same within reason... or not... The idea is to inspire creativity and have fun. It's ok to modify words slightly - make them plural or past tense.

I have a fairly large collection of old exercises that I did some years back. Most of these were done on the spot. I think I do better under pressure. I thought I'd share an old one every week for the fun of it and so people can have an extra challenge if they want to come up with their own paragraph using these words as well as or instead of the words for the week. It's so fascinating to me that 10 unrelated random words can produce tiny stories like this one from the words: velvet, runway, television, guitar, oblong, chessboard, clay, pillow, woman with cat in her arms, rainstorm, xylophone

Sam sat working with the clay, shaping it slowly, skillfully into a beautiful woman with a cat in her arms seated cross-legged on a pillow. He had originally intended for her to be holding a guitar, but something in the oblong shape of it did not suit his artist’s eye. Actually, it had nothing to do with artist eye. Just that as he began to work the clay it had suddenly become Mary that long ago day, sitting on her favorite blue velvet cushion, some small creature, as always, in her arms, the rainstorm, blowing, beating down on the tin roof like a madman playing a xylophone. The chessboard sat between them and on the television, which in Mary's house ran constantly, the plane on the runway burst over and over into flames as if to sear the image into his brain, to make sure he never forgot how his brother died coming to surprise him for his 30th birthday. He only learned of Phil’s death hours later, but his heart had known, somehow, and sealed it into that moment of normalcy and Mary's beauty and rain on the roof.

For future weeks, I invite readers and participants to email or post some suggested words and phrases. This should hopefully make it more fair, spice things up a bit and deepen the variety and depth of the weekly challenge as well as taking the burden off my shoulders. I make every effort to be totally random in my choice of words and to just choose whatever pops into my head. (You can thank Tara Grace for "yowling cat". She is having one of her "talkative" evenings. Sigh.) Anyway, the words for next week's challenge are:

Yowling cat, ink stain, fever, river bed, home improvement, laughable, motorcade, broken camera, crafty and bourbon.

Just for the record, here are some basic Wordzzle Guidelines/Hints:

1) If there is a word or phrase which seem like the most difficult to use, try to get it out of the way first.

2) Sometimes especially outrageous words can be turned into the name of a character, e.g. given the words Bambi and bonanza on one occasion, I created a character named Bambi Bonanza, thus eliminating two really hard to use words in one easy stroke. Try to keep the names plausible, though. Nothing like teddy bear toothbrush. That's just cheating.

3) If you come across a word whose meaning you don't know or can't quite remember, there are a number of solutions. One very simple one is to have a character tell you that they don't know what it means. Make it part of the title of a book. Put it on a flag or poster. If you think you can get away with it, use it to name the cat or dog, a company or a castle.

4) Let your imagination play. It is not necessary to write the Great American Paragraph, to be profound, to make perfect logical sense or to write with total scientific or historic accuracy. The idea is to have a good time and to stimulate your creativity.

5) Don't work too hard. I seldom spend more than 20-30 minutes on these exercises. But it's up to you. If you want to spend time crafting a masterpiece why not? As long as you enjoy the process. If you aren't enjoying it then it is probably doing your creative juices more harm than good and you might want to find another way to entertain yourself.

That's about all the hints I can offer. This is an art, not a science, a game, not a chore.

The main idea is to have fun!

MARCH 2nd ADDENDUM:

I noticed over at Diane's blog that there were requests for fewer words. I'm open to offering a mini challenge in addition to the standard 10-word size, though I think if you try the 10 word challenge, you'll discover it's more fun than only 4 or 5. For those of you who are more visual, I'm open to the idea of you creating a visual drawn/or photo story. I have no idea how that would work, but if anyone wants to try it, go for it.

Here are the words/phrases for a mini challenge: outer limits, Lucifer, automobile engine, monk's habit, peanut butter & jelly

Thanks for playing...