I see it time and time again, but it’s with my peers too. And some, especially lately on social media, seem to expend an awful lot of energy on comparing themselves to others, and then acting atrociously as a result. But I don’t think they realize that it stems from comparison, because it takes form in reverse. It’s a passive aggressive sort of thing. I see it in some poetry. I see it in some commenting. What exactly am I talking about? I’m talking about people who don’t even realize they are comparing themselves to others, because they mask it as a sort of diatribe of superiority against contemporary writers and poets. They “bash” others in their quest to feel better about themselves, which begs the question: Why? Why expend so much energy on creating a negative environment that says: I’m better than you. I’m a better wordsmith. You don’t do this like I do therefore, you’re mediocre, and so on. Isn’t that a form of comparison? I don’t think it has a damn thing to do with them truly thinking they are superior. No. I think it’s actually the opposite. It’s a comparison, maybe even subconscious, that is actually making them feel inadequate, it’s their only refuge. Whether it be to ask: Why is THAT book or THAT poetry doing better than mine? Why is that post or that poem getting so many likes? It is a COMPARISON. It is a comparison of what YOU are doing against what OTHERS are doing or what is happening for them and not you. And bashing others or their work is really just a loud coping mechanism. Guess what? I’m on to you. Maybe you disagree with me, and I’d love to hear it! But my motto in my life right now is: DO YOU. I’ll do me. And if we meet in the middle to shake hands, wonderful. If we don’t? Go pound sand and keep digging your own grave. Working WITH people not AGAINST people is the only way to grow. Lifting people while staying grounded is what a community of writers or learners is. Without roots, nothing lasts. Without roots, everything gets easily plucked away in the wind and dies. So I say: Stop insulting other people. because you aren’t where you think you should be. Compare yourself to where you were yesterday and drink in the sun and water to grow. And if there isn’t any sun or water where you are, find another place. Then water those around you too. And watch just what happens to a rose and the whole rose bush when you do. Look back, yes, but only to compare yourself to the you YOU were before it bloomed and now. And smile with joy.
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October has arrived with insistence, and yet summer fights to hang on. Sound familiar? Letting go? Or trying to? Relationships, friendships, like nature itself—the trees, the flowers, the plants-- all have their seasons. Some come back. Others fall away into something else. And some become memories.
When traveling recently, I looked down from the plane onto cities and vast expanses of land, and I wondered just what makes us think so much. What makes us worry so much. Are we really anything more than anything else? Do we have a soul? Are we mere energy? You know, the standard crap that makes us human and keeps us up at night, thinking and worrying and contemplating. Sometimes, I wonder why we can’t just live, instead of hurting each other, insulting each other. Our insecurities are larger than anything below the sky, and we’re so infinitesimally small, aren’t we? I also realized that some people are small in other ways too. Their insecurity is so high, they must belittle others who are just trying to live their best life. If this is all we have, this one life, wouldn’t it behoove us to treat each other better? But it’s hard if we feel poorly about ourselves. When I see someone trying to stomp on others—their creativity, their voice—I realize: They are projecting. They are projecting their self-worth onto others. So when someone tries to trample your spirit, it’s because they haven’t found their own. They are the leaf that falls before it had time to discover the meaning of their own lives. They wrinkle too soon…for “whenever men are right they are not young.” Let me be young and wrong, then, and give me a world of Octobers of letting go of all that weighs me down to an early death. It’s not that we won’t die. It’s that we have to decide to live first. And blossom. Our own way. In bright, beautiful colors. Step outside of the square. Do your own dance. Twirl like a leaf in October wind. And smile, knowing, you’ve discovered, you can leave the trees that try to fixate you to a spot you don’t want to be. Be red. Or orange. Or yellow. But never be what someone else has said you must be when a world of Octobers exist. LAST NIGHT...was the first time in months I didn’t sleep with the AC on. The rain was performing in the night air and demanded to be noticed. With the overhead fan on and the sound of the rain and wind, I opened my window and fell into a deep sleep. When I awoke, the rain had stopped its show, and I lay there, very early—another thing I hadn’t done in months—and just reflected. Reflected on the day ahead. The week ahead. The semester ahead. My plans of travel and the long weekend. And a certain breeze not only passed through my window but through my body. It felt like breath.
I’m not a morning person. I like the nights. I like staying up late when the cars stop roaring and the stars come out. I like to sit with a good TV series and then climb up to bed to meet my latest book characters and forget who I am for a little while, let the responsibilities of life fade into the background of “that can wait,” before I take my ride with Morpheus, where dreams are unencumbered by expectation, and where I have no control of what happens there. It feels like freedom, even if only for that one second before I slip and enter the world I won’t likely remember but know anything is possible. I’d forgotten how wonderful the morning is. How quiet it is then too, before the bustle starts and the stress kicks in and the noise takes over. It’s a perfect time to write. To meditate. And spend time in the moment. And in this moment, I saw the trees, still wet from the night’s spectacle, but the leaves blowing gently against each other in harmony, a couple of big oaks seemingly in love. Within the leaves I stared, and like that old Magic Eye book or when I stare for long periods of time at the clouds, I saw a kiss in those leaves, a face I wanted to capture—a side profile of eyes, a nose, hair blowing back, and lips, lips kissing the leaves next to it. I thought to myself, I’m just seeing things, and yet, still, I wanted to get my phone and snap a picture to prove it to you, to see if you saw it too, to show you how real it was, the trees in an embrace, kissing one another. But I stopped myself. This was my moment, what I felt and saw and knew was real. And I realized, it didn’t matter who believed me or who might have seen it too or who thought I was foolish. It was my waking dream, whether fabricated or not: Those leaves loved each other. And I realized: Isn’t that all any of us want? To be kissed? In the morning when no one else knows, when the only thing that matters is that we know we were kissed, that we know: We are loved. And that’s what being alive feels like, the gift of morning. And I'm happy for it. It's funny. My dad always loved that song from Fiddler on the Roof, maybe one of the earliest memories I have of musicals, a love of mine. And though I often hear people talk about the sunset and all its beauty, I rarely hear people talk about the sunrise. So today, I want to talk about the sunrise, something I haven't witnessed in a very long time. When I was younger and camping with my family, my dad loved to wake us up wherever we were to see the sunrise. He'd poke my brother and me, and we'd begrudgingly crawl out from under the warmth of our sleeping bags, remove the pillows from our faces that blocked the very sun we were about to revere, and either walk, or scramble into the car, to go see the sunrise at some ungodly hour before 6 am. As I grew into a teenager, I often "passed," my dad going it alone, decreeing: You only live once. After he passed, I often warmed at the thought of all those years ago, the thermos held tightly in my tiny hands full of the coffee he'd make I couldn't drink but loved to smell like I loved to smell his Old Spice. And this morning, I felt myself right back there. I set my alarm, something I loathe to do, made some coffee, poured it into a thermos, and went and sat on the beach to watch the sun rise. I could marvel and describe to you the colors and how the horizon met ocean and sky, that moment of grace where I know I'm important and not at the same time, a moment where I toasted my freedom on the 4th of July, and the inexplicable awe of nature. But instead, it was the smell of that coffee mixed in the with sea that I noticed more than anything, and I swore I saw my dad's smile in the clouds, a smile so infectious, anyone who met him talked about it. Before I knew it, the tears soaked my face, but they weren't sad tears. They were profound tears. I was sitting on that beach because I could, because my parents gave me a life that set me up to where I am now, a life where both my parents, but especially my dad, had made great sacrifices.
When I sat there, I knew I wouldn't be seeing a rainbow I often associate with my dad, given the weather, and yet, I kept looking anyway, because in that moment, I knew, though I am agnostic, there are greater things at work I'll never understand, like why my dad was taken from me so young. And even if scientifically there couldn't possibly be a rainbow, the possibility of it still existed. We don't have answers to everything. We never will. But my dad was right: You only live once. And so, I do, living freely, able to have the luxury to set an alarm if I choose to go see the sun rise with my dad. I’m looking at a nest precariously sitting in a tall tree, and the birds look like floating leaves in the clear, blue spaces between the branches. And hear them, even with my windows shut. Spring is coming! And it demands to be noticed. It feels…different. It’s as if your whole body reacts to the change, and something shifts. That heavy winter, the one that made you drag your feet every morning in the dark cold, where coffee wasn’t hot enough, now shifts to hope, like those floating leaves, and something says, deep inside you—Clean up. Get it together. Shake that baggage. Simplify. Become lighter! It makes me want to strap on my Converse and walk and notice and breathe. That’s what spring is. BREATH. It’s the conscious inhaling and exhaling of breath. And that does more for our psyche than any drug or substance. It is a physical and mental warmth. It’s a meditation, if you let it be. You put your head to the sun and let it warm you, and FEEL it, not superficially. You feel less harried. Less stressed. You don’t want to rush the way you do in winter. There is no longer a need to rush from house to car to car to building to car again to get anywhere but the cold, running to get out of the pelts of snow or wind. Instead, you feel your neck removing itself from your ears. You let your arms hang in a natural rhythm by your side. You’re no longer freezing. It’s quite fascinating when you stop and really think about it. That tension of pulling coats close and tucking scarves into necks so they don’t move as you walk is gone. You don’t even mind standing in one place. You feel each muscle unfurling, the tension and aches--gone. You can…think. That blue is brighter than any color you’ve ever seen. So what will you do to stop and breathe? What baggage will you leave behind? Sit for a bit. Watch the birds-- for they are "the secrets of living”—and hear them, even if it’s the first time.
I love Halloween. Do you? What has made you love or hate it? I seem to hear a lot of mixed feelings about this “holiday.” And it makes me reflect on what is it that makes me adore it so much. I’m not sure when my love for it began. Perhaps it was when, early on, it was an excuse to bob for apples and have parties with my school-age friends, eating and drinking whatever we wanted for once. Perhaps it was being raised Catholic, and the spectacle of Halloween was somehow a bit of accepted sin and mystery, wrapped in fiction and stories and movies and tall tales spun by bonfire and candlelight, one where being safely scared was highly guarded. Perhaps it was because it hearkens back to the night I lost my virginity on a porch in our neighborhood, both thrilling and taboo, where he quoted: “If the stars refuse to shine. I would still be loving you. When mountains crumble to the sea. There would still...be you and me.” Perhaps it was because my brother always had the best ideas for costumes and executed them with such aplomb for the both of us my whole life, even in college, that it sealed the everlasting awe I still have of him to this day. But perhaps, it is truly because it happens to fall in the month of change, where we watch each leaf take its leap into the unknown of this thing called death, and we see ourselves in each one of them. One by one, they each fall, some gracefully, accepting the inevitable respectfully, maybe even hopefully; and others, fighting to hang on long after their time is up, not going “gentle into that good night,” forcing us to ask ourselves if they’re fighting on purpose or if they simply don’t know what’s in store for them until they sit on the earth to be taken away with the wind to who knows where, they, our mirror image. And it makes us ponder why some people fight and grow and rise above strife in the same exact circumstances while others crumble and lash out and give up, our fates all the same in the end. Halloween is that one time a year, it’s about us. No obligatory presents or killing of perfectly vibrant trees or endless wrapping of paper to waste and clog and destroy our environment after. No obligatory family gatherings or meals or meaningless football games. No obligatory drives far out of the city to sit and gorge on things we hate and conversations we loathe, only to drive home miserable. But instead, perhaps it’s that we get to focus on just ourselves, mostly, selfishly for once, surrounded by like-minded individuals with the sole purpose of levity and kinship, and where we get to put on a mask and be someone we wished we could always be but were too afraid to…and reflect, that maybe, just maybe, this year, spring will be different. It’s that time of year. Halloween is upon us. That mischievous feeling (just how do you pronounce that word anyway?) is in our blood. We remember our childhood antics and everything seems to be in tune with what is about to happen. The wind is cool. The leaves are falling. And the branches brace for the change of time. And so do we. The other night I was driving, and the moon, a rather plump moon, more half than whole (I’m sure someone could tell me its phase), was playing a game of jump rope or hide ‘n’ seek or tag, lighting my way as I sped down the road, first bright on one side, then on the other, and I smiled big as it played its game with me, smiling its big smile back. I have these moments where I want to believe it’s my dad somehow, and it’s impossible not to when I think back to his tale: “Look. The moon is following you,” and for a moment, I remember a simple time, a time of childhood and carefree bliss. No bills. No worries. No fear of acceptance or success. Just simply one goal: To get that moon not to turn its back on me, to keep following me as we bumped along, not understanding how, no matter how far my dad drove, that moon still followed. I would prop my body around as best I could in the back seat the whole drive, craning my neck uncomfortably, to see if the moon was, in fact, still with me, ducking his face occasionally behind a building or a tree, causing my heart to race until Dad would yell: "There it is again." I was amazed by it. Enamored. Mystified. Felt special. And I believed...in magic. Nothing else mattered. Time gets us all to the same place, and the ride best be ridden with bright lights on our sides. A friend keeps telling me to pay attention to events and things that happen around me. That all of it collectively speaks to each one of us. I’m not sure I believe her. I’m a skeptic you know. But it’s hard not to notice when the weight of everything at once all add up, and we feel ourselves drowning; and then something like this happens, impossible to ignore. Perhaps it is simple coincidence. Does it matter? For in that moment, I remembered the feeling of unconditional love in the light of my dad’s memory, and all my troubles faded to jump rope with a moon. You’d think summer would be my favorite season, having months off to write and swim and sleep late and eat the best of garden veggies, and it is, but there is something about fall that brings waves of nostalgia like I can’t describe. Fall makes me feel, as does each season, but fall is in a class all its own. It might be that it always makes me feel like I’m still young. I’m still the teenager Rosemary. School starting. Back-to-school shopping and tights and sweaters and UGGs. Halloween afoot. The colors and smells of pies and apple picking and pumpkins and cool, brisk air that lets you know you’re alive. Maybe it brings me back to days of first loves and leaf fights and innocence and innocence lost. Bonfires and football games and cheerleading and back-to-school dances. Maybe it’s because I teach and those things haven’t changed all that much. I really don’t know why, because it’s this strange feeling I get when fall is on the horizon. It’s such a strange emotion, I can’t even describe it. It’s an anxious excitement. It’s not all good, and yet, I clutch at its strength, its power. It’s like every sense is reawakened somehow and every emotion on the spectrum. Maybe that’s why. Maybe summer is too ‘easy.’ Maybe there isn’t as much meaning in easy. Maybe it reminds that I don’t like standing still. Maybe it reminds me of how easily I get bored. But often, and probably as long as I live, it will remind of my mother and the difficult relationship we had. (CLICK HERE to see a former BLOG about my mother.) It’s not only because of the anniversary of her death, but it’s remembering our “fall” fights. We fought the strongest during those early fall months. We couldn’t agree on clothes or hair or make-up. Dance classes would start up again, and the insecurities blossomed bigger, the pressure ever heavy, even as I needed to dance just as I needed to breathe. We loved each other under the most complicated of terms right up until her death. But it was love. Maybe falls reminds me that some days, I wish I could do a redo. And maybe every fall reminds me that I can’t. I CAN, however, do right now…and I better start figuring out what RIGHT NOW looks like. Maybe I need to let go of what others think I should be, and instead, let all my worries and inhibitions fall, a leaf from a tree that realizes when it's time to let go. Maybe “to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose” is true. And maybe, I need to start living as I was meant. Me. My season. The purpose I divine. Today I ponder what we eat. How many among us are moving towards a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle? Why is that? Why do many of us still eat meat? Is it simply because it tastes good? Is it a way to get the most nutrients and proteins as easily and quickly as possible? Do we HAVE to eat meat because of our diet restrictions as some of my friends tell me? Where do you fall into this spectrum? And why? My thoughts stem from a conversation that started with a “friend” of mine who used the word “fat” to describe someone at an environmentally-conscious-eating-healthy-and-organically event for lack of clearer description. When he used it, the whole table hushed. It was as if the word fat was a swear word, that to use it was offensive, insensitive. I remember as a child my mom saying once when watching a dance recital video back of mine that she couldn’t attend: “Who’s the fat one?” She didn’t care how graceful or perfected her form was…ballet dancers aren’t supposed to look like THAT. I’m not sure our perceptions have changed all that much. This friend (really friend of a friend) said it matter-of-factly, and people, after the hush, started to berate him as being judgmental, that he was being discriminatory against a group of people. He quickly rose to defend himself. He argued that being fat was a sign of unhealth. That it was a choice one makes. That “his taxes” were paying for "their" ailments. As the discussion got more heated (it’s a wonder, really, we all stayed seated at the table), we got onto other topics, topics of poverty and how our country makes it a luxury to be healthy. The impoverished communities having to rely on fast-food and cheap eats, and the rise of inner-city co-ops, which are a great idea, but which aren’t sustaining themselves, sadly. (at least not near me). That organic food is damn expensive. That eating healthy costs bucks. That THAT is the issue… The discussion progressed, morphed, spiraled, and it really made me think. This event I went to was all about gardening co-ops, healthy lifestyles, vegetarian eating and the alkaline charts, and living naturally with and on this Earth...and I heard a child ask: “But Mom, aren’t we killing plants too? Then what will we eat?” I stopped dead in my tracks as I often think about that too. The flowers in my vase, the many living things we kill for our aesthetics. But I thought on it and wondered how the mother might have answered. When we kill an animal to eat, that’s it. We take their life, and still, in some instances, in brutal, slaughterhouse, disgusting fashion. That's not about affordability. That's about greed. And we have evolved enough to know the intelligence and feeling capabilities of our warm-blooded friends. The pig. The cow. They cuddle. They think. They love. They feel. They are “sentient” beings. Plants are not, and science backs this. But further, some of our plant friends can bear us fruit year after year if we tend to them. That peach, for instance, grows back for us every year. The apple orchards, if tended, produce and continue to bear us fruit. And that rose oil can still bring us health benefits from afar as long as they are tended, preened, and fed.
It’s harmonious…and that, if it were my child, would have been my answer. Besides all the health benefits of going towards a more vegetarian life, it’s the ethical ones that have guided me towards my goals. I’m not hear to judge or have a contentious debate…I’m here to live my own life with my own conscience. And I ask you to think about yours consciously…after all, we're all here to grow. Do you believe in Karma? Whenever I get up to my lake house after a school year ends so I can exhale among the stars, my mind often goes to philosophical ideas. It’s hard not to when surrounded by the beauty up there and the quietude. There’s just so much about the universe we don’t understand, CAN’T understand. And why do we have to? There’s so much written about being in the moment, but of course we can’t just BE in the moment, because it’s too fleeting. The next moment has already started before we can be in it and ends before we can take our next breath and so it goes, over and over. But we can be MINDFUL in moments. We can be mindful in what we eat. How we treat ourselves and others. How we speak to ourselves. How we temper judgement. How we pause to think before we speak. I sit on the beach and try to do just that. I look around me, and I see so much beauty, this moment of sun on water that seemed as if I had faked the photograph, the glitter on the water so surreal it looked like a trick of the camera. It’s hard not to pause at moments like that. It’s funny how at that moment I snapped the picture, I was battling with a persistent spider, none too large, I might add, and I know most would squish it…but I didn’t and rarely can. So what? It’s a spider and tiny and who cares, right? But it lives. As do all insects, the mosquito the only one I wage war with. And so, I let it be and marvel at its tenacity and strength as I will a few minutes later with the industrious ants whose homes will soon be destroyed by summer laughter and excitement in dancing feet. I don’t know where or why I’ve grown to treat these infinitesimal creatures as if they’re human. I have a memory of a childhood friend’s mother who taught me about nature, who espoused often: “Spiders are our friends,” and I hear myself echoing that. No one had ever talked to me about those kinds of things before in my household. No one seemed much to care about that. Of course, there will be casualties, but my knee-jerk reaction isn’t to kill them. We need them more than they need us. For we are all connected with pollination and plants and oxygen and the whole lot of it. But I don’t do it out of some great cause or a belief in karma or fear that I might be a spider in my next life. No. And herein lies my question I posed at the beginning. Do you? Do you believe in karma? And does it only apply to humans in your view? I hear so much about karma. That what you do will come back 3x to us, as if that will somehow even the score and give us the motivation to do the “right” thing, to be kind. What a lovely thought to think, that if I just do right, good things are inevitable and even deserved. You can imagine, knowing me, what I think. I think it’s a load of rubbish. I don’t beat down those who believe that. Just as I don’t beat down those who believe in god or gods or whatever they have come to accept as true. But what I don’t like is that it presumes that when BAD things happen to people that it must be deserved. That’s the problem I have with these belief systems. They are so heavily unbalanced that it makes little sense to me. Certainly, the atrocities of the pasts, the Holocaust for example, tells us this simply is not so. And it bothers me. It bothers me a great deal, because people have tried to use those excuses to explain evil, even applying it in that case. And we’re better than that. I don’t care if there’s karma or a god or not. I live a life that feels right in my soul, in my conscience, in the pit of my stomach, my gut, whatever you want to call it. Whether I’m rewarded or not is of little consequence to me. I am not here to say I’m perfect. Please. Who is? But what I do believe is that there is intrinsic good that exists, outside of anything we can possibly understand, just as there is bad, not because of laws, but because it just IS. It has no beginning and it has no end. I feel it. And that’s all I need. I don’t care to understand or have answers to the rest. Instead, I think I’ll just be quiet, and continue to let this moment--head back, mind open, and face to the sun--be enough.
I think of all the years she protected me and to be kneeling now, taking the flowers out of my hair to plant in front of the soil of her grave, I worry the stone’s shade can’t protect them for long. Tears and sweat mix to blur my eyes from fully being able to read the engravement: Loving mother, wife, and Nana. I look up and watch a cloud, like my mood, move to the left to cover the sun, and the weight of my sadness imprints deeper into the earth. But then I think: Maybe she’s just trying to protect her flowers now. I smile. That would be just like her. Call today's post my closure on my mom’s death, something I think I had been avoiding…but have somehow found this weekend in a cloud. Yup. A cloud. All kidding aside. Nature does that to me. It speaks to me in this very strange way. I’m not sure if it’s because I stare a lot at it--a tree, the sky, the earth--but my mind goes “limp” in a way. It relaxes, like being in a hypnotist’s chair and being told to stare at a spot or a dot on a paper. It serves the same purpose, but it’s more organic. It’s us reflected in IT. I somehow have come to believe that. Maybe Emerson’s “Transparent Eyeball” really does exist. I certainly felt that way this weekend, and that poem came out above. I’m sure there’s not one of us here who hasn’t lost someone to that crabby and persistent dude called Death. It’s really just a fact of life. Like light and dark and good and evil and pleasure and pain and any other opposite, so too, we have life and death. But here’s the thing. Are they opposites really? What happened with my cloud was supposed to be a bad thing, but talk about opposite! Do you think death is a bad thing? A sad thing? It hurts, because we’re living still, especially if we loved that person, and they’re not. It’s almost a selfish thing when I think about it. That’s where the pain is. In our void. That we still have to live without them. We also don’t like to talk about death, and yet we must. We must plan for it. For everything else we plan for--retirement, saving money, etc.--death is really the only sure thing. Have you thought about what you’d like your funeral to be? Do you want to be buried? Cremated? I know. Morbid. But why does it have to be? I realized something about my mother’s death this weekend. I hadn’t dealt with it. Not the way I thought I had. In fact, I realized I hadn’t really gone through the proper stages of grief at all. It wasn’t denial. That is not it…it was just so compartmentalized that I didn’t deny it, I just didn’t want to look at it, face it, think about it in any way. If you read my share last week about my mom, you know why.: The topsy-turvy relationship between mother-daughter, between traditionalist and free-spirt, between stoic and emotional, between proper and wild. But I also realized something else. My mother planned everything. Her plot was bought, funeral paid for, her spot on my dad’s stone just waiting to be engraved, also planned. Everything was a blur, as if my body went through all the motions in a dream I watched from a safe distance, but wasn’t really happening, not to me. I hadn’t really had to do anything but show up and cater it…(that’s not entirely true, I realize, I did), and as I stood in front of her grave this past weekend, planting flowers, I finally saw her death and I somehow let go of so much guilt and resentment and fear and what-ifs. I exhaled it. Quite literally. Right out into the air. And now, I finally have the closure and peace of mind I’ve been searching for these last couple years. It's okay. We must learn to forgive ourselves. Life isn't a game of villains and heroes. It's much more real than that. And grey and all its shades, as my cloud taught me, can be a beautiful color too. Today’s post comes from a movie I watched the other night: The Shape of Water. Have you seen it? This won’t be a movie review. It’s impossible to write one without giving everything away, so I discuss the thing I loved about it the most, the eroticism of it. When it comes to sexy, we all have differing ideas. Just look at last week’s post on hair! Short. Long. Dreads. Bald. And everything in between. We all have different tastes and different styles. What about our reading or movie-watching pleasures? What do you find sexy there? Or does that depend on what you’re looking for at the time, your mood? If you’re looking to get aroused, perhaps to aid yourself in rising to “that” place, the big O, a quick, one-handed read? Or is it a long, angsty drawn-out sexual tease? Or perhaps you prefer more subtle, more sensual art and writing? Less erotic and more romance? What about no sex at all? Just straight romance? Really! I want to know. As I write this, I’m smiling because it started to snow, and so I am going to seemingly go in a different direction for a moment, but I’m not, not really. I always look out the window when I write for some reason, as if Nature herself will tell me what I’m thinking or what’s on my mind. You know that idea that to center ourselves we can place our fingers on our collarbone with our right hand on the left side of our collarbone, move it down just a bit and press? That is what Nature does to me. When I look out at her majesty and stop and let myself go and not think, that is when I think. Oh the irony! And when my mind quiets, I can write. What quiets you? Where are your thoughts? It’s the quiet moments of the morning where I write best, especially in the summer, when my mind isn’t going in a million directions. And the way the snow is falling right now, big, huge flakes, so light you know they would melt on your tongue immediately, their white beauty a direct contrast to the naked trees, brown, barely alive. And I realized I find it oddly erotic. Subtly so. The beauty of it is quiet. It doesn’t make a sound and yet it makes such a loud impression. This. This is what I like. And it ties into my thoughts today. I like subtle eroticism, even though sometimes I don’t write that in my own work. Like I asked you above, it does depend on my mood too. But the things that affect me the most, are not the in-my-face and graphic erotic, but, instead, eroticism that is there nonetheless, somehow a work of art, that I somehow find beautiful or sensual or erotic. I guess one would simply call it romanticized eroticism. Hmmmm…I wonder if that term has already been coined? Perhaps I should coin it if not, because yes, I do see the world that way. Things I truly admire or marvel at bring me to that conclusion. The Shape of Water does that too. Its director brings us a tale that is so rich with such beautiful, yet subtle eroticism, we suspend our disbelief about all of it. It strips barriers of stereotypes and what it means to be human and lets us just see living and love and hate and racism and good and bad and light and dark and greed and pride and science and nature and romance and the romantic and everything in between. It is no surprise why it won best picture. It reminded me that I do wonder, often, if we don’t really exist as we think we do. That perhaps we are all just connected parts of nature, four seasons, going through the cyclical inevitability of life. When I look up at the sky and pause and see its infinite expanse and ultimately question true existence and whence and how I came to be, I have no answer. Somehow, that too, is beautiful. And I realize, I don’t mind at all. I do breathe. I do feel. I do love. And that is all I really need to know. For I exist.
Is there anything you’ve always wanted to do but haven’t tried? Too scared? Or is it that you have no talent in it? Is it too risky? People always say silly idioms like: You only live once; or take a chance; or you’ll never know if you don’t try. Someone once wrote: What if I fail? Oh, but darling, what if you fly? 😊 This morning, when I woke, I lamented that I couldn’t take an adequate picture of what I saw. I wished for much longer than the briefest of moments that I could paint my view with brush and stoke in maybe watercolors or acrylic. To write it is almost impossible for me. The snow is falling as if feathers were let go out of a pillow and the pines…Oh the pines! It’s as if an artist took her paintbrush, dipped it in the purest of white, a white that doesn't exist, and meticulously placed its color just so. I swear. It felt like I was dreaming. I’ve always wanted to be an artist. In my mind’s eye, I see things so vividly. Sadly, those that “BE” decided I would have a recessive gene, and the skill of“art” was not bestowed on me. I’ve always been drawn to art in all kinds of forms. I loved the Degas ballerinas at my studio. In fact, I'd sit and get so lost in the detail that I often entered my class late. (Ha! Being late. It's my forte!). The renaissance painters. A beautiful photograph that no painter could depict. Odd, surreal stuff, like Dali. Depictions of Satan or Hell or fallen angels. I remember bringing one to college with me, I admired it so much. My roommate looked at me like she had just been put in hell herself. I didn't care. Art fascinated me. But I, myself, couldn't draw well. Or paint well. And taking the perfect picture happened once-in-a-blue-moon while. A picture of a sunflower I took graces my bathroom, but ends there. And my watercolors still remain two: A flower and oranges. Perhaps that is why I started to write so young. I had this creative energy inside of me that needed its voice. It was loud and strong and really, I can’t remember a time it was silent. I remember the first time I shared a bit of it I wrote. It was some silly contest in 4th grade. It was a simple bit of verse about nature, something assigned and something that just seemed to flow out of me. I remember thinking I’d probably be laughed at and almost didn’t share it. But I’m glad I did. It landed in the school “newspaper” and it validated, even that young, that it was okay that I had a voice of my own. And that it was okay to share it…sometimes. That idea of sharing work with others still doesn’t feel all that comfortable and sometimes, that’s okay. Some audiences are meant to be one. You’d think I’d be a bit more skilled at it by now, but it still makes my belly a bit too uneasy. Sometimes what resonates profoundly with me, the things I'm most proud of, don't seem to be the ones most people like. I do grow each day. Learn new things. And try to wake and put something down every morning, whether it’s poetry, this mumbo jumbo I share with you some mornings, or fiction, where I let my subconscious reign and roam free with little restriction. And so, I try something I’ve always wanted to try this summer, something I’ve long said I would do but haven’t. I have signed up for an introductory art course. One of the instructors where I work convinced me after we argued vehemently about those “step by step” studios that produce “paint by numbers art which is anti-art by its very nature.” (I still don't entirely agree with her!) Part of the course is photography and it’s the first I’ve seen where I don’t need a fancy camera. That is the next class. Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s never too late to try. What, really, do I have to lose? Absolutely nothing. Oh, but what I might gain!
On a hot, summer day this coming July at my family lake cabin, you might find me taking a hit of a joint, back firmly placed against the peeling wood of a floating dock, eyes closed, knees slightly bent, a contented smile hard to hide, the sun caressing my half-naked body as it welcomes the slight sunburn it knows it will garner, having been covered in layers of wool and cotton for too many New England months. Pink is such a pretty color. Perhaps I’ll roll over onto my tummy, hold my chin in the fists of my hands, elbows firmly placed on the wood to get comfortable. My legs might even cross behind me at the ankles to sway, and you might even hear me hum a tune, something like Weezer’s, “And it feels like summer,” as I take long, slow inhales and exhales, watching the smoke disappear up into the clouds like my stress. (‘course, I romanticize. You realize there is no way to get a joint out to a dock without, most likely, ruining it. 😉). Funny I’m thinking about this, isn’t it, with so much snow on the ground and sticking to all the trees this morning? It’s beautiful really. The snow is still even coming down ever-so ethereally, so lightly, and the trees, the huge pine trees, are weighed down by the wet, white wonder. It makes me wish I could paint. But not all the trees look so lucky. Some are bare but for the snow that sticks to them. And even that pretty white color can’t hide its pain. I almost feel bad for them. They look cold. Old. The one I look at right now as I write this has what appears to be a wound. I see the chipped wood of its protective outer layer gone, exposing what could almost be described as a slice in its soul, the bark, red, visible, even as I know summer will do its repair. But not all its broken branches will find their way back to rebirth. Even with all this romantic beauty around me, the picture only artists can do justice to or famous photographers, like Ansel Adams, and even with my fortunate life that allows a safe distance of warmth as I sip my coffee to marvel at it through my window, I’m beginning to feel cold myself. Winter out-welcomes her stay, and so, my mind drifts to that special summer place, where anything has always been possible. It’s where I wrote my first love letter, where, for one summer, innocence got gladly lost under a crescent moon, where, if you’ve read Ruin My Lipstick, I sometimes dared to swim to the deep part of the lake, where teenage girls shared one joint between eight lips and dared to tell our secrets. This summer, a new law will be in effect. I will be able to walk into, I’m assuming, a smoke shop in my cut-off, jean shorts, sun-kissed, messy hair, skin still damp, and buy a joint or a bud, or what will it be? I’ve never actually bought the stuff. It’s hard to fathom. Smoking weed has been such a taboo, secretive act for so long, to think about doing such a thing in the open air, makes me feel like that teenager who is finally able to drive for the first time alone. It’s a bit like masturbation. You’ve kept it hidden for so long, to share it freely, it just seems…well…odd or out of place, not something we brag about or share. That stuff is private. The funny thing is that I don’t smoke marijuana. Of course I have. I don’t mean that. I even inhaled it. ;) But I never really liked it. Not my bag. Anymore than a puff or two and I didn’t feel like myself anymore. Felt a bit out of control. Paranoid. I wonder if it’s because I was so self-conscious back then, worrying about EVERYTHING, if my legs were long enough, if my shifting eye color was too weird, if I was smart enough or good enough to get into the college I dreamed of. I wonder if I just wasn’t confident enough in who I was to alter my psyche, but instead it just highlighted my perceived flaws. I really don’t know. But this summer, I may, on a warm, July day, lie alone, in a newly-purchased bikini, much more comfortable in my own skin than all those years ago, and contemplate all the things I wish I’d done but didn't, and perhaps, too, blow a bit of the past in rings of smoke and see what words it writes across the limitless, night sky in front of me. Or perhaps, still, all these years later, I won’t have the urge to alter my state of being at all under a night sky, and instead, safely smile in the daylight of the blazing sun. Yes, perhaps, that will be quite enough. ~Ruin My Lipstick |
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I LOVE to write and read. I particularly enjoy reading erotic romance that has tons of emotion in it. I hope you will ask me questions and share your favorite authors and novels. I welcome all feedback.
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