Moon Moments
As the moon gets its light from another–
another surer source,
a brighter blazing light,
so must I give over my smudged soul to Spirit’s light:
Shine forth!
Shine where I would have only cast shadow.
Lilly Green--Everything Changes in the Light
Showing posts with label clouds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clouds. Show all posts
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Friday, May 4, 2012
To Your Loving Life
Another morning is here to lay at Your feet–
all the pain and thought traffic of this world.
From weak hands to Your strong loving life,
I unburden myself, unfasten my load.
In my gnawing weakness,
You are strong in me.
In my inability and short-sightedness,
You work creatively to make
all things right.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Monday, April 16, 2012
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Sunrise in My Bathtub
Standing in my bathtub
in my nightie,
camera in hand,
snapping pictures
as a blazing sun burns off the memory of yesterday’s storm.
Not superior planning by our builder,
this picture window for a bath–
but for capturing sunrise souls,
superior!
It’s an eastern vista, a bird’s-eye view
except for the other pesky houses in my way.
I wonder if my neighbors think I’m a peeping Tom-ette
as I stand in my bathtub,
in my nightie,
camera in hand?
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Tips for the Writing Impaired
1. The number one tip is to not plagiarize. Even if it is a dark and stormy night or the best of times and the worst of times, never use another’s idea and present it as your own work. Just because you purchased it off the Internet does not mean it is truly yours!
2. Put air in your text, either by using short indented paragraphs or by putting an extra space between paragraphs that are placed flush margin left. Preferably, that air is unpolluted, cloudy, and even stormy.
If you write in one continuous, dense, sentence-thick block of text, your reader’s eyes glaze over and the weight of the words forces the reader to either skim or give up on your brilliant, innovative writing.
See, now doesn’t all that air make you feel better?
3. Only write with narrow margins, big font, and with really short chapters if you feel like the only readership you can snag are the contemporary semi-literates with short attention spans and a thirst for gladiatorial combat. Blunder Games may make you an easy million, but your readers will not be prepared for something more mind-bending, like Oliver Twist or even Cat in the Hat.
4. If u r riting 4 a formal audience (lol), drop the colloquialisms and text speak. (If you didn’t notice anything wrong with that sentence, you are in deeper trouble than you thought!)
5. In formal writing, avoid slang, nonstandard English, contractions, ostentatious language, and regionalism. “Pitchin’ a fit” may mean something to a homemaker in the South, but your broader audience will be as lost as a coon in a quarry.
6. Clichés are overworked words and phrases, that were once as right as rain and as comfortable as a worn pair of slippers, but now they are simply redundant. If you can’t think of a fresh way to say something, then, yo, get a life!
7. Sexist language is supposed to be something to avoid, but it can get awkward for the reader if she / he / it has to wade through all those slashes to get his / her / its grasp on the content. Better to reword and avoid some of the unnecessary pronouns and possessives.
8. Revise, revise, revise. Edit, edit, edit. And never trust your computer’s Spell-check function. Form it’s beginning, it has knot bin able to distinguish be tween good end proper con tent. So stretch a brain cell and do the work yourself!
Whew, I needed more air!
(For more tips, see this previous blog: “Lilly’s Top Ten Writing Tips.” And I would link this if I could, but I am link deficient.)
Friday, March 30, 2012
Alone . . .
Today I passed you on the road. Our eyes didn’t meet through the tint, but I caught the outline of your face as you whisked by. What thoughts were you thinking in your shiny new car? Are you a real person like me, blood and bone, or only an actor in a Truman-type world—a prop for the life I think I’m living? Did you go home to your cozy suburban two-story where laundry and dirty dishes await? Just like me? I wonder if you care about me. This “other” that shares your space, approximates your life, almost touching but not.
My house is on a street with about twenty-five others. Every one has a sycamore out front and a dog in the back. My house is in a neighborhood with about two hundred others, in a city of many more, street upon street, warp and woof. We are many but alone. We are community but not communal, living in isolated bubbles, protected from anything real and vital. We share common roads but no common history.
We shop at the same markets and buy the same goods. Our flesh glides by each other granting slight neighborly smiles, but distance is maintained by inches. A force keeps us apart, repelled like same ends of a magnet. How can we be so many, so close, yet so alone?
Once in awhile real contact is made—a brief moment of connection, a fire flicker. But more often than not the circle closes in, the fire extinguishes, and we go our own ways. But what is the value of our own ways if we live our days in Solomon moments, meaningless steps on a treadmill, caring less and less about those around us and more and more about our protected space.
A neighbor almost died last year. I didn’t know. She had alienated us over the years with unkind words and tall fences. When I heard, we had a talk. I took her some homemade bread. Another neighbor tried to commit suicide. I didn’t know. I heard through the rumor mill months after the fact. She still doesn’t know that I know.
We use city water that’s pumped into our homes—a shared resource. But we seem to suck up our own private wells of comfort in times of suffering. I wonder if it’s enough?
In my house, we have a thriving ant community. They mysteriously appear from nowhere to plague me with their sheer numbers. I spray and kill, yet their presence never seems diminished. What’s strange about these ants is that they carry off their dead. What do they do with fragments of bodies?
Sometimes I think they must be cannibals, and in taking home fallen brothers slathered in lemon fresh cleaner, they guarantee a feast for the folks who have kept the home fires burning. Other times, I wonder if with their strong sense of colony and community they take their dead home to honor brave fallen foragers complete with little markers, tears, and eulogies. Do they feel the loss of one as the loss of all?
In faraway places, there are tribal communities whose lives are interconnected because of their dependence on one another for life itself. Their survival depends on community. They live and move together and share a common story passed down to wee ones. I wonder if our wealth and technological advances are such an improvement to their quality of life. We might have fuller bellies but emptier hearts.
It’s not that they are the noble savages and we should wear loincloths and adopt all their ways. They have other deep dark needs, but their lifestyle imposed upon them by geography and physical poverty has put them in a position of needing one another. Even with our bank accounts and cars and houses, we need one another, too. Just as badly. But in our affluence, we have lost that critical sense of need. There are just too many fences.
Today I passed you in the aisle. Our eyes didn’t meet. You glanced beyond and through me, intent on something else. Are you a real Christian like me, or merely a prop in this body-life I think I’m experiencing? I wonder if you care about me—this “other” that shares your pew, shares your worship, shares a ritualistic hug, almost touching but not. Are you afraid of knowing who I really am? Or are you afraid of being known?
We are called brothers and sisters, family. But it feels like there’s been a divorce. We walk as aliens—not only as aliens in this world, but also as aliens in Christ’s church. We are community without communion. We worship in isolated bubbles, protected from real and vital fellowship. We share a common history but no common roads. We are many but we walk alone. As it is in the neighborhood, so it is in the church. We are alone in a crowd.
People need people. There is a sickness in isolation that infects the mind, the body, and the spirit. There is a weakness, a degeneration, in self-centered individualism. If we have no vital connection to the church, how can we grow in strength of faith and character? How can we embrace the joy that comes with a sense of belonging? If we have no genuine connection to our community how can we love our neighbor as we love ourselves? How can we earn the right to offer them life in Christ except in desperate kamikaze runs that put “spiritual” notches on our belts?
If we continue, out of fear, to build more fences instead of tearing down old ones, if we do not risk rejection by expanding the borders of our lives, we will continue to walk in longing and loss. Alone.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
The Effects of the Fall
'11
(Now if you believe in Adam and Eve and the fallen nature of man, you got that title and thought it was ever so clever . . . or not. If you don’t believe, pretend it’s a seasonal piece.)
I thought perhaps I’d humored out on broken rib posts, but given that the pain meds were giving me too many side effects, and given that I hurt more than ever, I figured I better milk it a bit longer before the little white shooting lights come back.
The following are painful observations:
- If there is a 50-50 chance of hitting the trash can with your rubbish, you will always miss, simply because it hurts too much to lean over and pick it up.
- If there is a 100 % chance of hitting it, the same rule applies. See above.
- If you are gimpily trying to put some food together for a raw, organic, nutrient dense lunch (That last part was propaganda.), you will undoubtedly drop most items on the floor because a broken rib somehow makes brains and hands impotent. If the item is edible, call the dog. If the item is inedible and unimportant in say anything short of contributing to world peace, kick it under the stove.
- If in the tiniest of print under “Contraindications,” you notice that 1-2% of test subjects experience swelling, Bubonic plague, cramps, bleeding, headaches, Tourette outbursts (but only in euphemisms), and those little shooting lights, be advised to return it to your pharmacy. A broken rib uses the new math where 2% = always.
- Breaking a rib is like the Butterfly Effect and will set off all manner of weird occurrences from leaking pipes in the wall to neighbor’s car alarms repeatedly going off to rising gas prices to earthquakes. (Somebody tell Mexico and Chile I’m sorry!)
- My friend recommended fresh parsley tea to help with one of the side effects that will remain nameless; and I must say, it is right up there with lemongrass. I envision a whole grass section at Starbucks in the not too distant past.
- Since I can’t take the heavy-duty brain, liver, and bladder destroying narcotics anymore, I’m trying a homeopathic remedy, which seems to be helping some. Problem: You must take it a half hour after having eaten or drunk, and not eat or drink for another half hour. Take 12 to 24 to 480 times a day. Now you do the math. I’m hobbling for the hormone-free ice cream because if I want that miniscule relief in my pain quotient, I need to do it now!
I couldn’t go to weather, so . . .
3-'12
I couldn’t go to weather,
so weather kindly came to me.
(Sounds almost Emily Dickinson-ish, don’t you think?)
Even with a broken rib,
I hobbled front and back and bedroom bath
to catch the wind and sun kissed clouds,
scudding across the sky, dodging raindrops.
There was only a 40% chance of rain,
and it was 40%-ing all over the place,
right above my head!
Endorphins heightened with every digital capture,
me in my wet socks and scruffy robe
(wonder what the neighbors thought),
me in my bed hair and hunched pain–but
better than pills,
and better than sulks is weather,
and it kindly stopped for me.
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