Slick

Careful, careful! That seaweed can be slick as snot and hiding a squelching tide pool. Not so deep that you fall in, but you may fall down and ouch! The rocks and barnacles are not soft.

Along North Beach, on the Olympic Peninsula.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: squelch.

Early morning light on the water.

Forgiveness

Rumi writes about the wound being where the light gets in. Leonard Cohen says the cracks are where the light gets in. My poems about being reborn or changed seem to involve either burning or the sea. I wrote this in 2009.

Forgiveness

I want to forgive something
Someone
In fact a group
Something that hurt a lot
I’ve tried logic
I tell myself
“It was an expression of concern”

My heart doesn’t agree
It is sullen
Immobile and grumpy
It whispers
“They have not apologized”
It whispers
“When people say you’re crazy
It could be a joke
An expression of concern
It wasn’t
It was a palm held out
At arm’s length
To distance me.”

My head argues
“That’s what it felt like to you.
You don’t know their intentions.”

I want to write
A poem of forgiveness
Hoping my heart will follow

My conscious doesn’t write my poems
My conscious wrestles with an idea
The poem comes out of this struggle
I look at the poem I’ve written
I think,
“That is what I would like
my conscious heart to feel.”
My poem is often more generous
than my conscious feels

My poems are not mine
They are a gift
From the unconscious
It is much larger
Than the small conscious me
I dream of feeling envy
I climb into a bathtub
And transform myself
To battle a trickster
We are transported
To the bottom of the ocean

In the ocean
The trickster and I are one
It is unlimited
It is not my unconscious
There is no separation
It is all unconscious

I did not think
A poem would give forgiveness
But pain drove me
Into the sea
I am connected
You gave me these pearls
Thank you

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: crack.

Silhouettes

I went to the store last weekend to get things like soap and a travel iron. I looked for pens too. I love colored ink pens for my journal. The pens and back to school things are right by the kids’ section. I bought an inexpensive kit. It is a sun print kit. It contains treated paper and plastic silhouette cutouts. I choose the cutouts and put them on the paper, put plastic on top to hold it, and expose it to the sun for 10-15 minutes. Rinse, dry, and voila!

The lower creature is from cutouts. The other I found cleaning the house: I thought it was a deceased large cricket, but no, it’s a praying mantis. I think praying mantis are wonderful creatures. I do not know if Sol Duc brought it in or it wandered in to the house on it’s own. At any rate, I am honoring it’s memory with this silhouette. I am also eyeing other small household objects and thinking about what would expose well. My grandmother’s ring, with a moss agate, that might let light through on to the paper. Paperclips, earrings, flowers, grasses. This paper is quite fun. I will use it as stationary and get to share it!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: butterflies.

Last on the card: May

The first picture is taken by my iphone. I have already posted the real last on the card, the rose bush from a few days ago, so this is the last unposted photograph. Is that cheating? Oh, well.

The second is from my Panasonic Lumix FZ 150, taken two weeks ago on my hike. This is on the way down. I was tired by then! Altitude + 4.5 miles, whew.

For bushboy’s Last on the Card.

There’s a boat here somewhere

Two of the ferries, that cross Puget Sound from Port Townsend to Whidby Island, are in this photograph from January. But it’s the sky that distracts. The ferries and the dock look small in the sound and the sky.

I do miss the Salish Sea!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: boat.