Space in the Real World

Posted on February 22, 2017 by Heloise Jones

‘Like angels and birds, poems flew to me unbidden as I transitioned through fear in the dissolution of my marriage and faced challenges as a single parent of a young child. Perfectly rhymed chronicles of my heart and thoughts spontaneously sprung from my pen. . .’
*

This won’t be perfect. I’m sure I’ll be back to edit. Because I learned I transferred money in the wrong direction between banks, and I’m scary overdrawn. Which means I run to the bank before I wordsmith. Ouch. A too-full mind missing details as I create a new life once more. Time blocked for writing and biz making, then pulled away by surprises with works put out less than perfect, needing rewrites & edits. Writer Life. Real Life, too.

Last week I shared poet Maya Stein’s query: ‘If you were to write 3 poems this week, what would be their titles?‘ One of mine – What Space Looks Like. Space is definitely up for me.

Every other week I get a postcard from my grandson in Taiwan. We don’t Skype so these are my tiny snapshots of his growing up I’ll never see. I send him cards, too, but haven’t figured how to get beyond the little sentences about his storytelling contest where so scared he almost scratched his butt, or petting silka deer at the beach who like him. A huge wave of missing his sparkly love and laugh washed over me with this week’s postcard. I wrote two back to him. And opening the linen cabinet, the blue towel caught me.

My son’s towels were always blue. It may sound crazy since he left home decades ago, but I always have that blue towel in my linen closet. It holds the space of me and him together. Like the stack of cards on my shelf does for my grandson. As I read the news, I can’t help wondering what holds the space of relationships for immigrants & refugees separated from their families. I know it must hurt their hearts like it hurts mine.

Someone who knows said her calendar is her freedom maker (read, space maker). It gives her permission to stop, step away from work and live with presence in ways that give balance. Because I’ve always been a work-til-the-task’s-done person, I’m still working on the calendar part. But I realized guilt and shoulds swallow my space as much as any thought of not having time. They’re linked. So this week I practiced no guilt as part of claiming space in rebuilding my life.

I met a friend who’s passionate about tea. He created a little tea-room in his bodywork office complete with low table filled with tea pots & small cups + cushions to sit on. I love his gentleness, and how happiness surrounds him since he married his longtime partner last year.

He had three containers lined up, told me to choose. I smelled each. Picked the one that made my eyes light up. It’s complexity excited me. I didn’t know what to think. The leaves were beautiful, too. A mixture of shades in brown, black, sage, & green that touched the artist in me. He told me it was an award-winning oolong he brought back from Taiwan when he toured tea farms. It’s the most expensive tea I ever bought, he said. He shared how tea farms are passed to sons, except this particular farm which passed to the daughter. Because she has the nose, touch, feel of everything tea. Her father still works for her.

We shared our delight and evaluated the infusions. He marked the seconds of ea. brew for future reference. We’ve got to do this tea together, again, he said as I was leaving. And this wonderful man, after sharing his prize, was gracious in thanking me for the gift of tea I brought him. I felt wholly filled with space.

Then a friend surprised me with a $25 birthday gift toward a massage at Ojo Caliente mineral springs. I said Yes to the day she had free. Ojo is part of what we do together. Started 23 yrs. ago when I lived here. Every other week for four yrs. we drove an hour across the NM countryside for a soak. It was on the calendar. What made this really big is for the first time in six years I have friends with me on my birthday. After 18 yrs. celebrating my Santa Fe friends’ birthdays each fall with a lunch or other gifts. We laughed. We put it on the calendar once more. Space carved.

There’s a shot I love of Rachel Ballentine, a poet whose observations of the world around her are so sentient I included one in my book The Writer’s Block Myth. The shot is so intimate, it’s almost as if we’re voyeurs. She looks about five. Her dress is plaid with lace trim, the kind of an era when young girls wore such serious patterns in often serious colors. She holds a brush lightly in her hand. So gently held it appears as if it could slip thru her fingers. The angle as if it might be calligraphy she paints. I love that it’s a brush, because she paints now, too. What I love most, tho, is the expression on her face. It’s one of complete Engagement and Peace. It conveys what all writers and artists know about immersion in the creative process.

That creating is often an intimate experience, especially for writers, and conversely the space is huge inside us when we’re in it. Rachel’s picture shows exactly what creative freedom looks like, for big people and small.

It feels as if the world is losing space right now. Not just info overload, or confusion of what’s real and what’s not, but freedoms lost in a veil of lies and self-serving kleptocrats. Protections of animals and the environment dismantled for the avarice of individuals and corporations. Space to contribute and live healthy lives co-opted as fingers point and bullies threaten anything ‘other.‘ A new set of shoulds being created for survival.

Author Nancy Peacock hits home with this: “The artist is always. . .between two opposite poles. This is what makes the artist. The ability to exist in the center of insanity and still bring something forth – of beauty, of importance, a story not yet told, a line of song, a note not yet sung. Making your art is more important now than it has ever been, and this will remain true for the rest of your life, no matter what happens or does not happen.“

This is my belief. Making art and writing are not selfish or frivolous. They’re necessary gifts in the mix of Life on Earth and create space for all of us. Writers and artists are the Voice for those who can’t say it, hold the Vision for those who need it, are the conscience of society. Sounds lofty, but that’s what I’ve come to believe bigtime.

I wrote a book to support writers and creatives. To help them thru the snarlies of life so they stay on their feet to live, work, and create at their best. Writers and creatives and all of us living in the Real World need space to use what we have. Words are what a writer has.

So, what you can do. . .give a book to a writer. Right now. Because I tell ya, I’m not the only one looking for breath and space.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

How do you find space in your life? Write me in the comments below.

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My Three Poems

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Heloise Jones

‘If you were to write 3 poems this week, what would be their titles?’
~ Maya Rachel Stein, poet and creative adventuress

My three:
– Saying Thank You 100 times as if It’s the Name of God
– What Space Looks Like
– We Don’t Have All the Time in the World

Maya and I are friends. We met nearly a decade ago, tho it seems weird to think it’s been so long because we both confess feeling a special bond despite seeing each other only twice. I discovered her poetry through a mutual friend. When I heard she was touring the country to meet some of the 600 people who subscribed for her 10-line Tuesdays (poems in our inbox!), was holding writing workshops in living rooms, that Charlotte was on her list of stops, I called her up. ‘Come to Asheville, stay with me,’ I said. ‘Asheville loves poets.’ I still have friends I made in my living room that day. Peeps I didn’t know who drove hours to sit with us. And Maya. Watching her adventures putting poetry and creative arts into the world, and her very special relationship with Amy. I couldn’t attend their wedding, but as I said in the sentiments I sent, I know there’s fun where-ever they are.

Maya and me. We share belief in the power of words and art. There are a dozen Thank You’s I have for Maya.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. I found a poem I wrote for my husband Art on our 24th Valentine’s together. I don’t think I ever gave it to him. Yesterday was our 31st. In the beginning he gave me a dozen red roses. Always. Until I fell in love with the raucous color and dance of cut flower bouquets. Something only rare florists master. We may have gone out to dinner, too. Until I decided the crowds & bad food of restaurant rush weren’t worth the money, either. There were cards and candy, all the other ways Valentine’s defined for couples. In that poem, I snuck from bed, placed foil-wrapped lips on a stick in his toothbrush holder with my heart filled with tenderness. Today, him in NC, me happy here in Santa Fe, I think that’s what Valentine’s really about. Tender hearts. For a loved one, for friends, family, humanity, the planet, for ourselves.

There are a thousand Thank You’s for those 31 yrs. with Art. I put one on the Acknowledgement page of my book:

I wish to thank my husband Art for the space and his willingness to see me through
years of creative pursuits. His insights during the times I needed a different perspective
made me a better writer, coach, and person.

I have multitudes more for tender hearts, our beautiful universe, and moments on this earth.

At the post office they always ask, ‘Need any stamps?’ My usual response is I’ve got plenty. Then I saw Wonder Woman. Of course I bought a sheet. I heard other women bought sheets when they didn’t need more stamps, too. An artist-healer friend in New Zealand wrote, asked for a note with the stamp. It’s been a very tough year or two, she said. ‘I’m sending you four, one of each image,’ I told her. ‘You’ll do something creative with them, and place it where you’re reminded what a Wonder Woman you indeed are.’ In the bigger sense, I believe Wonder Woman is women claiming the space we’ve always held.

I could talk for years about space. My Thanks to Art in my book mentions it – the space to create. Now, the space of solitude to flow with my life rhythms, commune uninterrupted with my imagination. The space out my windows to far horizons and mountains that always imply more on the other side. Like the space I used to feel when I looked out on the ocean. ‘What do you see,’ Art used to ask. The world, I told him. It’s the same when I look at those colors in the shot above. Because color in all forms gives us space.

I was in Santa Fe three days when I ignored my ragged face, the 8* weather, and dressed to go out for a Women2Women lunch. The agenda – introduce ourselves & hand out cards, have good food & good conversations, and hear someone in the community speak. I (very) briefly connected with a gal there. We met for brunch two weeks later. ‘Where do you live,’ she said. I told her the neighborhood. Then. . . which street? what number? Turns out she’s a neighbor and one of her best friends is my landlady. Exactly how I fly in Santa Fe, with magic. But honestly, we really don’t have all the time in the world. We gotta show up, say our Thanks, and find the space between us.

Because Life can shift in a heartbeat. Less that that, a breath. To the good, and not so good. I know because I’ve been there. . .chance meetings, a poem accepted, house on fire, husband run down by a car. Yesterday was a hard day. A brief, gentle dressing down for doing something that comes natural to me. A reminder the clock’s ticking on something very important to me. At the end of the day I felt myself in loosely-glued pieces with thoughts of failure, while every bit of me wanted space to give what I do well: support empowering writers & creatives to move forward, live their best creative life. Because I think they hold our Voice when we can’t speak, and Vision when it’s hard to see. Our conscience when we get snarled and tied up. But at the end of the day, all I could think was author Mary Anne Radmacher’s famous words: “Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’ ”

I had Thanks on my lips and a deep belief in restored space on the morrow when I went to bed, even knowing we don’t have all the time in the world. Despite feeling small. Because what I know is I’ve cracked the code to help people live their best creative life and that’s something grand. Sometimes it’s just hard doing for ourselves what we do for others.

Another Small Journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Tell me. . .what would the titles of your three poems be?
I’ll tell you a secret. . .we really don’t have all the time in the world.

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Using What I Have

Posted on February 8, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word.
He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices:
the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.”
~ Federico García Lorca
(poet, playwright, & theatre director executed by Franco).
*

I typically scan facebook for the patterns in what’s been up for me. The sum today is I slept many hours last night, starting 8pm on the sofa, moving to bed at 11:30, & with waking only once, rising late @ 7am. After weeks of scant sleep + insomnia the night before from which I rose, pulled out my courage & contacted folks for book reviews, and others with a dissatisfaction. My publisher told me launching a book is a marathon, not a sprint. But the fact is I’m sprinting to catch up from the late start in the process, and the move to Santa Fe, creating a functioning home with box-lined walls, plastic bins at the ready in the garage for re-packaging from the cardboard mousies love. Sprinting to regain a rhythm in my life.

The other day I went to a movie for the first time in a year. As I pulled from my driveway, I saw clear through the picture window of my little home to the light & view out the kitchen window at the back of the house. It rather stunned me. I thought, this is why I’m here. To do my work with a sense of space and expansiveness outside me and inside me. This does not require a sprint.

By my front door is a ceramic vase with two delicate oriental cranes on it. I bought it in Jacksonville. It’s not my style and made no sense to get it then, nor any time I’ve looked at it in the ensuing 4 years. But I was, and still am, completely drawn to it. Then this. . .

For a year before I returned to Santa Fe, I subscribed to New Mexico magazine. I’ve moved magazines before. They’re heavy & never worth the cost. But the little voice said ‘throw this one in the box.’ Sandhill cranes and the caption ‘Flocking to NM’ on the cover. I flipped through it the morning I pulled it from the box. Read ‘Preparing for Liftoff’ + an 8-pg. spread on writers and indy bookstores. This note stuck out: “. . .the National Endowment for the Humanities has ranked New Mexico first in the nation for the number of working writers per captia.” Those unseen guides, talking to me even in Jax.

A family member wrote on fb I should quit sharing my thoughts about the world and focus on selling my book. (I’m really nice in my posts, focusing on love of the planet & humanity, empowerment) Two people responded. One said she vehemently disagrees. ‘Your influence as a writer is far greater than any of us less articulate folks. Please use it as your conscience dictates.’ Another said, ‘Yes!!! Love your voice and the strength that fuels it.”

I’ve always been an artist, creativity at the heart of every job I’ve had. I asked my mother when she was dying what she remembered I loved to do most when I was a kid. ‘Draw,’ she said. ‘From the time you could hold a pencil.’ At eight, I made folders out of 2 sheets of notebook paper, the front sheet folded down. forming a flap. The sides taped or stapled. I colored pictures with themes on the front – holidays, myths, animals. I wrote stories & drew pictures to fit the themes. My first experience of writer’s block was in 3rd grade. I sat at a brown lunch table composing a poem, prompted by one I saw in a school newsletter. I thought a poem something I could do. But young as I was, I questioned myself, never submitted it. The next year I wrote stories for a book I planned, complete with Table of Contents. At 18, tho, I turned in a blank sheet of paper to my college professor every Friday in response to our single assignment for the day, Write. That failure kept me from having the GPA to continue school. Took 5 tries to get my degree and find my worldly heart. Two while in an abusive marriage. Five. Persistence.

For months I’ve come out with aspects of my past that I’d kept to myself because, well, I felt ashamed about some of it. + I didn’t want to be identified with stuff that happened years and decades ago. . .when I was a diff woman. But it’s all part of my history that informs my understanding of human-Being. Not my identity, but parts of me that’s shared with others who are battered, broke, stalked, on food stamps, dismissed, have homes that burn, lost children, husbands run down by cars, businesses lost, little income for months on end. Who’ve lived in places very different than they’ve known. Have been thought weird or different. All part of human-Being that when turned into something besides fear, opens to empathy.

I’ve not shared my book on facebook the past few days. I’ve shared this:

Let’s support writers this week. I’m all about it. Because words have power.
Writers in other countries have been executed for that power.

Nearly 20 yrs. ago I joined a circle of writers to regain a Voice I’d lost. Writing and all things authorly have been my passion since. I’ve known I was a writer thru trauma, move after move, & distractions. I know the power of the written word for my insides and our outsides. I know the ways we get waylaid. It’s why I use my Voice now. We use what we have.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

What empowers you?
I’ll tell you a secret: Today I say action with heart.

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I work with people who have a vision & desire to write.
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Rose Petals Under Our Feet

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Heloise Jones

“It’s the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget.
It’s that the sod seals them over.”
~ Anthony Doerr (from All the Light We Cannot See)
*

rose-petal-stage

I don’t take pics during a performance. This is before Deva Premel & Miten came out.
What wonderful heart energy, I thought. Those rose petals beneath their feet.
*

I just read two novels back-to-back set in France during WWII German occupation. It wasn’t intentional to do that. Each showed up as the best option when I was looking for a story to settle into. One in a very small library at the beach, the other in an airport bookstore. I’d heard they were good reads. And how the author showed the characters beyond the dramatic backdrop interested me.

The first is about two French sisters with completely opposite personalities. Their motivations and actions defined and driven by their character. The book’s sympathies center strictly in the French experience of the war. The second is about two young people with very different backgrounds, from opposite sides of the conflict, coming of age in war. Both books were heavily researched. Both were page turners. But my experience as a reader with each was like night and day.

In the sisters’ story, I was pulled in close, viscerally thrust bone-to-bone into the deprivations and cruelty. Ground so hard I skimmed over concentration camp scenes. Something I rarely do. I finished still wondering, as I have for decades, at what appears to be blind inhumanity. A wondering that’s niggled me despite many essays read that explore and explain the psychology and sociological influences. A wondering that prompted me to answer ‘I don’t know’ when someone recently asked if I believed in Evil, because my head knows the reasons such disassociation happens inside people, and how fear & character allow willful blindness, but Evil seems beyond reason. What I read in the novel seemed in the realm of beyond.

The language in the second book was so beautifully poetic, and some of the scenes so full of perfectly constructed lists placing me there, that I felt distanced from the horror. Strung out in a beautiful dream that wasn’t right. As I read, I understood on a new level how the rise and fall of the German Reich happened. A sympathetic human level, if you can believe that. The author showed me incrementally, in small details, in very short chapters that switched effortlessly between the people on each side. Every awful thing, each decision made that we think we’d never make, digested as I was carried forward. Held in a tight line of cognitive dissonance the entire time, with me not fully realizing it.

Until a simple line about a boy stepping on a land mine and ‘disappearing in a fountain of earth.’ I paused after that line, reread it several times. I could see the dirt rise high, arch and fall. Hear the cascading sound of granules showering the ground. My mind knew it was awful, and yet, the way he said it held a terrible beauty. He didn’t have to describe a thing. Not even the soft pink mist of blood.

That line, the boy disappearing in a fountain of dirt, was where I’d stopped the day I drove an hour to Sarasota for an evening of sacred chant with Deva Premel and Miten. I felt lucky to get tickets. I heard they only booked a few US engagements this year. I sat on the 8th row in the Performing Arts Center that sat only a thousand. No one in front of me. Only 2 phones glared before being snuffed. I felt extra lucky.

Toward the end Deva & Miten invited us on stage with them. Perhaps 200 of us went up. Miten led the men in a two line song about being the ocean. The women sang one word over and over with Deva – Hallelujah. When Miten said, sing to yourselves, I put my hands over my heart and sang with abandon as I swayed side to side. I felt my blood rise, run fast and strong. Felt my heart beat under my palms. Heard it pound it in my ears. And then my head lifted right off my body. When we stopped singing, I had to leave the stage. Everyone else stayed put. Miten was speaking. I was in an altered state I didn’t want.

I’m not sure how to convey the spectrum of experience after I left the building that night. Driving home in a sort of no-worry hyper-presence. Completely ungrounded the next morning. Unable to focus with care on anything. But I didn’t want to give a day to coming back to earth. ‘I have work to do, the clock ticks’ bobbed inside my floaty brain, and I wanted to meet that commitment. At 2:30pm, knowing beef would bring me back down, I drove out for hamburger.

Something has changed inside me. As weird as it sounds, my molecules spread so far apart they rearranged themselves when they came back together. I know it. And not believing in coincidence, that night as I picked up my novel I thought for the twelfth time there must be a reason I’m reading these two particular books back-to-back.

The last chapters of the book are an extended epilogue. We get a final wrap of each character and the connections between them. As I read I felt those chapters unnecessary. A device. Thought his editor was too much in love with his writing because there was no other reason they weren’t edited out. They steal something from the reader, I thought. But then, tears started. I saw they were like the fabled diamond in the story holding water and fire, immortality and death both. Illuminating a truth.

We are all connected. The possibility of the best and worst of humanity inside most of us. The choice how that’s played out not necessarily easy. But it’s a choice, whatever the motivation. And whatever happens, life moves on. We move on. Everything that’s happened in our lives becomes part of who we are. The past can either seal us under sod, or we can soften to all that remembering in our hearts, stand helpless to empathy for others. That’s what I got.

I still have to coax myself to trust I’ll be okay, come out upright on the other side of big changes in my life. Fear still sits in the corner, waiting to win. But I don’t think about resigning or quitting, any more. Don’t doubt I’ll get where I intend to be, do what I committed to do. That’s what I carry.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
*

Tell me. . .what do you carry from the remembering in your heart?
I’ll tell you a secret. . .I’ve only just begun to tell you all I’ve seen.

I’m writing a book – The Writer’s Block Myth.
About getting past stuck, living and loving your best creative life.

How to Tune & Patina

Posted on April 26, 2016 by Heloise Jones

They know when they’re been parked
for the last time, despite the promises of a new
transmission or bumper or fuel pump
The tires somehow know too and slowly
begin to sink into the land
and the land rises to embrace them, and gather
the car back to her
trees and leaves know too, and try to help
they shower the car with branches and fallen leaves
and slowly it becomes their own
becoming much more organic than when it was on the hiway
humans are now shut out of the picture
and the plants and animals
now have the title to the car.
~ Rachel Ballentine (Old Cars)
*

cloudy-skies-7 *

I admit I feel chosen by the great blue heron that lights down in front of our sliding glass doors, hunts little fish from the strip pond. That as I watched it sink low into the water the other day, its neck curved, folded down like when it flies so it looked like a strange giant duck floating there… and watched it dip its head, fluff & flutter it’s feathers, take a bird-bath (!) before wading to a small concrete slab where it sat in the sun with it’s wings splayed and bent, tips touching in prayer like some bird buddha…I knew I was.

I even felt my discovery of 5 tiny ducklings swimming fast & furious in a bunch along the seawall. In and out, picking bugs from the bricks above the shells stuck at waters edge. Mama behind them, watching, as a moment I was chosen to witness.

Author Patti Digh in a piece about Prince says he’s like a piano she has that can’t be tuned to a prescribed note, only to itself. Making beautiful music all the same. I believe that’s what’s happening to me. I’m relearning how to tune to myself. That it’s my innate nature reclaiming me like nature reclaims old cars in New Mexico. Rising to entwine and embrace me. Pull me closer so I hear my intuition clearly, follow it. Experience the world in remembered ways. That I’m revealing layers of rust, gorgeous color and texture of myself like what happens to old cars in the desert. Mold impotent on me like it is in dry air. And that like old cars in the desert I’ll one day patina, be seemingly as lovely as old buildings in Italy and Morocco, my own way.

I’ve been talking to writers as research for a book I’m writing that’ll support us moving thru stuck-ness so we can work, live, and create at our best. I say to them, tell me your dreams, the big ones. Often they need encouragement. But when they finally speak, I hear their shoulders drop, their breath exhale. Their voices fill out, grow round. Then they tell me how the pressures of their life push their dreams to the sidelines to wait. Reminds me I’ve put my own dreams aside. Time spent writing stories about characters you can’t see until you read my words. Moving back to Santa Fe where life organically embraces me, and I meet hitchhiking angels all the time. I asked one writer how his frustration felt in his body, and he described hearing a voice between his heart and his collar bone that he ignored for years. And one morning he woke knowing that day he’d ignore it no more. And the yellow brick road appeared to a mentor, community, publication, and a fulltime writer’s life with purpose for greater change in the world. I hear that voice, too. Have ignored it, too.

Patti Smith wrote in her book M Train about meeting one of her heroes, chess great Bobby Fischer. How he was bizarre, paranoid, almost childlike. She concluded that “…without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.” It reminded me I eclipse moments of wonder and magic all the time. Like the morning I stepped out my door, looked up to a sky like the painting of clouds by Georgia O’Keeffe. The clouds over my head glowing with lights inside them (not white) in an ethereal moonlit (not blue) sky. How I ignored that dreamscape, jumped in my car for the reality I knew at the bay. Where the wind blew so hard, not a magical cloud remained.

But then, there’s the time a tall, big-framed older man stepped up, parked at the monitor displaying my purchases as I bagged my groceries. The one slap next to the credit card machine. I noted the space behind him, and when ready to pay, said in a nice voice, I’m not done checking out, sir. And he didn’t move. So I moved up, squeezed my elbow to my side, dug in my purse. ‘I’m not looking at what you’re buying,’ he gruffed as I slid my card. It’s not about that, but about space, I said. At which he took a step sideways, turned away. ‘They’re everywhere.’ The checker leaned in to hear him better. He’s talking about me, I told her. A big smile on my face because strange as it seems, he didn’t bother me a bit. Not even when he moved further back, turned and looked straight in my face, said in a not nice voice, ‘Yes, I am. You’re a lot of trouble.’

I tell you the truth. I stood smiling as the checker struggled with the tape machine, as she handed me the receipt. Smiled as I replied to the man with utter sincerity, Why, thank you, I appreciate that. I even stood smiling when it was all done, before going outside, wondering if I was nuts. Hoping *we* were indeed everywhere. A friend later said I put into the world what I wanted back. And that’s not crazy, at all.

Perhaps it’s simply all part of my innate nature saying look here, and here, and here, spend time with Joy. And my thanks and appreciation in the market, so sincere, making no sense, were for a chance to experience joy in a moment that looked rough.

What do you think?

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
*

A secret: The past four years have been really hard. I guess I needed it.
A favorite: Rachel Ballentine’s poetry. I shared a wonderful day with her in NM.

Image: painting by Georgia O’Keeffe