Dandelion phase three?
In one way I am reduced to taking from others...in another way I like sharing from others...

 Dear Reader

Through what precinct of life’s forest are you hiking at this moment?
Are you kicking up leaf litter or stabbed by brambles?
Of what stuff are you made? Gossamer or chain mail?
Are you, as reputed, marvellously empty? Or invisibly ever-present,
even as this missive is typed? Have you been to Easter Island? Yes?
Then I’m jealous. Do you use a tongue depressor as bookmark?
Are you reading this at an indecent hour by flashlight?
Plenty of scholarly ink has been spilt praising readers like yourself,
who risk radical dismantling, or being unmasked, by rappelling
deep into sentences. Your trigger warnings could be triggered every
second, yet you forge on, mystic syllables detonating in your head,
the metal-edged smell of monsoon-downpour on hot asphalt
raising steam in your imagination. You hold out for the phrase
with which the soul resonates, am I right? Reading, you’re seized
by tingly feelings, a rustling in the brain, winds that tickle your scalp,
bubbles erupting from a blow hole at the back of your neck.
You forget the breathy woman talking softly on TV across the lobby
(via TiVo you’ve saved her for later.) Birds outside are cracking jokes
and cackling. Reader, smile to yourself, rock the cradle, kiss
everyone you wish to kiss, and please keep reading. It beats
fielding threatening phone calls for $15 an hour which is what
yours truly is meant to be doing right now, instead of speculating
on the strange and happy manifestations of, you, dear reader, you.

Amy Gersler

It's not quite dandelion time but I couldn't resist! I wish I could actually say this: I'm sorry I'm late but I didn't want to come!

The other day I think I accidentally ate too much cheese and my lactose intolerance kicked in big time. I really thought about my mortality and then I realized that I couldn't die quite yet because my apartment was just too messy to leave behind...

This is a rather long entry...but I think it is worth it...and since I make books of my blogs (yet another cry for self-discipline) I want to keep it. It is a reply to a posting from someone I knew in high school who wrote of depression and suicide on Facebook and I just couldn't ignore him.

David, it’s Pat...

I’m terrible at Facebook...as you may see and so I don’t really know how to share or really post or anything, but I talk with friends about depression and I have been in therapy...I didn’t know why at the time except that my dad had died and I realized at the end that I didn’t know who I was...I was fortunate to have a therapist who chose to help me find my strengths rather than my weaknesses...(She said I was all too aware of them and perhaps saw more than were actually there!) We are taught in this society to work on our weaknesses rather than our strengths...I think...I don’t know if you knew that my father suffered from very bad depression...he was hospitalized several times...and when I read the passage from Black Dog I identified with it...in the sense of being the person outside the depression... and the words Black Dog rang true...there was little I could do for my dad save for not sweep his  condition under the carpet...and he taught me that...he taught me how to listen because he was a listener. And he taught me a sense of the absurd which confused my poor mother no end because she just didn’t get it! But most of all he taught me that the words - I don’t understand. You have so much going for you. Why don’t you just get over it? – are ridiculous words to use or think when someone is suffering from mental illness.

And perhaps most importantly he taught me compassion or not to judge although the pragmatic side of my Irish grandmother sometimes interferes! But I have to admit both of them taught me laughter...

I sort books with a very earnest friend at the local library for the annual book sale. We are buried in books. In the midst of sorting yesterday I got the hiccups. My friend said to me,  “Turn your back because what I’m going to tell you to do will be hard to do facing me.”  Did I say he was very earnest? So I did. And then he said, “Stick out your tongue as far as it will go.” And I did...but I broke up in amusement. And then I did it again and it worked. It evidently is an East Indian remedy. And as I write, I think of my dad because if I had told him that story, he would have loved to use it in a sermon or a children’s story.

It’s the kind of story I tell via email to my friend who admitted to suffering from depression so she knows I am there...and she knows I’m walking with her but not telling her to get over it!

Oh and my dad taught me to be obsessed with children’s stuff! At the age of 77 (I’m younger than most the class because Auntie Gertrude was teaching grade one and wanted me in the class because she was best friends with my mother and she thought Barbara Joan and I could be best friends so she got me into grade one early...Barbara Joan and I never were best friends!) I still do origami when in doubt...

I don’t really do Facebook but I did do a blog which I should be keeping up except that I have the attention span of a fly with a lobotomy (one of my students pointed that out!) but it might make you smile to putter through it...

I can't keep going back to see what I have and what I don't have...I'm just going to have to accidentally repeat myself until I take more pictures...yet another loss of discipline!

But I did save this fortune cookie bit: You have an unusual talent for success. Use it properly. I think said talent is that no one expects me to succeed...so I can do it without pressure!

I have absolutely no self-discipline...that is why all my dreams are those of catching up with the correcting I never finished. So now I owe fourteen entries for February if I want to catch up...and some of said entries are going to be pathetic...but I have to learn self-discipline before I turn 80...it is a mandatory entrance into old age.

My problem I have realized is that I am normal...I am so normal that I have no stories to tell save the stories of others...I remember once finding the definition of anticlimax: The rest of all the acts of Asa, and all his might, and the cities he built, are they not written in the chronicles of the kings of Juda? Nevertheless, in the time of his old age, he was diseased in his feet. 

Alas I have built no cities...but I do have sore feet! My friend gave me hope the other day when he suggested that I was just slightly manic...at last...a condition!

This is a stolen photograph! My friend, Babs Lapointe, takes fine pictures...she is the one who made me conscious of clouds....
It is a full moon and the demons are definitely dancing...

These are the three men of my family. I think I told you that when I was 17 I was standing at a bus stop in TMR and a car stopped. A woman got out and asked: Are you Pat Machin? It threw me. Yes...and she introduced herself as my uncle’s fiance. She had never seen me or met me – I would have been five when he died – but she recognized me from him...and he was six foot five or so...She said to give her love to my grandmother and left...I said very little...I was too surprised. As I reflect back now, it would only have been 12 years since my uncle died...she still could have been grieving...she and my grandmother were close....they even went together to choose her engagement ring...my uncle had wired my grandmother the money...  

When in doubt there's always something on Pinterest!


The poem, the one that runs
along side and through your
life, pay attention to that
poem.
Nayyirah Waheed

I worry that I am too old to have cats...that I am not playful enough...but the presence of a cat or two in my life is sheer joy and I have it arranged that should anything happen to me....That having been said I lost one of my cats for a moment and panicked. Had he escaped into that hall he is so curious about and I hadn't noticed. So I took the house apart whilst he watched!

Anything too stupid to be said should be sung.

Imagine being the artistic director of the Summer Writing Program of Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics?

Some messages are worth repeating:

Whispered message

of each new wrinkle:

Rejoice! You’re still here.

On the topic of poetry:

Like a piece

of ice on a

  hot stove

    the poem

must ride on

       its own

   melting.

Robert Frost

Ironically...that is a complete sentence!!

If I had the time, I would go back through my blog just to make sure I'm not repeating my pictures and words...but I don't have the time at the moment...and I have to catch up since my goal is to make 365 entries this year...This time it's the sky I'm looking at...not the cheetah...and a quote stolen from Pinterest:

Poetry is a story that is so good it doesn’t need complete sentences.

My friend is in Africa at the moment doing the Safari that I did over ten years ago. We have the same pictures. I know that seems impossible...but it is so...the same animals are posing! I never thought I would go to Africa the first time around...I never thought I would want to return but I do...her pictures make me yearn for that experience once more...