Transform your life…
Image borrowed from Loren Webster’s blog, In a Dark Time…The Eye Begins to See
In my rapacious search for poems to send out (yes — I made it to 50 submissions!) I came across many old poems, plus notices that a few had been published elsewhere already and needed to be removed from the send-out file. Here’s to better organization in the future.
This poem appeared at Escape into Life (EIL), thanks to the fabulous Kathleen Kirk. I wrote it when my daughters were young and I used to write early in the morning, in my basement room, usually while also running a load of laundry and getting ready to dash off to the college.
The Tree
She cracked the window to let in the world
and a great tree offered its branch
blistering the green wall of her room
where desk and bookshelf and lamp
stood sacrosanct. Here,
said the tree, this branch
is a ladder. Transform
your life. Put out your eyes.
See all things bright, restored, whole.
Possess all that you long for.
She pushed the branch out,
closed the window. Hands sticky
with resin, redolent of winter fir,
she turned to the blistered wall.
She sang with the trapped wind.
Last night Emma and I saw Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and we thought it was epic. And heart-breaking. But as always happens when a writer watches a movie (at least it always happens to me), I found myself thinking about what got me invested in each character — especially Jyn and Cassian, and Cassian’s (at first) annoying droid, K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk) — and how the parts were woven together. If it starts as merely someone’s vision, someone’s wild idea, and then becomes words on screenplay pages, and then camera angles, etc., what makes it come together, what makes it come alive and tick?
and Productive Writing Practice, by Jordan Rosenfeld, and I came across a page about the folly of multi-tasking. Rosenfeld refers us to an NPR story citing neuroscientist Earl Miller, who explains that the brain is not good at doing more than one thing at a time. What the brain is good at is “deluding itself” (qtd. in Rosenfeld, 31). I noticed last quarter that young people, especially, believe that they are the multi-tasking generation. Nevertheless, their minds often seem miles and miles away from whatever task is at hand. At breaks, all 29 of them whipped out their cell-phones and began tapping and staring intently. When, during class, I’d see a student on his cell phone, I made a point of asking a question of him (or her). Looking up at the sound of his name, looking a little dazed, the student would say, “What?” Not good at multi-tasking. As I told them, in a few years we will all be in 12-step programs trying to break our fierce dependence on these devices.
