A short prose piece was published on Life in 10 minutes here. It feels good to be writing something other than sales tickets, school papers and grocery lists. Please enjoy.
Peace
Life in Ten Minutes
Gifting: Ten for Today
A day of gift giving, my family gathered to celebrate the holidays early. As usual, I was the master distributor of the 75-odd gifts (or more) to the anticipating gift-ees. The small children lent a hand.
My two adult children (or near) stared into their phones but were grateful and gracious, for the most part. They liked what I surprised them with this year–Totoro themed shirts and tiny ceramic hedgehog planters from the gift store at the Japanese market–the small gifts as appetizers to the main dish, the blue and white wrapped cash wad.
Some years I’m not as successful. I’m not good at giving or receiving gifts. I mean, I’m thankful in just the right degree, I’m sure, when given presents. But gifts trigger slight anxiety in me, a discomfort with the offering.
First, I don’t want for anything, and especially material things. Second, the offeror anticipates my response. All givers want to know they chose well, or already know they haven’t but hope to be surprised, or just want to get past the whole ordeal.
It’s excruciating the subtle yet deeply cutting undertones, nuances and inflections inherent in gift exchanges. Always lurking behind the handing over is “Will he/she like it?” And the risk is “No, he/she has that overly thankful, forced corners way up smile with nothing behind the eyes.” Nope. Rejection.
Honestly, the best gifts I’ve ever received, I can’t even remember. My husband gifted me lovely, thoughtful treasures through the years, from fashion wear to Shiraz to diamonds, but my most treasured gifts were bestowed upon me un-offered.
I inherited a good sense of humor, and so many people happenstance’d into my days with a laugh and an irony for smirks. My mother’s logophilia seeped into my bones too, and I can’t measure that reward, that unearned prize.
I have long legs and patience, capacious passion and anger, boundless love and delicate touch, all ignited at the thrust of that last push and first inhale–at birth. My DNA, what a gift! And those who’ve spent their time with me, enjoyed my story, shit on me, broke my heart, and prayed for me, all presents: bow-less, ribbon-less and priceless clay-of-me potters.
I remember those gifts by name.
Music, Mood and Mindfulness: how music works its magic on us
Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier (24)” streams at 29 percent volume while I write this. My go-to writing music, Baroque, floats wave-like above and below my consciousness, simultaneously soothing and awakening. It’s not…(read more here).
I am
I am.
Soh hahm.
Not affirmation.
Confirmation.
Truth.
I shed my skin slowly.
Infinitely slow.
But I discard it nevertheless.
For it serves no longer any purpose.
I change my clothes.
And no one sees me new.
Yet I emerge from the dressing door clothed.
Different shoes than when I went in.
Eternal womb.
Pixabay: butterfly
Message in a Beer Bubble: Ten for Today
Happy hour. A hearty hoppy beer might make things go right for a short while anyhow. Maybe even release the vise grip on my brain. This tension headache brought to you by your local, fucked up telecommunications service. No tv, then no internet, and no rhyme or reason. “We’ll overnight that modem to you, but it will take 3 to 5 business days.” What do you answer to that kind of math?
But at least it forced me to work at my favorite watering hole for some atmosphere, compared to my usual, dull writing environment: dusk-lit room, dilapidated desk over-cluttered, bed beckoning from behind my back, and puppy chewing on my bare feet as I try to focus on a screen that sometimes allows me to reach the world outside–when the internet hasn’t drifted in then out. Today, like yesterday, it’s all out.
And then there’s the election. It’s worse than anything I can remember in my public awareness age. Yes, even Watergate. This trumps all, pun intended. The banana republic antics. It’s hard to stomach any more. It’s like stupid times infinity, as we used to say. We’re sliding speedily down the ice hill in reverse. I can’t watch–but like that carnage on the side of the road, I must. No entertainment. All sadness and nausea. There’s an ache in the pit of my stomach that threatens to swallow my entire body, engulf it in burning bile.
Or is it just me? I can’t tell any more. As I look into the foamy, golden crystal ball of my immediate future, cold and wet to my clasped hands around its glassy trunk, I ask, “Is it just me?”
She answers from inside a beer bubble, “It’s always been just you.”
Cut
I cut myself last night, a slice not deep but well-placed
like a knotted finger string, center tip of the left index
or pointer, that guiding gun dog of the hand.
It happened as I chopped and spoke, diced and
listened, as she teasingly warned, “Careful. Don’t cut yourself.”
And then, not five minutes after smug riposte, “I don’t cut myself
any more. I’ve been chopping longer than you’re alive,” the eye first,
followed a hair-pin later by stinging prick alarm, ending with
stifled exhale and reflex footing to clear water.
Quick pouring like a scalp wound, I swiftly improvised a napkin
tourniquet, then resumed my chop in plump, papered digit,
slow labor, but serviceable, hidden, blunted, wrapped
crimson seeping like shame, pride and irreverence tucked
under the skin resting on disbelieving bones.
I slipped so quickly to the sink and back, returning
to my task unfazed and fluid, so they wouldn’t see, she
who pronounced my fate and the other who witnessed.
Brushing off the slight speed bump in the banter, I turned
the absorbing wrap growing redder toward me, out of sight.
And soon they left me for work and parties, wounded, hindered
and aching to know, the pain signal, what attention needed
paying, which moment or opportunity squandered.
Today, I press it, that slit in consciousness, right thumb to
left index, cataloguing input–sensory, intuitive and cognitive–
carefully
caressing the seconds at my fingertips.
Ten for Today: No Time
A brewing there is; it’s in the air,
Something unknown, something
Unwarranted, not guaranteed but
Certain all the same, something
Like tomorrows, which never
Ever come, at least not the way
We experience them in the thick
Of time, inside of it, surrounded
By it, time, that is, the same time
That convinces us that the present
Moment is all there isn’t, not
Like there’s a day or so, or more
Ahead like a y intersects an x, at
The axis, an infinite line projection
To somewhere, really nowhere
Except in the collective imagination
Of something coming and something
Going, as if it-they-we could do it,
Make time and space move us, move
Us toward that something’s arrival.
For it’s certainly coming, definitely
Here————————->.
A Mauve and Amber Place–Ten Minutes
July 21, 2016
The fan blares suffocating sound and empties the room’s edges. A constant hum drowns out noise that wedges its way into my ears by its decibel variability, vying for my attention–a shrill bark here, a chair across floor scrape there muffled by a closed door and small child shrieks outside. Sunk in the river of a whirring fan, these bumpy sounds don’t bother me, no more than a buoy on a staid sea sways for the rippling wavelets. Not much.
Wouldn’t the world taste better, more palatable, if I could carry the whirring fan with me wherever I went? If not the fan itself, its hum inside my head? And then add some cool shades that mediate bright and low light into that roseate dusk sky, so that every one walked, ran, drove or sat showered in a mauve and amber mood. I’d like that.
No, I have no conclusion, no point to make here–just ongoing sense, words, a keyboard and ten minutes.
Image: 1967 Cooley’s Gardens (wikimedia)
Travel Notes Sitting on a Bench at the Farmer’s Market
Woke up to sleeping bodies in the dark, slurping in sleep’s sweet succor. I was ready. Yoga at the hotel fitness center cured the morning blank canvas of what will it be today? It will be all right, says yoga on the mat in a small hotel fitness room with one other exerciser on the treadmill making miles go statically by.
Before long, the world intruded. Breakfast with Pascal and talk of more violence, Facebook posts on how to understand Black Lives Matter and white resistance to the reality that no white person has ever awakened black in America. How can anyone not black know for sure? Listen. What can we do? Keep compassion in our hearts; let it soften fear at the lack of control we all surely have over what happens despite our illusions. And no more than ten minutes pass and my voice raises in anger at the lack of care, people, fear, ignorance, helplessness. People die, no stopping it. But people got to live too, be allowed to live.
For now, however, the warm breeze in a characteristically cold place soothes the upsurge in remembering the world out there spreads chaos inside. But oh, there is a bass fiddle and tuba piping out deep sonorous puffs of scales, notes and contrapuntal tunes, while the appreciative fold claps. Two low lying dogs yap at one another in the passing. There are dogs and people and stores with reggae music drifting in the rests of the two live musicians on this wood and concrete terrace along the store fronts, sidling the quaint corner farmer’s market.
The booth in front of me advertises Capay organic cherry tomatoes 2 baskets for $8. And now the bass fiddle takes up the bow, and there is a sweet, lilting classical tune that tells the story of parlors past with hooped skirts and tight ankled pants, wide buckled shoes.
The air passes in muted bustle, not quite loud and frenetic as Saturday morning’s cruising in this Sacramento side street tucked between a bank building and artisanal strip mall, boutiques and coffee shops, and Peets coffee, the largest one I’ve entered.
Pregnant young mom, ahead of trailing chapeau’d dad and stroller. They are on their second. He wears mustard colored shorts with his felt feathered bowler and sky blue shirt. She wears running shoes, baggy grey shorts and beige shirt. They scuttle between tomatoes offered here, mini watermelons there and cantaloupes.
Straw stetson’d tattoo young man with a full bust of some man tattooed on his left calf and a mythical looking, hair-flowing, witchy woman on the right. He and his son pull up on mountain bikes. The son plops the mini melon on the scale.
Colors of the market cheer up the asphalt upon which merchant stands rest under canopies like a parade of white circus tops. One stand sports a red umbrella for shade: Certified California Grown. And the bodies saunter and browse, dogs or kids in tow, some singles and childless, dog less couples. Mostly white folks selling and buying. Very few people of color. And there it is, the crying toddler that incriminates the moment’s peace.
Sipping a one pump vanilla soy long pull latte from Peets, Bob Marley says, “Everything gonna be all right…don’t worry ’bout a thing…” And it’s true. Buy the shirt or shoes if it pleases you. Small pleasures. Dogs bark to each other, communicate or ignore one another, just like we do. Hey, see me, I exist. See me. No, huh? Maybe the next one. And so it goes.
In the gaze of the other 
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