Inspirations

1. Write about a time when the power went out? Did you use candles? Did you need them?

2. Where does a smile come from? Write about the person from your past or present who made or makes you smile the most.

3. What place do you think of when you think of total darkness? Write about that place.

4. "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." - Sri Chimnoy Ghose

5. "A choice, right now, between fear and love." - Bill Hicks

6. "The eyes of love, instead see all of us as one." - Bill Hicks

bird

"Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings." - Victor Hugo (1802-1885; French Romantic Poet, Novelist, and Dramatist)

"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark." - Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941; Indian Poet, Playwright, and Essayist; Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913)

"I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862; American Essayist, Poet, and Philosopher)

"I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life - but there was no one to tell me." - George Washington Carver (1864-1943; American horticulturist, Chemist, and Educator)

april poetry ponderings

April 8, 2010

"If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden."

- Claudia Ghandi

April 7, 2010

"This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up, and the flickering, watery rushes."

- D.H. Lawrence, "The Enkindled Spring"

April 5, 2010
"It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on."

- W. H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"

April 4, 2010
"I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold."

- by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder), "I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone"

April 3, 2010

"I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body."

- Pablo Neruda, "Sonnet XVII"

national poetry month

Last April, for National Poetry Month, I excerpted a line or two from a poem I like and linked to it in my facebook profile. Last year it was a hit, and so I will do it again this year, including my posts here as well. Click the link to read the entire poem. Enjoy!

April 1, 2010

"I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after."

- Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

April 2, 2010

"Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise."

- Ezra Pound, "Notes for Canto CXX"

winter or spring

Today is the first day of spring, or so we thought.  During the night a winter storm came through with a few inches of snow, some slushy rain, and a lot of gusty wind.  I'm tired of winter and ready to plant some seeds in the four huge planters in my front yard and probably some spinach in my backyard.  But it was a beautiful sight to see the white reflection of snow through the windows behind my daisies in wine bottle vases.

I realized I was out of coffee, so I had to walk to the nearest store and purchase some so I wouldn't have one of those painful headaches I tend to get when lacking caffeine.  On the way there and back the big-breasted robins were hopping quickly from snow-covered parking spot to sidewalk and back again.  I managed to get a picture of one.

Here's to hoping that this is winter's last hurrah this season.  May spring arrive in its full glory and thrust of seedlings, birdsong, and bloom.  And spring breaking ground makes me think of a quote I cannot find, one that says something about the violence of spring, but this one by Whitman will do:

"The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks." - Tennessee Williams

Quotes to remember

"We don't see things as they are; We see things as we are." ~ Anais Nin

“I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me.” ~Anais Nin

"Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh." ~ W.H. Auden

"There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment."
~ Wislawa Szymborska

"I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons." ~ Adrienne Rich

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."
~ Ray Bradbury

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title." ~ Virginia Woolf

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life." ~ Virginia Woolf

"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit." ~ e.e. cummings

"There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy and a tragedy." ~ Mark Twain

"The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom."  ~ bell hooks

“We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” ~ Alexander Pope

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to live the width of it as well.” ~ Diane Ackerman

“I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”
~ Augusten Burroughs

"Earth's crammed with heaven."   ~ Elizabeth Barret Browning

"I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship."
~ Louisa May Alcott

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."
~ Sir Francis Bacon

"We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."
~ Tom Robbins

"truths in their wild state" ~ Gilles Deleuze

"The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention."
~ Richard Moss

"delirium of solutions" ~ William Carlos Williams

"Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love." ~ Leo Tolstoy

"We are not the same person this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person."
~ W. Somerset Maugham

"Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity."
~ Gilda Radner

“chords ran together like tears on a cheek”  ~ anonymous

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

"Do I dare
Disturb the universe"
~ T.S. Eliot

Bob Dylan lyrics

I've been listening to a lot of Bob Dylan lately and so I decided that this Wednesday's writing prompt will include single lines from various Bob Dylan songs. If there don't work for you, visit bobdylan.com and find a line or two that click with you.

“I saw a white ladder all covered with water” - “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”

“Spreading their wings 'neath the falling leaves.”  - “Changing of the Guards”

“Were handing out the flowers that I'd given to you.” - “Changing of the Guards”

“But the next time I looked there was light in the room.” - “Day of the Locusts”

“I been lookin' at my shadow, I been watching the colors up above” - “Dirt Road Blues”

“it's hard labour and cold beans”  - “Endless Highway”

“A place where there is no pain of birth.” - “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking”

“Stand in one place till your feet begin to hurt.” - “Hard Times in New York Town”

“Highway 51 runs right by my baby's door” - “Highway 51”

“The next time you see me comin' you better run" - “Highway 61 Revisited”

All quotes above are from Bob Dylan songs.

Writers on writing

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Ernest Hemingway

"What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call." - Liz Carpenter

"Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer." - Susan Sontag

"For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity." - George Orwell

"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." - Pablo Picasso

"when there is no more
story that will be our
story when there is no
forest that will be our forest"
- W. S. Merwin