Alluvial Miners - Gleaners Welcome

A Bit of Gold

2006-09-27T15:10:00.000Z

More Thoughts on Dowsing

2006-09-15T18:24:00.000Z

As some of you know from posts I've made on other bloggers, some of my ancestors were dowsers-- at least that's what I've been told.

I did, a while back, fashion a pair of rods out of brass tubing and the plastic outer casings of ball point pens (to use as handles to allow the tubing to move freely). I fooled around with the rods and put them aside, determining in my mind that any pronounced movement of the rods had a rational explanation.

Earlier this week I lost an earring. It was an amber stone in a silver setting-- not expensive, but enough so to make it worth my effort to hunt for it. I scanned the floor of my office, our parking garage, the sidewalk outside my front door, and of course every room of my apartment. No luck.

So, I'm sitting in my living room a couple of nights ago and saw the rods sitting on the top of my bookcase and I thought-- "What the heck, I've done weirder stuff...." So I began to dowse for my lost earring.

I know you see this coming: I found the earring. It was on the floor of my bedroom where I had walked numerous times since I lost the earring but didn't see it.

I actually can't remember if the rods crossed right over the earring. It could be that I was simply walking much more slowly and looking more carefully. It might have been that, it might have been luck, or it might have been those darn rods leading my attention to the earring.

I'll let you all decide for yourself.

Lori Gloyd (c) 2006

Thoughts on Dowsing.....

2006-04-22T02:43:00.000Z

Thoughts on Dowsing

My aunt says that my great-grandfather was a dowser, or a “water-witch,” a person who used divining rods to locate underground water. She says that her son, my cousin, has successfully dowsed for water, and she herself tried it once, only to scare herself silly when the rods actually began moving.

Because I am a more scientific person than a superstitious one, I decided to give it a try myself, mainly to debunk the experience; however, a little bit of me was open minded enough to be receptive to anything. So I fashioned myself a pair of brass rods and began moving around my apartment. Interestingly, the rods crossed whenever I got near electronic equipment—my television, my computer, a halogen lamp. Since I had previously heard dowsing rods supposedly cross whenever they are near energy sources, I surmised that I was merely unconsciously moving the rods myself to accommodate what I already knew.

The supposed purpose of divining rods is to search for things hidden deep—water, gold—or for things hidden beyond—spirits, paranormal energies. Perhaps dowsing is merely an outward manifestation of some deep seated motivation all humans have to get to the heart of themselves—looking for some inner golden nugget of validation, or seeking the waters of understanding deep in the recesses of the psyche.

Whether or not my ancestor was a real dowser (my dad, contrary to my aunt, says he wasn’t), the experience for me proved an insightful one, both experientially and metaphorically. By the way, I didn’t throw out the rods I fashioned—they are nearby in case I feel the need to go searching for “hidden gold” again.

Lori Gloyd © April 21, 2006.

Standing Outside the Fire

2005-10-20T02:13:00.000Z

This entry has been months in coming. I got sidetracked from this song and as a day became plural, turning into a week and more, I lost the mood and the immediate impressions I'd received from it. I let it fall by the wayside. But yesterday when Jessy, Brogan and I were at Sonic getting refreshments, Standing Outside the Fire by Garth Brooks was playing towards the end of our break.

I first saw this song's music video on CMT several years ago and was immediately struck by the portrayal of it. Amidst clips of Garth Brooks singing and strumming his guitar, they showed clips of events from the Special Olympics. The lyrics combined with the visual was a very powerful, emotional package, and naturally, because of my own situation it resonated with me on a soul's level. And being the emotional creature that I am, I had tears in my eyes and coursing down my cheeks, listening and watching and letting it sink in.

Standing Outside the Fire
We call them cool
Those hearts that have no scars to show
The ones that never do let go
And risk the tables being turned

We call them fools
Who have to dance within the flame
Who chance the sorrow and the shame
That always come with getting burned

But you got to be tough when consumed by desire
'Cause it's not enough just to stand outside the fire
We call them strong
Those who can face this world alone
Who seem to get by on their own
Those who will never take the fall

We call them weak
Who are unable to resist
The slightest chance love might exist
And for that forsake it all

They're so hell-bent on giving, walking a wire
Convinced it's not living if you stand outside the fire

Standing outside the fire
Standing outside the fire
Life is not tried it is merely survived
If you're standing outside the fire

There's this love that is burning
Deep in my soul
Constantly yearning to get out of control
Wanting to fly higher and higher
I can't abide standing outside the fire

Standing outside the fire
Standing outside the fire
Life is not tried it is merely survived
If you're standing outside the fire

Standing outside the fire
Standing outside the fire
Life is not tried it is merely survived
If you're standing outside the fire

Standing outside the fire
Standing outside the fire
Life is not tried it is merely survived
If you're standing outside the fire

Garth Brooks

Thinking about it, I think I know why they chose to link the song to the Special Olympics. Those kids "stand inside the fire" most, if not, everyday. They are ...consumed by desire to do their very best. They are the ones the world calls fools, the ones the world calls "weak," for they risk the tables being turned; they risk being burned and they risk ...the sorrow and the shame from standing inside the fire.

They're so hell-bent on giving, walking a wire / Convinced it's not living if you stand outside the fire
And really, that's the basic truth. What life is about. Having the courage to be considered a fool and weak, living inside the fire. Having the courage to risk all, on the chance of sorrow and shame, heartache and pain for the chance at glory and victory...for a chance at love. That's living, as the song attests.

Life with passion. It isn't living without it. You don't have to go crazy, expending your energy till you burn out like a nova in a grand display. Just live life being passionate about what matters most to you. Remember, fire is the test of gold; from the refiner's fire comes the purest, prefect form of this precious metal.

Memories To Warm Us Through Our Winters

2005-09-08T19:57:00.000Z

"Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories."
~An Affair To Remember~
My favorite quote from that movie, you know. When I first heard it again a couple of months ago on AMC, it struck a resonant chord within me, and I knew I had to use it in an entry. Several times I tried; I'd begin, but once the initial sentences were in this entry box, they just...dried up. Like an old, tired and forgotten creek, which flow dwindles and evaporates until it is but a trickle then a few muddy puddles here and there and finally an empty, dusty creekbed, my flow of words became naught.

But not this time. They are ready, I think, to flow back into the barren creekbed. The dam that held my words from me has been destroyed or removed by Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory, Philosophy and Reason. Now my words can rush back along their intended course, unimpeded, rising to the very edge of their green, grassy banks. And I, I can kneel on one of those banks, rejoicing, dipping my miner's pan into the cool clear water, smiling as it flows over my sun-warmed flesh like silk. Bringing the old metal pan back up dripping, I swirl the contents around and around, sifting and slowly pouring the water and loose sediment out, leaving only the gold nuggets I first glimpsed among the creek stones sometime ago. Again and again I repeat this process, until all the gold nuggets I see are put into a nearby pail to be added to the other treasure I've found while mining.

My room is basically like a miniature apartment. In fact, the whole downstairs of our house could be considered an apartment for me. I'm zee only one with a room down here (on zee first floor at zee back of zee 'ouse), while everybody else is upstairs at zee opposite end. The dining and living rooms, a bathroom, front room and kitchen are all down here as well. As this house has been my childhood home since I was six or seven-years-old, it's got a lot of memories attached, but... It is my room now, as I look around, that contains the memories that surface the most readily.

*laughs as she looks around* Perhaps that's because anywhere I look, most every knicknack, stuffed animal or wall decoration I see has a definite memory attached to it. On the wall facing my bed, I've hung the birthday balloon my mother gave me as part of a balloon bouquet. (She loves balloon bouquets.) It's iridescent orange with a lighter orange polkadot border. The center has a smiling sun, and in rainbow lettering across the front it reads: "Have a Sunny Birthday!" I had another heart-shaped red smiley balloon with it, but, *sigh* it got loose and flew high into the stratosphere.

It was my 25th birthday, and we were in Twin Falls for my sister's basketball tournament. However, it was the last day so we spent some hours on the road, heading home. It was a rainy, dismal day made miraculous and beautiful by the most vivid and distinct rainbow I've seen in my life. It arced gracefully over the highway we were traveling, and just looking at it, I was lifted up, renewed, awed. It was the most beautiful benediction to a storm I ever saw, and I felt as if it were my rainbow, given to me by Heavenly Father as a gift.

Shifting my gaze to a different wall, I spy a picture of Mike and Jen standing before Aunt Colleen's fireplace in Midway. It stands on the second shelf attached to the wall. You can see it was taken in October, because of the ghost garland my aunt had hung across her mantel. Mike is as bald as a cue ball there in the picture. *wry laugh* He'd gotten his deployment order to Iraq and was about to head to WA State for training before deployment. (Jen is the one who shaved his head, btw.) And unbeknownst to us all, it was about the time she conceived. The day the picture was taken, we all gathered at my aunt and uncle's for a barbecue. Nan and Paw Paw, my family and aunt, uncle and three young cousins. It would be the last time we'd all be together before Michael left for the war. We visited and the kids played games, then *blinks back sudden tears* the men gave Mike a Priesthood blessing for his continued health and safety.

Moving my gaze again, this time to my left, to the shelf topping my computer desk, I see a metal or tin rose painted a deep sparkly red with painted green leaves. It stands in a light purple bottle shaped like two hearts, one slightly in front of the other, perched on a pedastal. Heather gave me the flower on one of her visits last spring or summer. As with all her gifts, I treasure the rose, because everytime I look at it--or at any of her other gifts--warm memories of our friendship and soul sisterhood come to the fore and I can't help but smile and hope she's happy still.

In front of the purple bottle stands a glass jar with a glass stopper. On the front, between two bands of blue and gold is a depiction of the Jacob Spori Building. This was my "home away from home" while I was at Ricks. It houses the Art, Speech and Pathology and Mass Communications Depts.; as well as the Scroll office and newsroom. This is where I gained my self-esteem, knew I was liked for me, that being myself was great and where I gained my testimony of Christ's gospel. This is where my self discovery began.

And last, but not the very least, not by a long shot, for there are many more memory items surrounding me...is the white buffalo stuffed animal on my nightstand. I bought him as a souvenir when Aubree, Kjerstina, her sister Natashja and I went to Yellowstone one summer. I bought the buffalo because
one) he's white, and a white buffalo is sacred to
Native Americans and
two) the buffalo seems to be my spirit animal.

For a period of time, anywhere I looked I saw buffalo. Or images of them. Idaho's Museum of Natural History's mascot was the ancient bison. They had "hoofprints" along the sidewalk, leading up to the door of the museum. Then there was a stamp with a buffalo on it in circulation. Sandy, my ex-care provider bought us matching shirts at Fort Hall's trading post. Guess what was on the fronts of the t-shirts? That's right. Buffalo. My sightings didn't stop there when I left ISU. I saw an iron silhoutte of a bison along the way to I.F. every day I went to the outreach campus for classes. And the cincher? I bought a picture of an Indian brave--a handsome Indian brave--in Jackson when my family and I went with family friends from RI. I didn't realize at the time, however, what was beneath his likeness. You guessed it, buffalo. Two males bucking heads together, trying to prove which one is the alpha male. The caption below them reads: Buffalo Warrior.

My room is indeed filled with many fond memories. I would share more, but it's getting late and I know I can't share them all. I won't ever lack for warmth during cold winters, for every time I look around, there is always something there to remind me...

Life is good. I have much to be grateful for and many things to remind me; a few of which I named tonight. There is another quote I would leave with you all before I go: "We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours." ~Dag Hammarskjold, Markings~

We have the power to choose what we put into or get out of life. *pauses, sobering before continuing* A family friend and member of my ward died of Lou Gerrick's disease this past Wednesday. He was a man with a zest for life and a love for people. He was cheerful, and when he was diagnosed two years ago with this disease, he decided he would live each day happily and better than the last. He never once complained or thought Heavenly Father had let him slip through the cracks. He knew he was being called home. And if it meant being back with our Father and progressing even more towards perfection, then he was happy to go through the trials he went through over the past two years.

I hope your winters can be as warm as mine.

The Land of Make Believe

2005-08-03T05:01:00.000Z

"MAKE BELIEVE"

Out walking, these words emerged,

and I wondered about the meaning,

of another land, with parallel lines.

Why say, if it's not real, not to be believed,

why say: "Make Believe"?

I wondered why Barrie, Shakespeare, Conan Doyle,

Coleridge, et al, all our loved ones - writers and poets -

are so loved. They who specialise in "Make Believe".

Perhaps the words really mean "Make us believe"?

Which may account for our love of them?

They seem to suggest there may be something else...

Gleaning

2005-08-02T14:46:00.000Z

Would someone else please pick up a thread here ...
I have a wedding to prepare for ..
or a preparation to wed,
or something

Eversong -3

2005-08-01T15:38:00.000Z

My upcoming wedding will have drums involved,
much to the consternation of 'fundy' friends,
who have fogotten ...

At this joining, not only of Em and I,
but of humanity and spirit in all who
will bear witness --
will be the pulse of blood, and nature --
in tune with the rhythm of the stars.

There will be other music too, but ...
"Whenever two or more are joined
in the name of Love, our Lord will be there" --
and he will dance as he did at a wedding long ago.

IN CIRCLE FOUND

Walk in the mists of Sakin’el
and feel the pulse of the silent breeze.
Some are driven to gather sticks
or slap their knees, or sing a tune.

The rhythm is the EverSong;
the greeting of the morning sun,
the whispers of the silver moon,
and the feather touch of Tegsh.

Fetch your drum and play along,
mumble a chant or sing a song.
Gather late by the Joining Fire,
or just dance on yearning grass.

Come, oh yes come to Sakin’el,
where the fading evening hush
magick’ly changes from throbbing drums
to strummed guitars and memories.

For the music here is laughter,
drawn from gentle inner peace,
and candles flicker in fine applause
to the joining of heart and hand.

Eversong - 2

2005-07-29T10:13:00.000Z

In March of 2001 I discovered the Retreat Center in Sacramento, CA and stayed a couple of days. On the first morning I wrote this,

"The realm of God is vast, too vast.
We seek meaning and purpose, order and rhythm, cause and effect.
What arrogance we have to attempt to limit Heash to what we can or cannot see, or touch or feel. What if the entire purpose of our existence here is only to be washed in the sea of our birth again and again until our souls are smooth and flawless? What if the grinding sand and crashing waves of our struggles produce a music we are not meant to hear?

'Listen for the song, feel,' - will soft whisper the approaching dawn."
………………………………………………………………………………………….
Ah yes, but we do!
And it blends with the music of the Earth and song of the Moon.
The melody is not 'in' us -- it is 'of' us;
Light, Angels, Mankind, lost souls, the Word.
Our symbolized thoughts -- speech -- songs -- actions do not just 'ripple' forth; they join the symphony of creation and stoke the bell of eternity.

As we oft remember random tunes of mundane musical effort, our dreams perhaps are remembered or glimpsed parts of the 'eversong'. And if out spirit dances in the Light, pulled by the strings of pure love; then our soul may be the essence that hears the song --

the Word made vibrantly real --
the anvil bridge linking humanity and Light in Covenant.
On this is our spiritual perception forged.
On this is our character and presence beaten into shape.

Oh the ringing, reverberating sound of the hammer of renewed creation clanking on the soul of our being.
Tink! Tinkidy -- wham!
Such a clamor!
Then, as the impurities are drawn out,
or alloyed with compassion and tears,
the bell skin purifies -- rarifies.
Oh, the chime of the pure spirit's rest.

Don't dance -- fly -- drift -- cascade;
all to the tinkling of a single crystal chime
and an orchestra of 'everbe'
and fine applause of laughing stars.

faucon

Seven Wonders of My World, Part 2

2005-07-28T20:29:00.000Z

Yesterday I started a two-part series inspired by an email story and an essay entitled, "Seven Wonders of My World--#2." I've wanted to do a similar entry on my own Personal Wonders since I first saw the title of that essay a week or so ago. I thought it would be fun to see all the Wonders we have in this world and it has been. It's been neat to see Wonders (or pics of them) that I didn't know about or had forgotten exist(s/ed). Tonight I will end with one more type and add my own Personal Wonders to the lists of Wonders around the world.

Seven "Forgotten" Wonders of the World
I. Angkor Wat ~ Cambodia
II. The Colosseum ~ Rome, Italy
III. The Great Wall of China
IV. The Inca city of Machu Picchu ~ Peru
V. Mont-Saint-Michel ~ Normandy, France
VI. Petra, the rock-carved city ~ Jordan
VII. Stonehenge ~ England

For my Personal Wonders I had to think awhile. What in my life could be as marvelous, as wonderous as those I've listed? I've never seen in person any of the Wonders around the world, and I experience the Wonders on the lil girl's list everyday. I wanted to add things specific to me, that aren't on the lists I've compiled. I thought and thought, and though it's taken some time, the list was relatively easy to compile. *smiles* Even though there is a repeat. Just goes to show how important this Wonder is...

Seven Wonders of My World
I.
Love

II.
Family

III.
Friendship

IV.
Temples

V.
Rainbows

VI.
The Peace Garden ~ Tasmania

VII.
Shooting stars/Imagination

I know, I cheated a bit. More than you know actually. *laughs sheepishly* I've never been to the Peace Garden in Tasmania, and I sneaked/squeezed in a last one on the seventh. I couldn't make up my mind.

I put the Peace Garden as one because I like what it stands for; I like the idea of the perpetually burning bonfire and the adding of stones in remembrance of our ancestors. Plus, cross-culturally, (Native American and Hebrew) my name means peace. And my brother, right now, is over in Iraq, helping to fight for Iraqi peace and freedom from opressors and terrorists. So, this garden, even though I may never see it personally, represents something special and close to my heart: Peace and Unity.

The last Wonder(s) is/are equally important to me. So, as I said, I squeezed an extra one in. =0D I saw shooting stars, or a meteor shower last summer(?) for the first time. Though it was chilly out, it was awesome! And with a writer's imagination and help from the appropriate Muse, something of this nature is excellent fodder for a written piece. Hence the addition of Imagination to my list. It's always been a part of me, inseparable really.

Seven Wonders of the World, Part 1

2005-07-28T20:21:00.000Z

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
I.
The Great Pyramid of Giza

II.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

III.
The Zeus of Olympia

IV.
The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

V.
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

VI.
The Colossus of Rhodes

VII.
The Lighthouse of Alexandria
*****
Seven Wonders of the Modern World
I. The Eiffel Tower ~ Paris, France
II. The Gateway Arch ~ St. Louis, USA
III. The Golden Gate Bridge ~ San Francisco, USA
IV. Mount Rushmore Memorial ~ South Dakota, USA
V. The Statue of Liberty ~ NYC, USA
VI. The Statue of Cristo Redentor ~ Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
VII. The Sydney Opera House ~ Sydney, Australia

Seven Natural Wonders of the World
I. The Grand Canyon ~ Arizona, USA
II. The Great Barrier Reef ~ Australia
III. Iguaçú Falls ~ Brazil, Argentina
IV. Krakatoa Island ~ Indonesia
V. Mount Everest ~ Nepal
VI. Mount Fuji ~ Japan
VII. Niagara Falls ~ Ontario, Canada, New York, USA

* Seven Wonders of the World (According To Elementary Children)
A group of students were asked to list what they thought were the present Seven Wonders of the World. Though there were some disagreements, the following received the most votes:
I. Egypt's Great Pyramids
II. The Taj Mahal
III. The Grand Canyon
IV. Panama Canal
V. Empire State Building
VI. St. Peter's Basilica
VII. The Great Wall of China
While gathering the votes, the teacher noted that one student had not finished her paper yet. So she asked the girl if she was having trouble with her list.
The girl replied, "Yes, a little. I couldn't quite make up my mind because there were so many."
The teacher said, "Well, tell us what you have, and maybe we can help."
The girl hesitated, then read, "I think the Seven Wonders of the World are:
I.
The Sense of Sight
II.
The Sense of Hearing
III.
The Sense of Touch
IV.
The Sense of Taste
V.
The Joy of Feeling
VI.
The Joy of Laughter
VII.
The Joy of Loving

The room was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. The things we overlook as simple and ordinary and that we take for granted are truly wondrous!

A gentle reminder--that the most precious things in life cannot be built by hand or bought by man.

Tonight I have shared with you several different types of wonders this ole world possesses. Each is a wonder in its own way, and long have I been fascinated by the Ancient Wonders. Truly, they show Man was capable of greatness even then and that he wasn't as barbaric or as rudimentary in technology or architecture as some would believe. The Modern and Natural Wonders are just as awe-inspiring, but, it is this young girl's list of Wonders that truly has me humbled and agreeing with her over her choices. There is beauty and wonder all around us. We just have to take the time to enjoy them.

* This entry and the next are inspired by the above email story and an essay from Soul Food's Alluvial Mine.

How Many Gates?

2005-07-26T03:27:00.000Z

"How many more?"
said the child,
socks around her ankles,
clutching her mother's
hand.

Small, little thing,
baby sweet,
one gate, two gates,
three, all
just too high to see over,
the world looks
big from down here.

School gate, Nanna's gate,
Auntie's gate,
neighbour's gate,
growly dog at a gate,
little one jumps
double her height,
now gripping Mother's
kindly hand.

"It's allright" she
said, "Just one more
and we're home."
Mother passes
the little one a
sweet on a stick,
comfort in the
dark valley of
fears.

"It's allright,
the doggy's gone" -
Sweet on a stick.
Little one, big
world, every day
an inch smarter -
new shoes soon.

The home gate swings
closed and the sun
sets in the west,
a golden,
kindly, watchful
ball of wise light.

copyright Monika Roleff 2005

EverSong -1

2005-07-25T14:20:00.000Z

on a search of my archives, this came up first ..

CURRENT of LIGHT

Though the Current of Light that empowers I
stretches beyond thought and stardust mem'ry,
it is balanced on self-known soul's edge,
in a dance of Life …
to fine sung Creation …
by Agreement and Covenant now secured.

NOW -- swing to the left in human embrace.
NOW -- ever claim the right of divine caress.
NEVER stop the undulation of growth,
whose vibrations dare engage angel wings.

By my choice the Beginning IS Creation.
By my bold faith the Word is manifest,
not in prideful dream nor ego's deceit,
but in the simplest humility
of knowing that I am of Love beheld,
and all Paths are of and be the Source.

Of this wonderment, surely eternal,
stand ever I in rapt attendance,
perhaps only to provide just applause
for those who choose to drift the Currents.
Yet I may be called to nurturing
of those who choose to return to the womb,
or by soul's indecision recycle anew
as instrument, conductor or baton
in the Now Creation of EverSong.

Every choice is resounding triumph!
One brought me here to limit time and place.
Another handed me a role to play,
guided by a scripting not yet writ,
'cept by ev'ry spirit's interaction.
For though the Current be energy's Love,
It is also 'current' in the BeNow,
drawn to the crossing of each soul's web,
entwined with all others at ev'ry point.

Write! Create! Sing! Prance! or simply Be.
As you choose so go there I entranced,
and of thee, me and therefore we be Now,
for by choice alone will I find our Home,
to breathe Life into your waiting soul.

Of Silence

2005-07-19T15:24:00.000Z

this is a 'list poem' -- meaning that
it started with a list of thoughts on a theme,
then was expanded into a complete poem.
The assigned theme was, "I thought I heard."
I took some liberties ...

faucon

The Space of Silence

I thought I heard a sock escaping from the drawer,
and the drapes battle vainly with the sun.
I thought I heard bread molding in the box
and ice cream chocolate chip.
and believed I heard the shadow skate across the wall,
and a button jumping from my shirt.

What sound of a smile shattered,
or candle growing bashful in the mist?
Are those dust bunnies I heard scurrying around,
or cry of crystalline salt tenderizing my life?

Yesterday I heard a raindrop start a mountain stream
and a window stare through close shuttered eyes.
I was startled to heard a vine drop its lonely grape
and gay mistletoe strangle a lusty oak.
Once I heard dewdrops slide down a feathered leaf,
and an earring dance 'neath blowing brazen hair.

I thought I heard a basket count its forgotten secrets,
and an unplugged lamp praying for a book.
I dreamed I heard a dish enfold some Christmas candies,
and a rocking chair flex its curving arms.
And I heard the blanket, I imagine, sneak upon the floor,
and memory call out my child's name.

but ..

All I heard was your key scraping in the lock,
and the click of furtive light switch
as I feigned expected sleep.

Song of the Phoenix: Luminosity

2005-07-17T19:36:00.000Z

Silence, they say,
is golden

(because it burns -
not
inferno
holocaust
pyre, yet

a flame
of desire:

a candle
lit
in faith, or
an ember,
ash-hidden.

Take wing;
uncage
the hot
sparks
of the soul -

firebird
or silence:
it
burns).

Water Life

2005-07-17T14:16:00.000Z

prompted by Lisa's "Troll Saw"

View from Beneath the Flow

I lay beneath the trembling waters of Shea,
caressed by the ever purifying cataracts
and dreams of creation caught in silent pools.

Find my 'memried toes tickled in the Goddess Sea,
with bold fingers of lighning's guiding Mistress tears,
down -- down to the golden sands of humanity.

Find me now in the whispered mists of dawn's delight
and silvered dew drops of love's yearning pain and joy
in which all life is reflected by the Father's gleam.

Pulse with me in roots and veins of this vibration;
send messages of Light to every particle
of flesh and mind and soul in life by right beheld.

And know that my spirit rests beneath the spring,
where everflows the song and laughter of birth --
or just a leaf swirling in an eddy of faith.

What the Bridge Troll saw

2005-07-16T00:38:00.000Z

molten
riversong,

heat shimmer phantoms
mica-spangled sand,
and

sun
kissed
ripples

to make
a shivering, dancing
net
of
light

Flowing through

2005-07-11T23:41:00.000Z

I'll bite. Here is a story whose impact
cannot be placed on the writer, the reader
or the muse ..
or so I have been told.

This is the only story my mother has never commented on.

faucon
............................................................

Page of Uli

There was nothing special about Uli, except his name, perhaps. He was Samuel by birthright, but his early life had not followed any path described in scripture. When his sister had come along and had been christened Samantha, wiser minds intervened and contrived the nickname. Thus, he was not really even himself, and somehow forfeit for all that. His name was frequently called more in teasing than for assistance or youthful insight into life's mysteries, gifts of a fair haired boy. He even came to refer to himself in the third person as, "Uli thinks it is time to eat," or "Uli is tired of this game!" The officialdom of that time refused to play the game, however, and teachers, priests, sergeants and social workers called him 'Samuel'. He rarely responded. When he was eighteen, he legally changed his name. Samuel was dead. He held a wake. The drinking part anyway.

The very next day, Uli started keeping a journal. It was certainly not a diary, controlled by the flow of passing summer days. It wasn't even kept daily, so the name is perhaps inappropriate. It was a bound collection of thoughts and dreams and reflections. Some was scarcely legible flowing dialogue with a hidden, internal self. There were neatly scripted haikus and penciled sonnets and random colorful phrases that Uli called 'refractions'. Sometimes these found later life in a larger piece. Mostly they molded like last fall's leaves covered by new 'reflections' of the sun. Like Uli's life, there was no order, pattern or direction. A cynic's view might be that he was laughing at the world. His departed mother would have thought he was mostly crying. Taciturn male role models would have lectured on his avoidance of the 'real world'. For the poet, he was praying!

Uli liked to sail and his small sloop was often out early to savor the peace of the sunrise dance on the small waves. He fished some, and drank some and wrote some. The order did not matter as he was always alone. He read a lot of course -- one cannot write with any touch of soul if he does not also travel into the mind of others. He dreamed a lot, lulled by the rocking of the small boat; sail dropped, sea anchor out, rain bucket ready for the sudden downpour -- Spirit's hand at the tiller.

His dreams were not of historic animal hunts, or a western chase across the plains. He rescued no maidens nor flew beneath the clouds nor battled Titans between the stars. Nothing so dashing for Uli. He dreamed of the symphony that plucked at his heart, of the notes he could not sing. Uli gathered the stroke of the dragon fly's wings and the cry of the polishing stone. He measured the beat of the thistle puff as it shattered the sprinkled lawn, and listened to the acorn's falling -- down -- down. Birds were resplendent in their hidden trill, even miles from the shore, for he remembered every vibrant song -- they coursed throughout his veins. In the written journal there was nothing of this, perhaps a man is best known by what he does not say! Uli was thought simple -- he was not a simple man!

When Uli awoke from his erstwhile trip to nowhere, there was no land in sight! His nostrils flared to gather any clue of direction or safe passage, but nothing came. No sounds of life or oil slick or drifting wing above. The sky was a uniform slate of anonymity upon which nothing was inscribed. Featureless -- lacking in texture -- lacking in overt passion. It might have been a reflection of his soul! No silent breeze clutched at his sail and the rudder described a meaningless 5 degree circle on the shallow waves. He could row, of course, but where? Better to wait. A touch of dismay crossed his brow and he sat down to write, not from inspiration -- just something to do. When he found land, it was not home, nor happy, nor any help at all. It was worthless!

The forbidding rocks were uniformly black, but certainly not uniform in size or shape. Each was a sinister barrier to life and approach. Even the sea birds were not drawn here -- at least there were no white striations to break the monotony. No trees, no piles of leaves or jumble of driftwood -- nothing. He allowed the tiny boat to drift around the small island -- no choice actually, for the currents teased with a multidirectional, swirling force. He attempted to row ashore -- why he did not know, but was always pushed away by a tide that always seemed to be rushing out -- out. The jagged rocks made any venture foolish in any event. Yet the island called to him -- not in yearning song, but in whispers. These somber tones came not from fear or dread or worse, but from a bell that was never rung. He rowed away.

"If this island does not allow approach," Uli thought, "then it must point in contrast to another saving path. Any port in a storm, they say. There is no storm and no port!" Row, row. He began to sing.

The gigantic tanker neither saw Uli not felt the crushing blow that crunched the craft into ragged shards. The looming swell or spinning brass blades may have been at fault, but Uli was beyond caring with the shocked interruption of his joyful cry. The ship passed on leaving only flotsam behind, scraps of wood, a couple of pots and a reddish knapsack in a box. These all washed ashore on the bleak island, they not impeded by the sloop's buoyancy or fragile size or pilot's will. The planks caught amongst the sharp boulders to bleach in the eventual sun. The box hinges rusted away to spill the contents into a slight defile, but the pages of the journal were still abused by wind and salt water spray. The writing faded with no less of a song that Uli had ever been able to voice.

A small plane crashed on the tip of the island, far from its charted course. Isn't that always the way? Only the young mother and three children stood upon the rocks to watch the wreckage slide beneath the angry surf. Such despair cannot be retold! But even then, the youngest daughter was disposed to explore a bit and found the wood, drawn by the rustling of the journal pages. They assembled the pile as best they could and tore out pages, many that blew away. They waited. When a flicker of light appeared on the horizon they kindled the fire and watched the hopeful finger of smoke snake and undulate into the gloomy sky. Ashes of pages drifted upward too. Then everything was gone -- every trace of Uli had completely vanished.

Years later a teenage girl sat beneath a tree and spread out a crumpled, withered page. Blue lines were faint. Fainter still were the words she had traced in pencil over the years, lifted from slight indentations in the linen scrap.

"I am the squire of the morning mist, herald of each birthing day.
I am the champion of daily hour's command,
from chivalry's call for helping strong hand.

≈ ≠µ ℓ ю ……

I am the monk seeking peace in Mother Earth
where setting red sun will measure my worth.
But do not fear for God's claim on my soul,
for each day grants new life devoid of pain.

I will bring in the day to squire your birth, gentle gird your loins in mail,
And cap your brow with helm of pure delight,
and grant curved shield of Aegis' might.
Claim your sword my friend and never cry yield
for I will be watching, will never fail.

Where what 'was' joins 'what will be', there is proud eternal braid
that in our evening's death there will cycle new life, to conquer unafraid."

The Seven Wonders of My World--#2

2005-07-10T20:48:00.000Z

Thoughts while reading Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins.

I do it every day and yet this afternoon was the first time I've truly considered the amazing ability I have to bilocate--to be in two different places at the same time.

Sitting on my porch--listening to the twittering of sparrows, vaguely aware of the plastic seat supporting my tush--I was simultaneously standing with Opal on her porch in Tennessee when a woman from the TVA came to inform her, her house would soon be under water.

How is it possible that I take for granted this astonishing power to transport myself. Shouldn't I view it as miraculous, hopping from zip code to zip code, or from country to country? What about jet streaming instantly through decades and centuries?

I know what you're going to say. All together now, writers! "WE are the ones who create this miracle."

Oh, please. Let's show a little humility. Give some credit to the person on the other side of the page or the screen. It's the reader who willingly suspends disbelief when we go on about dragons and fairies, the reader who hyperventilates during one of Anita's creepy tours, then chokes back tears when one of you poetic-types hits the nail resoundingly on top of her innocent head.

With only a modicum of talent from a writer, a reader's brain takes countless personal experiences and memories and mingles them together with the printed words to draw out a full spectrum of emotions. So really, don't you think it's time we stopped being quite so full of ourselves?

I mean, it's the darn muse who does most of the work, anyway.

Manor House at Sakin'el

2005-07-09T02:12:00.000Z

Sakin'el Henge

2005-07-07T15:06:00.000Z

Another View

2005-07-06T16:27:00.000Z

With little to 'glean' onto, I'll post
another part of Sakin'el -- the Wood Henge.
Only three arches made of 8' cherry logs,
but the site of weddings, sunrise mass,
and just drifting.

Henge Moon

The arches stretch a little taller
beneath the cloudless moonlit sky,
but not because of the Mistress – no!
just knowing you are here beside me.

The shadows grow short and round about
in an ancient dance with Henge and all,
and the glade swoops down in hollowed bliss
to gather the songs of the night and dreams.

The rough bark sketches fairy signatures
on shadows that smile and hide away,
and my love is written in whispered rhyme
of slow pacing moon and starlit eyes.

This is the place of Joining and Light,
and as two hold hands and circle ‘bout,
all friends are with us in fine applause,
and the warmth of the moon fine indeed.

faucon

Night and Day

2005-07-04T20:53:00.000Z

from Alexandra "Every day and every night. Word by word"

this was written months ago
about a spot at Sakin'el
........................................................

TIES of TOR

One must sing at Sakin’el
to join bold breeze or silent heart,
by draw of Henge, Grove or Glade;
but for one you must choose where to start.

‘tween hollow and parapet
there are found four strong the Ties of Tor,
seen as steps or seats by right,
ascension or rest as told in lore.

Sit and watch the games of sport,
or archery quest or test of skill;
or climb above to the Glade,
and listen to music as thee will.

These Ties do bind night and day,
in shade of noon or by fairie moon;
and Tegsh will sigh sad farewell
as ye come and go from Tor so soon.

faucon

Alexandra Roman's Dream Fairy

2005-07-03T03:42:00.000Z

In Stages

2005-06-30T10:45:00.000Z

Gleaned from Alexandra

"The world is full of stages.
Here where I stand is mine!"

These thoughts are meant to 'add to'
the fine, heartfelt words above --
yet also to give a different view
that all may savor here thoughts and words.

By Stages

The world is full of stages,
here where I stand is mine --
yet as I dance the Goddess tune,
the world may then swirl me by.

Each new word is lonely
as scene on a static page --
and the audience must see
the stages of creativity.

Thus, I must write in stages,
rather than a bounded page,
for with each word made manifest
I am a different person.

A poem is a birthing,
attended with blood and pain;
and the resulting Child of Light
cherished beyond form and rhyme.

This child is its own reward,
Though others may bill and coo.
By faith alone I do the work,
and know that some heart will sing.

It is the silent applause
of inner balance and peace,
That gives plot and theme and setting
real purpose -- Light upon the stage.

faucon

2005-06-29T17:25:00.000Z

My Duende

The world is a stage

2005-06-29T16:51:00.000Z

But I am no actress!
I stand here in the middle of the stage
waiting for the spotlight to shine upon me.
But there is always someone else.
A person, a voluptuous woman
who takes the light away from me.
I feel small, unworthy.
Invisible to the naked eye.

I stand there but now one is watching
They see beyond me.
What do they see?
There without light, darkness falls.
I am standing in the middle of the stage in darkness.
Then I smile with pride, confident.
I have seen beyond them
and beyond those who have taken the spotlight away from me.

The world is full of stages.
Here where I stand is mine!
My stage is like no other
My stage is a book
My stage is a sentence
My stage is a page
A blank page and I am the pencil.
Black and white we become one.
There where the page is my stage
no other person or voluptuous woman,
can take the light away from me
For here I rein.
This is my world.
This is my stage!

I proclaim the page my stage.
Every day and every night.
Word by word.

Compliance -- but you may not like it

2005-06-25T14:22:00.000Z

as requested --
a poem based on the line;

"drawn by the vibrations of our hatred"

The pulsing, throbbing drumbeat in my beleaguered soul
Is not in tune with the nat'ral rhythm of earth and moon,
But drawn from insistent pounding of senseless hatred
Into ev'ry heart and mind by those who worship power.

Am I to be a martyr on a funeral pyre
As the fragile structure of our freedom is kindled
By savage vengeance and unreasoned bigotry,
Until naught is left but the embers of forgotten justice?

A last moment’s eternity before a rushing death
Is aspired to be of prayers and impassioned pleas,
For sure release from naïve doubt and peaceful swell of faith,
To guide us forth on rightful wings unto ennobled skies.

But a soul’s divine search does sway before an ego’s claim
Upon a guest for purpose and proud relevance of self.
Is this world enriched somewhat or put to helpless shame
By my tiny thoughts of wisdom never suited for dusty shelf?

Who will stand up to plead for peace, a place I scarcely fill?
Pray do not count my carcass charred among the moving voice
That screams for reasoned vengeance; rhetoric stench of practiced drill
For steeds ready saddled in the field, and knights who do rejoice.

I had thought that to leave no mark was sign of living hell.
Please scratch my name from life's list and dare not cry for me,
Rather than I provide spur or lash to support vengeance's knell
And be held up by false principle as banner for the free.

Grind my life to forgotten dust 'tween stones of greed and power
As freedom is reduced to a whimper, mercy but a thought,
But do not use my humanity as a prop for ego's horror,
Protect me Lord from savagery, this terror we have bought.

papa faucon

Strange Gleanings (from a radio sermon)

2005-06-24T13:28:00.000Z

A radio program I heard last week started me musing about the "Wonders of the World." Not the ancient ones--the pyramids, hanging gardens, we're all familiar with or even the new lists that pop up and include the "found" continents' Grand Canyon, Angel Falls, etc. I'm interested in your personal current wonder.

So, just for this fleeting moment, what has grabbed hold of your imagination and has you in a state of awe or admiration? Is it as emotional and traditional as a baby's smile, or do you have some strange quirky bit of knowledge occupying your time and your brain cells?

My wonder, you ask? I am taken with the power and beauty of script, not fonts, but the symbols we use for written communication: Oriental ideagraphs, the calligraphy of Arabic, alphabets in all their myriad forms, lovely, mysterious, minute bits of ink imprinted onto paper and cloth, lines and forms etched into precious metals, carved in stone, traced in sand only to be consumed by the lapping waves, treasures that can be opened only by those who have the key of knowledge, but that can be enjoyed on a different level by "appreciators". Here are some. Unfortunately I couldn't copy many of the Oriental ones. Go to www.omniglot.com for some beauties. Artists see the absolutely gorgeous glyphs (sigh.)

Посмотрите силу русского алфавита (Russian: Look at the Russian alphabet.)

وقال خامنئي اثناء ادلائه بصوته في احد المراكز الانتخابية في العاصمة طهران:Arabic ( I have no idea.)

Και ητο πασα η γη μιας γλωσσης και μιας φωνης. (Greek—Tower of Babel )

וַיְהִי כָל-הָאָרֶץ, שָׂפָה אֶחָת, וּדְבָרִים, אֲחָדִים.(Hebrew Tower of Babel)

At some point do try to copy and paste Arabic and watch as your comments are added backwards. LOL

For 'believer' -- "Earth Pride" extended

2005-06-24T01:01:00.000Z

RAGE

When they came, there were no monstrous ships, or light displays or churning clouds. No show of strength or attempted contact with those who have assumed control of our world. They just were here! Their appearance was unfamiliar enough that all would know they were not earthly bound -- Terran that is, for all species have an 'earth'. Yet, they were familiar enough that all would know of their humanity, if we speak of a common bond of all sentient things. The Farlin. Actually, they appeared slightly differently to each of us, as part of their communication was ingrained in emotional reflection. One thing was uniquely and universally disturbing. They had no fear, and therefore generated no fear. They were neither friend nor foe -- the terms simply did not apply.

For men, given our history, nothing to fear meant nothing to love either. With neither love nor fear to direct or divert our passions, emotions quickly turned to hatred. That is why the Farlin were here. They did not understand! Of all the creatures in the galaxy's sweep, only Man turned hatred into a religion.

We never knew if they were few or many, as all Farlin looked the same and somehow shared a common memory of events and human interaction. They understood our attempts at communication, regardless of language used. We could understand them also -- sort of. Ideas were exchanged through a combination of emotional flux, shifting body hues and tinkling music. It was a type of telepathy, I guess, but not 'in the mind' as much as 'of the mind'. Nothing obtrusive. Perhaps they could have read my mind if they wished. Beyond effort? Beneath effort? Actually, they had severe limitations. They weren't really here at all!

We came to understand that they laughed at our attempts to construct physical capsules of air and food to bridge the planet pace and the expanding wealth of stars. It was economically impossible! Any expenditures in such folly obviously depleted resources more useful in other ways. Food from the mouths of children? Conquering of disease? Contemplation of God's glory? They never gave guidance. It was clear our choices were a matter of maturity. Time was the essential element that would destroy our vain desires to reach beyond, and out, and new! No useful life should be expended on a century journey in a steel coffin just to satisfy curiosity. Not when an hour of internal contemplation could open worlds of discovery. Not when the mind could be trained to embrace many traces of thought and dream at once. Life is too short. Of course, life has little value to most men -- even their own. If I have nothing important to do, I may as well build a spaceship, no?

The Farlin, and others, had learned to send their intellect across the unfathomable drift of galactic dust. More importantly, only part of their mental effort was expended in the process -- there were more important tasks to attend to. Children had to be coached in how to make the flowers grow. Emotions from thousands of spirits, near and far, had to be blended into symphonies. Each being had to spend an eternity in seeking a balance between the force and attraction of willful control, and the simple blending of will with the pulse of chaos that Guides. The sending out, the mission to another star, was not instantaneous. It had taken about fourteen of Terran years to reach us, drawn by the vibrations of our hatred. Each attending Farlin set part of his (heash?) mind to the effort, perhaps as a type of hobby. They had curiosity too -- it just had nothing to do with control. We were a mirror in which they could observe themselves in a new light, a new passion. They meant to give nothing and take nothing away. For them, man called to man, species to species. It just was!

It has been years since I felt the brush of peaceful emotional caress. They have moved on. New religions have started up to deify their 'second coming'. Old religions have sought to integrate or deny. The Farlin Passing is now relegated to a historic phenomenon, or epiphenomenon, depending on the state of your soul. Soon it will be myth or legend or parable. No one expects them to return. Why bother? If we want more, we will have to learn to 'send out'.
The feverish chase to physically jump the void had lessened a bit, but it is truly driven by monetary greed more that life enhancement. World strife has lessened a bit, fueled by a drop in birth rate more than any lesson of compassion. Hatred, if anything, has increased, though it seems more directed toward emotional posturing than violence. We should be brought together in common bond now that we know that we are not alone -- that 'in God's image' is a matter of mind and spirit, not form. I sense that until we leave this chrysalis of despair behind we will never extend beyond our untrusting thoughts. We clothe our bodies in shame. We cloak our spirits in shame.

Well, we were sent the prophets and oracles and Christ and Mohammed and Buddha and Chief Joseph and Mother Theresa - more. Now the Farlin. Will we ever learn?

It is not really a question?

Nugget or Fools's gold??

2005-06-22T14:06:00.000Z

I have always liked Taylor Caldwell
as a model of writing imagery and
vocabulary usage -- as well as meaningful plots.
My reading now is usually limited to a page a night
before the book falls on my face ...

but here is a line, just found, that could be
a seed for many poems, methinks --

I will attempt one later today.

enjoy, papa
........................................................

"Emma had had a very tragic life,
and therefore seldom seemed sad."

Earth Pride

2005-06-21T01:47:00.000Z

Gleaned from Shiloh,

"T'would be fascinating to see what the future would be like in eight, nine hundred years--if the Earth last(s/ed) that long, to see the answers to my many questions unveiled."

and yet ...

we are not looking to earth, as much as yearning for the stars ..

sad ...

We are daily stroked by messages of man's yearning for discovery on planets and stars so distant that even thought stumbles in passage. Nothing new! With the passing of decades and centuries only the terms have changed and the gathering of alleged 'facts'. New perhaps is the courage (or exposure) of scientists now willing to say, "we are looking for life out there." They are not afraid. I am!

We imagine that we can detect and recognize life should it be found -- out there. Yet we cannot recognize life in our neighbor, or our children, or, heaven forbid, a stranger! Is that flicker of light in Grandma's eye a sign of life, or it that only a concern of the nurse there in the home? Look into the telescope and dream. When did you look into the eyes of a homeless, sexless mass of rags and search for life there? What of your own signs of life? Are you best reflected in a make-up mirror, or TV screen or monitor's glare? Would you recognize life if you saw it? Will these great scientists?

What if this life
-- out there -- does not resemble our hoped for dream? Will we destroy it like we do those of earthly claim with only slight differences? Will we attempt to mold it into our own arrogant image of which we know so little? Will we welcome these strangers into our homes and hearts -- as we do surly now? Ha! If we now rape our children and youth -- what of them -- any 'others'? Do we feed off of life -- are the scientists hungry?

What will we give them -- out there? Perhaps there is in this world a source of peace and charity and -- humanity. Can we export it -- can we even recognize it here, or are we decades away in squabble over what we would even like to be? Those with the power and possible ability to send a message to the stars are of a common bond -- what would they give except what they know? Greed. Terrorism. Character subversion. Technology supremacy.

Fortunately, I won't last long enough to see a destructive blast to man's star based destruction. I hope I live long enough to see an earthy man approach me without fear and say, "hi there -- I am a stranger."

papa
(aka Ken Muller and faucon)

Duende

2005-06-17T10:08:00.000Z

Over recent days, as I have sat, reflecting and meditating during long hours at the hospital, I have had cause to ponder upon Duende, the creative force that propels our creative endeavour and fills our well with droplets of steel in times of need. Now I feel compelled to ask each of you to consider not only the angel and the muse but Duende.

Duende came in search of me once more when Winnie, in a pensive, philosophical mood, asked me how I teach writing. I admitted that I do not really teach writing but I encourage people to put their hands in the loam and experience duende. I encourage people to grope and feel duende for it is only when duende is present that writing becomes authentic.

Read the following article by Frederico Garcia Lorca and talk about your views on the 'life force' that drives creativity, the mead we each seek.

The Duende: Theory and Divertissement
by Frederico Garcia Lorca

Whoever inhabits that bull's hide stretched between the Jucar, the Gaudelete, the Sil or the Pisuerga - no need to mention the streams joining those lion-coloured waves churned up by the Plata - has heard it said with a certain frequency: "Now that has real duende !" It was in this spirit that Manuel Torres, the great artist of the Andalusian people, once remarked to a singer: "You have a voice, you know all the styles, but you'll never bring it off because you have no duende."

In all Andalusia, from the rock of Jaen to the shell of Cádiz, people constantly speak of the duende and find it in everything that springs out of energetic instinct. That marvelous singer, "El Librijano," originator of the Debla, observed, "Whenever I am singing with duende, no one can come up to me"; and one day the old gypsy dancer, "La Malena," exclaimed while listening to Brailowski play a fragment of Bach: "Olé! That has duende !"- and remained bored by Gluck and Brahms and Darius Milhaud. And Manuel Torres, to my mind a man of exemplary blood culture, once uttered this splendid phrase while listening to Falla himself play his "Nocturno del Generalife": "Whatever has black sounds has duende." There is no greater truth.

These black sounds are the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know of, and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art. Black sounds: so said the celebrated Spaniard, thereby concurring with Goethe, who, in effect, defined the duende when he said, speaking of Paganini: "A mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain."

The duende, then, is a power and not a construct, is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist, a true virtuoso, remark, "The duende is not in the throat, the duende comes up from inside, up from the very soles of the feet." That is to say, it is not a question of aptitude, but of a true and viable style - of blood, in other words; of what is oldest in culture: of creation made act.

This "mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain," is, in sum, the earth-force, the same duende that fired the heart of Nietzsche, who sought it in its external forms on the Rialto Bridge, or in the music of Bizet, without ever finding it, or understanding that the duende he pursued had rebounded from the mystery-minded Greeks to the Dancers of Cádiz or the gored, Dionysian cry of Silverio's siguiriya.

So much for the duende; but I would not have you confuse the duende with the theological demon of doubt at whom Luther, on a Bacchic impulse, hurled an inkwell in Nuremberg, or with the Catholic devil, destructive, but short on intelligence, who disguised himself as a bitch to enter the convents, or with the talking monkey that Cervantes' mountebank carried in the comedy about jealousy and the forests of Andalusia.

No. The duende that I speak of, shadowy, palpitating, is a descendant of that benignest demon of Socrates, he of marble and salt, who scratched the master angrily the day he drank the hemlock; and of that melancholy imp of Descartes, little as an unripe almond, who, glutted with circles and lines, went out on the canals to hear the drunken sailors singing.

Any man - any artist, as Nietzsche would say - climbs the stairway in the tower of his perfection at the cost of a struggle with a duende - not with an angel, as some have maintained, or with his muse. This fundamental distinction must be kept in mind if the root of a work of art is to be grasped.

The angel guides and endows, like Saint Raphael, or prohibits and avoids like Saint Michael, or foretells, like Saint Gabriel.

The Angel dazzles; but he flies over men's heads and remains in mid-air, shedding his grace; and the man, without any effort whatever, realizes his work, or his fellow-feeling, or his dance. The angel on the road to Damascus, and he who entered the crevice of the little balcony of Assisi, or that other angel who followed in the footsteps of Heinrich Suso, commanded - and there was no resisting his radiance, for he waved his wings of steel in an atmosphere of predestination.

The Muse dictates and, in certain cases, prompts. There is relatively little she can do, for she keeps aloof and is so full of lassitude (I have seen her twice) that I myself have had to put half a heart of marble in her. The Poets of the Muse hear voices and do not know where they come from; but surely they are from the Muse, who encourages and at times devours them entirely. Such, for example, was the case of Apollinaire, that great poet ravaged by the horrible Muse with whom the divinely angelic Rousseau painted him. The Muse arouses the intellect, bearing landscapes of columns and the false taste of laurel; but intellect is oftentimes the foe of poetry because it imitates too much, it elevates the poet to a throne of acute angles and makes him forget that in time the ants can devour him, too, or that a great arsenical locust can fall on his head, against which the Muses who live inside monocles or the lukewarm lacquer roses of insignificant salons, are helpless.

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

And repel the Angel, too - kick out the Muse and conquer his awe of the fragrance of violets that breathe from the poetry of the eighteenth century, or of the great telescope in whose lenses the Muse dozes off, sick of limits.

The true struggle is with the Duende.

The paths leading to God are well known, from the barbaric way of the hermit, to the subtler modes of the mystic. With a tower, then, like Saint Theresa, or with three roads, like St. John of the Cross. And even if we must cry out in Isaiah's voice: "Truly, thou art the hidden God!" at the end at last, God sends to each seeker his first fiery thorns.

To seek out the Duende, however, neither map nor discipline is required. Enough to know that he kindles the blood like an irritant, that he exhausts, that he repulses, all the bland, geometrical assurances, that he smashes the styles; that he makes of a Goya, master of the grays, the silvers, the roses of the great English painters, a man painting with his knees and his fists in bituminous blacks; that he bares a Mosen Cinto Verdaguer to the cold of the Pyrenees or induces a Jorge Manrique to sweat out his death on the crags of Ocaña, or invests the delicate body of Rimbaud in the green domino of the saltimbanque, or fixes the dead fish-eyes on the Comte de Lautréamont in the early hours of the boulevard.

The great artists of southern Spain, both gypsies and flamenco, whether singing or dancing or playing their instruments, know that no emotion is possible without the mediation of the Duende. They may hoodwink the people, they may give the illusion of duende without really having it, just as writers and painters and literary fashion-mongers without duende cheat you daily; but it needs only a little care and the will to resist one's own indifference, to discover the imposture and put it and its crude artifice to flight.

Once the Andalusian singer, Pastora Pavon, "The Girl with the Combs," a sombre Hispanic genius whose capacity for fantasy equals Goya's or Raphael el Gallo's, was singing in a little tavern in Cádiz. She sparred with her voice - now shadowy, now like molten tin, now covered with moss; she tangled her voice in her long hair or drenched it in sherry or lost it in the darkest and furthermost bramble bushes. But nothing happened - useless, all of it! The hearers remained silent.

There stood Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman turtle, who was asked once why he never worked, and replied with a smile worthy of Argantonio: "How am I to work if I come from Cádiz?"

There, too, stood Héloise, the fiery aristocrat, whore of Seville, direct descendant of Soledad Vargas, who in the thirties refused to marry a Rothschild because he was not of equal blood. There were the Floridas, whom some people call butchers, but who are really millennial priests sacrificing bulls constantly to Geryon; and in a corner stood that imposing breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murabe, with the air of a Cretan mask. Pastora Pavon finished singing in the midst of total silence. There was only a little man, one of those dancing mannikins who leap suddenly out of brandy bottles, who observed sarcastically in a very low voice: "Viva Paris!" As if to say: We are not interested in aptitude or techniques or virtuosity here. We are interested in something else.

Then the "Girl with the Combs" got up like a woman possessed, her face blasted like a medieval weeper, tossed off a great glass of Cazalla at a single draught, like a potion of fire, and settled down to singing - without a voice, without breath, without nuance, throat aflame - but with duende ! She had contrived to annihilate all that was nonessential in song and make way for an angry and incandescent Duende, friend of sand-laden winds, so that everyone listening tore at his clothing almost in the same rhythm with which the West Indian negroes in their rites rend away their clothes, huddled in heaps before the image of Saint Barbara.

The "Girl with the Combs" had to mangle her voice because she knew there were discriminating folk about who asked not for form, but for the marrow of form - pure music spare enough to keep itself in the air. She had to deny her faculties and her security; that is to say, to turn out her Muse and keep vulnerable, so that her Duende might come and vouchsafe the hand-to-hand struggle. And then how she sang! Her voice feinted no longer; it jetted up like blood, ennobled by sorrow and sincerity, it opened up like ten fingers of a hand around the nailed feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni - tempestuous!

The arrival of the Duende always presupposes a radical change in all the forms as they existed on the old plane. It gives a sense of refreshment unknown until then, together with that quality of the just-opening rose, of the miraculous, which comes and instils an almost religious transport.

In all Arabian music, in the dances, songs, elegies of Arabia, the coming of the Duende is greeted by fervent outcries of Allah! Allah! God! God!, so close to the Olé" Olé! of our bull rings that who is to say they are not actually the same; and in all the songs of southern Spain the appearance of the Duende is followed by heartfelt exclamations of God alive! - profound, human tender, the cry of communion with God through the medium of the five senses and the grace of the Duende that stirs the voice and the body of the dancer - a flight from this world, both real and poetic, pure as Pedro de Roja's over the seven gardens (that most curious poet of the seventeenth century), or Juan Calimacho's on the tremulous ladder of tears.

Naturally, when flight is achieved, all feel its effects: the initiate coming to see at last how style triumphs over inferior matter, and the unenlightened, through the I-don't-know-what of an authentic emotion. Some years ago, in a dancing contest at Jerez de la Frontera, an old lady of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, carried off the prize merely by the act of raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping the little platform with a blow of her feet; but in the conclave of muses and angels foregathered there - beauties of form and beauties of smile - the dying duende triumphed as it had to, trailing the rusted knife blades of its wings along the ground.

All the arts are capable of duende, but it naturally achieves its widest play in the fields of music, dance and the spoken poem, since those require a living presence to interpret them, because they are forms which grow and decline perpetually and raise their contours on the precise present.

Often the Duende of the musician passes over into the Duende of the interpreter, and at other times, when the musician and poet are not matched, the Duende of the interpreter - this is interesting - creates a new marvel that retains the appearance - and the appearance only - of the originating form. Such was the case with the duende-ridden Duse who deliberately sought out failures in order to turn them into triumphs, thanks to her capacity for invention; or with Paganini who, as Goethe explained, could make one hear profoundest melody in out-and-out vulgarity; or with a delectable young lady from the port of Santa María whom I saw singing and dancing the horrendous Italian ditty, "O Marie!" with such rhythms, such pauses, and such conviction that she transformed an Italian geegaw into a hard serpent of raised gold. What happened, in effect, was that each in his own way found something new, something never before encountered, which put lifeblood and art into bodies void of expression.

In every country, death comes as a finality. It comes, and the curtain comes down. But not in Spain! In Spain the curtain goes up. Many people live out their lives between walls until the day they die and are brought out into the sun. In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country of the world: their profile wounds like the edge of a barbers razor. The quip about death and the silent contemplation of it are familiar to the Spanish. From the "Dream of the Skulls" of Quevedo, to the "Putrescent Bishop" of Valdés Leal; from La Marbella of the seventeenth century who, dying in childbirth on the highway, says:

The blood of my entrails
Covers the horse.
And the horse's hooves
Strike fire from the pitch

to a recent young man from Salamanca, killed by a bull who exclaimed:

My friends, I am dying.
My friends, it goes badly.
I've three handkerchiefs inside me,
And this I apply now makes four.

there is a balustrade of flowering nitre where hordes peer out, contemplating death, with verses from Jeremiah for the grimmer side or sweet-smelling cypress for the more lyrical - but in any case, a country where all that is most important has its final metallic valuation in death.

The knife and the cart wheel and the razor and the singing beard-points of the shepherds, the shorn moon and the fly, the damp lockers, the ruins and the lace-covered saints, the quicklime and the cutting line of eaves and balconies: in Spain, all bear little grass-blades of death, allusions and voices perceptible to the spiritually alert, that call to our memory with the corpse-cold air of our own passing. It is no accident that all Spanish art is bound to our soil, so full of thistles and definitive stone; the lamentations of Pleberio or the dances of the master Josef Maria de Valdivielso are not isolated instances, nor is it by chance that from all the balladry of Europe the Spanish inamorata disengages herself in this fashion:

"If you are my fine friend,
Tell me - why won't you look at me?"
"The eyes with which I look at you
I gave up to the shadow."
"If you are my fine friend
Tell me - why don't you kiss me?"
"The lips with which I kissed you
I gave up to the clay."
"If you are my fine friend
Tell me - why won't you embrace me?"
"The arms that embrace you
I have covered up with worms."

Nor is it strange to find that in the dawn of our lyricism, the following note is sounded:

Inside the garden
I shall surely die.
Inside the rosebush
They will kill me.
Mother, Mother,
I went out
Gathering roses,
But surely death will find me
In the Garden.
Mother, Mother,
I went out
Cutting roses,
But surely death will find me
In the rosebush.
Inside the garden
I shall surely die.
In the rosebush
They will kill me.

Those heads frozen by the moon that Zurbarán painted, the butter-yellows and the lightening-yellows of El Greco, the narrative of Father Sigüenza, all the work of Goya, the presbytery of the Church of the Escorial, all polychrome sculpture, the crypt of the ducal house of Osuna, the death with the guitar in the chapel of the Benavente in Medina de Río Seco - all equal, on the plane of cultivated art, the pilgrimages of San Andrés de Teixido where the dead have their place in the procession; they are one with the songs for the dead that the women of Asturias intone with flame-filled lamps in the November night, one with the song and dance of the Sibyl in the cathedrals of Mallorca and Toledo, with the obscure "In Recort" of Tortosa, and the innumerable rites of Good Friday that, with the arcane fiesta of the Bulls, epitomize the popular triumph of Spanish death. In all the world, Mexico alone can go hand-in-hand with my country.

When the Muse sees death on the way, she closes the door, or raises a plinth, or promenades an urn and inscribes an epitaph with a waxen hand, but in time she tears down her laurels again in a silence that wavers between two breezes. Under the truncated arch of the Ode, she joins with funereal meaning the exact flowers that the Italians of the fifteenth century depicted, with the identical cock of Lucretius, to frighten off an unforeseen darkness.

When the Angel sees death on the way, he flies in slow circles and weaves with tears of narcissus and ice the elegy we see trembling in the hands of Keats and Villasandino and Herrera and Becquer and Juan Ramón Jiménez. But imagine the terror of the Angel, should it feel a spider - even the tiniest - on its tender and roseate flesh!

The Duende, on the other hand, will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death, if he is not convinced he will circle death's house, if there is not every assurance he can rustle the branches borne aloft by us all, that neither have, nor may ever have, the power to console.

With idea, with sound, or with gesture, the Duende chooses the brim of the well for his open struggle with the creator. Angel and Muse escape in the violin or in musical measure, but the Duende draws blood, and in the healing of the wound that never quite closes, all that is unprecedented and invented in a man's work has its origin.

The magical virtue of poetry lies in the fact that it is always empowered with duende to baptize in dark water all those who behold it, because with duende, loving and understanding are simpler, there is always the certainty of being loved and being understood; and this struggle for expression and for the communication of expression acquires at times, in poetry, finite characters.

Recall the case of that paragon of the flamenco and daemonic way, Saint Teresa - flamenca not for her prowess in stopping an angry bull with three significant passes - though she did so - nor for her presumption in esteeming herself beautiful in the presence of Fray Juan de Miseria, nor for slapping the face of a papal nuncio; but rather for the simple circumstance that she was one of the rare ones whose Duende (not her Angel - the Angels never attack) pierced her with an arrow, hoping thereby to destroy her for having deprived him of his ultimate secret: the subtle bridge that links the five senses with the very center, the living flesh, living cloud, living sea, of Love emancipated from Time.

Most redoubtable conqueress of the Duende - and how utterly unlike the case of Philip of Austria who, longing to discover the Muse and the Angel in theology, found himself imprisoned by the Duende of cold ardors in that masterwork of the Escorial, where geometry abuts with a dream and the Duende wears the mask of the Muse for the eternal chastisement of the great king.

We have said that the Duende loves ledges and wounds, that he enters only those areas where form dissolves in a passion transcending any of its visible expressions.

In Spain (as in all Oriental countries where dance is a form of religious expression) the Duende has unlimited play in the bodies of the dancers of Cádiz, eulogized by Martial, in the breasts of the singers, eulogized by Juvenal, and in all the liturgy of the bulls - that authentic religious drama where, in the manner of the Mass, adoration and sacrifice are rendered a God.

It would seem that all the duende of the classical world is crowded into this matchless festival, epitomizing the culture and the noble sensibility of a people who discover in man his greatest rages, his greatest melancholies, his greatest lamentations. No one, I think, is amused by the dances or the bulls in Spain; the Duende has taken it on himself to make them suffer through the medium of drama, in living forms, and prepares the ladders for flight from encompassing reality.

The Duende works on the body of the dancer like the wind works on sand. With magical force, it converts a young girl into a lunar paralytic; or fills with adolescent blushes a ragged old man begging handouts in the wineshops; or suddenly discovers the smell of nocturnal ports in a head of hair, and moment for moment, works on the arms with an expressiveness which is the mother of the dance of all ages.

But it is impossible for him ever to repeat himself - this is interesting and must be underscored. The Duende never repeats himself, any more than the forms of the sea repeat themselves in a storm.

In the bullfight, the Duende achieves his most impressive advantage, for he must fight then with death who can destroy him, on one hand, and with geometry, with measure, the fundamental basis of the bullfight, on the other.

The Bull has his orbit, and the bullfighter has his, and between orbit and orbit is the point of risk where falls the vertex of the terrible byplay.

It is possible to hold a Muse with a muletta and an Angel with banderillas, and pass for a good bullfighter; but for the faena de capa, with the bull still unscarred by a wound, the help of the Duende is necessary at the moment of the kill, to drive home the blow of artistic truth.

The bullfighter who moves the public to terror in the plaza by his audacity does not fight the bull - that would be ludicrous in such a case - but, within the reach of each man, puts his life at stake; on the contrary, the fighter bitten by the Duende gives a lesson in Pythagorian music and induces all to forget how he constantly hurls his heart against the horns.

Lagartigo with his Roman duende, Joselito with his Jewish duende, Belmonte with his baroque duende, and Cagancho with his gypsy duende, from the twilight of the ring, teach poets, painters, and musicians four great ways of the Spanish tradition.

Spain is the only country where death is the national spectacle, where death blows long fanfares at the coming of each Spring, and its art is always governed by a shrewd duende that has given it its distinctive character and its quality of invention.

The Duende that, for the first time in sculpture, fills the cheeks of the saints of the master Mateo de Compostela with blood, is the same spirit that evokes the lamentations of St. John of the Cross or burns naked nymphs on the religious sonnets of Lope.

The Duende who raises the tower of Sahagun or tesselates hot brick in Calatayud or Teruel, is the same spirit that breaks open the clouds of El Greco and sends the constables of Quevedo and the chimaeras of Goya sprawling with a kick.

When it rains, he secretly brings out a duende-minded Velasquez, behind his monarchical grays; when it snows he sends Herrera out naked to prove that cold need not kill; when it burns, he casts Berruguette into the flames and lets him invent a new space for sculpture.

The music of Góngora and the Angel of Garcilaso must yield up the laurel wreath when the Duende of St. John of the Cross passes by, when

The wounded stag
peers over the hill.

The Muse of Góngora de Berceo and the Angel of the Archpriest of Hita must give way to the approaching Jorge Manrique when he comes, wounded to death, to the gates of the Castle of Belmonte. The Muse of Gregorio Hernandez and the Angel of José de Mora must retire, so that the Duende weeping blood-tears of Mena, and the Duende of Matinez Montañes with a head like an Assyrian bull's, may pass over, just as the melancholy Muse of Cataluña and the humid Angel of Galicia must watch, with loving terror, the Duende of Castile, far from the hot bread and the cow grazing mildly among forms of swept sky and parched earth.

The Duende of Quevedo and the Duende of Cervantes, one bearing phosphorescent green anemones and the other the plaster flowers of Ruidera, crown the alter-piece of the Duende of Spain.

Each art has, by nature, its distinctive Duende of style and form, but all roots join at the point where the black sounds of Manuel Torres issue forth - the ultimate stuff and the common basis, uncontrollable and tremulous, of wood and sound and canvas and word.

Black sounds: behind which there abide, in tenderest intimacy, the volcanoes, the ants, the zephyrs, and the enormous night straining its waist against the Milky Way.

Ladies and gentlemen: I have raised three arches, and with clumsy hand I have placed in them the Muse, the Angel and the Duende.

The Muse keeps silent; she may wear the tunic of little folds, or great cow-eyes gazing towards Pompeii, or the monstrous, four-featured nose with which her great painter, Picasso, has painted her. The Angel may be stirring the hair of Antonello da Messina, the tunic of Lippi, and the violin of Masolino or Rousseau.

But the Duende - where is the Duende ? Through the empty arch enters a mental air blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unfamiliar accents; an air bearing the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things.

Lorca 1930

The Truth About Me

2005-06-08T04:34:00.000Z

I've not intentionally ignored the Alluvial Mine, but as I've not successfully completed an exercise or two for it in quite awhile, I feel like I have been. Two or three pieces are in various stages of completion, but are coming along slowly. I guess the nuggets I initially saw in each piece are more stubborn than I thought and require more effort and more inventive ways to extract them. They will be extracted, but it may take more time. In the meantime I returned to the surface in temporary defeat. But every so often I've gone back in with my miner's digs and gear and tried freeing the nuggets I glimpsed a few months ago. Still no such luck with the big ones. But, unexpectedly, this nugget below and another one a few days later, though smaller than I what was hoping to get free, broke off. In my single-mindedness to work free the bigger nuggets, I didn't notice these at first at my knees.

I dunno why, but I feel like doing another prompt from Daydreaming on Paper. I've been doing several of them lately, I know.

This is the truth about me:
I'm happier. I'm to the point where, most of the time, I can honestly say I like who I am. I can be better, I readily admit, but, even with all my faults, I like whom I'm becoming. I have a long way to go yet, but at least I'm feeling more positive about myself and am moving in the direction where I know true happiness lies for me.

This isn't to say life has gotten easier or better for me or for my family, because it hasn't. We're still plugging along like everyone else, still trying to work through a hard family situation that has left my youngest sister heartbroken, depressed, paranoid and withdrawn emotionally two years after the traumatic event. It's only now that the signs of the damage and hurt she's felt and is feeling have come to the forefront. The past several months here at home have been tense and uneasy, but thank goodness, we are seeing a glimmer of a silver lining finally.

I'm a good person, most of the time kind and compassionate; a softie whose marshmallow heart is almost too tenderhearted. I tend to tear up or cry at the least degree of moving or heartwarming stimulus. (Which is the main reason why I try to or tend to avoid tear-jerkers or movies with sad parts in them as often as I can. Which is why I have yet to sit down or even felt like watching Finding Neverland with Mom...even though it has Johnny Depp in it. I know I'll boo-hoo through it.) Really embarrassing, it is and I wish the waterworks weren't so easy to turn on.

I once said I'm fairly open-minded. More open-minded than many I know. I honestly believed this too. But my experience with Heather in the last months of our dying friendship taught me differently. I'm not nearly as open-minded as I thought I was. I have a stronger sense of what I feel, what I know to be right or wrong or in the gray than I thought, and I cannot comfortably put myself in situations where I'm rationalizing it's ok this time or compromising my standards for the sake of keeping the peace. I just can't. However, that doesn't mean I'm narrow-minded to the point of inflexibility either. I'm still open-minded; I'm just more discerning and aware of it now.

I'm a contradiction. I like breaking out of the mold, trying to think outside the box. While others are 'X,' I like being 'Y.' Even so, on occasion I'll catch myself slipping into Mode X, doing so to be like them, to be cool and to please whomever I'm around. When I do this, I find myself less than pleased or discontent; and I know this is because I'm not being true to myself. It's a habit I need and am trying to break. I also like things orderly and neat or put into categories. Yet, my room looks cluttered and well-lived in. My desk always ends up in disarray, as it is now. That's another habit I need to break.

I'm bossy. I'm concerned. I'm a nurturer. I'm a mother hen. I care about animals; I care about people and their welfare. I care about keeping them safe and keeping the harmony around us intact. Regarding my younger brother and sisters still living here and any of their friends who come over, I know the rules. In my eyes most of the rules set forth by our parents are good and fair and necessary. I don't mean to be bossy, I just don't want them (my siblings) to be ragged at by our parents; it's not pleasant for either party, or for myself, an involuntary witness and fellow sufferer of the unease which seeps into our home environment. But, of course, this is a third habit I need to break, because I realize their bending or pushing the rules to their limits or the outright breaking of them is not my problem. They (the kids) can't learn anything if they don't make mistakes.

I can be a motormouth. I have the nervous habit or defense mechanism of talking to someone to fill the void if I feel the silence is an uncomfortable one. I hate it and yes, this is definitely one habit I would love to conquer. I feel like people should tell me to shut up, but they are too polite or too lenient with me to do so.

I'm stubborn. I'm tenacious. I'm a thinker. I can be ingenious. And I'm optimistic. I have to be. These qualities are what get me through (them and Heavenly Father's help, that is) the hard times that come upon me due to my disability. I've realized this recently, and I have a lot to be grateful for. The degree of my disability is worse than some, but better than others. Still, if I'd have let it a long time ago dictate how I respond to and view the world and the trials my disability brings, I would have been a miserable, cantankerous ol' soul who delighteth in making others around me as miserable as yours truly would've been.

They even add to my sense of humor. A few nights ago Jon was dead tired when he put me to bed. He left my overhead light on. All night long. I called out to him three or four times, but he either was so far gone he didn't hear me or was already upstairs when I tried catching him. Thankfully, under the surface irritation I was amused. I was exhausted in my own right, and half the time when I get that way, I'm as onery as a mother bear watching out for her cubs. And in a situation like that, where one is unable to get out of bed by oneself, walk over to the doorway by which the light switch is and flick it downward, it pays to be able to laugh. Because if one can't, all that's left is crying and cursing.

I'm a bridger. Let me explain. I'm old enough to be of the Old School when it comes to values and standards and such, but I'm enough of today's generation that I want instant gratification. I want what I want when I want it and it's usually NOW! Today's generation doesn't want to wait, and some of it doesn't even want to work for what it wants.

And lastly, but by no means have I plumbed the deepest fathoms of my soul here today, *mysterious smile* I am curious. I like to be in the know; I like knowing what people are talking about or what the heck they are laughing at. Though in recent months, I've discovered it may not always pay to have my curiosity satisfied. I learned more peace might be gained if I let other people's problems be their problems and not mine as well. Why borrow trouble? Being blissfully in the dark about some things can actually be better and healthier for my frame of mind. So, I started trying to tune out what I consider is none of my business.

Though, when living with more than two people it's not always easy to escape seeing or overhearing what goes on. In some cases I would love to, but I can't always do so. Because I'm the only one home during the day a lot--big surprise there--I've been given the nickname, by both Dad and Kami, "the wall who has ears." Flattering, eh? The premise is that I know most everything that goes on here, so therefore I'm the source to come to if somebody wants to know something somebody else did, said or what have you.

Thank you very much, I've always wanted to be thought of as an inanimate structure.

This is the truth, and I've barely scratched the surface. I'm happier. I can be better. I'm more positive. I'm a good person, kind and compassionate, a softie. I'm more discerning. I'm a wheeling contradiction. I'm bossy. I'm concerned. I'm a nurturer. I'm a mother hen. I can run off at the mouth, wishing somebody for the sweet love of Heaven, would stop me. I'm stubborn. I'm tenacious. I'm a thinker. I can be ingenious. I'm grateful and optimistic. I'm a bridger in my own generation. I want what I want when I want it and I want it NOW, thank you. And I'm curious, but am learning to curb it. I'm flawed and I love it, with several obvious bad habits that will take time to change. I'm a woman. I'm human. I'm me; I am Shiloh.

Future Earth

2005-06-08T00:17:00.000Z

This is yesterday's journal entry. I knew Gwen would get a kick out of it, so I showed it to her, and she suggested I post it as a possible writing challenge. I remembered Barbara suggesting Gleanings, so I'm posting it here. Please enjoy and please do take up the writing challenge presented in the many questions I posed.

A random thought ocurred to me yesterday--I find this happening a lot more, or it could be I'm just following up on these piques of harmless curiosity more often. Whatever the case, I found myself thinking and wondering from a literary and historical point-of-view: If the Earth had several more centuries to reveal yet, what would future generations have to say about us? What would they consider to be classics, timeless and of the same magnitude as we find The Illiad and The Odyssey to be today?
What events or people from the 20th and 21st Centuries would be thought of or revered as legends and myths come their time?

Though Egypt, Mongolia, Greece, Iraq (Persia), England, Italy and many more countries have stood the test of Time and are powers of the modern world, they're not the same as they were thousands of years ago. The Ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Romans, Ancient and Classical Greeks, Ghengis Khan and his Empire, the Saxons, Mayans and Aztecs--all were proud, intelligent civilizations with distinct and different cultures. But in the end they all...collapsed. Or were absorbed into the conquering, rising cultures that followed their falls. What new countries and cultures will have come about by their time? What countries and cultures will still be around, but changed yet again? What countries and cultures will no longer be on the modern map or be a way of life? What will civilizations be like then?

Aaahhheemmm. Yeah, my mind was really going to town with this train of thought. But after searching for a Greek/Roman myth to add here, I got to wondering. History, myths and legends are fascinating--at least to me--and I got to thinking about how we marvel and admire civilizations past. And I couldn't help but wonder. T'would be fascinating to see what the future would be like in eight, nine hundred years--if the Earth last(s/ed) that long, to see the answers to my many questions unveiled.

Another thought similar to this vein of deep thinking came to me some weeks previous, but until now I've not pursued it. I can't remember exactly what sparked it, but I got to thinking about discoveries and explorations and the many animals (some now extinct, sadly) found on such excursions. As I stated before, there are myriad species of animals and plants on this Earth with us. Who's to say they're all discovered? Wouldn't it be exciting, I asked myself, if they really found the Loch Ness Monster? Surely not all species of animals [or plants] are discovered?

Scientists would definitely have a field day if ol' Nessie was, indeed, discovered. Personally, I have no doubt she may actually exist. The seas and oceans are many fathoms deep and there's no telling what secrets they have yet to reveal. So who knows what unknown creatures reside in the deepest waters? And besides, if I remember right, sharks and crocodiles are prehistoric creatures that have survived millennia, so why not an aquatic dinosaur (a plesiosaur)?

And going a lil further to tie this altogether, what species of plants and animals would be extinct or endangered eight, nine hundred years from now?

GLEANING

2005-05-30T12:49:00.000Z

Seed Lines: By Maya (Featherstone woman)
At Cherita Fitzgerald
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Fitz #1 continued

“Caught in the breath of night.....”
“Join me, if you dare to dream.”

I am always caught in the breath of night. The process in which a normal body is awake for sixteen hours and asleep for eight seems to mean less than nothing to my body, which obviously doesn’t count itself as normal. I’ve always had rhythm, but I am currently fresh out of the ‘circadian’ variety. The normal human brain contains a type of "pacemaker" called the suprachiasmatic nuclei which regulates the firing of nerve cells that set the bodies circadian rhythms. I evidently have a broken suprachiasmatic nuclei. Possibly my nerve cells are pacificist. They certainly are not firing. No matter how you construe the metaphor, something is broken. I don’t seem to be able to get a cast for it, find a clock-maker to mend the springs or discover the right kind of glue that will repair it. None of the ancient remedies, old wives tales, modern medications, approaches, techniques, systems or methods have been able to unspasmatic my suprachied nuclei.

Caught in the breath of night, I drift. Sometimes, I drift like a tumbleweed on the dry prairie air, rolling here and there in an aimless, random way, squashing up against things only to lie there until a stronger wind comes and rolls me on again. Sometimes I float like a feather, falling in drifting patterns through endless ebony; weightless and unconcerned, never touching anything but darkness. Sometimes I fall like a stone; fast and hard, spinning and shredding through razors of stars.

Awake, out of rhythm, caught on the breath of night, strangely, incongruously; I dream. Not the dreams of sleep, that rich, kaleidoscopic ride into the subconscious, but certainly not day-dreams either; for, of course, it is not day. The waking dreams of the night are very different than day-dreams; less regulated, less patterned, less predictable.

I find the usage of the word ‘dreams’ fascinating. When someone asks ‘what are your dreams?’ they are very rarely asking to hear about the surrealistic paintings your psyche produced last night. They usually mean ‘what are your aspirations? What are your hopes?’ There is a chance they might even be asking ‘what are your longings? What are your yearnings?’ If we took everything a step further than anyone ever takes it, we might conceivably be asking each other, ‘what are your fantasies? Your reveries? What are your inventions? Your creations? Your inspirations? What is your mythology? What are your rainbows?”

Caught on the breath of night, I spread my words out around me like glistening glass beads and in the long hours of darkness, I string dreams. I thread them onto the clear filament of my thoughts; onto ribbons woven of idea, image and concept; onto the thin, glinting wire of vision. When they are strung, some of these shining strands turn out to mirror my aspirations and my hopes. Some strands, slightly translucent, echo my longings and desires. Then there are those gossamer strands that are created of cloud, airy and ethereal, stung directly onto my veins . . . here are reflected my exhilarations, my elations, my rainbows, my myths, my fire. Shimmering and scintillating, these lacings of alabaster ice become poems. Poems about dreams.

I find all of the dreams intriguing, partially because they are not what one would expect them to be. They are not what I expected them to be. Some of them are so small and so simple that I am shocked. I still want to write “The Great American Novel” and I wouldn’t argue with it being wildly successful. However, the sound consummation of a poem of integrity is of much greater importance now. When they were babies, I sometimes dreamed of my children being wildly successful, flowing over with achievements, living cornucopias of fantastic accomplishments. I smile at this now, knowing that my greatest joy comes simply from their being happy. I count among my favorite things the Debate Team that gives my son self confidence, the job that fires my eldest daughter’s mind, the boy that puts the sunshine in my youngest daughter’s voice.

My longings and yearnings have changed so much that the girl I used to be wouldn’t recognize them. I wouldn’t turn it down if someone wanted to give me a million dollar mansion, but what I’d really like is for someone to help me clean my office. I still want to travel, but the exotic, glamorous places I used to dream of have faded into softer images.

For the last couple of weeks, I have been completely transfixed with an idea, sort of nailed to the wall with the sharp star of a specific dream. When Anna Chinappi first joined our groups, I went to visit her web site, as I always do with new members. To see what someone is doing on their own site helps to get to know them and understand better who they are. I was quite interested in the Amherst Writers and Artists Method and Anna explained it to me in a little more in depth.

I kept going back to her site for some reason, however, reading what I had already read. As I read it over again and again, certain words waltzed away from the others and lined themself up, creating an almost-poem that felt full of strange import . . . a yearning, dreaming feeling that was brushed about with something enchanted.

The Guided Pen CREATIVE Writing Workshops Led by Anna Chinappi. Writing Workshop and RETREAT Guidelines. In Anna's writing CIRCLES, beginning and experienced writers will find a SUPPORTIVE and ENCOURAGING ENVIRONMENT to CREATE from their DEEPEST SELVEs. ALL YOU NEED IS PEN, PENCILS, NOTEBOOKS. SLIPPERS, SOCKS, COMFORTABLE clothing and walking shoes for daylong retreats are highly recommended. Weekly writing workshops the center for PEACEful Living, inc. Day-long writing retreats at LADYWOODS game preserve.

Retreat
Creative circles

Encouraging environment
Supportive selves

Pen, pencils, notebooks
Slippers, socks
Comfortable
Deep

Peace . . .
Ladywoods
Retreat

Deep . . .
Deep
Peace

There was definitely a theme going on in my head. It seemed to have much to do with the word, ‘retreat.’

Definitions of retreat:

* noun: a place of privacy; a place affording peace and quiet
* noun: withdrawal for prayer and study and meditation
* noun: a area where you can be alone

But Anna is not necessarily talking about prayer or just study and meditation. She is talking about writing. Ah. That is the delicious feeling of “All you need is a pen, pencils, notebooks. Slippers. socks. Comfortable clothing.” So basic. So beautiful. She is not talking about being alone, but about writing with other people . . . and there are the words: circles, encouraging, supportive. LadyWoods . . . this word whispers to me of myth and legend. Creative. Well, that is my own word, it always has been.

When I thought about it, and distilled it all, the yearning and enchantment that I was feeling could be brought down to two words: Writing. Retreat.

And then, reading through the Guided Pen site, I added a third word. Italy.

“It is fate. But you can call it Italy if it pleases you, Vicar.”
(From ‘A Room With a View.’)

International writing retreats. Cortona, Italy (Tuscany)
Sept. 24 to Oct. 1, 2005.

Writing. Retreat. Italy.

I haven’t gotten completely lost here . . . this does all have to do with dreams. You see, I told Anna that I couldn’t think of anything I would rather do than go with her on this Writing Retreat to Italy. I was half shocked when I thought it through some more and realized that I was absolutely, undeniably serious. I really couldn’t think of anything I would rather do. Anything. Not a string of romantic nights in Paris, nor roller skating down the Great Wall of China; not dancing under the full moon at the Acropolis or waltzing in the Vienna Woods; not experiencing the Great Pyramids of Giza, Karnak, Luxor, the Temple of Hatshepsut, the Valley of the Kings, nor Boating on the Nile in a boat with perfumed sails; not drinking rum in the white Carribean sand or sipping Dom Perignon in a hot tub in St. Moritz; not Running With The Bulls in Pamplona nor running the rapids on the Amazon. I really couldn’t think of anything I would rather do. I, truthfully, found this strange and a little unsettling.

Then I read Maya’s beautiful poem and was arrested by two lines. Both of them kept coming back to whisper to me. “Caught in the breath of night”, and “Join me if you dare to dream.”

Maya’s words brought me a deep sense of peace. Deep. Peace. The last two words from the almost-poem that had waltzed itself into being. I felt a deep sense of peace because I realized I do still dare to dream. My dreams have changed, they are different than they once were, but they are still strong and full of power. They have never stopped flowing or ceased to fly.

I am probably not going to make it to Cortona, Italy in September of 2005. But I can imagine it. I can envision it. I still dare to dream it.

I will continue to ride that ship of dreams, a hope-enchanted-vessel woven of fantasy, moondust and starshimmer; sea-worthy, spellbound and sailing . . . caught in the breath of night.

©Edwina Peterson Cross
May 30, 2005

Gleaning Image

2005-05-29T11:17:00.000Z

"You don't even know what is swarming in your own insides" Winnie Cross - Desert Dreams -Weird Tales From Deadwood Hall May 27 2005

Gleaning Images

2005-05-28T04:38:00.000Z

The Croatan Treasury by Heather Blakey

I have never been known for my 'sketching abilities'. This is a skill had been well and truly hidden under my apron. A number of patrons have shared terrible experiences about people making scathing comments about their art. One story that is etched into my memory is from the person whose mother destroyed here Art Work because it was not appropriate

Well no one even bothered to be scathing about mine. I was deemed useless in this department so I have never attempted to express myself with a pencil or paint for that matter. My husband, Darryl in contrast is quite the artist and has drawn from time to time. About fifteen years ago when we were on holidays he was sketching and I had a mad burst and sketched people. Suddenly I realised that I could actually create something that resembled something, so long as I had something to guide me. But I never bothered to go on with it and have not sketched since.

Anita Marie Moscoso's stories have fascinated me mainly because I have never taken any interest in the twilight zone and horror. Then recently she sent me her story 'Going to Croatan' and I was intrigued by her idea and said that I could see what was happening and that I had a desire to sketch. When she pleaded with me to do a sketch I thought 'right'! Now I have gone and opened my mouth far too wide.

So I checked out the internet and found various images that matched what she was saying. I did feel rather ghoulish when I put corpses into the search engine but sure enough - up came some corpses. I pulled up odd images of doors and rooms and ghoulish votives and other weird stuff and then propped myself up in bed with my sharpened grey lead and eraser and well, what you see is the completed sketches, based on stuff she had written.

Darryl of course sees these images and thinks I have lost it completely. He sees Amazon parcels arriving with books like Dead Men Do Tell Tales and Ship Fever and my references about poisons and alchemy and shakes his head and looks disturbed. Interestingly enough it does not really disturb him too much and I half suspect he thinks it is all a bit intriguing.

It took some courage for me to actually put those images on the blog and I felt weird when Anita said her husband and family liked them, but it took even more courage to 'really' show them to anyone.

I should have known that the folks at Soul Food would be supportive.

Going to Croatan - The First Part of the Journey
by Anita Marie Moscosso
Illustrations by Heather Blakey

Years ago, before they walked into oblivion someone turned back and left this message carved on a tree, " gone to Croatan ".

Now it's my turn, tonight I'm going to Croatan; I'm going to Croatan to avenge my own murder.

My name Is Livia Cotard and once I owned a little bookshop at the Marina on the Duwamish Bay.

Duwamish Bay by Heather Blakey

In the front of my shop you would find books sought after by collectors from all over the world. Rare first editions, bound sets, atlases, maps, and a variety of other books that were prized by collectors for their illustrations.

The front of my store is separated from the back by a large imposing oak door. Its hinges are leather and its locks and tumblers are made of wood.

The Imposing Oak Door by Heather Blakey

This is where my real store is; this is where I conduct my real trade.

The room behind this door is a very comfortable library. The walls lined ceiling to floor bookcases. One case has a glass door, the second had an iron gate and others were left open.

Each case held over 100 volumes.

The books were crafted by an unusual group of Authors and had been written for a very exotic group of clients. These were famous one of a kind horror stories among this group of readers and they would spare no expense in collecting them.

The Authors by Heather Blakey

This is how these little treasures were created.

If the Authors were to arrive at a home for a story they always came hours before a funeral and they were never turned away. After a small ceremony involving salt and scented oils they were left alone with the Dead and their work would begin. The Authors would take blank sheets of parchment; sometimes strips of linen or thin sheets of copper, gold and in later years paper and place them over the chest of a dead person. Then the Author would place their hand over the corpse's stilled heart and the story would be recorded.

Authors at Work by Heather Blakey

It was said you could hear the scratching sounds of what was assumed to be pen to parchment and that no matter how much you were tempted that you should never try to catch one of these Authors at work. Not unless you wanted to end up bound in one of those books too.

When they were finished what was recorded on these pages were all the sins and evil that the dead person ever committed. Page after page would hold horrible dark stories and horrific illustrations. Brought forward by the Author's skilled hand, images and words and flashes of smell and sound would be captured then interpreted by the Author and burned onto the pages.

The Authors always left a gift for the stories. Sometimes they left gold or jewels, potions in bottles and sometimes money.

The Croatan Treasury by Heather Blakey

After they left these homes the Authors would take these pages and bind them, and place them in libraries in homes not fit for human habitation.

To read the complete story Go To Croatan

GLEANERS "We interrupt your regularly scheduled day to report the mackerel sky. . ." Ruhdwulf at Live Poets, 4/26/05

2005-05-27T17:40:00.000Z

"We interrupt your regularly scheduled day to report the mackerel sky--"

I can still see it--a celestial traffic jam of cumulus clouds in shades of peach, violet, and gunmetal gray. My friend, driving me home, turned at the corner to let me off, had no time for interruptions, couldn't stop for the magic or the glory. I got out and watched for a few precious minutes as the colors faded and blurred into the deep blue of night.

One summer day, while reading, I noticed a flicker of movement on the ground beneath the butterfly bush in my back yard. The featherless bluejay, covered with ants, became a blessed interruption for the next three months.

A regularly scheduled workday was almost cancelled due to an overnight ice storm, but since the ground had been warm the streets were safe and dad drove me to work. As we wended our way through the park the sun burst out turning every twig and tree limb to blazing crystal. His phone call twenty minutes later told me the same sun had melted every drop and the extraordinary was once again ordinary.

I learned long ago to savor interruptions caused by nature, the miraculous and serendipitous moments that can be so fleeting and yet last for a lifetime.

I'm still working on telephones.

GLEANERS

2005-05-27T12:25:00.000Z

Seed Line: From the Poem “Ecstasy” by Vi Jones.
Posted on the Lemurian Abby Blog, Friday, May 20, 2005

“Such is ecstasy”

Seed Line: From a post by Tracey at the Joseph Campbell Mythology Group

“ Where are your bread crumbs now?”

Ecstasy. A word to crack the stars with splendor. Like much else in life, it’s meaning is constantly changing, altering and shifting; transposing, transforming, transmuting, transfiguring; translating like an ermine in the snow; modifying, metamorphosing, and mutating; molting flight feathers and springing up covered with soft, new down. The word has been erotic, metaphysical, descriptive, abstract, effervescent, linguistic, arousing, tangible, delicious, luxuriant, exciting, motivating, . . . A list that goes on forever: the voluminous, vivid and varied shapings of “ecstasy.”

And such is ecstasy . . .
Brimming with bounty, full of fulfilment, rocking away midnight with a baby at my breast. The luxuriant flood of slow pure light like liquid silk poured over the night, a luminous mountain moon. The transparent, transcendental reality of a rainbow splashed like a fantasy across the heavens. The suspended voluminous vastness of a summer sky shot with silent silver stars. The stillness of secret snow, breathing the wind, becoming whiteness as the world falls away in a rush of descent. The drowning sweetness of a mouth on mine, lit like lightening, melting my bones like wax. A sun of impossible fire sinking behind the mountains in an aching awe of color. The ripe, mellow moan of a single cello, the haunting, ancient call of a wooden flute, the spine shivering spill of a Celtic harp like a fey Bridge Between. Questing for words: desiring them, dreaming them, discovering them, drinking them, drawing them out into deep designs of . . . ecstasy.

The river above Ashland is rushing full with a spate of spring, tumbling and splashing in the green shadows beneath the pines and the towering redwoods. A sudden shudder . . . a thrill sings up the spine . . . a clear, indrawn breath of wonder. What walks beneath the trees, beside the river? Is it only twilight? Where are your bread crumbs now? “Follow your bliss,” the wise man said, but in the emerald shadows flowing beneath the ancient trees, I think that it is following me.

©Edwina Peterson Cross

GLEANERS

2005-05-26T15:55:00.000Z

Seed Lines: From the Poem “Dancing in Perpetuity” by Anna Chinappi. Posted on the Lemurian Abby Blog, Tuesday, May 24, 2005.

“She’s done with the dancing,
no steps and moves left,”

April Night

She has the truth of
my body
the slim, supple, rounded limbs
that flow so freely into movement.

She has the truth of
my spirit
a joy that knows no edges
a heart that dances and dreams.

Bright, ethereal spark of dancing light
she is the image of my
other side,

That solid self
once-upon when
before time
before the splintering shadows
of pain.

She is the image of
my body,
my spirit
my joy
moving . . .

Moving . . .

I leave her at the studio door
and a shadowed specter slowly walks away
eyes swimming with salt
body twined with pain.

I hear the music
I can almost taste the movement
behind the
closed
door.

But, this shrouded spirit is lifeless
dormant, barren, maimed,

Broken, cleft, splintered
still.

As my soul split
I kept only
my heart

and it is
burning . . .

Burning

©Edwina Peterson Cross

The Prospector

2005-04-27T08:18:00.000Z

It had been a relief to escape the monotony of her working world and now as she lay with her lunch in the Edinburgh gardens, the warm rays of the sun gently kissed her bare arms and penetrated her being. Before her eyes the branches of the elms spread to form a canopy and it seemed to her that diamonds of light glistened like stars in the night sky amid the tapestry of branches and leaves. The words 'know thyself' pirouetted amid the imaginal theatre, words, which recurred in her dreams and during these quiet moments of daydreaming when she permitted herself to enter the temple of Apollo for respite. Like a hospes this sanctuary comforts pilgrims and traveller's who seek it protection. Like a hospes the temple of Apollo is a place for healing. It is a place where people can express both grief and joy, celebrate life and death and find meaning. Today it provided a place for her to remember and gain strength from childhood memories.

Carefully she unpacked the small 'medicine bag', her companion on these excursions. Silently she stopped to look at the bag contents, gently fingering them as she laid them alongside her. Today the small bottle of golden specks caught her attention. A remnant from her childhood this bottle contained golden slithers that she had painstakingly scraped from the gold pan and bottled over forty years ago. The specks seemed brighter today, flickering and flashing in the sunlight as winged memories swarmed about her. The word prospector came, seemingly from nowhere, as if searching for someone to remember its meaning. “Prospectors look out for gold and explore regions” she wrote in the small notebook that was her constant companion. “Prospectors mine experimentally”.

Archie Hair was a prospector who loved the bush. She remembered that he had filled his days wandering through the Australian bush, placing small signs, clues for the treasure hunts he took people on. When she followed him along secret bush trails she had learned about prospecting. They were always on the look out. "Bob low. Look up" his quaint markers guided them. Every turn bought promise. From the ridge they had an extensive view across the landscape. Only a tiny trail of smoke dotted the spot where 'The Arches' lay. Mr. Hair always bought them back safely. He knew to carefully mark his trail. He knew every branch and gully. His prospecting gave her another view of life. Through him she learned to search and to be optimistic. He filled her heart with trust and a sense of adventure".

As she turned the old bottle over and over, looking for a fresh perspective a mental landscape spread out before her. Calmed by a sudden sense of Mr. Hair's presence she lay quietly in the curve of the old tree trunk, permitting herself to drift off and be with him once more. She remembered his treasure hunts affectionately and considered that the fairy mail slot in the adjacent tree was the perfect spot to leave a message. Archie would have taken advantage of a spot like this to hide one of his trinkets. With this thought she believed that she heard Archie's laughter tinkling in the distance but perhaps it was just wind chimes or, more likely the sounds of happy children drifting from the nearby school yard. Childhood memories had come uninvited, drifting towards her, a host of golden words surrounded her and, deftly snatching them she wrote with vigor for such luminous memories did not come every day.

“Archie Hair built the Arches alongside the Freestone Creek just out from Briagalong. He had retired from active farming to enjoy solitude and squander his days roaming through the bush. The quaint cottage that he built near the Blue Pool became known, affectionately, as 'The Arches' to the streams of people, from all walks of life, who came to spend a few restorative hours with the old couple” she wrote, but stopped.

This is hopeless she thought, wearily pouring the steaming contents of her thermos into her Bodem. It did neither Archie nor Edna justice to write a traditional narrative but she knew she had to introduce them. They had meant so much to her, been the grandparents she had never known. She wanted to capture their essence but the right words eluded her for the moment. So she wrote a new heading on her page.

‘The Prospector’

To gain inspiration she quietly she took a deep red stone from her bag and ever so gently caressed the facial features, the eyes, mouth, eroded by waters tumbling constantly over it. She was searching to find a fresh perspective and a new approach. She would be happy to be a stone and explore the cool, quiet corridors. Could an old spirit be trapped inside this stone that she found lying in the stony creek near Flowerdale? Could the spirit of this stone guide her?

Her mind was leaping from one idea to another, much as she had leapt with agility across the stepping stones in the Freestone Creek all those years ago. There was no point going back to the actual creek bed, as it no longer looked anything like the place she had once loved. No traces of the old people could be found anywhere. A picnic ground had long replaced the old house. There was no sign of the banksia roses that wound their way through the arch that once marked the entrance. She gently turned the stone over and over, fingering its chaffed body and as she did so she thought she saw a vapor rising.

Like a puppet she began to write. Words slipped silently on to the crisp white page and a story began to form.

‘A vapor rose out of the stone, rising slowly, speaking of things that were and are and will be. The stone remembered the Hair's, the old couple who lived by the Freestone Creek. "I will take you back there" the stone offered.

They stepped into the parallel world together, into the creek bed, cool water trickling over the multitude of stones, the sunlight twinkling on the water, lighting the stones, and highlighting their multicolored backs. Stepping carefully from stone to stone they made their way along the creek bed, edged by Eucalyptus and ferns.

In the distance a child was panning for gold. Intent with her search for golden specks she did not look up. Just ahead, in the Blue Pools her brothers were splashing happily. On they wandered. Further along the creek they found the path that led to the back of the house where Archie stood cutting strips of meat. A Kookaburra sat by his side, watching every movement its head cocked on one side, expectancy glistening in its eyes. But Archie did not speak. He seemed not to have noticed their arrival.

Beyond the distant hills a thin wisp of smoke zigzagged across the sky and drifted slowly southwards. A hush fell over the bush. Leaves hung motionless on the huge gum trees. The intense heat of the summer's sun had dried and shriveled them and young leaves drooped lifelessly in the heat. A small wallaby stopped briefly, head cocked. It was listening to the wind, its nostrils turned northwards. The smell of bushfire bought fear. If the north wind whipped up the fire could turn into a terrifying firestorm that would destroy everything in its path.

"The fire had started quietly after a lightening strike" the stone explained." The fire leapt playfully at first, zigzagging through a fern gully, slowed only by the dampness of the tree ferns. But then it ran up a Eucalyptus and joyfully scampered and crackled, exploding across its dried, crisp branches. No longer playful, the fire leapt triumphantly from tree to tree like a Roman candle. Then it ran down again to the tinder dry undergrowth further down the gully. The fire transformed. It noisily cracked, spat and hissed. Out of control and fanned by a gusty north wind it sent smoke mushrooming into the sky and burning ash across the bush. As the fire marched over the hills the heat took away the air and it sounded as though a hundred fiery, fighting dragons surrounded 'The Arches'. A wall of flames appeared on the ridge, belching high in the sky. The Arches were destroyed. The hills and gullies were shrouded in an eerie orange light and where the countryside had been green all was black. Mr. Hair had to be taken to the safety of his son's property when the fire came. He never returned to see the charred remains of the Arches, the trees stripped of their foliage and reduced to glowing stumps. He never saw the embers that glittered in the ashes of the ruined cottage...’

Briefly she paused to re-read the words, in awe of the stone's narrative that so explicitly revealed why there really was no point going in search of the Arches. Stones like this one have borne witness to all the important events she thought. We live chronologically, experiencing our lives as a succession of events, but it is not until we look back that we see the picture forming and begin to write our narrative. In the first instance we rehearse living through reading stories, using these stories to extend our experiences and to experiment. Stories give us categories that help us to evaluate our daily experiences. It seemed that the stone was guiding her pen. Her thoughts and words seemed to come from the stone itself.

Subdued by remembering the destruction of that simple cottage she sipped the coffee and sat slowly savoring a Yo-yo, the closest thing to a Kiss that she had been ever able to find. Mrs. Hair made the most beautiful Kisses. Her father had loved them. The sun caught hold of the bottle and the pureness of the old gold caught her eye. She tried to remember and capture the happy hours she spent with the Hairs yearning to give them the immortality they deserved. They had been such significant figures in her life. She wrote

"The child bent to pick up the small slimy rock. Turning it over, inspecting the yellow tinge she turns, excited, and calls out to the old man working nearby. He turned to examine the yellowing stone. "It is only lichen Heather". Disappointed she dropped it and continued her search for 'golden nuggets'. As she dipped in her fingers in the cool stream water fresh young words came flowing towards her.”

The Arches were magical she decided. In this sanctuary she felt completely safe. Within these walls she could tell her story. “Narrative helps us to make sense of our lives by telling our story either to other people or to ourselves” she thought. When something happens to us it is a normal impulse to tell someone about it. Framing events as a story helps us get things in perspective. If we cannot tell someone else, we tell it to ourselves, sometimes compulsively over and over, trying to make sense of it all. Story heals and palliates our pain. It is a part of the process of development.

As she wrote metaphors and symbols fought to gain her attention, memories swam past in schools. It was The Arches that she really wanted to write about. But her memory of them was fragmented and blurred. Once she had known every marker on the road that led to their place. The Austin A40 knew the way along the Dargo road almost as well as she did.

Trying again, desperate to capture a sense of this place she took up her pen, writing as though she were there once more.

“Just ahead she saw a log lying across the ground. As she step up onto she spotted a piece of torn material, tied to a branch. "This is the right direction" she spoke aloud, "but where are the others? They always go on ahead and leave me behind. It's not fair. They should have to wait. Mum told Brian he had to look after me today, but he's rushed ahead."

Just ahead a figure in brown flannels sits, waiting patiently. Smiling broadly, Mr. Hair greeted her warmly. "Look Heather! I have saved some of Mrs. Hairs kisses and my ginger ale for you. Your father and the boys have gone back to 'the Arches' but I waited for you. It is getting late".

The ginger beer tasted beautiful but she ate only one kiss, leaving the others by the tree for the Joey she had seen hopping past just a few minutes ago. "We really better head back now." Archie said as he returned from leaving fresh signs for the next group of treasure hunters, coming up from Briagalong during the week.

As they walked back down the slope, past the cascading banksia roses and into his quaint cottage she held his hand more tightly than usual. She didn't ever want to forget him or his strong hands. Mrs. Hair's eyes danced brightly as they walked into the tiny sitting room. A crocheted rug lay across her knees. Edna sat by the fire in an armchair talking to her mother. They loved to talk. "Archie, make a cup of tea for Dorothy, there's a good fellow. Dot and Colin are staying for tea - bring in some kisses and ginger ale for the children." "Oh goodie" she clapped and danced. She just loved staying with Mr. and Mrs. Hair for tea. Life felt particularly good when they stayed on with them in their quaint little house. As Archie boiled the kettle she skipped up the small staircase to the attic where he had plastered the walls and ceiling with cuttings from old magazines. It was her favorite room in their house; a tiny sanctuary far removed from her every day life.”

Satisfied that today she had drawn up old memories she sighed with relief and drained the last of the coffee. Sustained by warm memories, ready to face the world of her work. Her tiny sanctuary was safe. Those fires never destroyed it any more than time has wearied the ancient muse. I can return to the bower of bliss and the muse of my childhood whenever I wish she smiled self -satisfied. It all lies safely within 'the Arches', tucked safely within a corner my memory.

Furtively she grabbed the pen, ready to record a second visit to 'the Arches' to check that she really could so easily reach her bower of bliss.

“The moon was shining brightly, throwing a silvery trail for her to follow. Without waking anyone she gathered her things and, opening the door quietly so that no one would hear, slipped out. The moonlight danced on the bluestone illuminating a path. Like a searchlight it swayed guiding her as she passed the strangely fluorescent fences. Gardens sparkled, white iceberg roses glistening as she wandered towards the gardens and her favorite circle of trees.

Sprawled under the trees she let her finger guide a path through the map of the labyrinth that she had bought with her. "If I can just get to the centre I will find the Arches and be with them all once more" she murmured. The moon's light drenched the circle and she stopped to gaze in wonder at her majesty. The glorious rays of the moon that have lit the wonders of the world since the dawn of time is focused on this spot tonight. A rustle and the play began. Woodland spirits in flowing white gowns floated by in rowdy orgiastic revelry as Wagner's music heralded the letting loose of some primeval force. Each local spirit held silvery threads and as they danced, faster and faster it seemed that a silver arch emerged and from within that arch stepped all the familiar faces.

Everyone gathered. Her childhood self came and nestled alongside her and together they watched as the theatre began. The setting was in a small cottage that perched precariously alongside the Freestone Creek. Mrs. Hair sat with a pretty crocheted rug snugly tucked over her knees. A small fire filled the quaint room with subdued light. On a small table, covered with a pretty lace tablecloth that Mrs. Hair had made sat the good cups and saucers and a sugar bowl filled with cubed sugar. A delicate set of silver tongs lay on top. The teacups clinked softly as Mrs. Hair poured tea and passed the kisses all round. Mr. Hair bought in freshly brewed Ginger beer and everyone gathered to savor the much-awaited afternoon tea. "Anyone for a treasure hunt?" asked Mr. Hair as the last of the Ginger beer was drained from the children's glasses.

But this time she was content to stay behind, up in the tiny attic and lie examining the pictures Archie had used to paper the wall. Silently she gazed at the gaudy, bright lipstick smeared lips that seemed to stand out on the porcelain faces of the film stars he had collected and she imagined….”

She closed her notebook and lovingly stored her book and pen in the 'medicine bag' she kept for this express purpose. Stretching like a cat she rose, gathered her supplies and strode, revitalized and content, across the park towards the clutter of golden spires and the familiar routines of work. One day she would write a story about 'the Arches' but for today she was content to have gleaned these fragments, happy to have remembered.

2005-04-26T10:53:00.000Z

The "Wedding of the Rails"

Intuitive Mining

2005-04-26T10:45:00.000Z

My Great-grandfather was a miner. My Great-grandfather was a GOOD miner, he was so good that he is recorded in history as a “a mining magnate.” (This is true: I found it on the Web!) He was a founder of the infamous mining town of Bodie, California. He was the owner of the rich, veined “Jump up Joe” mine. He was in attendance when the “Golden Stake” was driven in at Promontory Summit, the "Wedding of the Rails" that linked the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific rail lines. He was also a Colonel in the U.S. Army, a banker, a two-term Utah State Senator, a member of the Utah State Capitol Commission, who designed and built the Utah State Capitol Building, an advisor to statesmen, senators and a U.S. President, a renowned and magnanimous Philanthroper.

At the beginning, however, my Great-grandfather was a good miner. He knew how and where to find precious metals. More than once, he discovered long, thick, veins of gold; heavy deposits of silver. He was very bright and was trained engineer, he knew scientifically where minerals were likely to be found. However, so did plenty of other people who never found them. What he had that made the difference when it came to finding silver and gold, was: something else. They sometimes called it the “Golden Touch”, this ability to put your hands on cold, dark stone and know if there were precious minerals under the surface. What was it really? In a word: intuition.

Intuition is a loaded word, with a myriad of meanings at many different levels. Noun: instinctive knowing (without the use of rational processes.) The last part of this definition is misleading. I believe that rational process is part of intuition. How do you suspend your rational process? You don’t. When you intuit something, rational process is part of it, it just isn’t all of it. “Instinctive knowing.” What does that mean?

Instinctive. Adjective: unthinking; prompted by (or as if by) instinct. Again, the part about unthinking is misleading. Doing something instinctively doesn’t mean that you suspend the thought process. It is more that something extra is added to the thought process, and that, by definition, is instinct.

Instinct. Noun: inborn pattern of behavior often responsive to specific stimuli. This is where it gets interesting. At some point, man decided that as a superior being, above and overlord of the animals, he must be as unlike those animals as possible. Particularly in the last age, man has perceived himself as scientifically intelligent and rational and come to the conclusion that, as such, he no longer has use for his ‘instincts’ the way the ‘lower animals’ do. Rationality and intellect came to be regarded as the opposite of instinctual and intuitive. When this happened, when instinctual reactions and behavior came to be regarded as negative, man - the great adaptor - learned to turn these intuitive reactions off and they began to cease to function.

“Mankind” of course means “humankind,” though in truth, women escaped a bit from the great shut down of the intuitive processes. “Woman’s intuition” was perhaps something too strong to be that easily dismissed or terminated, tied as it is to the maternal instinct; a profound and powerful instinct, meant to protect the species. Even though “woman’s intuition” was suspect and regarded as unreliable, it continued to exist and women were somewhat exempt from the self imposed shut down of the instinctual system.

So, when my Great-grandfather was able to somehow know where a deposit of ore was located, it was termed a “Golden Touch,” and regarded as something beyond the ken of mere mortals - when in reality it was merely the ability to intuit.

Intuitive mining: a mining method well worth considering. When the metaphor is unraveled and we look at what we are mining here, it is precisely the method I use myself. My mining for words has always been instinctive, reflexive, spontaneous, intuitive. This does not mean at all that it has nothing to do with intellect or cogitation, for the concepts are not mutually exclusive. To let intuition flow, one does not begin by shutting down the thought process. Cerebration and intellectual thought work hand in hand with intuition, one builds upon the other.

It does mean that one has to learn NOT to shut down the intuitive process, however. For me, this means that if I try to mine using a method based solely on intellect or knowledge, what I find are bare, blank walls without the glint of a vein of gold or the sparkle of silver dustings. If I try to find precious gems in words already written, or someone else’s thought, I find nothing but carbon. I can only mine by opening to something that is supposed to be lost, by accessing a part of myself that I can’t explain, I can only feel. It isn’t strange, however, or unusual or singular. It is perfectly natural and completely organic; a questing that makes me glad, a flowing that makes me whole.

©Edwina Peterson Cross

Chinese Mining Methods on Australian Goldfields

2005-04-20T00:35:00.000Z

In 1861, Chinese immigrants made up 3.3 per cent of the Australian population, the greatest it has ever been. These Chinese were nearly all men (38,337 men and only eleven women!) and most were under contract to Chinese and foreign businessmen. In exchange for their passage money, they worked on the goldfields until their debt was paid off. Most then returned to China. Between 1852 and 1889, there were 40,721 arrivals and 36,049 departures.

The Chinese, like so many others, came to Australia to dig for gold because there were problems in their own land. Drought and famine and a downturn in trade had caused poverty in China. By 1854, there were 4000 Chinese on the Australian goldfields.

The Chinese miners used different mining methods to the Europeans. They are said to have seldom tackled new ground, preferring to go over ground abandoned by the Europeans. It is thought that they found much gold which had been missed by European miners in their haste. On those occasions when the Chinese did dig for gold, it is commonly believed that they constructed round shafts rather than square or rectangular ones. This is both sound engineering and a likely deference to the superstition that evil spirits would hide in corners.

It also angered some diggers that the Chinese were successful in finding gold. They would work very carefully, for long hours, to get just a little gold. They would take up a claim that the European diggers had given up, and would find gold there. It was easy for some rowdy and hot-headed diggers to convince their disappointed mates that the Chinese were their enemies. The Victorian government became worried about the numbers of Chinese arriving, and tried to stop them. The captain of a ship arriving in Melbourne had to pay the government ten pounds in tax for every Chinese passenger. The captains avoided this by landing the Chinese in South Australia, which had no gold rushes. The Chinese diggers then walked hundreds of miles across country to the Victorian goldfields.

The Balfour Memorial Mining Method

2005-04-19T07:09:00.000Z

You will need:

1) A large amount of chewing gum
2) Cheap slippers
3) One extra large Baggie
4) Miner’s hat with built in flashlight
5) Tweezers
6) Magnet
7) Brother
8) Guile

Start with six large packs of Doublemint gum. No, better make it twelve. Doublemint is the gum of choice because it’s chewed consistency is perfect. It is also my favorite. Begin chewing, two sticks at a time. Chew until the gum starts to taste of repetition and you find yourself snapping it; gum that snaps has lost the excess sugar and reached the correct stage of stickiness. As soon as the pieces in your mouth are appropriately desugared, take them out and park them, then start in on two more. If you happen to be a lawyer, Mick Jagger or Stephen Tyler, you can probably handle more than two sticks at a time and thus speed up the process considerably.

Once you have all the gum suitably desugared and softened, take off your shoes and begin to spread the parked gum across the bottom of your soles. You want to press down enough that the gum isn’t going to fall off the shoe, but still leave quite a bit of loose gum. It is an art, at which you will grow more proficient with practice.

This is where the cheap slippers come in. You will need to wear them until you reach the floor of the mine where you will be working. Once the bottoms of your shoes are quite covered with gum, you are ready to go. Wearing slippers, carrying shoes, descend into the mine and go directly toward a site that someone else is actively mining.

Just before arriving at the claim, switch your slippers for your shoes, stash the slippers in some deep dark crack and proceed into the claim area.

There are several, obvious, advantages to this method of mining. The most obvious and most important is that you don’t need to discover gold by yourself. You don’t need to make guesses at where that gold might be, mine false leads or empty rock. You don’t need to stake a claim or hammer rock or chisel stone or shovel slag. All you need to do is wear your miner’s hat, with the built in flashlight, and wander around a site where someone else has already been mining. Pretend to be interested in their work. Make appropriate noises and say positive things.

Samples:
“Wow!”
“This was one tough vein! You must be in great shape to have been able to move this amount of rock!”
“It must have taken a lot of muscles to get that all that gold out of the mountain and then out of the mine!”
“How did you EVER know to drill right here? You are completely brilliant!”

Miners are far less likely question what you are doing if you are giving them compliments all the while. It’s the way miners are. It’s the way everyone is.

Now all you have to do is hand out compliments and stroll around. After a fair amount of time, definitely before the miner starts to wonder what they heck you are doing, say good-bye and head topside. Switch back into your slippers and put your shoes in the extra large Baggie which you are carrying in your pocket.

Now there remains only to extract the gold flakes you picked up off the floor from the gum. This can be done effectively with tweezers and a magnet. The ideal scenario is to make this a family operation and make your brother do this part.

A system very similar to this mining method was evidently carried out for years in the Balfour Jewelry plant near where I lived in North Attleboro, Massachusetts. Balfour makes all kinds of jewelry, but is best know for being the world’s leading manufacturer of school rings. It seems that this method of obtaining gold was quietly going on for what amounted to generations before Balfour finally figured it out. Nowadays the employees of the Balfour plant have to strip down to nothing and change into paper suits to do their work. They wear paper slippers on their feet which they must turn in at the end of each shift. They are not allowed to chew gum.

One of the most entertaining things about this story is that when the Balfour plant finally got wise, there was, simultaneously, a substantial jump in the number of people who applied for state and county services. Under the section of the application which asked why they needed the aid, people stated that they just could not make ends meet since they had been forced to stop pilfering from Balfour. The employees were really quite miffed. One, quoted in the local newspaper, said: “It’s been a source of income for my family for three generations. We don’t know what we’ll do now, it is practically impossible to live on just the salary Balfour pays.”

©Edwina Peterson Cross

Extraction Methods

2005-04-19T02:14:00.000Z

Crevice Mining

When first starting, crevice mining offers an easy and inexpensive way to get started. Gold is heavy. It finds its way into the nooks and crannies of the bedrock. Therefore, these are good places to look. To mine crevices you will need:

1) long tablespoon
2) long teaspoon
3) old flathead screwdriver with the tip bent at a ninety degree angle 2" to 3" from the end
4) tweezers - to pick out the gold flakes and nuggets
5) wide mouth plastic jar or bottle - to put gold in
6) small magnet - to separate gold from black sands
7) small shovel - I prefer a folding army style shovel which can act as a pick or shovel
8) small hand pick
9) garden trowel
10) flashlight
11) small metal bucket - to carry tools to the site, to sit on if need be, to carry rock to nearby stream
12) gold pan

Find a crevice in area you think has gold. For ideas on locations go to where the gold is. Dig out the crevice using your small shovel, trowel, and spoons. You may need to loose the dirt or enlarge the crevice with the bent screwdriver or hand pick. REMEMBER, gold is heavy and likes to gravitate to the bottom of the crevice, so don't give up too easily. Place all of the extracted material (rocks, plants, clay, etc) in your pan or bucket and carry it to the nearest stream. Now, you are ready to pan for gold!

Describe a prospecting or extraction method that you have discovered works quite well here in the word mine.

Part One

2005-04-01T11:42:00.000Z

A Bodie Christmas
by
Edwin T. Peterson
and
Edwina Peterson Cross

In 1859, in a cold, lonely space of the high desert country of California, Waterman S. Body discovered gold. Soon this little corner of the high desert was no longer deserted as more and more people rushed there to “see the Elephant.” Of course there was no elephant in the California high country, “see the Elephant” was what the miners called looking for gold, and because of gold, the town of Bodie was born. There was a story that the name of the town was changed from “Body” to “Bodie” by a sign painter who didn’t know how to read and write, but the truth was that the town’s folk changed the name themselves because they didn’t want people to think their town was named “Body” as in “a dead body,” though it seemed for awhile there were plenty of those to be found in Bodie anyway.

Bodie became a Boom Town, growing rapidly, filled with sudden riches. By 1879 there were 2,000 buildings lining the streets of Bodie and 10,000 people living there. Bodie had also become famous as the most Wicked Town in the West. It was known far and wide for it’s lawlessness, wild living and badmen. There were robberies, stage holdups, and killings every day. When someone was buried, the fire bell rang once for each year of that person’s life. It seemed as though the fire bell was ringing all the time.

There are many stories told about Bodie. Some are told about the mysterious, infamous “Badman from Bodie” but no one seems to know who he really was. There is another story of a young girl whose family was moving to this wild and wicked town; it is said she wrote in her diary: "Good-bye God, I'm going to Bodie." Soon everyone in the west knew the saying.

I am going to tell you another story about Bodie, a story that is a little West of the wild tales everyone knows of holdups and gunfights. This story tells not about the ledged of the town of Bodie, but about the people who lived there. It is wider than the wild tales, deeper than the legend, this is a story about miners who spent their days underground; and a particular kind of gold that they found together. It is a story that happens to be true.

It begins on December 23rd, two days before Christmas. It is a clear, cold day, but it is beginning to smell a little bit like snow, and snow would be just fine for Christmas day. There is a smile on the face of the handsome young miner who is riding through the mountains toward Bodie.

Ed Loose is not much older than twenty, but he has been on his own a long time, he is a quick and smart; he knows how to look out for himself and how to take care of business. He and his two older brothers William and Warren are mining a claim about two hours ride away from Bodie and they are doing well. Ed doesn’t mind the mining life, but now it is Christmas and he is heading to town to stay with his best friend Billy Metson and to celebrate. He hums pieces of old Christmas Carols as he rides. Ed is in a fine mood, after weeks in the mining camp, he is looking forward to the good food and drink that the season will bring. “And clean clothes,” thinks Ed to himself smiling, “and a hot bath!” It gets mighty dirty down in a mine and it’s cold in the high desert in December, just the thought of a hot bath and clean clothes is almost enough to sing about in and of itself! Ed laughs and decides that, actually, a hot bath does deserve a poem at least and he begins to think of rhymes as he rides.

On the outskirts of town, Ed bypasses some shanty sheds, working his way up a hill toward a small house set back against the hills. He’ll just save himself some time and pick up those clean clothes on his way to Billy Metson’s. The festive smile slowly fades from Ed’s face. He has taken his clothes to the laundry being run by Dan Davenport’s widow, to try and help her out. Dan was killed earlier in the year in a mining accident. Ed knows that the family came from the east and that they used every bit of their savings just to get to the California gold fields in the first place. Dan’s widow and her two small children couldn’t go back east if they wanted to. The laundry is hard, back breaking work and Dan’s wife has never been particularly strong, but she doesn’t have much of a choice. Ed bites his lip. “At least I’m bringing her some work,.” he thinks. Somehow, this doesn’t make him feel any better.

The little house is really only a cabin. It is built well, but it wasn’t made to be a laundry and it is crowded and cluttered. Mrs. Davenport seems embarrassed by this and she fusses about trying to tidy things up, but there is just no where to tidy them to. The two small children seem to be right in the way, they keep getting underneath her feet, but she is patient with them.
“I’m sorry the place is such a mess,” she says pushing a stray piece of hair back from her face with her wrist, “I can’t seem to ever get ahead of the work anymore.”
“It looks extremely tidy to me Mam,” Ed says solemnly, “I just came from a mining camp.”
She doesn’t laugh, but a small smile lifts the corners of her mouth for a moment.
‘Fair like she has forgotten how to laugh,’ thinks Ed to himself. ‘And it’s no wonder.’
He notices that she somehow looks smaller than she used to. She is pale and her eyes look red and tired.

“I’ll just get your things, Mr. Loose. They are all finished, here in the other room, but I’m afraid I still have to get them together. It will just take me a moment . . . if you don’t mind . . .”
“I don’t mind at all,” he says hurriedly, “I’ve done what I set out to do today. I was coming to Bodie and I’ve accomplished that.” The corners of her mouth lift briefly again, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. She disappears into the adjoining small room.

The little girl follows her mother, but the little boy, who is about five-years-old stays behind, shying regarding Ed from under a thick set of blonde bangs. Ed smiles at him.
“Hi there,” says Ed, trying to make his voice sound not as deep and round as it usually is.
“Ya . . . ya know what mister?” the boy blurts out.
“No,” says Ed, “but I bet you do.”
The little boy thinks about this for a moment and then bursts out laughing. It is such a sparkling sound that it makes Ed smile his Christmas smile all over again.
“So, I’ll tell you what!” the little boy says, grinning, “it’s almost Christmas! That’s what!”
“You are so right!” says Ed, “it is most definitely almost Christmas!”
“Ya wanna know what Santa Claus is going to bring me?” he asks. His eyes are blue and they are sparkling with secrets.
“I sure do,” Ed droops down on one knee so he is just about the same height as the small boy.
“Andrew!” says Mrs. Davenport suddenly, sharply, appearing at the door. “Stop bothering the gentleman.”
“Oh, he’s not bothering me Mam . . .”
She smiles tiredly at Ed and steers young Andrew into the other room where she is getting the laundry together.

Ed wanders around the tiny room. Looking at the window casings that look as though they leak, the cupboards that look ready to fall down. He tries not to listen, but there isn’t much he can do, the little cabin is so small he can hear every word that is being spoken in the other room.
“I wanted to tell the Gemplman about the wooden soldiers, Mama,” says Andrew, “you know the ones all painted bright, Daddy was gonna make ‘em for me . . .”
“I know Andy,” the woman’s voice sounds thick. “But he didn’t even get them whittled from the wood, and I . . . I just can’t do it, I, can’t work the knife . . .”
“No, Mama, it’s OK!” pipes in the little girl, “you don’t have to whittle wooden soldiers or make the new dress for my baby Abigail either, ‘cause Santa Claus will bring them, just like he always does.”
“And oranges!” says Andy excitedly, “I don’t remember the last time I even saw an orange! But Santa always brings ‘em and apples and stripped sugar candy.”
“And new mittens! And a thick hat with strings that will keep my ears warm!”
“Children . . .” the woman’s voice breaks and she has to clear her throat. “We are a long way away from our house in Vermont . . . I don’t think Santa Claus will . . will know where to come way out here.”
“Of course he will Mama! Julia ‘n me’s been so good this year, haven’t we Julia? And Santa Claus always knows where good children are, Daddy said so.”
Ed is close enough that he can hear the woman’s fast breaths as if she is trying to get her breath back after running. Or trying not to cry. “That may be so in the rest of the world,” she says shortly, “but . . . this is not the rest of the world. You know there just aren’t . . . there aren’t many children out here and Santa, well he can’t remember everything. Santa, he . . . he probably doesn’t remember that Bodie is even here.”
“Oh Mama!” says Julia in a shocked tone, “That just can’t be so! How could Santa forget a whole town?”
“Because he . . . did,” she replies sharply . Ed can tell she can’t think of anything else to say. He hears her take several gulping breaths. “Now you listen to me and you listen good!” her voice is raised suddenly, it sounds distraught and a little bit frantic, “I don’t want to hear anymore about it now! No more talk about Christmas! We left Christmas behind in Vermont . . . we buried Christmas with your father . . . and Santa Claus . . . Santa has forgotten Bodie, who could blame him! and he doesn’t remember there are any children here at all. Do you hear me? Santa has forgotten Bodie.” This is followed by nothing but shocked silence.

Ed walks as far away as he can get in the small house and looks out the front window, still when she brings him his shirts carefully folded, her face is burning and she is biting her lower lip to keep from crying. She doesn’t look much older than a child herself at this moment - except for the deep dark circles underneath her eyes.

“I must apologize Mr. Loose,” she says simply, and with a lot of dignity. “This place being as small as it is, that you had to hear all of that. I just had to take care of it and not keep putting it off and letting them go on. It . . . had to be done and I . . . I just had to do it right then. I’m sorry.”
“Oh no, Mam, . . .” Ed Loose is well read, extremely intelligent and very seldom at a loss for words, but at this moment he can’t think of anything to say that won’t make things worse. “It’s no problem, Mam,” he mutters, feeling like kicking himself for being unable to offer anything else.

When he pays her for his laundry he tells her that he hasn’t got anything smaller than a twenty dollar gold piece; she’ll just have to keep the extra. Her lips press together. “I understand what you are trying to do Mr. Loose and I thank you, but I don’t take charity.”
“It isn’t charity,” he argues, “I just don’t have any smaller coins, it would be doing me a favor.”
“No, I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I haven’t the money to make change. If you haven’t anything smaller, you’ll just have to pay me next time.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that Mam . . .”
“You can do it just as easily as you can overpay me for work I haven’t done. Again, I thank you for your thoughts, but I don’t take charity.”
Ed just nods and suddenly finds some smaller coins in the depth of his pocket.
Andrew has come out from the other room and is peering at Ed around his mother’s skirts. He is rubbing at his reddened eyes with his fist.
Ed says good bye to the widow and to the widow’s son and goes back out into the wind of December.

©Edwina Peterson Cross and Edwin T. Peterson

Silver

2005-03-25T03:14:00.000Z

River of Prayers

Walking miles through ceaseless rain
Barren hills of fear and pain
Color fades and light goes out
Rain falls parched and seared with doubt
Memory fades, meanings spin
Pain is all that’s ever been
Never to again feel peace
No kind of hope, no release

In the bats wing of despair
Appears the tail end of a prayer
Silver in the blackness falls
Twists and glitters, silent calls
I saw it there, a slender spark
Leading up, out of the dark
In the silence, thin and hollowed
Silver sang, and I followed

Like a woven plait of stairs
The silver sang with many prayers
Linked to make a glistening light
Leading out of pain and night
Through the hours it carried me
Silver river to the sea
Borne upon it’s healing foam
The river brought me safely home

©Edwina Peterson Cross

An Old Site re vitalised made me think of History

2005-03-14T00:44:00.000Z

This Sunday just passed the 13th March 05 I saw an advertisement for a garden that was open to viewing by the public "The ad said "Old wharehouse now a lush indoor garden & residence".
So I travelled to an old inner Melbourne suburb for a look.
The building was an old brick factory built in 1890.
In those days it was a metal spring making factory,springs for everything that needed springs.
Then after WW2 part of it became a saw-tooth factory and then a place where "Men's & Youth's trousers were made.
But all changed and in 1990 is became a distribution wharehouse for men's suits made overseas in Tawian,Phillipines etc.
And then........ in 1999 a couple Pandora and John bought it and converted it into their home.
Pandora a teacher of Media Studies
John a cabinet maker of mainly re/cycled timber furniture
So this was a home/business/factory
The front part of the factory is a large indoor garden with half the original tin roof exposed to the sky.A large fish pond of Red Comets filled with exotic plants has at its centre an enormous stainless steel fountain 5 pieces each 20ft long.This fountain is run from 2 enormous(7000litre) rain water tanks beside the building by an electronic system
The garden around the pond has hundreds of rainforest and various plants suited to this site.Many in beautiful pots and urns with plenty of lovely seating to rest on while taking in the atmosphere.A timber boardwalk surrouns the pond and garden
The rear of the factory has their wonderful office with old leather couches and the back is the workshop filled with all sorts of recycled timber & machinery.The showroom has many pices of fine furniture in Australian timbers such as Kauri Blackwood,Sassafras,Celery Pine,Tasmanian Ash etc.
Upstairs are the living quarters of the family and by adding old recycled windows they have a wonderful view of the surrounding district of North Fitzroy.
It was revealed when stripping back the brick rendered walls beautiful blue stone bricks adding another dimension and thinking of those workers who lifted these massive heavy pieces of natural stone brought down from a country town in the the 1890's.
Very little cracking appears in this old building and on the outside facade the names of the factory's history has been retained.

I loved seeing and experiencing the conversion of this old wharehouse and admire those people loving a past and bringing it into the future to meet their needs
In the suburb where I live ,which is much older than where Pandora and John live were many buildings, hundreds in fact that have been raised to the ground and replaced with ugly concrete apartments with no relevance to the past not even the facade has been preserved ....I cry and mourn for Port Melbourne for it has been so cruely levelled in the name of profit and perhaps a need for some to live close the city and the sea.....Some use an expression "We are having a Sea Change" but at what cost one might ask. History is but a word.

So my Sunday out was inspiring making me think that those who retain the past and are able use it as the present and the future are to be admired.

Lois (Muse of the Sea) Monday 14th March'05

Going Topside

2005-03-13T04:55:00.000Z

Dear Fellow Miners,

Time seems to move strangely and differently above and below ground doesn’t it? It seems that we have been in the mines forever in some ways and in other ways it seems that we have just arrived. It also seems sometimes that we don’t see each other very often as we come up and go down and move ore and work on plans and open new shafts.

I wanted to let you all know that I am going to be away from the mine for some time topside. In the real world I am going to be going into the hospital on Monday for some extensive surgery which will probably keep me away from my computer for quite some time. I will look forward to catching up and reading about everything that you have all discovered during my absence when I am able to return to the mines once again.

Blessings to you all until we meet again. ~

Winnie

A Special Place "In the Archives"Port Melbourne

2005-03-09T01:26:00.000Z

Yesterday (Tue 8th Mar"05)I was working in our newly opened room, which is to store much of our archival material.
I had not connected it to being like a mine ,but in many ways it is, as it stores .....papers,books,photos,sketches, paintings,memorabilia,snapshots taken over a 100 years ago .It is a room of only the past.It is a place for one to mine for information.
The room has special temperature control and all is packed in special archival boxes and folders,carefully labelled.
Yesterday I labelled books dating back to to 1860's of council records .Our town was then called the "Borough of Sandridge"
Why the name "Sandridge" well it was because my town was all high sandunes at that time as was the whole of Port Phillip Bay's shores. As I read and put the details in these books onto a card to have them put onto computer discs I marvelled at the simplicity of those ,who were known as the Borough people
Constant work was found for residents shovelling the sand away from buildings,laying road metal ,lighting oil lamps,rowing settlers from the sailing ships out in the bay to the shore.There were many ships not able to tie up at the one and only Town Pier,so this was a worthwhile profession.
As I read the ink written faded minutes of the meetings I come across different ways of spelling ,one for instance is by-law spelt in those times as bye-law.
Married women carried the name of their husband like
Mrs Archibald Smith...not Mrs Heather Smith ,so be it.
I feel like I am on an adventure into the past ,a bit like archeologists in the desert,not knowing what I am going to find and then being so excited when I find something that leaves me in awe .
I find the name of many the same as mine but not knowing if they were a part of our family.I know that my descendants were not in trade,the judicary,the hiearchy but were boilermakers,wharf labourers,welders,chocolate dippers,fish factory workers, cart horse drivers,sewing workers,abbatoir workers etc.So their names do not make the council minute books.
So each Tuesday for 3 hours I will work in the mines of my ancestors documenting their history for those who wish perhaps to trace their roots or research a story of a life or the adventures of a family travelling across the sea from England,Scotland or Ireland..
I am indeed blessed to be able to work in the archives of the Port Melbourne Historical & Preservation Society.
My heart is full and a feeling of joy comes over me as I wander through a history I feel proud to be a part of.

So each Tuseday till the end of this year & on , I will be
a small but important part of a team effort that for each of us means so much....Lois (Muse of the Sea)
Port Melbourne Wed 9th March'05.
.

2005-03-06T04:50:00.000Z

Ancient Egyptian Judgement
Alexandra Roman

2005-03-05T17:44:00.000Z

Bodie

A Tale of Bodie . . .

2005-03-05T17:41:00.000Z

What is left when the gold’s played out?
When the vein of silver is gone?
Weathered boards and vacant floors
Packing up and moving on
Empty shafts on lonely hills
Sit silent in the sun
Hollow windows tell a tale
Of a town whose time is done

There are echos in barren places
Where shadow sounds are cast
Whispers down the mine shafts
Voices from the past . . .
They seek for something simple
Something we can give
They ask to have their stories told
That their truth might always live
Some speak through ruins left standing
And ask that their tales be known
Some reach through generations
And speak through blood and bone

I’m a weaver of words, a spinner of tales
This tale I’ll weave on a loom
That my brother has strung with the warping threads
All ready for story to bloom
His warp, my weft, we answer the call
That sings through our blood clean and clear
So I’ll tell you a tale of Bodie,
When Ed Loose came for Christmas one year . . .

©Edwina Peterson Cross

2005-03-03T15:14:00.000Z

This is my Grandmother Pastora, The Shepherdess.
Alexandra Roman

The Scent of Mnemosyne

2005-03-02T16:18:00.002Z

I do not remember how many times I have been sitting in the dinning room for the same reasons. But still I wait for it like something new is going to happen and it does. Always new feelings surround her, a look of longing in her eyes sometimes of happiness, sometimes of sadness. It always depends on what’s on her hand. She comes from the living room walking fast with a black gift box on her hand. She has always kept them there. Nothing fancy for she is not that way. Simplicity is the word that describes her better. Loving is the word deserved to be said about her every time someone speaks of her.

In that box she keeps the memories of the family alive. The treasure of many decades kept in a fragile box that means so much to us as a family. She sat in the chair in front of me and removed the top box to reveal a world of photos, old a new, which have made their way to that enchanted place of memories. It looks like a sea of memories, of past events frozen in a moment cherish by those who lay they’re eyes on them. I have discovered for the first time drops from the stream of Mnemosyne.

But this time there was something different with her, the woman sitting in front of me. I love this woman dearly; she is the matriarch of the family, my grandmother. Her skin is as the color of sweet delicious chocolate and her heart is fool of feelings that are beyond words. She is not the same today and is not because of her age or her many illnesses but because of her scent. It is Mnemosyne’s sent, a sweet scent of water and lilys. She is within her today letting me know that my grandmother is one of her chosen ones. No wonder my grandma’s name is Pastora witch means The Shepherdess. She is the one to guard us, the one that protect us like she has always does. She might look fragile but she is not. Her name tells of her strength and courage. Her box of pictures tells her story, our story, my story, the story of my daughter.

Pastora took one of the pictures in her aged hands and smiled. It was one of her youth. It was black and white and she was sitting in the ledge of a window. She had a long white skirt and a black blouse. Her long black wavy hair was tossed on her left shoulder. She looked just like a model does when posing for the camera. If you look at her you can still see in her eyes that moment for she has, still, the same look in her deep black eyes.

Another picture she took after handing me hers. It was of my grandfather squatting with his back on a wall. My mother was at his right and my uncle on his left both little children looking straight at the camera. My grandfather was looking else where like his gaze was looking beyond that moment. In those days they lived in Old San Juan a beautiful small city filled with history, with cobblestones on the streets and barricaded by a wall build by the Spaniards. The same place my mother wishes to spend her last days remembering her childhood like the one in the picture.

They are so many memories of lost souls that have gone to their Creator and are mourned, of living souls that still struggle with everyday life, of souls that are happy and those souls that are lost in the meaning of life. It is so overwhelming to plunge oneself in a stream like this one full of so many feelings. I do not have the knowledge to swim but I feel like I was always thought how to flow in this stream since I was a child. For I have been in it since I can remember. Mnemosyne has thought me how to swim, how to survive in the sea of memories from which I have taken part and made my own. Yes, for if you visit my closet you will see a small brown shoe box. In it there is part of that sea, because I have been chosen to be the new Shepherdess. My name is Alexandra it means the Leader of Men. I am in training to become one of the keepers of memory in my family and I have started with a simple box and a digital CD prepared, for people like me, by the magical land called Kodak.

The world of memories is full of grace and feelings. It is a magical place that resides in the simple things guarded by a mortal and escaping from wrath of time.

Jake's Tale

2005-03-01T20:51:00.000Z

I don't know if any of you ever notice an old guy hanging around the mines. His name's Jake and his story proves it's never easy unearthing memories that hide and demand to stay buried.

“Strange things happen underground; gold's buried deep and hard to spot in feeble lantern light. Still, miners are a persistent lot, full of wild hopes that one day we'll strike it rich and dance out of this black pit into the daylight. Never happened to anyone I knew; sure never happened to me.

“Did you know this mine's been worked before?

“It was abandoned after a cave-in. It wasn't a miner got trapped, though, it was his wife. We got to her after it was too late. Never figured out why she was down here in his spot. Her husband, Frank, was miles away buying fancy equipment when it happened. He disappeared after the funeral and nobody ever saw him again. The owners offered bonuses, but not one man took 'em up on it. In those days, a woman in the mines brought bad luck, everybody knew that. A dead woman in the mines, who had no reason to be down here? Nobody'd even talk about it.

“I found a wedding ring today; it was Mary’s.

“What's that? How much gold's in a wedding band? I should know, but I guess I'm too old to care. Oh, I still chip away at earth and stone until my muscles and bones ache and I can crawl through these passageways, with the best of them, just to dig in a space as cramped as a bear's winter den. But I don’t hope no more.

“It was in a metal box.

“I remember her. No man ever saw Mary could forget her. She came to town with Frank when they were just married. I knew half a dozen guys tried to make a play for her. Thought about it myself, but I wouldn't've stood a chance. Mary only had eyes for Frank. She used to wear these pretty little sundresses, and sorta trip around town in high heel shoes. Didn't see much of that here abouts.

“Found this letter, too, but I ain't gonna read it.

“The whole town felt bad for Frank. Everybody knows when gold fever hits there's nothing nobody can do, but folks talked. He stayed underground more'n any man I ever knew, worked double shifts, dug on Saturdays instead of taking his wife to a movie, hauled out on Sundays instead of sitting next to her in church. Saw him go down with a blanket once. Said he was close.

“It's addressed to Frank.

“The gossips had a field day. All the wives hated her, couldn't wait til she got fed up and left Frank, but she hung in for nearly a year. Always acted like a lady, too, never cried or carried on, but you could see the sadness in her face. Didn't help that she had no friends. Made you want to help her. I even talked to Frank once. Didn't do no good, though.

“Here, you take it.

“Folks stayed a bit after the mine closed and worked the hills near-by, but little by little they drifted away. I'm the only one never left. Used to come here sometimes, just sit and think about Mary, maybe bring her daisies from the valley, or wild violets from what's left of that forest east of here, the one we used for lumber.

“Please.

“Read it if you want. I'm going now. I don't think there's any harm my takin the ring, do you? Nobody left to remember her but me. I'll just put the roses over there by the box. Maybe you could bury it again with the letter. Nothin left for me here. Put the boards up when you go. Keep folks outta here, those timbers are old and rotten.”

I waited until he left before I read the letter. It was best he didn't see it. There were just two lines.

"This is all the gold we need. Come home, My Love. Mary."

Ticket Stub Travel

2005-02-21T13:52:00.001Z

Ticket Stub Travel:
If I pressed these small paper passports here, against my third eyed, Mnemosyne Lady of Memory . . . one at a time . . . would you take me back . . . just for a moment?
Simon & Garfunkle on two folding chairs in a spill of one yellow light, facing each other with two guitars. They sang out to the audience some of the time, but most of the time they sang as if they were singing to each other, old friends sat on their park bench like bookends . . . Creedence Clearwater Revival rocked the rafters and shook the stars down. We sat up on the boys shoulders, sang along and screamed until we were horse. Someone got excited had to call the state militia gotta move, playing in a traveling band, yeah . . . John Denver loved the audience, loved to preform, I saw him many times, he always gave off such vibes of complete love for what he was doing and affection for the people who were listening, I never saw another performer who had such a report with the audience. I haven’t got a ticket stub for the first time I saw him, because there were no tickets, it was in a coffee house in Denver before he was famous. We didn’t know who he was until later, just that he had a sweet voice, sang Peter, Paul and Mary songs (which were actually his) and, as always, just loved the audience, and talked of poems and prayers and promises and things that we believed in, how sweet it is to love someone how right it is to care, how long its been since yesterday, what about tomorrow? What about our dreams and all the memories we share? . . . I saw Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1969. I saw Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1989, it was pretty much the same show. A great show, quite remarkable, old David with his new liver and all. They played “Our House” and said, “Here you go kids, this is the song your mom lost her virginity to.” There I sat with Lezlie on one side and April on the other, thinking, close but no cigar, David my friend. Old Graham Nash could sure write a sweet song though. I'll light the fire, while you place the flowers in the vase that you bought today. Staring at the fire for hours and hours while I listen to you play your love songs all night long for me, only for me . . . The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played just at dusk after a long day of blue grass music in a meadow on the side of a green mountain. I was sunburned in my sundress and tired and very happy. We drank Sangria while a sunset split the sky behind us and the band played their brand of cajun-cowboy-country something or other than no one else could ever duplicate. Winnie the Pooh doesn't know what to do, got a honey jar stuck on his nose. He came to me asking help and advice, And from here no one knows where he goes. Steepenwolf was nearly three hours late, amazingly they held the venue for three hours and amazingly every body sat there and waited. Everyone in the whole place was stoned on second hand smoke by the time he showed up whether they were smoking themselves or not. Steepenwolf, he felt bad about showing up late so he played an extra long time. The concert didn’t get over until about three in the morning. I like smoke and lightning, Heavy metal thunder, Racin' with the wind, And the feelin' that I'm under, Yeah Darlin' go make it happen, Take the world in a love embrace, Fire all of your guns at once, And explode into space . . .I would like to go back for a moment, Lady, and see Cats or a Chorus Line . . . no, I would like to look down at the faces of the little girls beside me watching with big eyes and their mouths slightly open. Memory - all alone in the moonlight. I can smile at the old days, I was beautiful then. I remember the time I knew what happiness was. Let the memory live again. Kiss today goodbye, And point me t'ward tomorrow. We did what we had to do Won't forget, can't regret What I did for love What I did for love. The time we saw Mikhail Baryshnikov live. Our tickets at Red Rocks had been so good, but it rained. When we had to move to the inside arena in Denver we were around a corner and were looking sidewards at the stage. I was very disappointed until I realized that because of how far over we were, we could see into the wings. We got to watch Mikhail Baryshnikov warm up and do his between number hold-warmings all the way through the show, it was the most fascinating thing I’ve ever seen . . . I saw Neil Diamond in concert with a backup band of about sixty and a huge choreographed light show with fireworks that went off on cue as he punched his arm in the air. I saw him another time sing the same songs sitting on a stool with an acoustic guitar in a single spot. I vastly preferred the stool in the single spot. Mnemosyne Lady of Memory, take me there. You are the sun, I am the moon, You are the words, I am the tune, Play me . . . I have seen Jerry Jeff Walker in so many places I can’t remember them all. I will see him again as soon as he gets close enough, for he is, as far as my husband is concerned, the only reason for going out of the house. I will go gladly. I’ve got a feeling something that I can’t explain, like dancing naked in that high hill country rain . . . I have seen Gordon Lightfoot everywhere I could possibly manage for thirty years. I have driven long distances to reach a venue where he was playing, I would do it again. I probably won’t have the chance, however. He has been very ill, he nearly died a year or so ago and will probably not tour again. But I have a lot of ticket stubs and a lot of memories and CDs where his voice comes to me as familiar as sweet, soft rain . . . The Minstrel of the Dawn is here to make you laugh and bend your ear. Up the steps you’ll hear him climb all full of thoughts, all full of rhymes, listen to the pictures flow, across the room into your mind they go . . . You know, I was camping with my sister’s family in New York during Woodstock. I was sixteen. We were about thirty miles away, but we missed the whole thing. Who camps in New York? It was one of the dumbest things I ever did. My brother-in-law who knew nothing about camping had us out in somebodies field in an unsealed tent that leaked when it rained. It rained. I woke up with my long hair floating in a puddle next to my face. The next day, after covering him with mosquito repellant didn’t work, I zipped the baby into my hooded sweat shirt to keep him from being eaten alive. My sister was pregnant and we had to get up and go to the outhouse through the wet fields in the pouring rain like big bats in huge ponchos six, eight, twelve times during the night. I suspect the people over in Yasgur's field were having the same sort of troubles, but they were there for a reason beyond trying to ‘camp out’ in New York, for heavens sake. Besides they were all stoned and we weren’t. We also didn’t get to hear Janis Joplin live, or Jimi Hendrix or Blood Sweat and Tears or The Who. By the time we had finally talked her pig-headed husband into going to a motel to dry out, the rain had stopped, Woodstock and history had begun only thirty miles away. We didn’t care, we were finally dry. I came upon a child of god, he was walking along the road, and I asked him, where are you going, and this he told me: I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm, I’m going to join in a rock ’n’ roll band, I’m going to camp out on the land, I’m going to try an’ get my soul free.
We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves, back to the garden.

2005-02-21T13:52:00.000Z

Ticket Stub Travel

2005-02-21T08:59:00.000Z

Fay from "Below"

2005-02-21T08:58:00.000Z

Kaija from "Below"

I Shut the Box and It Became A Poem . . .

2005-02-21T08:42:00.001Z

Come Mnemosyne and weep
Weep for the fast winds of summer brought bright in a silver key
Weep for childhood condensed into a circle of rubber
That fits inside my palm
Weep bright haired Titan for rings that seem made for a child’s fingers
Too slender to have ever been mine
Weep for midnight rituals, long kept vows,
For sisterhood, childhood, weep for the innocence
Of Saturday’s spent kicking the air in joy
Come Mnemosyne and weep for this spark of sulphur
I have saved and hoarded, snap it beneath your fingers
And give me again the silken cream moon over the Bay of Naples
Give me once more the awe in the face of the child
That stood beside me, gazing into a bowl
Of pink misted Vermont dawn,
Lady of Memory, give me back in the flash of this long kept flame
Both boys who loved me long ago, in Jackson

Weep Lady Mnemosyne for the blackstar giving child
Who needs became a hardened man too soon,
Weep for the girl with the lovebeads
who burned her candle hard at both ends
And burned it into nothing. Weep. Weep. Weep.
Weep Beautiful Titan for the body that moved across the floor
So fast that the air eclipsed and blurred
Weep for the joy that bloomed like miracles under my rib cage as I flew Weep for this still, silent chair
Weep for the twisting ache of empty desire that holds my heart now
Weep Mnemosyne, weep for the pain.

Weep Lady, weep for a boy, who was more than just a name and
The date he went down.
Weep Lady, Weep for LtJg Lee Benson.
Weep for March 17, 1968.
Weep for a War that had no meaning.
Weep for those who were lost and never found.
Weep for the thousands who died.
Weep Lady, Weep that they will not listen to you even now,
You who know, you who remember.
Weep, Lady, weep, bitter tears of frustration
As they carelessly do the same thing again.
As if they had no
Memory

Weep with me Lady for these small paper memories
The sweet nights of youth, weep for the music,
The crowds and the lights that wove into the everything of it
Weep for the hard-driving sound that defined my generation,
Which beat in the blood and pounded the body whole
The soft ballads, beautiful poetry kissed with music,
Weep with a smile, for the mystery never meant to be solved
Left an enigma of puberty, Cleopatra the Queen of thirteen,
Egypt, the secret password of twelve, mystical sealed tombs
Hold the mystery of life, which was never about growing up

Weep Memory, for the Lady I miss whose soft gnarled hands
Worked this broach. Weep Lady Memory, stay here and weep, for
All who have gone and all who will go, leaving things . . . corporal Things to hold in the hand and yet who leave no spark to speak,
No hand to touch, no answer when I call . . .

Mnemosyne, Lady Memory, Titan of the Gorgeous Hair,
Weep, that you come to me much so sharply
Are we companions too clearly you and I?
You have blessed others with softening grey and with shadows
With sponges that drink the ink of the scene
But it all comes penetrating, clear-cut and incisive to me
I hear, I see, I smell, I remember . . .

Will you weep with me Lady?
Have you blessed me or cursed me?

Weep for a love lost, not forgotten, still bound by a small golden band. Your hands on my shoulders Mnemosyne
You let nothing slip by or turn softly to sand.
Weep for this wide open nautilus that came from a far distant sea
Weep for the brown eyes I never have seen
The hands that I never have touched

Who do you become beautiful Titan
If your face turns away from the past?
If you looked out into the future
Would you be someone different at last?
Would your focus and face be changed
Would the change run shallow or deep?
If you turned your face into the future
Lady, would you cease to weep?

©Edwina Peterson Cross

2005-02-21T08:42:00.000Z

Mnemosyne Weeps

A Memory Box

2005-02-20T10:25:00.000Z

.

Mnemosyne, mother of muses, would you have me open this carved wooden box, inlaid with wooden flowers, one rusty hinge broken? Indeed? What will lie inside? Treasure, wealth, fortunes, riches . . .

‘Treasure’ She says. It opens with small sound of twisting cork. And I find . . .

A collection of junk. Is this a treasure? Ah, but let us consider who we are speaking to here. Mnemosyne - Memory - the Titan of the beautiful hair, who consorted with Zeus nine nights in a row to produce the nine Muses. Consider: through her daughters she gave the world all of the humanities. But, what of herself? By birthing memory, Mnemosyne discovered the uses of the power of reason, and gave a designation to every object, which is of the utmost importance, since without names very little could be expressed, and mortals would not be able to hold conversations with each other. Thus she holds the ancient magic of naming, as well as the birth of reason.

But above all, she made available to mortals the power to remember, a great faculty upon which rest many others. She owns all tales, as these could not exist without her power, since each narrating word would vanish without leaving a trace as soon as it appears if Memory would not preserve them. If a person were deprived of the gift of Memory, he would neither know who he is nor what he is. And if he were told, he would not be able to retain that knowledge, and each moment would be for him as the first instant of his life, feeling, thinking, and acting much like a newborn. Then if Memory came to him so that he could remember who he is and what he normally does, but did not assist him in other regards, he would not, for example, be able to recognize other people. In that manner, he would have to make the acquaintance of his loved ones every new instant of his life, incapable of remembering either names or faces, or how he is related to them. Consequently, the meaning of such words as 'mother', or 'son', or 'wife' would have to be explained to him over and over again, and there would be no hope that he would retain what he is told. For, deprived of Memory, he would not be able to learn anything permanently. This is why Mnemosyne is a great goddess, knowledge is inseparable from Memory.

What gifts can Mnemosyne give? Beyond the bountiful gifts of her daughters to the world, reason, naming, recognition, understanding . . . Mnemosyne can take a box of junk and make it into treasure. These are MY treasures.

This, my children is a skate-key. I wore it around my neck on a string every summer of my childhood. I used it to tighten, put on and take off my roller skates. These were not the roller skates you know, where the rollers are attached to a boot-like-shoe, these were a separate apparatus that had to be clamped to the bottom of the shoes we were wearing and then tightened up to fit. My world was outlined in sidewalks as a child, they were the pathways to everywhere. I put my skates on as soon as the snow had good and melted and kept them on until school started in the autumn. Not everyone did, of course. Most kids only skated some of the time, as an activity, but for me it was a necessity. My legs were too short to keep up otherwise and without them I would spend the entire summer plaintively calling “wait for me!” Which, by the way, never happened. With the roller skates on, I went faster than anyone else. If they cut across the grass, I went around, I was still faster. I was only sorry I didn’t have wheels all the time. Coming down the hill in front of our house the wind would fan out my short gold hair, drying the sweat of summer with the sweet, sliding air of speed. I loved it; and I liked the feel of the skate key bouncing in rhythm against my chest.

And this, children, is a Hop-scotch-lagger, this hard rubber disk used to throw and kick out of the hop-scotch. You can still see the out line of a hop-scotch drawn on one side of the lagger. THAT is the proper way to draw a hop-scotch. We had them painted on the asphalt at school in a long, long row. It was the proscribed activity for girls during recess and I even actually did it some times. My best friend Adrienne and I were more likely to be off somewhere playing witches, space aliens or inventing new lands complete with intricate governments, but I did have a hop-scotch-lagger. It reminds me of standing in the hall of the Edith Bowen after recess while everyone takes off their coats . . . the hall is full of that smell of wet snow, wet wool and cold air. I am flipping the lagger in the air and laughing, very loud, with my head thrown back. Some teacher, I don’t remember which, comes past and remarks mildly, “Bring the lagger home for a landing in your pocket, Edwina, and I think about half of that laugh could stay outside. Yes. About half.” I remember it distinctly. Not, “Shut up!” or even “Be quiet!” or “Settle down,” but “I think about half of that laugh could stay outside.” Thinking back on it as a teacher myself, teaching in that same school, I always remembered amid the smell of wet snow and wet wool and cold air, that she was going to let me bring half of my laugh into the building. It was the way things always were there.

Pins. “Go Big Blue” - that is from college. I must have said that out loud six thousands times . . . It was a cheer. It was a good cheer. Simple. Easy. People picked it up. Funny, when you have heard something ten million times it starts sounding not like three words, but one. We went to Nebraska where they were yelling “Go Big Red.” WHAT? That sounded completely bizarre. It didn’t fit. Everyone knows that the words Go and Big only go with Blue.

Pins. “Go Greek.” - No, not a trip to Athens. I’m proud to belong to the Panhelenic Council of National Sororities and Fraternities as a member of Kappa Delta Sorority. It was/is an important part of my life and nothing what so ever as the stereo-type would have you believe. I am continually amazed that people who consider themselves liberal and open minded, who would fight forever against discrimination then turn around and automatically do the same thing to groups such as Fraternities and Sororities. Reverse snobism is fascinating, alive and everywhere.
Mnemosyne gives me beautiful rituals in the dark, by the light of a single candle that were so meaningful, so full of love that bound me to my forever friends, sisters, AOT. I have my sorority rings strung on a chain. They are strange, so small, so extremely tiny. I can’t imagine how I ever got them on my fingers. What has happened to my fingers? Or did these rings shrink here in this box?

On another chain are my High School and College Keys. My kids asked, “what are they.”
“Ummm,” I answered, “Keys, you know.”
“Keys to what? What kind of keys? They don’t look like keys?”
“No, they don’t now that you mention it. We got them at the end of the year for being in activities. They had this key banquet . . .”
“Weird.”
“Yeah probably. Look though . . . I’ve got a lot of ‘em!!!”
“Great mom.”

Match Book covers. Hotel Parco dei Principi, Sorrento, Italy. The Snow King Lodge, Jackson Hole Wyoming. The Peruvian Lodge, Alta, Utah. The Sands, Los, Vegas, Nevada, The Spinnaker, Lake Dillon, Colorado. The Antlers, Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The Hollies, Stratford-on-Avon, The Von Trapp Family Lodge, Vermont, Vail Lodge, Vail Colorado, The Racquet Club, Jackson Hole Wyoming. There was an avalanche. There was a full moon. There was a valley full of mist. There was a baby conceived. There was a tradition born. There was a blizzard. There was an anniversary celebrated Connect the dots.

Love beads. I found them on my bed one night when the world fell apart with a note that said “Love is all that matters in the end.” I laid them on my sisters coffin. I brought them home to this box.

Round black onyx stone set in a star of sterling silver. We saved our money all year so that when we went to Southern Utah we could go to the Indian shops and buy something wonderful for ourselves. I picked out what I wanted the first time we walked down to the shops, unfortunately, I found two things and I could not make up my mind. One was a beautiful turquoise cut in a long triangular shape, the other the black onyx ring. I went back and looked over and over. I fussed about it, I worried out loud. I rung my hands. My brother couldn’t decide either. He wanted a lot of things. Coloring books. A coon-skin hat. Drums. Bow and Arrows. Knives. The last day I went up in the morning and bought the turquoise ring. I spent the day looking at my hand and sort of sighing. Had I done the right thing?

You see this one coming don’t you? We were in the car on the way home before I asked him what he had bought. He dug around in his “car sack”on the floor and pulled out a paper bag. Inside it was the black oynx ring. “Well,” he said, “you wanted them both and I didn’t really want anything.” Unfortunately, we were too young for me to call bullshit. I couldn’t even make him take it back. It wasn’t an isolated instance either. I have a pink furry stuffed kitten which was the entire scenario repeated. I’m sure my brother doesn’t want this kind of stuff to get out, he is a Prosecuting Attorney now and likes people to think he is nothing but one tough bastard. It’s OK Eddie, no one will ever figure out anything from this, I promise. I mean, just because my name is Edwina Peterson and yours is . . . well, a little too close for comfort, doesn’t mean that anyone is ever going to find out your hidden secret. I’ll certainly never tell.

Here is the medallion that says I danced with Dance West for three years. I loved their style . . . Burch Mann said she read Whitman, heard hism say, “I heard America singing . . .” and she answered back in her mind, “I saw America dancing . . .” and she went on to create a dance for America. She always said it had the space of the prairies in it, and the vistas of the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon. Her choreography moved across the floor fast, breakneck, hell-bent-for-something, but graceful and beautiful, with leaps that could have gone over the Grand Canyon. It was hard to do, but fantastically fun and incredible to watch.

A horseshoe with my name across the top. My uncle had it made for me in Willisburg. Everyone always had a big fight about how you should put up a horse shoe. Do you tip it so the u points up? That way all the luck stays in side. Or do you tip it down? It is a symptom of my reckless nature, that I kept it above my door always . . . tipped down. I figured, what good was all that luck sitting up there going stale? I’d just as soon have it constantly pouring down, and I figured that was what it was doing, constantly renewing and constantly pouring down. I got so I could almost feel it, walking under that brief golden shower of luck. Who wants to have a big spludge of stale luck suddenly fall on their head? Not to mention a horse shoe?

A thick silver bracelet band. Across it’s front is etched: LTJG LEE BENSON 3-17-68. It was called a POW bracelet. A lot of us bought them, the money went toward the effort to find and bring home the Prisoners of War from Viet Nam. They asked you to wear the bracelet as a reminder. Most people wore them for a week or so. They were not particularly comfortable, not terrifically stylish. I said I wouldn’t take mine off until I knew that the man whose name it carried was found, one way or the other. I wore it from 1970 until February 1, 1973 without ever taking it off. They told me I had to take it off for Cheerleading, for plays I was in, I calmly told them “no” that it was against my religion. I took it off when the war ended. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. LTJG Lee Benson never came home, he is not listed on the Viet Nam memorial wall, I have been there to see. He is still listed as officially Missing in Action. I laid my flowers near the “B’s” where his name should have been. I went back and told the people at the visitor station that they needed another monument. They said, “Yes, we’ve heard that before.”

Medallion from Egypt - two squares linked to two triangles and a large circle of gold, turquoise, white and coral enamel mosaic. It has the Sphinx, Eye of Ra, Isis and Osiris. I didn’t know what any of it meant, but if formed the center of my “Altar” during my Egypt period. I’ve read all kinds of psychological mumbo jumbo about young girls and ‘Horse Periods.’ I’m slightly interested, but only slightly because a lot of it is Freudian and there for must be take with much salt and because I never had a “Horse Period.” I did have a rip roarer of an “Egypt Period,” however. I was going to be an Archeologist for years. What causes the “Egypt Period?” A need for mystery? For knowledge? For something different? Something foreign? When we are ten, eleven, thirteen . . . while our sisters are out swooning over large bipeds with liquid eyes, why are we dreaming of an ancient civilizations and crumbling ruins?

Ticket stubs: Gordon Lightfoot; Jerry Jeff Walker; Disneyland; Gordon Lightfoot; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; Smithsonian, John Denver; Gordon Lightfoot; Monticello, Jerry Jeff Walker; National Gallery, Kennedy Center; Neil Diamond; Simon and Garfunkle; Smithsonian, Cats; Gordon Lightfoot; Disneyland; Kenny Loggins; Dorothy Chandlier Pavilion L.A., A Chorus Line, Olivia Newton John; Ann Murry, Steppenwolf; The Grass Roots; Smithsonian; Gordon Lightfoot; Smithsonian, Neil Diamond; Kennedy Center; National Gallery, Evita, Creedence Clearwater Revival; Smithsonian, National Gallery, Fleetwood Mac; Gordon Lightfoot; Jerry Jeff Walker. Yes sir, I would see Gordon Lightfoot if he came to town again!

A fairly gaudy broach in the shape of a wreath of silver leaves entwined with blue crystals. It just may have been my grandmother’s favorite piece of jewerly. She used to say, “My neck is a wrinkley mess!” as she wrapped a light scarf deftly around it, then she secured it with a broach, usually this one. When she died, they brought out her jewerly and told all of her many, many granddaughters that we might each have a piece. My grandmother had lived in our house, I grew up with her being there all the time. These others did not know her at all. But they picked, beginning with the eldest. I was nearly the youngest. When it was my turn I choose this slightly gaudy blue broach. My aunt hesitated, then decided she should say something. “Honey, you can take anything you want.” I was nineteen, I knew what she meant. There were still plenty of pieces of jewelry there that were worth a lot of money. I shook my head, “No, this is the one I want.” I’ve saved it carefully. It won’t be too much longer before I’ll need it.

Small wine colored velvet box. Inside is a ring made from melting the end of a spoon. A beautiful sterling silver spoon, probably one of a set of demitasse spoons. I have a fairly good idea who has been short a demitasse spoon and for how long. A long, thin gold chain passing through a golden disk engraved simply with the word “Princess.” A small gold band resembling a wedding band, but very small; plain, unadorned 24 ct. gold.

Hello Will. Your face gets around a lot. Your hair is receding old chap, I guess you knew that. It would hardly bother me at 440 either. This, I believe, came off of a pair of earrings that belonged to April when she was in about the third grade. Yes, she went to the third grade with dangling earrings bearing the likeness of William Shakespeare. Probably wearing one white tennis shoe and one back one as well. April has always done precisely what April wanted, that is for sure.

Here is a shell that came from a far off sea, it came from the hands of a friend that I have never seen. It has chambers open to the air as if all its secrets are known. I don’t believe that for a moment.

The Chambered Nautilus

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)

Mnemosyne do you weep for me? You who know and remember all?
Do you weep for what I’ve forgotten? Do you weep for what I recall?
Do you weep for what’s gone unnoticed?
Do you weep for what’s gone unseen?
Do you weep for the moments unremembered and grey?
Or the ones that will always be green?

©Edwina Peterson Cross

Mining for Scrap

2005-02-19T09:27:00.000Z

Today is Saturday 19th Feb 2005
This is a mining story with a twist
On Friday I typed up a list of the materials listed
by Heather for the school kids projects.
I put each list in a clear sheet proof collector A4 envelope
And thought hard who would be good candiates for collecting items from.................
Who has un tapped boxes stored in garages
Who never throws out anything even ribbon ties and wrapping paper
Who lives just around my corner and can pop in at any time
Who will part with nice odds and ends
Who is not too sentimental about old beads and buttons
Who has time to spend a few hours in fossicking for said items
The answer I found within myself is that each person is in some way maybe hanging on too long to the past as I myself did, but now I find that giving away possessions brings me joy and the recipient pleasure and it is great to be able to reycle such treasurers....so I popped my reguests into their letter boxes.....and TODAY
I have had 3 visitors with bags of goodies and more to come
So although I was going to mow the lawns (it didn't get done)
It turned out a a good day for welcome gifts ...
So one really needs only to ask and if the request is not too difficult then little miracles happen.

Lois (Muse of the Sea)

A Treasure Box of Memories

2005-02-10T02:25:00.000Z

Long after I have gone there will be in a treasure box,for those left behind
and in that box will be
A collection of a life past
A life enjoyed
A life treasured
A life varied in its creativity,
its growth,its wonder,and its thankfullness,
It will allow those who find this treasure box
an insight into how and why they are loved.
It will be a special day to share with others
The life I lived and the life I celebrated.
I will not bury my treasure box too deep
I want it to be found and rejoiced of my being here
I want a celebration of the life I loved and lived.
And for you to be happy that I was here,and that is all that matters.

I and Mnemosyne permit you to surround yourself
with the memories of me and be gladdened that we knew one another
and that is a blessing for us all.

Lois (Muse of the Sea) 10/2/2005.

Mnemosyne's Advice

2005-02-07T04:44:00.000Z

This is what I need right now, right here,
in the depths of winter at the heart of my despair:

the colors of flowers-
heliotrope and pink,
periwinkle and crimson,
citron and violet,

the sound of their names:
larkspur and foxglove,
cyclaman and daisy,
delphiniums and lilacs.

I need a burst of sunshine, the caress of a breeze,
the absense of snow and the presense of butterflies,
bees over-laden with nector, birds building nests,
sweet honey scented air and vast, endless skies.

I need the garden in Lemuria today
Mnemosyne was right.

Down,down down to the ends of the earth @16.

2005-02-07T03:34:00.000Z

I was reminded recently when searching through photo albums going back some 50 years of a holiday taken when I was a young girl of 16 years.The snap was of me and my Mother Jessie standing outside our tent at Bucham Caves (pronounced Bukan)
These caves are well known in Australia and visited by overseas travellers now,not so much in the 1950's.
We had gone there camping ,Mum and Dad and my brother John.Our 1st trip in a borrowed car,as my Father Bert had just got his licence.Not enough money to but a car ,he had to wait until he had the cash which he insisted on ...House to pay for firstly.My Dad was keen to go down these caves as he had worked on a big dam project called the Snowy Mountains Scheme,one of the largset dam building schemes in Australian history.
So here we were,I had never been underground or up in a plane for that matter .."Nothing to it " said Dad,
There was a guide at the entrance who had a lantern and a few small torches for the youngsters.You were not allowed down under 10years of age....So we entered ,Dad firstly then John and Mum and I.
The smell was the first thing I noticed. Cold,a deep cold and a chilling feeling.Not a lot to see until we descended further.
By this time I was starting to have trouble breathing .It was so cold ,but still I pulled the high neck sweater away from my neck.
I asked if I could go back as I had started to shake,no one else seemed effected and as my Father said "Most people feel like this at first,you will get used to it ,give it a bit longer".
Five minutes seemed like an hour,and my hands and legs wouldn't stay still.
I felt giddy,the next thing I remember was sitting on the ground with my back resting against the cave wall and looking up at stalactites hanging above me and the guide and my family looking down on me.
I had spoilt my Fathers' dream.When helped up by him ,I was still wobbly.We returned to the surface and there I stayed for some hours dozing on and off I was told.
Nothing more was said,Dad and my brother did the trip down that afternoon and talked and talked how wonderful it was.
I didn't care if they had met the lock-ness monster down there I was never ever going down underground ever again.
That night I had what is termed as a nightmare .I woke in a lather of sweat and thought I was dying.I wanted to tell everyone in the family that I wasn,t going to be alive after that night..I could not be pasified.Mum got me a pen and paper as I had insisted on, and I wrote out where all my possessions were to go (Not that I had much) having just finished school and about to start work at Swallow and Ariel biscuit factory in the February.
Next day Mum pumped fluid into me...hot cups of tea,cordial and water and loads of sugar. I spent the rest of the day between the tent and the toilets.
I don,t remember a lot of when we came home or if the holiday ended abruptly.The matter was not spoken of again and only a photograph remains of a young teenage girl with brown curly hair standing in the sunshine outside a tent with her arm around her Mothers' shoulders.
And I might add that to this day I have never ventured below ground even declining an offer to go down into a submarine docked at my local pier. "No thanks " I said "I'll give it a miss"
Looking back, that experience left me with a very high regard for any miners who do this for a living ,as far as I can see they should be paid whatever they deserve,instead we see them having to fight for their rights with the mining companies who after all,do not own what they take out of the ground,it is only leased to them.
The profits they make for their shareholders far outweigh the wages of the miners.
In closing I hope I can call my story.
"Mining underground is not all that it is cracked up to be"

Lois (Muse of the Sea)
PS When I see Madam Muse again I will show her the photo of Mum and I and that terrible experience down in the mine.

~BELOW~ Part 1

2005-02-01T11:42:00.000Z

~ BELOW ~

PART I:

I begin to fall behind. The voices of the rest of the company keep getting more and more muffled and the light keeps getting dimmer and dimmer. I get so tired at the end of the day, the equipment starts to feel so very heavy. I stop to rub the back of my neck, my stiff fingers kneading the knotted muscles between the roots of my hair. The lights are moving further away, bobbing along in the semi-dark, but it doesn’t really seem to matter, as my eyes are beginning to rock shut on every other pulse beat anyway. I take off my safety goggles and rub my eyes, shaking my head hard to try and wake myself up. It doesn’t help much. The lights are getting bleary and blurred as they get further and further away. Suddenly they turn a corner and I am plunged into complete blackness.

The thing is, of course, I ought to be terrified. I am not terrified. I am staring into the inky darkness completely calmly. I take an inventory. My heart is not hammering, my breath is not coming too fast. I can’t see anything. I am completely alone. I haven’t a clue where on earth I am. Interesting. Obviously I know something that I don’t know that I know. That would be intuition. Of course it feels much too strong to be merely intuition, but I don’t know another word for it, so I will call it intuition. I am not frightened or alarmed or panicked. I know everything is going to be fine, everything is going to be all right. Except, of course, for the fact that the song that has begun to fill the air, is just a little bit on the flat side.

It is a sparkling song, however, a song that is actually putting small, bright diamond bursts of light into the air. It smells like diamonds too and if I breathe in quickly through my mouth, I can taste it. Wet diamonds. If I didn’t have such a good ear I wouldn’t know it was flat either. I consider: a diamond song really would have to be a little flat, in theory. A diamond just isn’t round after all, not like a ball. Roundish, of course, which is why the song is just a little bit flat. I reach my fingers out and try to catch the diamond sparks that are snapping in the air, but they are elusive. Elusive diamond sizzles snapping in the dark.

When the a new gem enters the air, I actually taste it first. I inhale through my mouth, my tongue against my lips, and find that the clear, sparkling diamond essence has been replaced by
ruby. Not cherry, or strawberry or even just red, but ruby. Umm, I like ruby better than diamond, it has more taste and, truly it’s song is not so flat. Why is that, I wonder? It doesn’t sizzle quite as much, however, nor snap. It seems to seep all over, making everything a deep, darkish crimson color. I can see around the mine a little bit now. I use the thick red light to locate my hat and pick ax. When I stand up, I find myself looking right into a bed of cream colored crystals. Sitting on the bed of cream colored crystals is a quite attractive Fae, about the size of my hand. She is purple and has pink and purple wings. Well. She looks purple in this ruby light anyway.

Now. I am aware that most miners who happened to look into a bed of cream colored crystals and see a purple Fae the size of their hand would probably decide that they had been exposed to some kind of gas leak and were hallucinating. They would immediately lay down, shut their eyes and try and make the purple Fae go away. Consider, however: I have already been perfectly at ease listening to slightly flat diamond music snapping and sizzling in the dark and slurping ruby juice off the air. Tells you something doesn’t it?

I look at the little Fae sitting in the crystals. “Hey,” I say, trying to sound off hand. She smiles slowly. “Straw is cheaper, grass is free.” Then she laughs. Her laughter is worth the stupid joke. It sounds like sweet, clear water tumbling over melting ice in a Spring chinook.

“Are you lost?” she asks me hopefully.
“Possibly.” I say nodding. “My company sort of went on without me and I don’t have any light.”
“Well, that sounds promising,” she says doubtfully.
“Are you supposed to be catching lost miners?” I guess.
“Oh no,” she says shaking her head. “I’m not even supposed to be talking to people who can’t hear me.”
I have to think about this. I look at her carefully. “I can hear you, you know.”
“Yes, there is that,” she says shrugging. She sounds disappointed.
“I take it,” I say, “that you were expecting someone . . . different?”
She squints up at me. “Well, yeah.” She scratches her ear. “A Princess, I think. I mean, I wore my DRESS and I’ve got proDUCT in my hair and everything.”

Sure enough, she is wearing a really cute, really little, little black dress and her black hair is spiked up on top quite carefully.
“Yeah,” I say nodding, “you look really good.”
She smiles. “Yeah?”
“Uh hu. Did you do you own hair?”
“Well, like, I DID it, I mean I didn’t CUT it, but I DID it you know?” She smiles again. “Your not a Princess, though?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think there is much doubt of that.”
She looks disgruntled. Then she looks thoughtful. Then she looks calculating. Then she looks crafty. Then she looks resigned. Then she looks delighted. This all happens very quickly, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
“But you CAN hear me?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Very good.” She jumps up on the crystals. “You are elected. OBViously you are THE one. I mean, I don’t know why you are wearing such weird clothes and all, but, hey, that is not my problem, you know?”
“OK,” I say. “What am I elected for?”
“Well,” she says carefully, “I’m going to take you Below and I’m going to show you how things Are when they are Backwards. This is important so listen: Once you understand how things Are when then are Backwards, then you can go back up topsides and tell everyone and they will understand and soon everything will work out better up there because they will understand and things will begin to be Backwards up there too.”

My eyes narrow slowly. “Rrrrrright.”
She takes hold of the end of my index finger and begins flying, pulling me along the mine shaft. This feels exactly like you would expect. Like having a butterfly attached to the end of your finger. “Comon.”
We might go over that part about hallucinations and toxic gas again, but, we are just going to assume that you have figured out a few things about me by now, so we can skip the part where I ought to be examining my sanity and move ahead to the moment when we come through the low shadowy mines to a find the long, long drop of an empty mine shaft. The pale reddish light of the ruby is still filling the mine around us. There is another kind of a light coming out of the shaft. A creamy, pearly light that leaves a shaft of swimming golden motes glowing above the mine shaft. I look down, but I can’t see the bottom. I mean, the mine shaft is lit all the way down with the same pearly, gold glow, but I literally cannot see the bottom, it is too far away. I look at my friend on the end of my index finger. “Below?”
“Yeah. Below.” She scratches her ear with her other hand. She looks me up and down. Her lips twist. She puts her head on one side. “Hummmm.” She chews on a purple thumb nail. She lets go of my finger, flutters over and looks down into the shaft. “I suppose you wouldn’t care for the idea of sort of . . . free falling?” She finally asks.
“Well, that sort of depends on what happens at the bottom.”
“I’d . . . I’d get down there first and catch you,” she says. “In theory.”
“No. I’m afraid I couldn’t go for free falling if it’s just in theory.”
She nods absently. “OK. How do you feel about wings?”
That is another story entirely. I smile. “Oh, I could DO wings! Is that possible?”
She looks at me critically. “Yeah. I think so. You are going to have to do some . . . shrinking and, I think you’re going to have to take your . . . shirt off.” I’m about to ask her who we might be going to run into “Below” when I decide I really don’t care. For the experience of flying, I’ll arrive where-ever topless if I have to.

I unbutton my work shirt and shrug it off, letting it fall on the ground. My sports bra goes on top of it quickly. She looks at me and blinks. “Tattoo. Wow. Cool.”
“Thanks.”
She flutters over in front of my face and forms her hands into a triangle, her thumbs together, her index fingers touching. Then just as if she were blowing a big bubble, she starts to blow slowly and softly on her hands. I hear a sound something like a harp arpeggio and I suddenly I start to itch really badly between my shoulder blades. I’m reaching my hand back over my shoulder to scratch when I am struck by several things all at once. One is that I am sort of hovering in mid air. The next is that I’ve put my hand, not on my shoulder, but on something that feels more like a maple leaf. The third thing is that I am still looking at the tiny Fae, but she isn’t tiny any more, she has grown to be the same size I am. All at the same time, I realize that none of these things make any sense and suddenly I come down with a rather large whomp on the floor of the mine, sitting on my work pants which seem to be big enough for the Jolly Green Giant.

The purple Fae alights next to me and sure enough, we are the same size. She smiles and nods indulgently and points over my shoulder, “Wings.” I twist around. NOW my heart is hammering and my breath is coming too fast. Spread behind me are the most beautiful pair of wings I have ever seen in my entire life. Well. I don’t know if they actually ARE the most beautiful pair of wings I have ever seen in my entire life, but there is no doubt that they are attached to my back, which automatically makes them the most beautiful pair of wings I’ve ever seen before in my entire life. I can’t see all of them, but I can see that they are blue with black veins. Yes. They are beautiful.

She is scratching her head. “Kinda . . . small.”
“Are they?” I look over my shoulder and end up turning in a complete circle getting hit in the face with a soft swish of wing at the end. They are smaller than hers. They just cover and rise above my back, where hers are big enough that she could wrap herself up in them if she wanted to. She walks all the way around me with her head on one side and one eye closed. “Temporary,” she finally concludes, “serviceable and . . . veeeeery attractive, if I do say so myself, and I do.”
“Yeah?” I can’t quite believe how pathetic my voice sounds.
“Oh, Yeah,” she says, nodding, “they’re gorgeous.”
We stand there grinning at each other rather foolishly for a moment.

I move my shoulders experimentally and the wings lift and close. When I move my shoulders a little bit more they lift me right off of the ground. Whoa! I look at the Purple Fae, “How do you . . .”
She shakes her head, “don’t think about it.”
“Don’t THINK about it?”
“Uh hu. You gotta just not think about it. Like, doing the Watusi, or riding a bike, or . . . yeah, you know. Just don’t think about it.”
I look at her with slightly narrowed eyes. “You do the Watusi?” She shrugs, “I can fly.”
OK.” I say, purposefully blanking my mind and subsequently rising up into the air.
“Very good,” she says, smiling. “Take a whirl around the mine.”

While I am flying there is a gem change. Because of that, flying will always be green. As green as the cucumber crisp menthol mist of mint on the tongue of summer, as green as the touch of cool dew damp grass and deep, wet, jade moss, as green as the ultimate, luxuriant, lush sound of emerald.

Fifteen minutes later I return to her side. I know that my eyes have changed. I know they will never look the same again. She looks at me, and her own eyes soften. “There will always be dreams,” she says wistfully.
I smile. “Fifteen minutes,” I say. “It was worth it.”

I have realized, of course, that I am not wearing any clothes. That didn’t matter either. She looks at me now, however and says, “I think we’re gonna have to cover the tattoo. Sorry.”
I smile and hold out my arms. “Have at it.”
She blows again, this time through just a circle made by the forefinger and thumb of one hand. There is very short sound like the single hollow note of a wooden flute. I look down to find that she has given me a rather terrible prom-thing with a big poofey baby-blue chiffon skirt.
“Oh, honestly! Are you trying to pull off the Princess thing here?” I ask her.
She shrugs again. “I thought it was worth a try.”

I swish the skirt around a little. “It matches the wings anyway,” I comment.
“Yeah,” she says modestly, “I’m really good at that.”
I look at my hands. “The gloves are a mile and a half beyond cheesy.”
“I like the gloves!”
“If you were going to go to all the trouble of blue gloves, you might have untangled my hair.”
She looks at the snarled rats nest of my curly blonde hair. “I like your hair!”
I snort through my nose rather too loudly. “Uh hu. Well, let’s go. You’ve got me looking like something short and fat right out of Sleeping Beauty here.”
She giggles. “Yeah, you kinda do! you know? You look just like Fanny Weathertinkle or whatever their name was. And the dress will all poof out when we go down too. So dainty.”
“Oh, go jump down a mine shaft.”

We don’t actually fly down the mine shaft. It is more like floating on the golden whatevertheyare that are slowly drifting up as we are slowly drifting down. It feels like falling through champagne might feel; really dry champagne, I mean totally dry, the bubbles sort of tickle all over as they go past, the way champagne bubbles tickle your nose. It seems like we are in the mine shaft for no time at all, and yet, it also seemed like we are here for eons of soft, slow, golden time as well. Nothing happens in the mine shaft. I could easily stay here the rest of my life.

We land gently and my skirt does, indeed, puff out. The purple Fae laughs her beautiful laugh again. “Bibbbybobiedwhatever,” she giggles.
I scowl at her. “What IS your name? I can’t keep thinking of you as “the purple Fae.”
She snickers. “It’s Fay.”
“It is NOT!”
“It IS!”
“Humph.”
“And what is your name?” She asks, smiling.
“Kaija.”
“It is NOT!” She throws her head back laughing; crystal water singing over melting ice.
“Actually, it isn’t,” I say dryly, “It’s Yekaterinanna, but that is kind of a mouthful.”
“Wow!” she says, “it IS! I can’t even SAY that!”
“Fine. Call me Kaija.”
“Kaija,” she repeats, “and you can call me Fay,”
“Fine,” I say again, “as long as you are not going to tell me your first name is Purple.” She smiles slowly, but she doesn’t say anything.

(Here ends Part I, of BELOW)

Blogger Beast

2005-02-01T07:16:00.000Z

She lays on the couch, staring up at the cobwebs crackling across the ceiling. “It’s like this doctor . . . It all started when I was a very small child and my tricycle was eaten by a Blogg . . . ”
He adjusts his monocle. “They did not have Blogg’s when you were a very small child, your tricycle could not have been eaten by one. This is clearly another case of transference.”
“No, I mean it, all my psychic fears were caused by Blogg’s. A Blogg locked me in an elevator once, that is why I’m claustrophobic.”
“That is preposterous. A Blogg is an inanimate object.”
“HA! That is what YOU Think! You know perfectly well that the minute your back is turned your Blogg gets up and plays old Elvis CD’s on your stereo.”
“All right now. It is time for some positive work. You are going to go to the Blogg and try to put some words on it.”
“OOOOoooooh Nooooooo I’m not. It will bite my arm off. I need my arm, I’m an artist. Besides, I just had my nails done.”
“Come on now. It is part of your therapy. Off you go. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Another failure experience isn’t going to kill you, you’ve certainly had plenty before this.”
“Gee, thanks loads doc.”
“That’s a good girl. Over to the computer. You can do it.”

She moves to the computer. She starts poking around with the dreaded Blogger Beast. The last we see of Herr Doctor, he has opened his CD machine. He looks inside where he finds “Nothing but a Hound Dog” spinning silently round and round. He raises a hairy eyebrow magnified ten times behind his monocle . . . perhaps she was right all along!!!

The Song of the Seven Miners

2005-02-01T03:47:00.000Z

When I signed up to go on a mining expedition I didn’t know what I would uncover as I ventured into the mine, making my way down winding untouched pathways and unexplored veins. For one whose biggest fear was discovering nothing I could hardly imagine that I would find precious gems with my first few tentative steps into the mine. Nor could I have foreseen the way the musty walls would creak and moan calling to me, challenging me, guiding my steps, and propelling me forward, even in moments where mining was the farthest thing from my conscious mind. I entered the mine afraid and reluctant in spirit just a couple of days ago. I figured I would have to go in quite deep before I would uncover anything of importance, so with no expectations as of yet I pulled out my trusty flashlight, found a sturdy rock, brushed away the dust and planted myself down.

“No reason to rush,” I thought.
“After all you made it inside, that’s as good a start as any.”
I pulled the paper out of my back jeans pocket and began to leaf through to see what was going on in the world outside of mining.
I made it all the way to the D-section, when I began to hear the whisper of the wind whistling through the mines. I buttoned my shirt and turned the page. The whisper then became a word, an echoing word…
“Come.”
“You’re imagining things” I tell myself as my eyes begin to scan down the page.
“Come”
“Come and See”
When I can no longer deny that the wind is speaking through the crevices in the mine rock, I choose simply to ignore it.
“How hard could it be to ignore the wind,” I thought.
..but I have to tell you wind can be persistent if necessary and with nothing to do all day but blow it showed no signs of stopping.
“Come and See”
“Come and See, Beth”
Since when were we ever on a first name basis.
“Come and see”
“Come and See, Beth”
“Come and See what!” I shout.
“For goodness sake, I’m on an important mining expedition here.”
“I don’t have time to come and see!”

I began to mumble to myself just as my eyes catch sight of something interesting on the page. Towards the bottom, in a small section on the left hand side I saw twinkling amid the stark black and white text. Running my finger over it I realize it is dust…gold dust glittering on my finger, shiny specks of golden dust dancing in the air above my head settling in my hair, on my shoulders, on my bare cheeks and lips. I wipe away more of the dust and it is there I uncover my first gold nugget.

I am astounded. I didn’t even have to break out my axe and chip away any ore and stone to find this treasure. There in small print is an open audition call for more singers to join a choral group that sings accompanied by the symphony. I feel the wind caressing my cheek and gently pushing on my back.
“Come and See, Beth”
I feel butterflies swirling in different directions in the pit of my stomach as excitement begins to build inside me.
“I have to do this.” I think to myself.

As soon as I affirm this calling, I hear shrill screams from deep down in the mine. It sounds like an entire swarm of banshees crying out loud. In a wild frenzy they come rushing at me and unexpecting, unaware, and completely unprepared I am assailed by a mob of doubts. They shriek in high-pitched tones past my ears. What about the time you were supposed to sing the National Anthem in Tallahassee and you intentionally stuck your skirt in the toilet so you wouldn’t have to go on stage. What about the Spirit Song audition where you messed up the harmony? Your name wasn’t on the accepted list, but your boyfriend’s was and what about 7th grade when you were a finalist for the Little Mermaid solo part, but froze up and never could stay on cue? You can’t even sing in the shower when you know someone’s home. Who are you kidding? They came in droves, each one carrying its own fear. I couldn’t believe there were so many. What about your voice, your laryngitis...

I covered my ears closed my eyes and listened for the wind. I didn’t have to listen hard. The whisper came easily, audibly…calling “Come and See, Beth…Come and see. I uncovered my ears and slowly opened up my eyes. The winds that had sent the gold dust swirling were gone, but the whisper, the prodding remained in my heart. I stood up, brushed the dirt off of my pants and took a few steps, but the path was steep and dark and I nearly lost my footing. Behind me the banshees cackled with glee. “See not even a yard into the mine yet…she’ll never make it…I can feel the doubt creeping in…the banshees poison seeping in slowly, wanting to suck the whispers of inspiration right from my very heart, but the dust on my finger still gleams in the cracks of light, and I know I will do this.

I close my eyes and call upon The Power of Seven.
I call upon the strength within myself, the red glittering horn, the pinecone basket and my six other miners.

They aren’t in range to get to me…all in different sections of the mine, but they hear my call. I toss them each a line and they help me keep my footing steady as I go. Winnie shines light in my direction…illuminating my path, and lifts my spirits with harmonious song. Barbara and Lois speak wisdom and encouragement that drowns out the banshees and directs my focus. Gwen reminds me of herbs and remedies she placed in my pack before the journey to keep my body and spirit healthy. Steph shares with me the similar challenge she faces from outside the mine and I know I am not alone, and Gabe shows me how I opened my heart to the mines and the mine was opening up new veins for me in return.

With “The Power of Seven-Plus” holding the line, I did go and see…and my song can now be heard in the whisper of the winds moving through the cracks in the mine walls. I invite you each to listen to my first treasure.

It comes from a song sung by my new choir and I know it was given as a souvenir of my first discovery. It was given as a gift to me. and I in turn give it as my gift to all of you who held the line for me:

It is from “I thank you God for Most This Amazing Day” by e.e. cummings: “I who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birthday of life and of love and wings…now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.”
Exhausted after a day of discovery I lay down on the floor of the mine and drift into slumber, dreaming peacefully,
my first dreams of a still far-off place called Eldorado.
I have far to go, and my boots are heavy, but for the first time my burden feels lighter and there is a song in my heart.

**Thank you all so much for your prayers and support and for holding the line for me...I did make it with the condition that I train for 6 months under the same Maestro, with the community choir he also directs. At first I was disappointed having this provision added but then I realized I get to have six months of additional instruction under an incredible Maestro, and who knows what discoveries I will make along the way. I am already so joyful that I even went through with the audition with my stagefright and the condition of my throat withstanding. For me this was such a big step. I seriously could not have done it without all of you along for the journey and as for the provision I have chosen to accept it with an open heart and an enthusiatic spirit. Who knows where this path will take me, and afterall it's not nearly as much about the destination as it is about the journey. A journey that has already taken me to places that just two weeks ago I would have doubted I could reach."** Beth

Silver and White

2005-01-29T21:26:00.000Z

The entrance to the mine is smaller than I expected; heavy timbers brace the earthen walls and ceiling. Earth under, above and on both sides of me, I walk down the sloping road carrying a pick and a bucket, while stowed in my backpack, are the small items, water bottle, flashlight, whistle and a shallow pan. A mining hat illuminates the way and every fifty feet or so a dim lantern hangs from a spike hammered into the wall and flings shivering shadows out to startle me.

All this talk about finding treasure and discovering El Dorado amuses me--no, that's not quite it, I suppose embarrasses is the better word. Maybe age has something to do with it, I'm sure I'm the oldest one here. I know I'm too old to be dropping down manholes and mineshafts and charging off on romantic quests.

I've set a smaller goal for myself.

It's colder than I thought it would be, a still, eerily silent cold, and I'm a bit out of breath from the long walk. The ground begins to level out--and the narrow corridor I've been following opens into a circular area. I take the rubbing I made of the manhole cover with the compass rose from my pocket and study it. Eight points surround a circle. Seven passages lead out from this location, one for each miner, plus the entrance passage. I hear the sound of digging from two of the passages. I would like company, but this is solitary work--there will be time to talk if I meet someone in the chamber or topside, but not here.

I choose one of the quiet ways and follow until it comes to an abrupt end. I suppose I should continue to lengthen the passageway and wonder if I can dig in a straight line. Lifting my pick, I aim it dead ahead. Dirt rains down and scatters at my feet. I strike again and again until I'm standing in a huge mound. Soon I'll be swimming in dirt and blocking my own exit. I've seen nothing that even hints at gold and I've been digging for hours.

It's time to go. I fill my bucket and gather my equipment.

I return to the chamber and look towards each point, listening intently but I don't hear what I'm seaching for. It must be along the entrance passageway. I wander back, the way I came in and carefully play my flashlight along both walls. All the writing advice I've ever heard has said: use your five senses, see, hear, touch, smell, taste. There's nothing to taste and I am already looking and listening. Wait. The cold feels suddenly less intense--a minute difference, but something has changed. I stop and sniff the air. Nothing can grow down here but I smell the scent of green things. Vegetation. There is a barely discernible movement of air, warm air, and the far-off sound of running water. I find the branch-off I've been seeking deep in the shadow between lanterns, a black hole easily over-looked when following the light from a miner's hat.

The less travelled path is narrower and cramped, the dirt ceiling brushes my hair and pebbles trickle down onto my shoulders and back. I struggle not to turn an ankle on the stones and slippery gravel. There is no light except from my miner's hat and the instant I'm aware of it, it blinks out. I freeze in the blackness, afraid to move and overwhelmed with despair.

Nothing but faith will sustain me now and after a murmured prayer, I stumble ahead feeling the way with my hands, heading for the light that will always exist even in the darkest night. The way narrows again forcing me to crawl and drag the heavy bucket after me until I finally sense, more than see a glimmer of light ahead.

Have I travelled an hour, a lifetime or an eternity? Without a way to measure time or distance I can't tell, but the ground beneath me begins to smooth, the walls widen and I find I can stand again. Warm, soothing air with a sweetness to it I can't identify surrounds me and, with deep gratitude, I pray again, knowing how unworthy I am for what lies ahead.

The gate is rusty but the compass rose design is unmistakable, and after a major push the hinges creak open. Dappled sunlight pours through tall trees and the stream I've been searching for beckons a short distance from where I stand. I had hoped to find Memory's Molten Stream and surely this must be it. I sit down on the bank and dip my hand in the clear, bubbling water. A school of minnows reroute themselves around my fingers and then reform instantly into a tight knot once they have passed. When I remove my hand it is clean and healed.

A white butterfly with silver markings brushes my cheek and I hear the whisper of a question. Mnemosyne!

"What is it you wish?"

"The gift of words," my voice trembles as I answer.

"But you have that already, in your thoughts, in your memory." Her voice is mellow and soft as a summer breeze. She sits, now in her human form, just across the narrow stream and she smiles at me. Dark hair tumbles onto her shoulders and her white and silver gown shimmers in the sunlight.

Her laughters ripples toward me, as she asks, " Too easy? So, shall I set you a task? Would that suit you?"

My heart nearly skips a beat. I know I'll do anything she asks.

"Relax and rest here, by my stream. Let the dreams come and remember them. When you leave, visit the Lemuria garden and take from it what you need. It is all there."

"May I return here?"

"Any time you wish."

"I was digging for gold," I tell her, "to wash in your stream, but there's nothing here to pan." I hold up the empty bucket I struggled so hard to bring.

"Nothing? Are you sure?" Her voice quiets again to the whisper I'd first heard and wings again touch my cheek as she flutters off.

A single grain of pure gold gleams in the bottom of my empty bucket

The Note

2005-01-28T21:21:00.000Z

Hands ruined by rough hard labor carefully pickup a folded note written on ivory vellum stationary with the initials S G embossed across the top. It was left on a bench in the gardens topside of the Mine. Carefully the rough calloused hands unfold the paper and dark glowing eyes read the following by the light of a setting sun:

To My Fellow Patrons,

One of the Miners has come up from Mines below the Cafe and has taken to strolling through the herb garden I've planted outside my Curiosity Shop.

She comes out just before sunset and walks down the little gravel path edged with Bee Balm; those are the flowers that are red and purple and smell just like honey. If you haven't seen my garden recently ( and I'm hoping some of you will soon ) I've scattered here and there among the Nicotiana my little stone gargoyles that my Aunt Akela gave to me the summer she crashed landed her plane and was nearly killed in a town called Abandon.

What I find interesting is the attention the Miner pays to those little statues. When she picks them up she handles them gently, as if she were holding a kitten or some other small delicate animal. She always puts them back down carefully and I've noticed she'll give them a little pat on the head before she stands back up again.

I've called hello a few times to her and she looks at me with what I can only describe as frank curiosity. Like the look you would be wearing if your cat were to walk up to you and ask how your day went.Then she pulls her shoulders back and moves away from me slowly. When there's some distance between us she simply turns and walks back the way she came.

Her eyes interest me most of all; how would I describe them? Ah, yes...feral. They look very bright and very feral.

I think that the next time I see her I'm going to invite her in to tell me her story.

I hope no one objects.
********************************************************************************

The dark orange eyes are flare as the Miner looks up into the setting sun and she says with a low laugh, " I certainly hope not ". She folds the paper and places it in the back pocket of her worn blue jeans and she walks up the path to the doorway that is the entrance way to the Curiosity Shop

Muse of Unorthodox Creative Writing

2005-01-27T22:45:00.000Z

*breathing in deeply and exhaling slowly, I sit quietly for a moment or three, trying consciously to relax my tense muscles*

Muses are elusive beings; with an ancient wisdom they are arbitrary at times, cryptic, irreverant and have an itinerary all of their own. They don't care if, you the mere mortal, are ready for them or not. They come when they come and inspire you however they wish. Sometimes they are crystal clear, and sometimes they make you work out your own inspiration, leaving you with only a glimpse or hint of what they see.

For more than a week now, I have heard and felt my own Muse calling. While her voice is as gentle and soft as a whisper on the wind drifting toward me, her pull has been quite strong, stirring a desire in my soul to face her, to meet her, to get to know her well for the first time in my life. She has been with me since my discovery and delight in writing my first play as a child. She's fueled my imagination, guided my hand in writing a few poems, inspired me with the right words for essays and led me to places or things that have awakened my creativity.

Such as this mine at Soul Food Cafe. I thank her, this nameless, faceless muse and am lucky to have her as mine. She's been with me for so long, and she has been patient, far longer than I could ever be. Not once has she asked for recognition or sought credit where it was due; not once has she expected a thank you in return or gotten one...till now. She knows I am ready to acknowledge her at last, to invoke her and seek her out. She knows I hear her, feel her and is ready to guide me and be a partner in my endeavors. I believe I was led to the mine, in part, to meet her, that part of this preparation in mining is really a quest to find her, to understand her as well as myself.

And for more than a week now, I have tried answering her call. But I failed each attempt. Well, perhaps not necessarily failed them, but have come across detours instead, blocking off unsafe or caved-in shafts of the mine. I have tried a couple of exercises in preparation, but part way through on each, a detour has directed me either to the left or right. Sometimes I've even had to choose as shafts opened on either side. The exercises will eventually come to light as gold nuggets or gold dust, but for now, I will follow the detours and see where they lead me.

She still calls me, my Muse. She knows of my efforts and knows I'll eventually find her in her magnificent cavern, whether it be underground or in a cave somewhere, or some place totally unexpected. She has the patience (as mentioned before)...and the wisdom to let me find her as I will, following whatever path is necessary. Learning whatever I need to to fully understand her, and myself, so that by the time we come face-to-face I will know her as well as I know myself.

She is a different muse, this one. My personal one, I'd like to think. Not one of the nine born to Mnemoysne, but perhaps a cousin. A daughter of Zeus or Apollo, born to a mortal princess in the Age of Gods and Goddesses. I don't know much about her yet, not her name, not her background or what she looks like, nor even what type of literature she is over. All I know is it's mine. Whatever my forte is. I'm not much of a poet, I can't rhyme. I'm not really lyrical, and I've never written a saga. I'm not an historian either or much of a record keeper, but I love history. And fantasy. I seem to write best when using my inventive imagination or when I write about personal experiences. I'm an unorthodox journalist, who likes painting a full picture for her readers' imaginations, instead of sticking to the bare minimum of details. *wry smile* I guess that would make her the Muse of Unorthodox Creative Writing, yes?

I kinda like that.

What I do know of her I know because of her past gentle influence and help through the years. I know she is kind, intelligent, playful, patient, insistent, fiesty, and for her...nothing is impossible. This is going to be one heck of a quest, and in the end I know we'll be great friends. I can't wait to meet her, my Muse, and have this conversation I know is coming about creativity, about my soul and hers.

I'm coming, Muse. Just keep calling; keep guiding and I'll get there. Eventually.

Shiloh

The Unexpected

2005-01-26T23:22:00.000Z

I have been intrigued by many things in my life---but I can't recall ever giving manhole covers a second thought. Still, it seemed a reasonable starting point for one with no practical mining experience and after looking at photographs from different countries and the artistic quilts and sculptures the covers had inspired I felt my enthusiasm begin to bubble.

The cover I found was a filthy black metal circle in the center of a dead end street, it held no fascination for me only distaste, but wandering around town dodging traffic to find another one to complete a writing assignment was out of the question. It would have to do.

As I squatted down to get a better look, I tried not to think of my ultimate goal, which was to remove the cover and descend into a cramped, dark space. Dried yellow stems and stalks from the previous summer had rooted themselves in every crack and crevice and I began to tug and pull at them. The pain was instantaneous but only after blood began oozing from my fingers and palms did I realize I was dealing with thistles and stinging nettle. I kicked them aside and cursed my stupidity for not bringing heavy gloves.

Blotting my hands with a tissue, I wondered what in the world I had hoped to accomplish. I was dirty and bleeding, my back was already beginning to ache, and this was the easy part!

I heard the sound of purring and then felt something nudge my leg. Oreo had decided to join me. "Aren't you supposed to be a big dog,?" I asked, alluding to the simple prompt I might have tried. My handsome tuxedo cat ignored the implied slur against his species and continued to rub against me.

There's no shame in quitting something you're unfit for," I muttered.

Oreo's motor stopped abruptly and he began to pace the circumference of the manhole as if he'd scented a mouse. In an instant he was digging furiously, kicking up a cloud of dust and pebbles until the taste of it was so thick in my nose and mouth I began to choke.

As quickly as the frenzy began it ended and, shaking the dust from his usually immaculate black and white fur, he sat down and stared at the manhole. He'd removed enough accumulated dirt and grime so that I could see hand holds for lifting the cover and a pattern in the metal that looked vaguely familiar: a circle surrounded with eight points, four large and four short.

Forgetting my injuries, I picked at the dirt in the circle with the only tools I had, my fingernails. Wavy hatch lines appeared near the bottom and what might have been a cloud near the top. My appreciation grew as I saw the care with which an unknown artist had etched the minor elements of the picture and I nearly prayed the center would show what I was now convinced must be there.

Brushing away the debris, I stopped for a rest. My nails were broken and ragged, dried blood stained my filthy hands, which continued to sting from the scratches and punctures I'd received from the vicious thorns. I sat back and took a swallow from a bottle of water and rubbed my aching knees. Oreo came and butted my chin with his head and began to purr again.

"It is there, isn't it?" I asked, almost expecting him to answer. Slowly and meticulously I worked on the center portion of the circle until the bow of a ship was visible and then the stern, sails came next and lastly, faint and exquisite, the rigging lines of a treasure ship.

It was the last image one would expect from a manhole assignment that was itself a preliminary to alluvial mining, but not all gold seekers had traveled to California overland and gold had been transported from Australia and Alaska and California by ship.

The design represented a compass rose, a ship's wheel that provides direction in the middle of an endless sea, a map that would show me first how to navigate beneath the manhole cover and then how to find my way in the depths of the alluvial mine.

Under an inch of dirt, I had unearthed the unexpected and it was as precious to me as gold dust. I grasped the hand-holds and tugged with all my might. Slowly, the cover shifted until I could see a ladder leading down. Light was coming in from above and there also seemed to be a source of light from below. Oreo watched, as I took my first few tentative steps, then climbed confidently onto my shoulder and curled around my neck. We both knew we were ready for whatever adventure lay ahead of us.

The Power of Seven (My First Steps)

2005-01-26T09:29:00.000Z

Alluvial Miners
THE POWER OF SEVEN

Standing in the hot sun, squinting from the gold dust rising up all around my small, unsteady frame one would never guess the job I had come to do. I do not wear heavy soled shoes to protect my feet, but braces to keep them in proper alignment. I have no flashlight to guide my steps, no walking stick to aid my balance, only a walker with two wheels in the front, a basket for collecting pinecones, and a snazzy red horn that glitters in the sun almost as much as the gold dust. It is 1984. I am a seven years old.
Born with Cerebral Palsy, my body hardly seems a sturdy enough vessel to venture deep into a dark mine and chip away tediously at black ore to reach a place few can imagine, but at seven years old it is a place I have seen. I am what many call a trooper. What I lack in physicality I make up for in spirit and idealism. I may not have a miner’s frame but I have a miner’s soul. Born not being able to sit, stand, or walk, I learned very young that many a rock must be lifted, the dust sifted, and the earth moved to reap even the smallest rewards. While other children scored soccer goals and ran laps in Phys Ed., climbing out of the bathtub unaided was my Eldorado. Every milestone, no matter how seemingly small was a huge victory marked by frustration, tears, hard work, resolve and faith. Yes, at seven years old, I am a trooper. Amazingly wise beyond my years, yet full of all of the innocence and hope that lends its strength to children. Our innocence makes us unafraid and undaunted. Standing before the dark mine, with its boards creaking in the wind and the dank smell emanating from its entrance that is how I feel…unafraid and undaunted…eager to explore and uncover…not just hoping but completely believing I will unearth a treasure of great significance. This is the power of unblemished youth, dreams given free reign, and idealism captured in the hope of Eldorado. This is the power and beauty of seven.
***
THE FRAILTY OF TWENTY-SIX

Standing in the hot sun, squinting from the gold dust rising up all around my less than perfect i.e. flabby body that has been the subject of more than one New Year’s Resolution, one would hardly guess the job I had come to do. I wear Doc Martens on my feet in the hopes of arriving as well-equipped for the task ahead as I possibly can. It is 2005. I am twenty-six years old, soon to be twenty-seven. My body is still a far cry from the vessel it should be to venture deep into a dark mine and chip away at all the baggage I have collected to reach a place I once could imagine with ease… but my body is now the least of my worries. Having brought new life into this world, worked a 12 hour day with a grueling commute to come home then tackle sight words and show and tell, while concocting something similar to green bean casserole, packing lunches, folding laundry, and still remembering to replace the toilet paper roll in my son’s bathroom, I am confident my body though it may be weary, will hold up just fine. It is my spirit, once my greatest strength that concerns me now. At twenty-six I am not a chipped tea cup or even a badly broken vase, my very being is a mosaic of shattered and mismatched pieces that don’t seem to fit or close the cracks no matter where they’re placed. There is no glue…no brace or orthodic to repair the heart. Standing before the dark mine with its boards creaking in the wind and the dank smell emanating from the entrance. I am intimidated. I am afraid
It’s not so much the monsters that might be lurking waiting to gobble me up from deep beneath that scare me, but rather the thought of emptiness. All my life, through every trial I held to the promise that there was some meaning, some purpose, some divine reason, and even if it could not be seen by the naked mortal eye, surely there was to be a divine reward, a heavenly blessing if one was patient and dedicated. Now at twenty-six I struggle desperately to hold on to that hope. Still wise beyond my years, but also older than I ought to be and not so innocent, Eldorado seems a far away fairy tale that I sometimes chastise myself for dreaming of, as surely it’s a way to escape reality. My path is so littered with broken dreams that to look back is so painful I feel I must physically hold myself together before my mosaic completely flies apart and disintegrates, and all that is me, was me, the power of seven is completely and forever lost. I know I am blessed beyond belief with a wonderful man in my life and a beautiful son, and even blessed with beautiful Hawaii; it makes me feel guilty to hurt sometimes. Just the same sometimes it seems that all I had hoped for, once believed in, my career, my ability to make a difference, the sanctity of marriage and the indestructible bond of devotion, the strength of family, all of this has moved to Eldorado. The place I can no longer see, the place I cannot reach, the place I am now afraid to believe in. For fear there is no reason, no purpose, no divine reward or heavenly blessing…no gold…The one discovery I dread to make is the discovery of nothing. Standing outside the mine in my heavy combat boots, with my tension-ridden shoulders and heavy heart I wrap my arms around myself to keep in the pieces. I close my eyes tight as tears fall and I pray. Dear God, Please give me something to believe in. Let it all mean something. All the sorrow in my life please let it mean something. As I take the first step this is the burden I carry. This is the frailty of twenty-six.
***
Written By: Beth Clewley

My Adventure Topside

2005-01-25T22:44:00.000Z

I received my map and invitation to the gathering on the bluffs for the meeting of the Alluvial Miners. I spend a lot of time in the valleys and mines, so I thought I'd take my motorcycle, which I rarely ride nowadays and take a trip up to visit my new friends.
Of course I got lost, why I haven't ended up on the other side of the world now is a mystery to me! It's all about maps down in the mines and following directions. Did I mention my eyesight is poor too? But really, who needs to see in the dark. You sort of have to feel your way and follow your gut; which is something I CAN do very well, thank you very much.
When I reached the bluff the winds were starting to blow hard and wouldn't you know it? It started to rain a little but that's okay. The little gathering place was above a lookout with a wooden fence to keep you away from the crumbling edge that fell to the Sea and rocks below.
So I hopped up and took a look down.
Very cool.
Do you know that when the tide comes in and bashes up against those black rocks below it looks exactly like the sky on a stormy day?
The trees here aren't lush and green, they're always fighting something off, fog, and winds, whatever ever else that comes up out of the sea and makes for the woods surrounding the cafe. So they're very tall and worn and gray. They remind me of these men who's biker brother died many years ago.
I planned the funeral and right in the middle of the service at this old fashion lovely church I could hear some sort of bottle roll down under the pews and one of them jumped up and yelled, " have some respect you sons of b*&^ we're in church you A&^%@#!
I'm not sure why I should think of those men and those trees as being the same. They're old, tough and defiant I guess. So they are the same.
If you go back away from the bluff, it's a little quieter and the Sea doesn't seem as loud and the wind isn't as insistent.
Someone has made a little garden here in the meeting place, there's some logs they've pulled together in the shape of a square, there's even rosemary planted all over the place and these little flowers that I think are forget- me -nots.
Forget-me-nots are my favorites.
It’s easy to see why people come here to write, to talk and be together. It’s warm and alive and growing and safe.
Then I start to think about the bluffs again and the wooden fence and those trees and all the secrets they've learned from the waters below. I wonder what they've seen? Do yo think if I go back I might walk away with a hint of those memories? I hope so... it's those whispers I love to listen to.
I can hear the others coming up the path now I think about going back to that wildness and I start to loose myself in the stories I could hear in those whispers. Then I hear laughter, real laughter. It's very nice, like when the sun comes out after a storm...plenty of which I've seen. Nothing is like that sight let me tell you.
No, I think I'll stay here for a while and listen to that laughing and talking. I don’t hear much laughter in the place I’I have come from. Maybe I'll even be part of it. So I’ll stay until I get called back. I’ll stay as long as I can.

Training the Imagination

2005-01-25T18:08:00.000Z

‘La piedra Degetau’ is a perfect setting for this exercise for it was what came to my mind when reading the “Training the Imagination”. It is place of beauty located in Aibonito, Puerto Rico, on top of a mountain. From which you can see the gorgeous ‘Cordillera’, a group of mountains that cross the center of Puerto Rico. So here it is…

It is in the country side resting on top of a mountain that is sister to a large group of other mountains that salute her from the distance. It is late and night is upon us while the fog is ready to cover us like a soft white blanket. There is a looking post made of wood created for those who wish to look beyond. Around it between beautiful gardens full of native trees, palm trees, bushes, flowers called “Miramelindas”, and a playground there are small cottages scattered trough out the mountain top. These little cottages are the entrance to other worlds and a place for visitors to stay a while and have a rest or maybe a good place to retire from the real world that surrounds the mountain. I see the ‘Miramelindas’ flowers looking gorgeous with their bright colors happy to exist in a magical place like this one. The air is cold but refreshing as it is always during this season. But this place carries something different. It is inspiration! An invitation to come every time your inner writer desires. For inspiration is in everything you see in here. Is every mountain you look from the looking post for in each of them lays the realm of a writer.
So with sadness I depart knowing that I will be back to create a new mountain in that endless chain of ‘La Cordillera’.

Alexandra Román

Dog Active Imagination

2005-01-24T07:27:00.000Z

A Dog ......
Gives love unconditionally and
loyalty unfailing,they don't object when you hold them tight.
But....they demand attention
disturb your sleep
flatten your garden
leave trails of fur
just everywhere
take over the couch/sofa
the front seat of the car
They always, rush to the door at the jangle of keys,
they pull on the leash in their excitement
they wind themselves around trees and fence posts
They pee in the most inapropriate places
They rush into to the sea,
then roll in the sand
They remind you when it is dinner time
by getting under your feet in the kitchen.
They help you spend your hard earned money at the vets.
- But what would we do without them-.

El Manantial

2005-01-24T02:30:00.000Z

Today has been a day of impatience. But I think it was more of energy building up for the next thing to come. Since yesterday I have been wondering what I was going to do in the mines tomorrow (that’s today). I think all that thinking got me a little impatient or made me build up energy for me to conjure at the end of the day as I did. I did the rituals we sometimes do in order to be in tune with ourselves and sat in my bed to write after doing some research in the Amethyst Meditation Garden.

El Manantial

As I walked trough the endless corridors of the mine looking for a site to dig I came upon a wooden circular door. A big round iron handle was placed in the middle of the door. Ela, my shadowy muse, and I looked at each other in dismay. What was a door like that doing inside a mine? Well, I suppose that in here, a very different mine, you could find almost anything. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to me that a round door was placed in the Alluvial Mines.

“Should we open it?” –I asked to Ela for she was my companion in this adventure.

“Why not? There’s nothing stopping us.” –she whispered, like always for that’s the way she talks.

“Yes, let’s see what lies beyond that door.”

We walked to the door, took the iron handle, holding it very tight, and pulled with all our strength. It was a heavy door and as it gave way it made a loud noise like screws that have not been oiled for a long time. We opened the door completely and had a look to see what lay inside that room. To our amazement it was not a room but a garden, a gorgeous garden.

We went in to have a closer look and admire its beauty.

“Wow!” –I exclaimed.

Ela was speechless, she was just looking to that enchanted place not believing what her eyes saw. I was in the same state of shock. How would a place like this exist inside a mine? I remember I have read of the existence of this rare gardens and worlds in the book One thousand and one nights. But I thought they were only legends.

There were elegant green trees, flowers of all sorts of colors and shapes. Green pastures and a lake of crystal waters. Willows were caressing the surface of the lake with its branches that fell elegantly down to the ground. The breeze was soothing and perfumed with all the aromas of the flowers.

What caught more my attention was that inside that place instead of being dark it was daylight. You could not see a sun anywhere but as you looked closer to the ceiling you could see that it was filled with clear crystals.

We walked beside the shore of the lake and inside it were fishes of all sorts of colors swimming by as we walked. One of them was very curious and jump trying to grab our attention. We kept walking and the fish, which was a deep red color with golden fins, kept jumping gracefully out of the water.

I was having fun watching him and all of the sudden he smile at us. I froze and immediately said to Ela pointing to the fish:

“I think he smiled at us!”

The fish stick his head out of the water and said:

“I smiled because she smiled.”

I looked at Ela, who had a huge smile on her face, and as I was ready to tell her something I realize the fish talks!

“Do not be rude by commenting that he talks. Just approach him and converse with the lovely fish.” –said Ela catching up with my thoughts.

She was actually right and I didn’t want to be rude. As I was pondering on what to talk about with the fish I sat down near the water. Ela sat down beside me with the same smile as before. I looked at the fish that was just emerging from the water witch I imagine he was just breathing. He looked at me for a while with out saying a word probably waiting for me to speak.

“This place is incredible. What is it doing here?” –said Ela excited.

The fish that looked very happy to have a conversation said cheerfully:

“Well it is very interesting story. Long ago the god Zeus in his battle with the Titans threw one of his most powerful bolts to the earth witch it stroked so hard to the ground that it open a crack and it gave way to a passage to this world. Zeus, after that great battle, came down to relax and have a walk along the great garden that once lay above us.

“He noticed the crack and making himself small enough to fit in it came down and found an enormous cave that extended for miles underground. He felt in love with the clear crystals that are incrusted in the ceiling. So he, there and then, open the crack to let the rays of the sun come down through the crystals so the light could shine inside this cave.”

“But what happens at night when only the moon is up and there is no sunlight to shine upon the crystals?” –I asked full of curiosity.

The fish went down to catch his breath and continued -“The rays of the moon shine upon the crystals and submerge us in a blue magical light. If you stay long enough you might see it and maybe you can see the magic of this place.”

I smiled for I would not miss that opportunity.

“Zeus was so excited with the out come that he, almighty that he was and all, started walking back works looking at the ceiling. The all powerful king of the Olympians Gods stumbled on a rock. That one you see over there.”

He pointed at a big rock that was covered with bright green moss and beautiful ferns grew majestically around it. From it crystal water flowed to the lake.

“The waters of this lake come from the water that flow from that rock.” –said he emerging once again- “You see when Zeus fell down on the rock he opened a small opening and water came out of it. When he tried to get up he cut his hand with a crystal, nothing serious of course, he is a god after all. He washed his hand with the water that flowed from the rock. The combination of these magical waters, called ‘El Manantial’, and that of the blood of Zeus was what this place needed to start life. From the drops of blood that fell in the ground emerge creatures just like yourselves. But with dark black hair and bluish skin, for the blood of Zeus is of a bluish color. These creatures can make things grow out of the simplest things. They live in the farthest corner of the Manantial cave and love their privacy. So do not disturb them. They also pass their days playing with their magic and waiting for the return of Zeus, their father.”

“What happen to Zeus, did he die?” –asked Ela intrigued. She was really paying very close attention to the fish.

“No!” –he exclaimed- “He is a God. He just grew borrowed of this place.”

“So, who built that door?” –asked Ela.

Emerging form the waters the fish answered –“Well the King of the Manantial people. They don’t stay here for they do not like the door. It reminds them that there is a strange world out there that they don’t know and might bring contamination to theirs. That’s why the followed the river down stream, that grew from the lake, where they found another bigger one and settle there.”

He went down once again and continued when he came up –“It’s getting late and I have to go know. It was really good talking to you. I hope to see you tomorrow and we can talk more.”

“Of course, thank you for your help.” –said Ela.

“You welcome.” –said the fish smiling.

“Wait! You haven’t told us your name” –I exclaimed.

“Oh! What clumsy of me. My name is Zep.” –saying that he swam away living us alone.

There was silence as the light became dimmer. Only the sound of flowing water from the ‘El Manantial’ echoed in the cave. The light change rapidly to a blue dim and the crystal of the ceiling sparkled majestically. Sparkling lights came alive when the night finally came and even the rock from witch the ‘Manantial’ flowed sparkled full of magic. Ela took out of my back pack a sleeping bag witch she told me Morpheus had given to her ‘cause he knew I will need it in case I wanted to spend a night inside the mines.

We lay down staring at the sparkling crystals embracing the beauty of that place.

“They look like stars.” –commented Ela.

“Yes.” –I said inhaling the pure air that surrounded us.

“What are we going to do tomorrow? Are we going to stay here or go back to the mines?”

“I do not know Ela. What ever tomorrow brings I know it will be good and full of blessings. Let us, for know, enjoy what we have been blessed with.”

Alexandra Román

Exercise in Training the Imagination

2005-01-22T04:18:00.000Z

Imagine a quiet corner of Soul Food on a summer's day
Permit 3 or 4 minutes to build up the picture of it in a garden, in the country, in the mountains, by the sea.
Mentally sketch in every detail, filling in the colours and seeing everything that makes the environment complete.
Now step into the place that has been built; imagine the warmth and the light of the sun, the sound it is filled with and the scent of the air.
Enjoy these for a minute, always maintaining the position of the observer.
Then deliberately withdraw and dismiss the picture - not just when tired of it, say after three minutes and return quietly to your world.

An Abandoned Mining Town

2005-01-21T09:35:00.000Z

I use to ride dirt bikes and on one of my weekend warrior trips I came across an abandoned mining town. Of course, it was NOT as cool as this. All I found were the foundations of about 3 buildings some glass medicine bottles ( which I still have ) and now scars all over my right shoulder.

Anyway, I was riding around the foundations and cut across a little field when all of the sudden I heard some ripping and popping sounds. I'd never heard sounds like that in my life and decided to open her up and get out of there fast. I'm ashamed to say I panicked and I nearly ditched my bike. I had good reason to be scared though; that sound seemed to be following me.

When I made it to the road I looked back and saw a HUGE hole in the ground. I had ridden right across these wooden platforms or 'caps' over an old mine shaft entrance and the tearing and popping was the sound of the wood breaking apart and collapsing.

There was so much dust and dirt that kicked up that it almost looked like a fire. And, it took a long time before I heard what I thought was the timber hitting the bottom of the shaft. On the other hand, I can't swear to that. I was way to scared and wasn't to sharp at that point.

Being that I was 23 at the time, it didn't occur to me I almost DIED. So after I calmed down I rode around and looked for more building foundations and found some. I also found things like railroad spikes, those little cars they hauled stuff out of the mines in and I spent a lot of time trying to find those helmets miners wore or lanterns but no luck.

I did find signs that trains use to come up here. I found tracks and what looked like and entrance to a tunnel that you couldn't get into because it looked like the entrance had collapsed. I guess the hill just slid right down the hill one day and buried it. In fact, you could see a lot of evidence of some serious landslides all over the place.

Do you know what happens to old railroads tracks? Nothing...and if you're not careful you're liable to ride across some half buried ones like I did and wind up face down in God knows what spewing every cuss word you've ever learned in your entire life.

I spent about a half hour alone up there when it occurred to me no one knew where I was. All of my friends and myself were on the way back to camp and I had stopped to be er, answer the call of nature if you get my drift.

I'd never had claustrophobia in my life, but all of the sudden that's what it felt like. It felt like I was in a little box or something and I couldn't get away from that place fast enough.

And there's this odd twist of memory...

The entire time I was up there I never heard a sound except for the caps collapsing. I never heard a bird, I never heard the wind and I didn't even hear the river until I got away from that little abandoned town

Would I go back? No way, never.

Some things should stay buried, and I think that little town is one of them.

Anita Moscoso

The First Step

2005-01-21T09:30:00.000Z

I came out of the ‘All important preparations’ land full of energy and ready to start digging in the Alluvial Mines. Before coming out I took a well deserve Japanese Bath/Shower, since I don’t have a bath, and feel invigorated and my whole body relaxed and free from stress or any other distraction that might hurt me or slow me down.

As a companion I have a shadow who I named Ela. I found her the first day I arrived at this place inside a manhole. Since then we have grow a lot keeping each other company. I talked to her a little about what I knew of the Alluvial Mines and she asked to see the map. I gave it to her and she stared at it for a while. Suddenly Ela smiled like she knew something I did not. She sat beside me and in a whispering voice said to me:

“Look closely and with your index finger look for the gold that is hidden.”

I looked at her and her eyes turn to the map. So I did as she told me. I put my index finger at the beginning of the map and started going down. When my finger touched the beginning point of the vein it glittered like gold under the rays of the sun. I smiled amazed with what I had found so I kept going slowly down the vein. What I found was wonderful. I was discovering digging sites inside the mine; places were I might find gold.

“Thank you!” –I said to Ela.

“You are most welcome.”

“It is time for us to go and meet with The Keeper of the Entrance.”

So we left the ‘All important preparations’ land behind and went to the entrance to start our digging. Once there we found the Keeper dress as always and with a lovely smile on her face.

“I'm so glad to see you again! I see you have found your companion” –she said while looking at Ela. It seems that this woman has a gift of knowing things ahead of time. She might be from the Oracle of Delphi send here to the new haven to keep the miners safe. Or she might have been sent by the muses. Who knows!

“We’re here to go inside the mines” –said I boldly and brave.

“Not just yet I think” –said the Keeper sharply back at me.

“I’m not?” –I said astonished. I didn’t understand for I knew I was ready to start digging and look for gold. How come all of the sudden I’m not!

“Ah, don’t look sad know! You are ready is just that you need a little nap while Ela and I prepare everything you need for your mining.”

“Doesn’t she need to rest too?”

“Ela has been trapped in that manhole of yours for to long. She wants to live every single second she gets her hands on. You, on the other hand, are the one with a mortal body and those needs to rest. So follow me, please, I’ll take you to see Morpheus.”

“Morpheus, the God of Sleep!” –I exclaimed surprised.

“Precisely. Aren’t you a fan of his? I asked because you love to sleep a lot.”

“I guess so” –I said smiling and catching up with her sense of humor.

We left Ela at the entrance smelling a white flower that grew between the roots of an old tree. We walked trough another path but this time surrounded by delicate violet flowers and green grass on our feet. At the end there was a wooden cottage smoke coming out of its chimney. When we entered it a huge black man dress in a velvet cream color robe was in front of the chimney. He walked toward us and said:

“So this is the new miner. She is one of my favorites. She’s a fan.” –he said excited in a sweet voice.

“I know sir” –said the Keeper half smiling- “She will be staying with you for a while. I’ll come back for her when I have finished preparing her instruments.”

“Good!” –exclaimed Morpheus with a big smile in his face- “I have prepared a room for you with a special blanket. Also, I know you like coffee but I have prepared hot chocolate for you.”

“Thank you” –I said a little confused since he knows I like coffee he should know it does not keep me awake. But maybe is just that he likes hot chocolate more than coffee since he is the God of Sleep and coffee has a bad reputation of taking him out of the job.

“There is something important you need to know about the mines” –said the Keeper- “There’s a place called ‘El Dorado’ and is has nothing to do with the Disney movie you like so much. While it has certain similarities to the Latin-American Indian legend, it is very different from what the Spaniards thought they could find there. Some say they still looking for it, poor souls! –said the Keeper in a secretly fashion.

She continued- “This ‘El Dorado’ that resides within the mine is the place you need to find. Know, while you rest think of it and what you might find in it. That is all you need to do for know. Pleasant dreams!”

The Keeper left closing the door behind her. I looked at Morpheus who was standing beside an open door with a cup of hot cocoa in his big hand. I went to him and he said:

“Know sleep well and rest because you will need it.”

He gave me the cup and I entered the room. It looked very cosy with a huge soft bed in the middle. I sat on it and drank my cocoa. Lay down and covered myself with a quilt full of stars and moon.

“What is ‘El Dorado’?” –I though. I keep seeing that movie in my head every time I think of ‘El Dorado’. Let’s see, what kind of place my ‘El Dorado’ might be? Would it be a place full of building made of pure gold?

My thoughts were killing me. I was lost with this thing having no idea of what it was. Only a place I had to look for. Suddenly I felt sleepy and my eyes closed. In the obscure darkness I saw my thoughts in the form of white words. A question emerge “Why did the Spaniards wanted to find ‘El Dorado’?”

In my sleepiness I answered: “To be rich.” Instantly a bright light cover the darkness and the words disappeared. I was left with myself understanding the magnitude of my answer. It was to become richer as a wordsmith, the goal for this digging and the search for ‘El Dorado’. I was not afraid and I was ready to become a miner.

As I felt into a deep sleep I smile proud of myself for I was a step closer to ‘El Dorado’.

Alexandra

The Beginning

2005-01-21T09:21:00.000Z

The Beginning

When I first heard of the mines I wasn’t that exited to check it out. But something caught my attention reading Heather’s mail about the Alluvial Mines and in that moment I was captivated. There was something like an invisible string that pulled me towards it. A voice, a soothing voice, was calling me also from the far lands that surround the mines. That’s how I found myself in front of the entrance of the Alluvial Mines.

A beautiful woman dress in a sheer blue dress, with golden wavy hair and skin as soft as a feather came out of the mine. She smile and her green eyes shined like stars. She was even more beautiful when she smiled.

‘You have arrived!’ -she said excited. It seems as she was expecting me all this time. Maybe she was the voice I heard calling me, urging me to visit. I didn’t now what to say. What to answer for I was just passing by. I was moved by curiosity to see this place and since I was not interested in a mine I was surely not staying for too long.

She open a wooden box big enough to have sorts of things there. She took a paper out and gave it to me.

‘This is the map to the Alluvial Mines. Look at it very carefully for in it resides secret pathways and extraordinary passages.’

I looked at the map and it seems simple enough. At mere sight I did not see anything extraordinary. I rapidly touch the large vein of the mine that crossed the map and felt like it was empty. So I looked at her in dismay but said nothing.

“You will find your way trough the mine soon enough. But before going in, you have to and must prepare. It is important to prepare ones path before embarking in a new journey. Every traveler knows this, so you must know it too.’

‘What do I have to do?’ –I asked excited and with curiosity in my heart. Curiosity is a special feeling that not only cats, that I’m sure do not die because of it, and children have. Is inside my heart and mind, it is what makes me dare to try new things.

‘What is your name and who are you?’ –asked I

Smiling once again and with cheerfulness in her voice she answered- ‘Well, I’m The Keeper of the Entrance. I welcome new travelers that decide to give a change to their lives and become miners. I help them prepare before entering the mine, as I will do with you.’

She was so clean and radiant she looked like she did not belong in a mine.

‘I know what you’re thinking’

‘You are?’

‘I do not look like I belong here. That is because I do not work in the mine that is not my purpose. Besides, a good receptionist must look her best while greeting the new comers. Don’t you think?’

‘Yes’ –I responded a little lost

‘Know, like I said before I’m here to help you prepare. So follow me.’

‘Where?’

‘To “All important preparations” land! It is an entrance to all that you need and will require in this new journey in your life as a miner. There you will find all sorts of places and images even a relaxing place to take a warm bath. Witch you may have any time you like. This is a place where you will face and find your inner self and the words with in.’

‘It sounds charming’ –said I smiling

‘Then come on, let’s go!’

She took my hand and show me a path surrounded by lovely trees leaving the entrance to the mine behind. At the end of the path, that was covered with leaves and made a crouching sound while we walked, there was an old iron gate. When we reach it she turned to me, kissed me in the forehead and told me: ‘Now, do as you may and prepare yourself, for the mining is not an easy task and your soul has to be strong. When you are ready to begging mining come out, close the gate behind you and meet me at the entrance were I’ll be waiting for you.’

‘You are not coming with me!’ –I said sadly to her for in this very short time I have spent with her I have become fund of her.

‘No dear this is something you have to do for yourself. Besides you will find company in there.’ –she caressed my chick and continued- ‘I have to go know. New miners are arriving soon and I have to welcome them. So I will see you soon. Be blessed, be loved and be in peace.’

Saying that she left disappearing along the path we came and returning to the entrance of the mine she keeps.

There I was in front of that old iron gate called “All important preparations”. Smiling to myself and full of courage I open it and went in. The first thing I saw was a manhole.

Alexandra

Dog Active Imagination

2005-01-21T07:00:00.000Z

Relax! Close your eyes and take a few moments to imagine a big dog. Allow a few moments for the image of a big dog to come into your mind and then record what presents itself.

Sham was an Alaskan Malamute I bought when I was 12. I bought him with fifty of my own dollars..which I ran home for and busted into my piggy bank apart for after the man who owned Sham and his ' family' lowered the price to after he said Sham was worth $ 300.00. I remember I almost died right there because I couldn't imagine EVER having that much money. And I loved that puppy, I stopped by their house everyday to play with him on my way home from school. Jake was the man's name and his girlfriend at the time took one look at me and jabbed Jake in the back. He lowered the price to $50.00 and I ran straight home to get it, all of which happened to be in change.

I remember when I came back ten minutes later and held the bag of change up I asked Jake if he wanted to count it and he laughed and said, no he'd trust me.

Sham was an adorable pure bred pup with a black cap, two black diamond shaped marks under each of his eyes and a white lightning bolt that went from his for head all the way to the back of his neck.

I see Sham when I need courage, when I'm not doing well, when I'm lost in the mines. I can see him when I need to be strong and sure of myself. Sometimes when I think of him I think of those carvings and pictures I've seen of soldiers on horses with their war dogs beside them.

I can feel him the most when I'm writing, sometimes I still wake up and swear I can feel him sleeping at the foot of my bed, which is funny because he never did that in life.

Sham was there for me, still alive in and in the prime of his life when I suffered through something terrible at the age of 14. I remember I went into the back yard after I came back from the Doctors and those beautiful orange golden eyes seemed to pull me in and they made me strong.

When I see that dog, I feel strength, I feel dignity, I feel courage, I feel grace.

One year we had a huge windstorm that was so powerful it knocked over trees, it was awful. When we lost power it was gone for almost 3 days. I remember hearing that had we not been between two mountain ranges and been near the water it could have easily reached hurricane strength.

I remember looking out my bedroom window when these powerful winds where snapping trees in half, branches were flying all over the place and Sham was sitting in the backyard, staring straight ahead. I opened up the door and called to him. I remember he turned his head to look at me me and then turned away again. He wouldn't come in, he was out there facing that storm alone. So I went out with him and we watched it together. I put my arm over his giant back and he didn't lean into me the way he usually did.I could feel him straighten himself and brace himself...for me.

He was long dead by the time I started work at the funeral home but he was with me all the same.He was there when I went to services, when I went to homes and hospitals at the worst of times for these families. I remember when I needed to be strong and focused for someone else, I swear I was looking at them through Sham's eyes. He taught me to focus, to be unselfish, to suspend my own wants, needs and self so that I could carry horrible burdens for other people.

I learned that from Sham, not my dog, not my puppy...my brother. That's how I think of him I guess. My wise old brother. He was never really puppy-ish. He was always a wise older dog.

He was there when I was 12 and realized for the first time I was a person...not a kid, a person. When I was 21 he died and my soul was pulled from my heart. I'd never felt pain like that before in my life. The deaths in my family that followed were just as devastating, but that awful feeling of having my heart torn in two and separated like that, well, I've never felt that again.

Those are some of the things I see when I think of that big dog.
Anita Marie Moscosso

I see a Rotweiller. *smiles softly with memory* Loki Von James. I see a big black puppy, round, stocky little body with big paws and ears. Big black round eyes. The typical tan markings over his eyes and on his muzzle and chest. I see now a grown dog in his prime, all muscle and sturdily built. He is like, yet unlike his Nordic divine counterpart, Loki, the prankster god of mischief and chaos. Loki is a prankster in his own canine right, a big overgrown puppy at heart. He'll try and sit on your lap if you sit in his favorite armchair. Yet he is gentle, patient and loving when it comes to kids. He won't bite, snarl or growl, but will allow a gentle tug-o-war on his ears or fur and with his toys. He loves rough housing and pets. He is no guard dog, however. But...he is man's best friend.

Shiloh

Having slipped into my hooded blue gown I go straight to the manhole cover. Experience has taught me that this portal leads directly to the world of the collective unconscious. The cover is not hard to locate now that we have cleared away the ivy and thorny Cecil Bunner Rose that had entwined its way around it making entry impossible. Now the pathway is clear and it is my daily practice to slip in through this portal.

Dougie, my Blenhim King Charles Cavalier and constant companion, is at my heels.

Instinctively I use the code, listen for the final click and lift the cover. With out hesitation we step purposefully onto the bluestone steps that lead within, stopping to reflect upon what a different place it is today. The old prison has been gutted and completely refurbished like one of those clever warehouse blocks. The foyer is warm and inviting and I head straight for the library.

I open the door to see that my shadow, dressed in a hooded blue gown has been at work for hours. She sits at a table that has the appearance of an alchemists work bench and word filled beakers bubble and ooze ideas. Words and ideas curl amid the vapours that surround her.

Neither of us speak or acknowledge one another.

Silently I slip out of the robe letting it fall with my earthly shape and my soul drifts to unite with hers, ready for another busy day within the Soul Food Cafe.

Dougie positions himself nearby, appearing to sleep peacefully.

Heather

Tara, the big dog

As I closed my eyes to see that big dog I found myself lost and confused. All I saw was a black dog bigger than me looking straight at my eyes in a very serious way. So in an act of desperation I open my eyes. This is not right so I will try it againg.

I relax my body and did an excersise I always do when I want to concentrate for a meditation. Closed my eyes once more and my expirience was different. I saw Tara in front of me. She was a pitbull of brown color with a white spot on her chest and long ears and tail that moved very fast as she greeted me.

We bought her in the street when she was only two month old. She was a playfull puppy. Strong, very strong! She did not now her own strength. Tara reminds me so much of myself 'cause I am as playfull as she was.

Tara is lost, she was stolen from our backyard and we could not find her anywhere. Sometimes I wonder what has happened to her. Many times I have asked myself is she a mother? If she's still playfull? Tara was a wonderfull dog always happy to greet you, full of life and curiosity.

Tara is the simbol of my hapiness. When I feel lost I think of her, I have let myself to be stolen, many times, by not taking care of me better. But as she always did, look for a way to make you smile, I will do the exact same thing when I feel lost. Look for a way to smile and give it to others in rememberence of Tara, my big dog.

Alexandra

I was only four years old when I saw my first really big dog up close and personal. My mother had sent me, my sister and baby brother out into the back yard to play. Our favorite red swing set was a source of many hours of fun. We usually enjoyed swinging as high as we could get our tiny legs to push the swings. If we tired of the swings, or something else simply caught our imagination, we'd play chase or build sandcastles in our sand box.

One such day, we were playing as usual and I felt a strange sensation; the hairs on the back of my neck tingling! I was too young to understand this of course, but looking back on it, I guess
this was my very first time I was fearful. I looked around and saw two huge dogs standing in the alleyway, very close to where we sat playing. All three of us just froze, staring at the dogs. They
stared back, tongues hanging out, bodies only moving to pant, saliva dripping to the ground. All at once I felt a strong urgency to RUN! We all did. The dogs started barking ferociously and we just knew we were in danger.

We all made a mad dash to the tiny back porch. I turned the door knob. It wouldn't budge.

"Mommy! Mommy!" we all screamed hysterically.

There was no answer. We all screamed again as the dogs tried to climb over the falling down fence just yards away.

No answer. I started knocking and knocking with my tiny fists as my baby brother and sister bawled their eyes out.

My mother had locked us out of the house! She wouldn't come to the door. The dogs were trying their best to get over the fence and snatch us up. We were all three very frightened little children and
our mother wouldn't come to the rescue.

We cried and cried and called for our mother while we struggled to squeeze in between the screen and door, hoping to hide from the dogs. They weren't fooled. Their paws scratched and pawed the fence.

Suddenly the door opened! My mother lunged at us, pushing us back out onto the porch, promptly locking the screen. We tried to tell her about the dogs. She wouldn't listen! She screamed at the top of her lungs for us to "get out there and play!!"

Our crying finally got the best of her and she stomped out onto the porch, waving a kitchen towel and screamed at the dogs to go away. They did, but we were traumatized. I just knew the big mean dogs
would be back. We still didn't get to come into the house, until much later. We had to sit on the porch, fearful for our lives while our mother finished watching her soap operas with the kids out of the way.

Sharon aka Redlady
Texas

I close my eyes to do this exercise and I think of Beethoven, then Lassie, then Toto, and even Old Yeller. I think of my childhood German Shepard Princess, and Sadie and Sondae two other dogs I have
had since leaaving home, but they evoke no special thoughts or emotions. I open my eyes take a deep breath and close them again **starting over** this time I think of Fred, a small frisky Dachshund with a smooth shiny black coat and stumpy legs. I can see our neighbors, Fred's owners in my mind, but at first I can't remember their names. I breathe. I think of his white hanes shirts, and round face and belly. His expression always jovial. Then I remember, his name was Mr. D, or that was what my brother and I called him. To us he was like Santa Claus. When we saw him out in the front yard with Fred my brother and I would come running even in pajamas because we knew where Mr. D and Fred were there were free popsicles. I groan and open my eyes again. This was supposed to
be about the dog...

Take 3...

I close my eyes and think of nothing but blank space. I am listening to the sound of my breathing and the traffic still moving twenty-three stories below. Just when I am certain I have fallen
asleep the blank space gives way to a classroom with a buzzing flourescent light and a sombrero on the wall. I have been transported to 10th grade. I am sitting at a squeaky desk staring intently at college-ruled notebook paper, pencil in hand. The word "Wolf" takes up two lines on my page. I turn around quickly and behind me I see my best guy friend Alex, and to his left is Autumn, the gothic chick with the GI Jane purse that looks more like an ammunition storage facility for the army. Alex and I know that all it really holds is an endless supply of skittles. We talk about her all the time. We joke but we are not rude. Truthfully Autumn fascinates us, and deep inside we are rather fond of her. I turn back to my paper and quickly jot down loyal, leader of the pack, and protective of territory, just as Ms. Franco calls "pencils down." I can hear Alex mutter something about the silly assignment behind me, and I laugh but I too am wondering what this has to do with Spanish.
Mrs. Franco then says the first adjective is how you see yourself, the second adjective is how you want others to see you, and the third is how you really are. I sigh and shrug my shoulders unsatisfied with this, had I known the objective I would have picked much different adjectives, that's for sure. I nudge Alex to see what he put, "A dog" he says. "Loyal, Affectionate, and smart," he beams. I smile at him then roll my eyes to keep the color from flooding into my cheeks. As I turn back around in my desk I am wondering if dogs and wolves could mate. They're close enough in species, right?
Angel

Active Imagination

2005-01-21T06:55:00.000Z

Now I have plenty of material on Active Imagination, which I have told you about, but I would like everyone to google and find out what they can about it. If you can afford to purchase a copy of Robert Johnson's Inner Work that would be wonderful but it is not essential. I will be using it and some other Jungian material I have as reference material as I work out some techniques we need to learn.

To prepare.

Relax! Close your eyes and take a few moments to imagine a big dog.
Allow a few moments for the image of a big dog to come into your mind
and then record what presents itself.

Share what presents itself. You do not have to write an essay - you
can just make some notes.

We will compare how we respond for everyone responds differently.
Some people will literally see a dog while others will think about
one in words.