Being here

I am fairly sure that even after all these years, I do not take living here for granted. On every clear day I still stop and stare at the Alps
as though I’d just arrived yesterday.

But sometimes I’m reminded that maybe, maybe I do. Just a bit. Maybe I have stopped seeing this city I am privileged to call home. I recently posted a picture to my on-line writing group and got virtual gasps in reply. It’s not every day you see statues like this.


Except, for me, it is every day. These Bernese statues on these Bernese streets. I must walk past them four days out of seven. And I know they’re stunning – I continue to take pictures of them, after all – but I forget, I guess, how otherly they are, how utterly special. Sometimes, it takes another person’s intake of breath to remind me to sigh. It takes another person’s eyes going wide to remind me to close my own in gratitude. That happened to me last week, so I’m going to take some time to look closely at the streets of my city. Because my home, it makes people stop and stare. I should be one of those people.

Budding

New writers are often called “emerging writers.” I like the term; it makes me think of a butterfly breaking out of its chrysalis. But that image is too dramatic, the transformation too complete, to apply to what’s happening to my writing, to my writing self. I like to think of myself as a budding poet. I have had four poems accepted this year (two of them were published here, the other four are coming out later in the year). It’s not enough to call myself a professional poet, it’s not enough to turn into a book. It is not the sudden transformation of pupa to butterfly overnight. It is more like a budding, the slow greening of spring when suddenly you wake up and there are blossoms everywhere and you’re not quite sure when it happened. It is like that. Slow. Gradual. Subtle. But irrevocable. Once spring starts, you can’t close the door on it. That’s what this feels like. There is no closing the door on this writing life, this budding writing life.

Love

Waiting for spring

Inspired by Jo(e).

This first day

Postcard poetry

I’ve got a postcard haiku up at the cool site Postal Poetry. You can see my poem here.

Rest days

I’m back from two days away from the family feeling fresh and energized. I filled the well. I took long walks, just me and my camera. I ate soup and sipped coffees. I revised a prose piece. I did hours of market research on-line (doesn’t this journal look gorgeous?) and I have my December writing goals lined up. I’ve got a success in my back pocket now and I know where I want to go next.

I can do this. It will take time, because there is life, after all, but I can do this. I can see the way, I can plan my next step.

When I was a cyclist, my coach always talked about the importance of rest days. Every Sunday night we would have a team meeting at his place and plan the next week’s workouts, and there was always a hard day – spinning drills on Flat Bottom Road or sprinting up Firehouse Hill – and there was always a rest day and every Sunday night he told us not to skip the rest day. It’s not a day off, he’d tell us, it’s a rest day. It’s meant to be active rest. Make it an easy 20 miles, maybe just out to the Causeway and back, don’t climb any hills but you’ve got to get your legs moving on the rest day. The recovery days are as important as the hard ones. They make the hard ones possible.

Sometimes I think the most important things I ever learned about life, I learned on a bike. 

So I rested. Active rest. I took my pictures and did my research and used my muscles in a casual, familiar sort of way. To let them recover. So that I can keep climbing.

Wordless

Sometimes I get tired of words and want only to stroll the streets with my camera searching for the door to another world. I see things differently with the weight of the camera tapping me on the shoulder. (Was it Margaret Bourke-White who said that the camera is an instrument that teaches people to see without one?) Sometimes I get tired of my story. It seems I am always telling the same story. (Was it Maurice Sendak who said that all writers have one essential story and we tell it again and again?) Sometimes I want an image without an explanation, an illustration without a caption. I crave a door, an angle, a color.

Running on empty

This is all I got for you today.

Sunday

It’s been a long week. I don’t even know what to say at this point other than it’s been a long week but I made it through the weekend, which was the melt-down point the last time R was out of the country for two weeks, without anybody losing it.

I’ve even managed to find some of the shiny.