13: For Forsythia
1. The forsythia surrounds me like warm bowls of sun.
2. With the flick of a switch the daffodils are lit.
3. Climate changed blooms / come a month too soon / forsythia flowers died / the year Trump won election / tampered in his favor / by Russians and traitors / refugees had no place to go… 2017 HERE.
4. “It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.” Dolly Parton
5. “What kind of white Planet of the Apes shit was that?!” – Chris Rock calling out the aggrieved white men who tried to overthrow the government that they run
6. About the infamous slap from Will Smith, Rock said, ‘Anybody that says words hurt has never been punched in the face.’
7. On a lighter note, yesterday Joe and I went on a bike ride and we wrote this nursery rhyme: Joey Klein took his time / to make me his valentine / He drew a heart / and said, “That’s a start / Now we’ll never be apart.”
8. How to Make a Freckle: There’s a danger in looking too long / so I close my eyes / I let the sun start a fire on my lids / turn from magenta to bright red / I imagine it making a freckle / or dropping a spark of inspiration / If I sit long enough in its glow / it might illuminate a truth I am blind to / It might melt a cold grudge / or fuse meaning where there was none…
9. Woke? I’m always open to awakening.
10. Moles or voles?
11. Moles are meat-eaters, and their diet consists of insects, grubs, and earthworms. Voles “V”, on the other hand, are vegetarians and eat the roots and stems of plants. A mole is 4 to 7 inches long with paddle-shaped feet and prominent digging claws. It has an elongated head and snout, small eyes, and no external ears It digs characteristic volcano-shaped hills in the lawn. The tunnels are dug at a rate of 18 feet per hour and can add 150 feet of new tunnels in the lawn each day. We have both!
12. TALKING ABOUT DEATH WON’T KILL YOU – Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise, describes our culture as death phobic and grief illiterate. And yet, there we were in the spirit of poetic memoir and depth psychology, delving into subjects so often avoided. Katherine left the bedside of a dying friend to share this encore call-and-response reading that she and I had done in November for 25 students of counseling at a Radford University Death and Bereavement class. She left her phone on vibrate… More HERE.
13. “Every creator’s creations are their coping mechanism for life — for the loneliness of being, for the longing for connection, for the dazzling incomprehension of what it all means. What we call art is simply a gesture toward some authentic answer to these open questions, at once universal and intimately felt — questions aimed at the elemental truths of being alive, animated by a craving for beauty, haunted by the need to find a way of bearing our mortality. Without this elemental longing, without this authentic gesture, what is made is not art but something else…” David Bowie on art/creativity
___________Thirteen Thursday
March 8th, 2023 10:10 am
Love your cute and innocent poem!
Flowers are beautiful!
I thought you were going to say mole or beauty
Mark!?
March 8th, 2023 10:13 am
Ha ha! When I looked up moles (cause we have an infestation of them making tunnels in the yard) one of the bits I read was on skin moles and I could make no sense of it until I realized that.
March 8th, 2023 8:42 pm
That was interesting to read.
The little poem was lovely.
Always interesting to see people having classes about dying and bereavement.
I survived dying and it changed my view on the process. It’s not poetic at all. I was not in pain.. but I was not drifting on a pink cloud.
My forsythia is flowering. It’s beautiful!
March 9th, 2023 8:06 am
The plants are way too early in their blooms. We needed a good freeze to rid ourselves of bugs and diseases, but now I have to hope we don’t have one because I want the fruit trees to be fruitful. My father uses some kind of mole irritation thing in his yard. It beeps. It sends out a vibration and makes the moles/voles go away. I think you can buy them at Lowes. He says they work.
March 9th, 2023 4:16 pm
I have used those solar mole beepers but they didn’t make a difference, probably because I only have 3 and I’d need a dozen for my yard and gardens… around 3 acres.
March 11th, 2023 2:45 am
<3 <3 warm bowls of sun !!
And How to Make a Freckle is so very warming too