The Clock Ticks, The Peacock Warns, The Butterfly Soars
Blog
Words to Ponder
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty – Christopher Morley
Stop Thief
She wasn’t always so fluid.
She thinks.
This is a thought,
Not a sentence.
By desperate she means in danger of leaking out of herself.
People do all the time, she thinks, remembering all the puddles.
This goes beyond incontinence, she thinks.
This is a thought,
Not a sentence.
The sentence would go like this: I hate dreaming I am somewhere and waking up somewhere else.
(If it was a sentence, and if the dreaming place rippled and the waking place caged.))
Write it out. Write it out.
This is an encouragement.
Writing seems monumental until she considered the weight of a thought.
She often had such enormous thoughts they fell on her chest like stones
Writing seems dull until she understood the sharp edge of an undisclosed thought.
Once she cut off her own leg with one.
For years she limped looking rather than writing.
Of course as it is with all lost things, they tend to turn up in the places no one looks.
This is reality.
Who wants to go there? She asks. This valid question holds the key to the cage.
No one answers.
Why? She asks, folding the key into a cork screw.
No one hears it.
Write it out. Write it out.
Bring others into your undiscovered world.
They have it too. It is not up to them. It is up to you.
Delete.
Correction:
Up to me.
It’s enormous.
It’s dark.
It circles around her.
It takes time, she thinks, picturing a clock propelled by a million swiped legs.
Oh there, she shouts with a ball point pen.
I recognize that one. It’s mine, she writes, feeling the loss of her limp.
Refusing Despair
Refusing Despair
Refusing Despair, we surrendered to Hope.
We remembered and marked the disasters along the way.
Returning to the forgotten, we nearly drowned for fear of the depths.
But Faith carried us forward.
We opened our eyes.
We unstopped our ears.
Truth showed us what we ignored, what we innocently witnessed.
We learned life had always been more than we could handle.
We embraced the friendship of clarity.
Using the mirror of our memories, we found relics of desire and unearthed them with prayer.
In the spring of remembering, we found the children we suffered to be.
Discovering them cold, hungry and alone, we embraced them.
We soothed them with listening, we cradled them with compassion.
We told them what we forgot and they never heard:
“We are the same as you. We’ve been wrong too. You were never meant to be alone.”
Chattering like birds, we receive our morning bread,
play out dreams in the afternoon and in the evenings,
drink God’s peace in the sheltering moon.
This is a short short video about my novel: The Frankincense Tree
When a Fireball Lands in the Middle of Your Dreams
This is what happens when the fireball in the sky lands in your dream and you have to listen to its flames and have to make sense of the blazing language that climbs up on your tongue and starts it wagging. A light gets turned on. All those dark nights turn into summer and you begin to see why the shadows confused you. The fireball doesn’t have to be enormous, it just have to be hot. Given the nature of fire you know that it is. You know it can burn you but it won’t. This kind of fire only burns things that aren’t needed. Things like shame or fear or regret. Things like “I wish I had not…, I should have… I missed out on….” Once the fireball lands you’ll be like those crazy people in Acts who knew about love. You’ll stop being cold, you’ll think about winter and how it won’t ever freeze you. You’ll realize how ridiculous it is to bundle up your desire. You’ll begin to yearn and stop caring about what is missing and why you can’t have it. You’ll start telling the truth and feel the fire warm you on the inside where snow used to camp. You’ll act a little crazy when the fireball lands but it will be the kind of crazy that makes sanity jealous. People will circle around just to stay warm and you won’t run out of blankets. I think the fireball was never meant to hide in the sky. I think it was meant to hide in you and me. It was meant to cause an uproar. To wake us up. To keep us hopping. To make us lie still. To undo us, to put us back together. All of this. All of that. The whole thing is ours. Its fire and its God and it is crazy and its good and now we can fan the flames and let it burn. Good morning.
