Tag Archives: journal

Journal – someone I remember

Posted on by 12 comments

 

I am empty

I have been empty for weeks now.
Is it because I have stopped writing?
Or have I stopped writing because I am empty?

I exist
I
Do
So why do I feel
I must prove it to you?

Because there’s nothing in me
I will tell you about someone I knew
From a distance.

She wasn’t particularly pretty
But you never realized it
Because she had charisma.
A smile you were proud to earn
Bright intelligent eyes
She would decorate the office
Her own, or the common areas
Leaving little pieces of her personality
For you to encounter and delight in.
She could cook food like no one else
And she was good at her job, too.
She fixed your problems without trouble.
She was a bit of gossip
I don’t think she even had a very tender heart
So what was it about her
That fascinated us?
I’ve been trying for years to understand charisma
The it factor
Something to do with being who you are
Something to do with purity
Something to do with confidence.
There are things which defy definition.
There are people who, when described,
Sound unremarkable.
Yet if you meet them
You count yourself lucky for having had the experience.
And if they asked you
You would follow them
Without knowing why.

This woman, she retired.
She doesn’t keep in touch
She doesn’t attend functions anymore
She has faded out of casual conversation.
We were never really friends.
But every Halloween and every Christmas
Some of her decorations make it back into circulation
Sometimes one of the long-time staff mentions her fondly
She was popular
Though she is out of my life in almost every sphere
She lingers in my memory
A bright fingerprint on my brain
Unique to her own face and voice and charm.
I didn’t need her, I don’t miss her.
She has made an impact nonetheless.
That is charisma.
Rather,
That is how
I fail to define it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Journal – Keeping Friends

Posted on by 10 comments

 

 

You always had friends, she says
Dismissively
But it makes me sad.

People love her.
Why doesn’t she have friends?
It’s not, as she attributes it, extroversion
Introverts make friends all the time.

I think it has more to do with forgiveness.
She can’t forgive a slight
imagined or otherwise.
When you imagine the best of people
You’re usually right.
When you imagine the worst of people
You’re usually right.

I can’t change her outlook.
I can’t teach her to forgive.
But if she can learn to forgive herself
She might learn to forgive others.
If she can learn to forgive others
She might be able to keep a friend.

Making friends is easy.
Keeping friends is hard.
I’ve won countless friends.
I have lost more friends than I’ve ever kept.
Some of them
For whatever reason
Stick.
Maybe they’re capable of forgiving my countless unconscious cruelties
My rough treatment
My tactlessness
Maybe they consider what I can give
to be worth what I take.
Maybe they’re able to accept my forgiveness
for the things they think they’ve done.

My friendships have been tried.
So many times
I don’t know what happened
but I lose them anyway.
I follow them until I realize
They’re not looking back at me.
This too, I must forgive.
And myself
For how I must have hurt them
Though I don’t know what it was.

Maybe no one did anything wrong.
Maybe it’s just nature
People come and go
Friendships rise and fall
with the changing tides.
Maybe I need more flexibility.

This is why I consider a friendship that sticks
Incredibly valuable.
Whatever alchemy
Has bonded us together
I refuse to let fall by the wayside.
Fight, drama, damage, conflict in values

I never considered myself loyal.
Loyalty always implied to me
That I would take their side no matter what.
That’s not what I do.
I consider rights and wrongs
According to my own ethics.
I try to make peace
Between them and their enemies
it’s the forgiveness thing again.
But I do love them no matter what.
Maybe that’s what loyalty really is.

Look at how good I make myself sound.
Somewhere in here is a lie
Somewhere in here is denial
That’s what it is to be human
We tell stories
We tell lies
even to ourselves.
I am not seeing something.
Maybe by love I am enacting hate,
My loyalty is fickleness,
My ethics are cold,
And my forgiveness is judgment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going on a Vacation!

Posted on by 12 comments

 

I’m going on a trip to the Grand Canyon! I leave early tomorrow, so just a few hours from now. I’m excited to see the beauty of a real desert. Checking it off the bucket list! 

I’ll be gone all next week and maybe the one after that. Please don’t expect me to an amazing, or consistent, or even existent blogger. I will return, with a scalp full of sand and a mind full of ventifact geometry.

Maybe this is a good time to post this one. Not even sure if it counts as a poem, just food for thought.

 

 

Running out of time

How much is left

To do what we want

To do what others want

What kind of a bucket list should we have?

 

Here is a bucket list written by a six-year-old.

 

– sit in hot tub

– visit grandma and grandpa

– catch frogs

– see a movie with mom

 

This is how simple life can be.

She has no agenda

No outside influence

On what a bucket list should say.

Her world is small and rich.

No popular tourist destinations

No huge purchases

No revenge 

No regrets.

All she wants

Is to spend her time doing what she enjoys

With people she loves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There may be such a thing as too much perspective

Posted on by 4 comments

 

Life has been on earth for five billion years.

We’ve seen five mass extinctions. We’re currently undergoing the sixth,.

There have been many geological and biological factors for the extinctions. The famous meteor impact. Volcanic activity. Thriving plants altering the chemistry of the atmosphere. Imbalanced ocean water. 

Have you ever looked up a video of the tectonic plates shifting? Landasses are just the dried pudding skin on top of a swirling hot ball of magma. Watch them float and mash into each other.  https://youtu.be/IlnwyAbczog 

I looked at Google maps today and zoomed out until I could see the earth as a globe. The land masses still look like liquid. They’re clearly made of a slow-flowing substance. Look at the tip of Africa. It’s crumpled.

How small we are. We run and scream and fret about the mess we’ve made of things. What absurd hubris. We aren’t the first and we won’t be the last. And unless something integral about us changes, we certainly will not survive as a species beyond another few hundred thousand years.

Only one thing is for sure: the algae always wins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Journal – the hard way

Posted on by 12 comments

 

Sometimes I enjoy doing things the hard way
The long, difficult way
By hand
Without electricity
Without advanced tools.
It connects me to the past
To ancient humans
Struggling to make ends meet
To those who worked hard perfecting a craft.
I tried to saw dovetails with hand tools
When I made my desk.
It was hard work.
It took days.
I was sore, my carpal tunnel flared
And when I finally tried to hammer the pieces together
It didn’t fit.
But I learned
how much work
Every piece of furniture should be.
I can appreciate
The ease of modern living
Machine made items shipped to your home.
I can appreciate too
What we’ve lost.
You forge a connection
With things you built
With food you grew, harvested, and processed.
Even doing something as simple as washing your car by hand
You learn more about the state that car is in
Notice its scratches and weak points
Restore the sparkles in its paint.

I processed five gallons of grapes by hand.
When I sat in my kitchen
Peeling grapes
I mimicked the motions of my ancestors.
Women have peeled grapes
Into bowls in their laps
For thousands of years.
They spent hours upon hours
Processing the bounty of summer
To stave off winter’s bite.
They told stories while working
Sang songs
And some just worked
Alone, in quiet thought.
Every grape I handled
Taught me more about this food.
I learned to tell a wormy one by feel
Its rough scar tissue
Sent a shudder through my marrow.
I learned what every color tastes like.
I learned to love the Concord smell
Rich and strong and sweet and tangy.
If I’d used tools
I wouldn’t have had to stand at the sink for so long.
I wouldn’t have had the quiet thinking time
I wouldn’t have been able to practice my working posture
Relaxed enough to fight fatigue, yet always moving.
I noticed I was taking much longer than necessary
Due to my need to get every grape, save every grape, not waste
Anything
And I knew someone watching me would have felt frustrated
Just as I felt
When I watched my mother process peaches for the freezer
Always graceful, always painfully slow, yet inevitable.
After two days of work
The peaches would be all blanched, peeled, sliced, sugared, and frozen.
I felt her echo in my slow fingers
Of her, and a million women before her
All of us preparing the harvest
So we might have something sweet
For winter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

« Older Entries