Tag Archives: Thursday Inspiration

Locked Rooms for Thursday Inspirations, Nov 30, 2023

Locked Rooms

My thoughts live in a mansion, restrained to just ten rooms.
When the unused rooms grow cobwebs, they must sweep them out with brooms.
They cannot see their pleasures, for they enter with eyes shut.
Sealed chambers filled with many things, but we do not know what.
It is exhausting just maintaining all these extra spaces.
No wonder that I lose my keys and forget most new faces.

No telling when we’ll let our thoughts roam free in other rooms.
For all these years they’ve been sealed up like dark and unused tombs.
Perhaps we’ll find they’re portals to other times and places.
Perhaps they lead to other worlds in intergalactic spaces.
They might allow a journey into the minds of others.
Would extrasensory perception make us enemies or brothers?

I’m sure the reason that we use small portions of our brain
is because if we knew of them, we’d use them all in vain.
We’d journey through the cosmos to plunder other spheres.
React to them like enemies, guided by our fears.
If there is any entity guiding how things go,
perhaps they recognize that Earth’s evolving sort of slow.

Our energies put into things instead of who we are.
Instead of love? Investments. Instead of aid? A car.
If perhaps we aren’t allowed the full use of our brains,
it is because we have not learned to use them for our gains.
How we look’s important. How much it costs the point.
We’re ruining our planet by cluttering up the joint.

Our brains we use for warfare. Weapons we can’t control.
They wind up in a child’s hands or on a grassy knoll.
They’re used for entertainment on a computer screen
in games that build aggression. We win by being mean.
Shows they call reality prefabricate each role.
The lowest denominator seems to be their goal.

True, other things are in our mind: poems, music, art,
dance and social functions, a few of them with heart.
So we stage elaborate galas to raise the money for
children who are hungry, adults chewed to the core.
And yet some of us still balk at giving health care to the ill.
If they are not wealthy, they must chew the bitter pill.

No doctors and no dental care. No succor for the poor.
If they worked, they’d have health care. Complaints are such a bore!
These things we fill our minds with. There’s no need for more brain space.
In the ten percent of brain we use, new thoughts we cannot face.
This E.S.P. is hogwash, and U.F.O’s are fiction.
Even the thought of universal health care causes friction.

For every room within the mind that’s used, there are nine more
filled with mysteries we won’t know until we try the door.
Some enter and return to tell of wonders they have spied.
Yet unenquiring minds respond by saying they have lied.
We’ll never leave these sealed up rooms unless we learn to dream.
Let creative thoughts flow out in an uncensored stream.

To seep beneath closed doors into our mind’s more spacious realms.
Be adventurous voyagers standing at the helms
of ships of mind that sail the wilder seas of consciousness
regardless of the ones who try to censor and to hush.
Turn off the TV sets and games of war and violence.
Let Honey Boo Boo slip back into former innocence.

Lay Kim Kardashian to rest, pull out your skeleton key
that just might let you in to all the rest that you can be.

For the Thursday Inspiration: Key

A Letter from My Future Self, for Thursday Inspiration, Nov 16, 2023

 

A Letter from My Future Self of 2038

 A Letter from My Future Self of 2038

Dear Remi,

Remember eight years ago, when you took this new name for yourself?  I notice you’ve slipped back into the “old” name (Judy) and the “old” you that you professed just five years before to no longer identify with.  What happened?  Was it merely the resistance of old friends to call you by this new name? Or was it that you slowly slipped back into being that person–more laconic, giving in to the heaviness and inactivity of age?  Did you also give up on romance and change and the excitement of the possibility of forward progress?  Did you decide to stay where it is easier with an established routine, people to clean your house and wash your clothes and mow your grass and clean your pool?

I’m wondering if you are thinking about how that is working out for you. I see you even more tied down than before–five cats instead of one, making plans to start more programs for the young people of your community, but will this be enough?  That sense of urgency and of time passing that has kept you vaulting from your bed and running outside to try to breathe at night—is it caused by any physical condition or is it me, prodding you to be young for as long as you can and to experience more before you sink into that routine that is the reward for doing all that you meant to do in this lifetime? Is it time to retire and to smooth your own pathway, or is it still time to leap over barriers such as this barrier of yourself and go boldly out into the world to see what else is there?

I’m not trying to prod or push you or suggest the way.  I am, after all, a figment of your imagination as surely as your present view of yourself is.  I understand that two foot surgeries in two years slowed you down and changed your exercise patterns as well as the patterns of your day.  I also realize that friends moved away or moved into new lives and that this also made you turn inwards.  There are reasons of one sort or another for everything we do.  We all have excuses.  At 90 years old, I have excuses, too.  I know where you ended up but I also know that there are a limitless number of me’s.

There is the me that succumbed to Alzheimer’s, as your sister did.  There is the me who moved to Italy and moved off into a new life that I only hint at here.  There is the me who has devoted herself for the past 20 years to making her small town a better place to grow up in.  There is the me who finally took off in that boat and went all the remaining places there were to go.  There is the me who grew grumpy and reclusive and eventually became dumber than her Smart TV.

There is even the implausible me who did all the “shoulds” and got her other books published—who maybe even got back on the agent/publisher treadmill and did it the “right” way. There is the me who found more romance, the one who converted her entire house into a dog kennel or cat sanctuary, the one who built the house on the adjoining piece of land and hired a nurse/housekeeper and invited her friends to come grow old with her.  There are so many potential me’s that I hope it is making your head swim and that I hope will make you think about what you want to do with the remaining 30 or so years of your life.

Things are not over.  In the first thirty years of your life, you grew up, went to summer camp, counseled at summer camp, went to University, sailed around the world on a boat and saw all else that life could be, got your masters degree, emigrated to Australia, taught for two years, traveled for four months through southeast Asia and Africa, moved to Africa and had various adventures, good and bad.  Fell in love, taught school in Addis Ababa, moved back to the U.S., taught for 7 more years, fell in love, built a house, edited a creative writing journal for teens, traveled to China and Great Britain and Hawaii.

Then you had a dream that knocked you into a recognition of your subconscious.  You quit your job, moved to Orange County, CA, wrote on the beach, moved to L.A., fell in love, studied film production and screenwriting at UCLA, worked in a Hollywood agency, joined a writer’s workshop, joined an actor’s studio, worked for Bob Hope, gave poetry readings, was co-editor of a poetry journal, fell in love again, married, moved to the Santa Cruz mountains, became an artist, traveled and did art and craft shows for 14 years, became the curator of an art center, lost your husband, moved to Mexico, self-published four books, traveled, taught English and art, fell in love a few more times, started a poetry series.

This is what can be done in thirty years.  So, what are you going to do with the next thirty?

Love, Remi–twenty years older.

For the Thursday Inspiration prompt, the words are home or letter. Thanks for the suggestion, Forgottenman. For the prompt, I am reposting this blog from 5 years ago, as reading it has actually accomplished its original purpose once again.  Moving to Italy? Probably not.  Moving on? Perhaps…We’ll see. It did prompt many possibilities.

A Room. A Window. (For Thursday Inspiration #226)

A Room.  A Window.

Outside the window, an entire world that I have not moved through for so many years.  Some of the world comes to me, it is true, and I am not so reclusive that I do not let it in.  Marietta brought her newest baby just yesterday, and I held it as though I have held a baby every day of my life, in spite of the fact that I have not held a baby since that baby slipped away from me, into the arms of another woman I have never known the name of. That baby was ripped more violently from my arms than it had been pulled from my female regions hours before.  I was not given a choice.  No one knew.  The baby vanished and then I vanished, off to another country.  Off. . . .

A cough.  I spin around and look behind me.  It is a new intruder.  After so many years alone, two people entering my world.  Perhaps if I’d kept the door unlocked all these years, more people would have come other than the boy who brings my groceries and the other woman with the many layers of skirts who brings me new medicine when I have need of it.

I do not know this new person.  It is a young man who carries a machete in his hand.  He is very tall.  Very very tall for a Mexican, so perhaps he is a Bedouin or some other Arab from a tall tribe, plopped down in this country  in the way many of us have been positioned here by fate, by circumstance or by force.  His skin is that beautiful golden coffee color of someone naturally dark who has also been in the sun for long period of time or for a long lifetime.

“Disculpe, senora,” he says, as he moves into the room.  When I speak to him in English, he switches to English.  He has seen my tall palm with the fruit and the seeding husks hanging dangerously loose.  He can scale this tree and cut them for me.  It needs to be done, senora, and if I have no money to pay, he will do it for no more fee than my friendship.  And if I have no friendship to offer, then he will do it for the good grace it will bring him in the universe and perhaps an easier ingress into heaven.

It is an omen, I think, and I surprise myself when I give him permission to trim the tree.  He cannot know how much he looks like a young man in my past and he cannot know how uncharacteristic it is for me to allow anyone at all into my life, my room, my trust.  Now I have an obligation to this man I know nothing about.  He may be dangerous.  Certainly, he carries a weapon.  The branch of the pomegranate tree taps taps on my window, as though a strong breeze has come up in this still day.  It is the fingers of the afternoon reminding me.  Warning me.  But then I see that it is the movement of the young man as he brushes past the tree that has set it in motion.

A large turquoise dragonfly rests on the branch that has stopped moving and that now sits isolated.  Another dragonfly approaches it and seems to attach itself in an arch and they go flying away together in this impossible configuration—a broken circle.  How two creatures can move as one is not something I have ever learned, not since the one person who was a part of me for so many months was pulled from my arms still weak from childbirth.  If they’d waited, I would have been strong enough, I tell myself.  I have been telling myself for most of my life.
After they took from me what was mine, we took a drive to a large place with many chairs.  Many chairs and many people, then a corridor.

Then I was on an airline and in spite of my terror, I fell asleep. I was an eleven year old girl, accustomed to doing what I was told to do.  I woke up in America, where I was driven to the beautiful house of my aunt.  It was here I lived for ten more years.  Here that they expected to give me a new life to encourage me to forget my old life, but as I sit for all these years in my isolation, it is the old life that I remember and remember and remember.

For Thursday Inspiration #226: Whenever, Wherever

This is a 5 minute inspiration piece I wrote for a writing retreat a few years ago.  It was buried in my poetry file, for some reason, but I resurrected it as it seemed to fit the “Whenever, Wherever” prompt so well.  Like its subject, it has been tucked away for too long. 

Free the Birds

Free the Birds

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” a psychic said to me.
Then my psychiatrist said the same, but for a bigger fee.
When people preach to me like this, I get set in my ways.
I’m never going to take advice from folks who spout clichés!

The birds that I have had in hand number very few.
I can’t recall a single time I combed a bush for two.
I have no wish to take a walk in another’s shoe.
I’m simply loathe to think in adages as others do.

I’ve never thought the grass was greener in my neighbor’s yard,
and spouting other people’s words does not make you a bard.
I don’t think quoting adages makes us any wiser.
If my neighbor’s lawn is greener, I’ll just use more fertilizer.

So please don’t give me your advice using a hackneyed phrase,
for all this glib advice just sorta puts me in a daze.
And if you simply must advise, my character to hone,
please do me a big favor and just use words of your own!!!

For Thursday Inspiration: Free