Summer Sun

Once the sun comes out behind the mild thickness of winter’s fog, light is everywhere - and everything - shining rainbow refraction on the windshield, cutting cathedral rays of gold between our ancient Spanish buildings, spilling in pools on our city’s red brick streets, glinting white light upon the shiny slick leaves of the always blooming magnolia trees. Reflecting up from the sky-blue water rushing in a dance of the eighteenth-century fountains found all over our small old city, shining in sweaty rivulets upon the smooth black skin of old men sitting on sagging stairs in the neighborhood of Lincolnville.

The light puts everything inside a glow and a gloaming - reluctant, always, to set, taking its time, malingering from gold to pink to plum, to that deepest blue of dreams.

The Seashell

Summer is ending. In Florida, that will mean October, for all intents and purposes. Nonetheless, I wrote a piece on bringing back the ocean to you wherever you are, by putting a seashell to your ear. Check it out right here on Art of Living. I also read at an open mic poetry event on Saturday. And I'll be reading at a bona fide event in a couple of weeks. I feel more alive than I have in years. Thank you, words.

Flesh to Fur, Feathers to Flight

For My Flesh Had Turned to Fur and My Thoughts They Surely WereTurned to Instinct and Obedience to God... --Blitzen Trapper, "Furr"
These wild swans Yeats writes about in the poem below, to me, are the family of geese...now much more than a gaggle at almost 20, who fly and float upon the man-made pond behind my workplace, in an office park of three-story corporations, near the highway, the hospital, restaurants, and newly minted roads, where we, humans that we are, try and circle in around the wilderness, in awe and envious of the wildness, the instinct, the effortless ease of nature, of creatures who answer to no one but ancient orders held in their bones--indestructible even as hunter's bullets fly, as acres of grass and trees and water turn to cement and manicured versions of forest, as their enemies turn from hungry alligators to the roar of shining cars speeding to Starbucks.

For they have never known, or maybe have always known, the tyranny of the ego, of measured days, of rakes, and iPods, and e-mails...now they know only that air suspends them, wind and water carry them, worms live in the grass, strength comes in numbers, and the pond is cool and giving as they float from one end of the man-made lake to the other--while featherless, pale creatures come and go, buzzing with a longing and fear that engenders just the slightest bit of sympathy in their tiny hearts, if sympathy they could feel, if they even had to write down and put into words that love, ah love, is more important than knowledge, and how could they forget-- how could they forget--something they never had to remember?

The Wild Swans At Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodlands paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool

Delight men's eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away? 

 

"The Wild Swans at Coole" by W.B. Yeats, from Collected Poems. Public domain.

{Image Sources-Girl with Fawns: We Heart It; Mom and Daughter Feeding Geese: We Heart It; Figure with Swans : We Heart It via Ali Scarpulla Flickr; Geese at Target: We Heart It via Swiss Miss; Cloaked Girl With Swans: We Heart It via Inspires Tumblr; Girl Holding Swans: We Heart It via Tybx Tumblr; Wild Goose Chase: We Heart It via Fiona Watson Art Flickr }

My Work Is Loving the World

"My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast;
there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
Keep my mind on what matters,which is my work
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished."
—from "Messenger" in Thirst (2006), Mary Oliver

Image: Sunset Over Paris by KMSF on Flickr, via 315 Thomas

Be A Sublime Fool

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life.

You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.

I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.

May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise.

Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.

And out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury {Via Advice to Writers} {Image via Ffffound }

Elements of Style

"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy." -- Dorothy Parker

It's the birthday of grammarian William Strunk, Jr. He was a professor at Cornell University for 46 years, and during that time, he created the "little book" known as The Elements of Style (1918) in order to make it easier to grade his students' composition papers.

In What Shadow Night

In what shadow night did you fall, there between the cupboard and the stove, to a place no one will ever reach? We all have them, Jennifer said so, shadow selves, secret places, our insides out when the light moves quickly behind a cloud. But yours is long, too long. It’s wide and deep and I’m sick and sore from trying to catch you. Give me a hand, won’t you? Can you give me a sign, a flicker, a scratch, something? Anything? Because I’ll stop. I will. I’ll stop reaching. I’ll have to. No one keeps caring about another forever. Not really. I mean I don’t want you to keep it all to yourself, but come on. We all have limits. We’re all human. Just sick, dirty, old sad humans looking for some shade to stand in for a minute, just a brief second, one of those seconds that’s like God’s time, endless, too much sense, timeless, timeless, timeless. Something that stands still. Something that moves, too, that never stops moving either. Something pure something real something deep something that is everything something we all long for something none of us can ever understand. We scream for that shade that peace that union but all the weddings and babies in the world won’t guarantee it. It’s got to come from something completely interior, completely too powerful to describe, to architect, to articulate, or picture, or express in any way at all. From or to or by no one but God. And us. Just the two of us. {image via weheartit.com}