23 July 2016
Reading one of my favorite writers this morning, Linda Hogan. If only we all could listen in the miraculous way she does.
“When the body wishes to speak, she will”~Linda Hogan
Make art about what the body has to say.
6/30/2016
“The human brain holds in its cradle its own strangeness”-Eric Waggoner Make art about the brain, the magic of the brain, its beautiful strangeness.
7/1/2016
“I could spend my life trying to distill the feeling of a summer porch”~Jessie van Eerden Make art about that summer porch.
7/2/2016
Make art inspired by this quote: “Who looks after the sensitive child?”~Nikky Finney
7/3/2016
“You have to let the Light in.”~Nikky Finney Make art about ways of letting the Light in.
7/4/2016
I wrote a poem today called “What Goliath Wants Us To Know.” Make art about what someone—real or mythical, living or dead—wishes we knew.
7/5/2016
Alton Sterling ❤
7/6/2016
Philando Castile ❤
7/7/2016
Dallas shootings ❤ Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, and Lorne Ahrens.
7/8/2016
I’m struggling to function in the sorrow of what we’re doing to each other. Keep singing a song I learned as a child, One Tin Soldier.
Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago
‘Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone
And the valley-people swore
They’d have it for their very own
Go ahead and hate your neighbor
Go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
You can justify it in the end
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day
On the bloody morning after
One tin soldier rides away
So the people of the valley
Sent a message up the hill
Asking for the buried treasure
Tons of gold for which they’d kill
It came an answer from the mountain
With our brothers we will share
All the secrets of our mountain
All the riches buried there
Go ahead and hate your neighbor
Go ahead and cheat a friend
Do it in the name of heaven
You can justify it in the end
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day
On the bloody morning after
One tin soldier rides away
Now the valley cried with anger
“Mount your horses! Draw your sword!”
And they killed the mountain-people
So they won their just reward
Now they stood beside the treasure
On the mountain, dark and red
Turned the stone and looked beneath it
“Peace on Earth” was all it said
Make art about what matters.
7/9/2016
Thanks and Love to Eric Waggoner for his seminar at the West Virginia Wesleyan MFA residency on writing ugly topics. Robert Bly said, “Dare to do something ugly.” Do this. Take on something ugly.
7/10/2016
Garmin took us down some strange backroads today, as it does at times 🙂 Today it took us down a two lane road with no lines, through a series of unicorporated communities, one of which was particularly sweet, Batesville Virginia. As we entered this tiny crossroad community, we passed a stone pillar with the word Elysium carved into it. Love letters from the Universe?
According to Eustathius of Thessalonica, the word “Elysium” (Ἠλύσιον) derives from ἀλυουσας (ἀλύω) and means to be deeply stirred from joy, or from ἀλύτως, synonymous of ἀφθάρτως (ἄφθαρτος) incorruptible, referring to the incorruptible joy of a soul in this afterlife.
Make art about your idea of the afterlife.
7/11/2016
Finding peace in doing the daily tasks of being home: folding laundry; washing dishes; sweeping floors. Make art about those moments when the mundane intersects with the divine.
7/12/2016
Lost a feline family member today, Dobi. She ruled our home with the most regal feline disdain for ten years, and my heart is broken at her going. Make art about what our animal family means to us.
7/13/2016
Coffee in the garden. Reminders of the cycles. Make art about what goes on, about what continues.
25 June 2016
Encountered a little slow down on the road yesterday 🙂 Three calves had broken out and were gleefully chasing around, having a high old time 🙂
Make art about unexpected obstacles. 🙂 Or about unexpected freedom 🙂
6/21/2016
I was raised Catholic, and in cultures that are very comfortable with the dead.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May they rest in peace.
Amen.
Make art celebrating the dead. Or write a prayer for the dead.
6/22/2016
Hold on, to me as we go
As we roll down this unfamiliar road
And although this wave is stringing us along
Just know you’re not alone
‘Cause I’m going to make this place your home
Settle down, it’ll all be clear
Don’t pay no mind to the demons
They fill you with fear
The trouble it might drag you down
If you get lost, you can always be found
Just know you’re not alone
‘Cause I’m going to make this place your home
~written by Greg Holden and Drew Pearson, performed by Phillip Phillips
Make art about remembering you’re not alone.
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❤ ❤ ❤
20 June 2016
Here’s a solstice poem I wrote a few years ago, memory of a solstice back when I was a girl of eighteen, enchanted with a beautiful boy 🙂
This poem appears in my book If We Could Know Our Bones, from A-Minor Press ❤
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Remembering the Body as Grace
We all live in a house on fire. Tennessee Williams
1
I dream back the hot slow sky your body was above me, goldleafed and dappled in early sun, in those running heated days of baggy shorts, thin shoulder straps, loosed barefoot in the woods, where the world wore the soft warm pelts we tumbled in, skins multicolored scarfs we slid out of, slid into, each other. We were hungering home.
2
I wore some long breezy skirt, thinking Stevie Nicks would approve; in those days music made our maps, At a party to honor the March stars, I sat in your lap on Alan’s floor, after too much tequila, naming fish, aquarium after aquarium lining old apartment walls. Outside, a vernal moon split the day in two perfect halves, calling the first point of my Aries into startling alignment with your laugh.
3
Thirty-one suns have crossed the celestial equator since then, science and memory rearranging, the Earth’s elliptical orbit, bending, changing, precession, axis tugged in another direction. Spring even now is being reduced by one minute per year, singing as it goes. Naked to the native acre, bone-clear, the body knows what it knows.
4
Age has freed us from any need to hide, that sweet surrender of knowing celestial objects near the celestial equator are visible worldwide.
5
Assuming the body as love, my body remembers—you sleepy-eyed and unshaven, hair long, lit by light breaking into that space, where we tangled like sweet-sweating animals. What we didn’t know then, spring sliding home into summer, we do now, having worn these faces, lived in these skins, long enough to comprehend gravity as grace.
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Make art about a solstice memory, about the body as grace.
15 June 2016
We’ve had a sick kitty cat. Ulli, our twelve-year-old rescue, a tiny delicate graceful gray creature who, because of the trauma she experienced before we got her, even after all these years, still jumps at loud sounds and runs from strangers, who will panic herself into an asthma attack in one minute, then turn and stalk a deer in the next. Ulli is definitely one of those cats who make you feel awed and grateful when she stops for that second to allow you the privilege of petting her, or when she musics the air around you with the low distant train rumble of a contented purr.
My oldest son, a large bearded Viking of a man, is completely devoted to this animal, and as age inevitably creeps into her bones, slowing and thwarting some of the natural processes, he becomes the one anxious, determined to give her the best care and most love he can. We both went to the vet to pick her up from a required hospitalization for twenty-four hours, and he loaded her little bitty crate into the car, saying, “It’s okay, Ulli. You’re all better now. No more tummy trouble. No more doctor. We’re headed back to Mimi’s for a little bit.”
I laughed, at being Mimi to this grand-cat, and in relief that our Ulli is okay, and in gratitude that my own child is so relieved to have his beloved old lady cat back in good health. The blessings of family, y’all. That’s what it is today.
“The smallest feline is a masterpiece.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
Make art about animal family.
Daily Prompt Catch-Up
6/11/2016
Beautiful day with family today.
From “On Family Regathering Seen One Night Through a Window” by George Moor
All flows; the person has no permanence.
The children will grow up, the parents die.
For each precarious present the past tense
Is waiting; all is sort of a lie.
The clean cut fruit in dingy crystal bowls;
The fading chairs; the family sitting down.
For reassurance meet these traveling souls,
Each with an intimate sadness of his own.
Old habits calm. Old stories of old days….
Make art about family.
6/12/2016
Just don’t have words. Heartbroken.
6/13/2016
My son and I found this tiny nest yesterday, tumbled on the grass beneath the Guardian Oak. No babies, wounded or otherwise, in sight, just this miracle of weaving, bits of bark and straw and leaf and string. Inside the tiniest shards of shell left behind, thin and white as paper. I was struck at how delicate—and how strong—it is, kinda like Love.
Make art about the fragility, about the persistent strength, of Love.
6 June 2016
I have a special affection for deer, for many reasons. I sit out on my little stoop and they slip like shadows from the woods, all velvet eyes and dancer feet, and they let me enjoy their company, their beauty, as they browse and graze through the section of the yard I leave wild just for them, what my kids call ‘Deer Diner.’ I planted them a persimmon tree there in that corner a couple of years ago, and I leave them three cups of corn daily 🙂 paying my rent for sharing this little wooded four acres that their kind occupied long before my house was built. I love them more than I can articulate. Their presence brings me into a place of peace like no other animal. I think they understand this 🙂
Make art about deer. Or about what in nature brings you peace.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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