Today’s Writing Prompt from Auto Writing Prompt is to write a two sentence story with a mood change.
I have been walking through this fog, in this wood, since before there was a before. Today I saw a shimmering silver light above the trees.
Gratitude List:
1. Deer on the hillside
2. Sharp-shinned hawk in a tree
3. Snowflakes
4. Baby wombats (google “baby wombat images”)
5. Mary Oliver’s “Starlings in Winter” (you can google that, too)
May we walk in Beauty!
Yesterday’s writing prompt from a friend of a friend: “Write a seven sentence story featuring a grape leaf, a kayak, and the color chartreuse.”
So I tried my hand at a sort of flash fiction thingie in the interstices of the day. I think mine turned out more like a fragment or the conclusion of a larger piece than an actual story, but here goes. Seven sentences, and all the necessary words included.
Eleanor the Illustrious, Queen of Chickenroost, opened her eyes just as the golden kayak of the sun slipped free of its horizon moorings and sailed into view above the hills east of the farm. Shadows shifted in the corners of the coop, and Eleanor ruffled the last sooty vestiges of night from her speckled feathers, keeping one bright eye on the strange Visitor who snored shallowly, curled in a pile of straw across the room from her nesting box.
On the rooftop, the sudden clarion of Janticle’s matins rang forth upon the hills and fields, juddering the Visitor to a wakeful and wary crouch, patchy grey fur a-quiver and bare pink tail snaking over the dusty floor.
“Mistress,” spoke the tiny royal hen into the ringing silence that followed the Rooster-king’s bugling, “you will be safe as long as you stay in these lands. We have heard tales, whispered from the rafters by wandering spiders and trilled through the gardens by sparrows and finches returning from sojourns in southern lands, of the Brave and Valiant deeds of Chartreuse D’Rat, and of the Vanquishing of Moses the Viper only last week in the Battle of the Vineyard.”
Chartreuse the Mighty calmed visibly as Her Ladyship spoke, and–bowing low and murmuring her thanks–held out the bundle she had carried close and warmed with her own body heat for the last days of her long journey.
“Here,” she said, unwrapping a small brown egg from a grape leaf and placing it gently beneath the soft feathers of the amazed Queen, “is the Child of the Prophecy.”
Gratitude:
1. Coyotes in the bosque. I didn’t see them. Jon did. (Now my heart is a little fluttery with sadness because this afternoon, someone knocked on our door and asked if he could hunt foxes and coyotes on our property. We said, “No, we like them here.”)
2. The sound of the white-throat as we shoveled the drive this morning.
3. Family. Weaver family reunion this afternoon. It’s great to re-connect and hear everyone’s stories.
4. Those clouds that looked like mountains in the distance.
5. When people’s dreams come true.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
So much depends upon. . .
1. Crows and crows and crows
2. in a white winter field
3. beside a red barn.
4. And a snowy break from routine
5. and a nap.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. A purposeful work life. Even when it feels overwhelming, the hard work is all to the greater purpose of developing confident and thoughtful communicators. And even that has its own greater purpose, which is to help nurture this group of soon-to-be-adults into a deeper knowledge of how they will belong to the world, how they will make their lives their own. This is a privilege that fills my heart.
2. Grandparents who help to take care of the children while I get some of the extra work done. A safe and caring and fun place to be, to make memories.
3. The hello part of the hello-and-goodbye cycle
4. Rain and mist
5. I don’t know quite how to word it, or how to express why I am grateful for it, but there’s something about grief that grabs my gratitude at the moment. I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, and it triggered some deep grieving for me. Like the main character in that book, my own (now many years past) grief over pregnancy losses is bound up somehow with the grief over lost species and the panic I feel about environmental loss. During the brief months of my first pregnancy, we celebrated the tender and fragile hope that perhaps the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was not actually extinct, but making a life in the swamps of Arkansas. My hopes for the survival of the Ivory-Bill and the monarch butterfly and the several species of African rhinoceros crumble less precipitously than did my dreams of that first pregnancy. Still, the grief settles in a similar place within me. Like my friend Natasha, who spent a large part of a year of intentional grieving (The Year of Black Clothing) for all the environmental and human costs of our modern way of living, I want to give the grieving space inside me, let it do the work that it has appeared to do. Whatever that may be.
May we walk in Beauty!
My holiday season is Twelvenight, the time that stretches from Christmas to Epiphany, a quiet and contemplative time, time out of time, intended for the gleaning of images and words that might help me focus the unfolding of my story in the coming year. I extend the season a little, beginning at Solstice. Through the long nights and the waiting for light to begin to return, I watch and listen for images and words that compel me in some particular way.
Two years ago, I found myself suddenly obsessing over the word palimpsest, a strange and new word that carried the sense of layers and shadings of meaning, of old stories suddenly appearing in the middle of new stories to inform the current living.
Last year, bridge was my word–an image that appeared repeatedly to me in conversations and dreams, and a concept that became incredibly powerful to me in the meaning-making of my own life when I found myself suddenly making a major life transition, from farm and child care back to teaching.
My grab bag of images and ideas this year is full and cluttered. Fred the cat has been in one of his agitated cycles during the past couple of weeks, frequently waking us up in the middle of the night, which leaves my head whirling with fog-skuthers of dream-images, compelling pictures that slip into my thinking space throughout the day. I woke up one morning thinking about a student at our school, wondering if she would be in my class next semester, with an almost wild sense of protectiveness for her. Vulture, lynx, and leopard have appeared in my dreams. Plantain and pigweed. Storytellers, fools, and shamans (somehow associated with the image of those magical folk from the east who decided to follow the sign of a star). There was even a nightmare about watching a plane crash that woke me up with a pounding heart and tight breathing. The dreams have been full and fantastical.
Out of it all, I have settled on two words that have floated to the surface of the pond of my unconscious: secrets and impeccability. I don’t really like the word secrets (I have seen unhealthy secrets destroy relationships too often), and I keep trying to change it to mysteries, but something in me thinks that the distinction may be important to explore during the coming season, particularly in the context of the word impeccability. Perhaps it’s a step in gaining wisdom and maturity, that ability to keep one’s own council and trusting to the strength of one’s own character. I know I have much to learn on both fronts.
In last night’s dream
we were racing down the road
in a jaunty little car.
(Aren’t all dream-cars sort of jaunty?)
“Holy —-!”
I’m afraid I screamed
what you think I did
as we skimmed the edge
of the giant sinkhole.
“Did you see that sinkhole?
It almost swallowed us up!”
My oblivious car-mates
(Me, Me, and Me,
according to Joseph Campbell)
were not paying attention,
and Oblivious Driver Me
sped up to crest a hill
which was covered with debris.
We didn’t make it over the pile of junk
and had to back up,
had to go another way.
“Oh, well,” said Driver Me to Disapproving Me,
“at least we tried.”
In my head as I woke up,
a familiar voice was singing,
“What will you risk?”
Each year, during the long nights between Winter Solstice and Epiphany, I carefully watch the dreams and pictures that appear to me, gleaning ideas and images that might be helpful to me in the coming year. This year I am impatient. I have been cataloging my list for the past two weeks and I want to solidify it and crystallize it. But it’s also delightful to anticipate what these last few nights might show, so I will wait, and perhaps nudge some of my list into a poem:
While I wait for the dreams to be complete
while I sit at the feet of winter
listening
waiting for the little bell to ring
for the sound of rushing wings
for the things born in darkness
to take form
to rise up–
while a vulture flies across my window
red root and plantain nourish and heal me
a lynx crouches by a granite outcrop in the meadow
the storyteller raises her voice in a chant of longing
and a silent girl turns the corner ahead of me
I sit down to work
and sleep overtakes me:
One more vision for the road
One more message for the journey
Blessings on your new year. Here is a little something:
So much there is
that cannot be told,
so much to unfold,
so many new meanings to try.
So much there is
that waits in the wings,
so many things
cannot find their sky,
that minuscule patch
of impossible blue
beyond the shadows
of this darkened room.
So many stories
have yet to be told,
so many adventures
of boldness to tell,
to live, to explore.
Open the windows,
pick up the pen,
and then tell me more,
tell me more,
tell me more!
It’s less than two hours away from 2015. Perhaps I should be staying up with the other adventurous types and ringing in the New Year. Instead, I am about to head to bed. I’ll see what dreams this New Year’s Eve, this central night of Twelve Night will bring me. Sweet Dreams to you. Don’t be afraid to dream big dreams, to dream outrageous dreams, to dream in a thousand colors. Make it happen this year.
Love to all!
Gratitude List:
1. Eagles, herons, vultures, Brant and Canada geese, flickers, red-bellies, robins, titmice
2. Oak, beech, holly, sweet gum, laurel, bay grass
3. Old and new, past and future, present
4. Teachers, activists, priestesses, dreamers, workers, makers, wonderers and wanderers
5. Family, old friends, new friends, acquaintances
May we walk in Beauty! Beauty all around.
