Poem: I Said a Prayer

I said a prayer

to benefit the dead

then saw the prayer was actually

for myself.

For we are connected –

the dead and the living –

by a strand slimmer than spider silk.

It’s invisible, even –

the tethers that bind us.

Words are inadequate

but still I try to say – to weave –

the spinnings of my mind

and mesh with the webs of others.

Prayers are inadequate

but still I strive to change the world,

one word, one soul, at a time.

Lazy Lip Balms

I was lying in bed a while ago and reached for the lip balm I keep next to my bed. I thought about it for a moment. I have a lip balm tube by my bed, in my purse, next to my computer, and downstairs in the living room. Do I really need all these lip balms? 

I remembered a time when I had one (1) lip balm to my name. Wherever I was, if I needed lip balm, I had to go get that one tube. Now what…am I just lazy? I need a lip balm on every floor and in every room or something? 

Well, I reflected, it is not that bad. When I am in bed, of course I don't want to get out of bed. And it makes sense to carry one in my purse. Since I acquired an extra couple of lip balms at some point, it made sense to have one in my living room and computer room as well, since I spend time in both places. So that's how it happened.

Still, that's a lot of lazy lip balms. The least excusable one is probably the computer room lip balm. Because I need excuses to get off my ass when I'm at that infernal machine. How hard would it be for me to just walk into the bedroom when my lips need moisturizing? Not hard. I should toss these (wait…I have three lip balms next to my computer?) tubes and make myself get up. It's the same principle when it comes to snacks. I should never keep snacks and candy next to my computer. Otherwise I will eat them mindlessly, and not even burn enough calories for the trip to the kitchen (which I'm not taking when the snacks are by my desk).

And speaking of lip balm, I keep it until it smells rancid. Which usually takes one to two years. Haven't you ever put on lip balm and thought, "Yuck! This stuff just turned between now and the last time I used it." Into the trash it goes.

Merging vs. Observing: Concerts!

Perhaps you remember the old days when people in the audience at concerts would hold up a cigarette lighter. I always interpreted that as the fans saying, "Oh great Rock Star, you are like the sun, and this small flame is my way of showing my desire to merge with your great light." (Ok I know they were probably just high and doing the lighter thing because it seemed cool, but I'm a mystic and a poet, so there.)

In more recent years, you go to a rock concert and instead of lighters, you see the virtual "flame" from hundreds of smartphones instead. The meaning-making part of my brain wants to understand this shift in cultural consciousness. And the way I read it is, "Oh wow I'm in the presence of something awesome right now and I need to record it in some way." 

I've done that myself. I've snapped crappy, blurry photos of the performers. I've attempted to bootleg part of the show with Voice Recorder (doesn't work, volume is too loud). And I've tweeted and Facebooked about the show while it is happening.

In fact, I've been recording shows for posterity since I first started going to concerts in the 1980s. I was a photography major, and I use to plunk my ass down on the stage at the 930 Club in D.C. and take photos of the bands I was seeing. I was well aware that I was choosing to step back and protect myself from the intensity of the experience by hiding behind a camera.

What's a little strange for me is that now everyone else is doing it, too. And I'm not sure what to make of it.

Seeking patterns: Music, movies and poetry.

Years ago I read an article positing a question about movie critics Siskel and Ebert. Why would they rave over some obscure, hard-to-relate-to film, while panning the latest feel good Robin Williams family fare? The article went on to answer its own question. In a nutshell, Siskel and Ebert have seen so many movies that they require something more from their celluloidesque entertainment than the average moviegoer.

I've mentally returned to the ideas stirred up by this article many times, mainly when seeking to understand why I can barely tolerate most of the music on the radio, while my own music tastes are "torture" to my friends' ears. Looking back on my history, I've spent time working in a record store and also as a volunteer disc jockey and music director for a college radio station. I've had a music zine, and my record reviews and music articles were published by an entertainment newspaper as well. (Oh and I've also written songs, recorded them, and played briefly with a band, but that almost doesn't matter).  Does all this put me into that Siskel and Ebert zone, where I'm so familiar with music that I am bored to tears by the mainstream fare and need some serious weirdness to wake my neurons?

Contrast this with my experience with poetry. Two and a half decades ago I was very involved in the Newark, Delaware poetry scene. I met regularly with local poets and we critiqued each others' work. Many of us also read our work aloud, and occasionally even got paid for doing so. But other than the work of other local poets, I was not much of a poetry reader. Fast forward to now, and I'm even less involved with poetry than ever. In an attempt to find some new poetry to enjoy, I've discovered the work of Mary Oliver, which speaks to me more clearly than a lot of other stuff that's out there. And guess what? Mary Oliver is apparently America's best selling poet. So following the thought pattern, I am apparently not enough of a poet connoisseur to have obscure tastes in rhyme and verse. And that's fine with me. A bit of a relief actually.

Art!

It's summer and that means the dome goes up in the backyard and I take up painting again. I've been working on a series called "Fruit Voodoodles" since before my kid was born. The past two summers I've made some good progress. 

Here's a sample of some recent work:

I'm also blogging a bit about art and what I've learned from doing it. I'll write and post more as I get closer to the finish of this project. In the meantime, you can see a close up of my first painting in this series.

Gold Yunnan Tea

A while back I wrote about tea, and how I like it to express the full rainbow of flavor. Well I did find one tea that expresses a short section of the color palette in great depth. That tea is Gold Yunnan.

For the sake of symplicity let's say this tea expresses…the full palette of available…golds/yellows. (Because that is the name of the tea, and although I do have a wild imagination, I am not, in fact, a possessor of the trait of synesthesia).

This is the tea I turn to when I don't want the strength of a black tea, but I do want a smooth, fragrant flavor. It's the tea I turn to when I want to casually, delicately, slam back two full cups of the stuff in under two hours. It's what I call a tea that is easy to drink. If I could guess intelligently, I would say it is low on tannins. 

When I first encountered this new favorite, it was at the 2012 Northwest Tea Festival. A lady from Teahouse Kuan Yin handed me a sample packet of loose leaves and warned me that the tea had been mislabeled. When I first tasted it, I was sure it was an oolong, but an oolong that I actually enjoyed. So I was kicking back cup after cup until the sample was gone, thinking "I finally found an oolong I like. I need more." But when I visited Teahouse Kuan Yin and asked them to help me find it, I learned that it was in fact, Gold Yunnan, a black tea from China. (The part that had been mislabelled was just the subtitle, which had declared it as Gold Yunnan: A Taiwanese Assam. I knew that couldn't be correct, as Assam is a region in India, Yunnan is a province in China, and Taiwan is, well, Taiwan. A tea can't really be all three at once unless it is a blend.)

So anyway, now I have a whole bag of this wonderful stuff. And if you want to taste it, come on over.

Sense of Foreboding

I'm not sure when it happened but recently I realized that I often view some of the things I have to do as "something I just have to get through." I'll look at my schedule for the coming weeks and think something like this: "Oh, that event/party/parade/vacation or whatever…I just have to make it through that and then I'll be fine." 

I'm wondering if this is what it's like to get older.

I'm more likely to have a sense of dread about events that have a big facet of the unknown to them. Like I'm going to an unfamiliar place, or where there will be a lot of people I don't know. The thought is: "what the heck am I going to have to deal with?" And this sense of uncertainity triggers the sense that somehow I'm going to have a hard time getting through it.

The good news is that the more I force myself into situations I'm uncomfortable with, the better I'm able to face life and its unknowns with a sense of purpose and courage.