What's in this room?

 Such an uplifting, energizing prompt offered up in the midst of a raw write by one of our lovely soul flowers... the line just appeared as she wrote and she ran with it! And it was soooo full of love. Simple, yet full of feeling, memories, prompts. 

Start here, now, right where you are. Even that clutter you stink eye is worthy of love and has much love to offer. You'll see. Perchance that Junk Mail? 

That old thrift store chair with the off yellow velour seat? The copy cat Bentley rocker? The cast aside Ikea chair, another bound for the chair graveyard in the backyard with all the other rejects that failed your body or cuz your body failed them? If that chair could talk, it would give me an earful about now

The exercise bands, the dozens of post it notes, the writing on the wall, the echoes of wild women, the calling Om and the flying blue fish dangling from the sky   and all the invisible things.... and... 💛

Living in the Poem

 Last week in Wednesday Writers we were workshopping some stellar pages that got us talking about well, what if this moment right now was an unfolding poem? In fact, what if life is always an unfolding poem that you can choose to live inside of anywhere, anytime? Like start seeing dolphins kind of thing. 

And not just the big and small poetry moments that much poetry is made of like sunsets and sunrises and hellos and goodbyes and war and lost love and weddings and apple trees and seeds and seasons and babies being born and all the "big" scenic life things (not complaining) that beg to be drawn out and snapshot for the page, for eternity, saying look at me, see me, see this, witness this miracle (as they should!), but what if we stop right now and also see the unfolding poem in the mundane (fraught, bored, impatient, uncouth, etc) or even the un moment? Not just see, but immerse in, be a part of, be the poem itself unfolding? 

This shopping trip to Trader Joes a few days before Thanksgiving, for example. All the chaos and commotion and passive aggression and blaring car horns in the impossibly small parking lot and people being their best and worst and conscientious selves and getting in your way and/or saying "go ahead" to avoid a head-on cart collision. And waiting in line forever and all this commotion swirling around one dude, the center of gravity, standing quietly zen like, bored to death still behind a pop-up display of pecan pie samples in those cute little white cups. And he's not getting much action (why not? saving up pie calories for Thanksgiving? What would others think? Well, I'm about to have dinner so...), but a few zealous takers who grab the cup and run (Oooh... yay! Pie! Pecan pie! My favorite! Sooo grateful for this! I better not...) with a chortle of gratitude (aren't we having fun? Oooh, I'm so bad, but let's not tell anyone: I won't if you won't ha ha ha ha ha) in attempts to (maybe?) justify their (shameful!) giving in to temptation and/or indulging a compulsion to people please in the perfunctory societal scripts in which we're all complicit... (ahem, what happened to that unfolding poem, Missy?) met with a blank stare by the dude at the display who could care less, I just want my however much it is per hour so I can go home, a TJ's teamship anomaly, if you ask me for isn't this The Love Boat, after all? Ahoy Matey! It's the Good Ship, Trader Joes! and why so glum dude? And it almost breaks your heart when some older guy, say 75 approaches the young glum bored display dude and says practically out of a movie, the old ones that still make me all kinds of nostalgic and incredulous (wait: life was like THAT?), he says "don't mind if I do!" and sweeps in with an elegance that is verging on extinct, which isn't what makes you sad so much as the dead air around him/them, that it goes unheard, that no one but me saw that and heard that, no one there to see this unfolding poem, accept his hand and waltz across the TJ's dance floor (isn't this... couldn't this also be a prom or a ball or..?), no one there to see and say back and match his old school joy for the simple things and my heartache turns to apathy and 

this was certainly not what I intended to write, but I guess I got so inside the unfolding poem that I found something swelling, which is to say I guess it worked (for me!). That was fun!

And anyway: all of this is just to say what if everything right now, even this now, was a poem and you were a line in the poem and the poet or the person living inside the poem channeling it for all the rest to see? 

Try it?   :)

How could I forget about you? (Writers of the Lost Ark)

 Holy Wow. How wonderful to receive the sunshine of this blog after so many years away. So many years away I actually forgot it was here.  

And yet, here it is, waiting, unchanged. 

What else have I forgotten that is still here, loyal and waiting? All the little gifts, written and otherwise, I've left for my future and now self as a reminder that my heart still recognizes the light. That these are the welcoming arms. 

I didn't go looking for this blog; I highlighted a dead link while editing an old template buried in the cavernous tunnels of infinitely spliced randemonium...certainly I wasn't searching for the lost ark.  And yet isn't that how it is when we write? How openings and portals and answers and old friends and love appear out of nowhere and once opened, how they shine up, even the darkness?

But if you try sometimes...

I cannot tell you how many times I have written about my first concert—The Rolling Stones—since the long ago day in 1980 when I was ten. And I cannot  tell you what joy it brings me every time I write about it, despite it not being a very pleasant evening. I could write about that night a million different ways with a million different details and it would still make me smile. 

I don't know why it happens every time, but it does. I mean really... what's fun about the 1980s anyway? What's fun about feathered hair, the LA Coliseum, the nosebleed seats, the drunk, raunchy Dead Head who squeezed my ass on the way to get Nachos, the roach my boyfriend's mom passed us in the limo, the puke in the gas station outhouse on the way there? What's fun about waiting for your preppy boyfriend to kiss you all night, the loneliness of coming home to an empty house and having to kick in the door, shirtless Mick Jagger in lemon yellow tights worming around the stage, and the foreboding echo of You Can't Always Get What You Want careening through your innocent, almost adolescent mind?

But somehow when we write and share—for better or worse—it feels good. It's fun! It's a deep cleansing, honoring, and remembering. It takes you back. Or forward. You get to hear yourself again... or for the first time, only with a gentle voice of experience looking back on innocence, on that one evening or moment in time and being able to say to your little(r) self, "hey, I'm back. I'm here. I've been here all along."

And if you do this long enough—this writing and sharing—you just might find...all these years later... you get what you need.

Oh yeah.

What made you smile today even if you had to force it?

My son being goofy in piano lessons
My Tuesday women's group writing about childhood and then some
A text from a grown man with cartoon doggies and hearts
A text from P in Austin
Ma's totally mixed up/faux pax voicemail wishing me a Happy Passover and to have fun at the cousins tonight (er... we weren't invited...)
Playing Lucy in the Sky... on the piano
Stretching my poor aching calves
Sitting in the sun
All the written words
Snow troffs coming down in clumps off the brick building across the street 4 floors high
Not wanting  to stop... knowing it will be always waiting for me

When in Rome... or your backyard... or...

Happy Spring Writers and those who love them... I recently received a request from a dear student for some travel prompts. Little did I know her request would turn into a prompt! Hence what we all know to be true: everything is a prompt! Happy travels!

There are so many prompts that I can only imagine will show up every moment of your travels; if you stay open to prompts, you will see them everywhere. Notice what energizes you/charges you--for better or worse and all in between--and there you have a loaded prompt. Is it pinwheels? Elevators? Hotel rooms? Hotel lounges or pools? Is is the lone person? The happy couple on their honeymoon? Is it a know-it-all-therapist? Is it jealousy or joy? Cocktail hour? Feeling left out? Feeling acceptance? The jacuzzi? The memories of being here before? The sensory array of blooming things? THe not blooming things? Can a face bloom or not bloom?  Notice what's happening inside and write from there and you cannot go wrong.

Sit. Check in. Look around. Check in. Write. Oh, and what about "checking in"? That there is a great prompt. Especially in therapy-land. Many stories there.

Ditto walking. 

Ditto sitting in a conference hall.

Ditto the carpeting in the hotel conference hall. Oh, the memories and infinite possibilities that live in hotel carpeting.

Which has so many shades and patterns and colors, and really, can take you to drapes, which have many stories you've forgotten you've forgotten, and of course, windows and views outside of windows and.... do you prefer your shades up or down? Is your favorite color blue or red or both? And what are your memories of that color and associations with it? And what if you just write for an hour about lemon yellow? Or lemons? Or table cloth white? Or table cloths? You've got to just trust that when you give it space and time, something magic will show up and have lots to say. Will move through you and thank you dearly.  For that matter, you could write about gratitude. Or grumpiness. Yours. Hers. Theirs. The righteousness you feel when it's some unenlightened else's. 

What you hear at the pool. Or smell. What does chlorine do to you?

And of course the food. What you love. Fear. Won't eat. Can't eat. How you judge what others eat. How you hold back. How you count calories or splurge or compile recipes or tell yourself "well, I'm on vacation..." and what about all that? Or maybe you have a daquiri which you haven't had since you were 21? Or whipped cream? Or try eel sushi? Or skip a meal and write about your hunger. Hunger moves words in a myriad of acrobatic and architectural ways.

And of course... it goes without saying... what you're learning and how it moves you because most of all I think it's good and energizing to attune to what moves you, what works that incredibly receptive life giving muscle to tears, laughter, to happiness, to release, to insight, to friendship, to new beginnings, and possibly new endings... 

and before I say 'write about beginnings or endings' or meetings of all kinds or reunions, I'd better quit now before this gets completely out of hand, but for now, I'll just say "thank YOU for the prompt."

Have a ball! (oh gosh... and who doesn't have ball stories? My first ball was a soccer ball...)

Bon Voyage!

Rox 

I just got a new push broom and I am thrilled!

What are you thrilled and excited about today?

Wish I had more time to write about this. Or more time to sweep. Darn. Never enough time to push the broom across the floor. Or sweep the hand across the page. But I've wanted one of those brooms forever. Lucky me.