Double Rainbow

 

     Gertie fed me a wonderful dinner of greens and cornbread.  She had already informed me I would be spending the night at her cottage, no arguments.  So at least for now, I knew where I would lay my head, and what I would do for the rest of the evening.

     “Rest up, child, you don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” Gertie said.

     I helped Gertie clean up and then she said, “There’s nothing more I love in this life than to watch the sun go down, with a glass of wine in my hand.  Join me on the back porch.”

     We walked outside to an evening that was cool and pleasant, with a slight breeze.  It had rained while we were eating supper, so there was a fresh scent in the air, and the glittering of crystal droplets on the grass and leaves.  We sat down, poured wine, and clinked our glasses together:  Gertie announced, “A toast – We made it through another day.  We witness today as it draws to a close – and we are thankful to be here.”

     “Amen,” I said, taking a sip.  Looking up from my glass, I saw the most beautiful sight before us:  a double rainbow.  “It’s a miracle!”

     “Every day is a miracle – this day just happens to have a frame around it.  The rainbow is a blessing – all those colors, embracing the light…”

   “Sometimes I think the world is such a bad place – so many bad things happen – and then I see something like that…”

   “You know what they say, it takes both rain and sunshine to make a rainbow…The world is both good and bad, delicious and devastating – but it’s the only one we have, so we have to honor it and protect it.  This is it  – for better or worse, love it or hate it.  I choose our world, this life – the whole package – rainbows and tsunamis, falling in love and breaking your heart, getting a baby to smile and saying a last goodbye to a pet in too much  pain – we take the bitter with the sweet, the joy with the sorrow.  The best we can do is to be present each day, and, like my mother always said, do our best to make the world a better place if we can.”

     “The world is a better place because you’re here, Gertie.”

     “And you, too, Kezza.  The world needs you, whether you know it or not.  You are at the nexus of here and now, of being and meaning.”

     “I am?  I’m just me.”

     “That’s good enough.”

     “Really?”

     “Yes, I think you’re good enough, Kezza.  Smart enough, strong enough, kind enough, capable of darn near anything once you set yourself loose!  I think you’re pretty good, Kezza, just the way you are.  And you know what I always say…”

     “Pretty good is hard to beat,” I said, quoting Gertie, and laughing with her.

 

(c) 2008 Kerry Vincent

Blessed Birthday!

Le Enchanteur

Mystic Cantor

Mistress Raven

Creative maven

Using her Aussie strine

And her clever mind

To each one teach one

And each one reach one

Encouraging students to take flight

As they draw or paint or write –

On this marking of Heather’s birth

We gather to celebrate her worth

A special presence on the earth!

(Kerry)

Many Happy Returns, Heather!

Wishing the happiest of returns for your birthday, Heather,

and for the coming year.  Thank you for all you are to us

and Soul Food Cafe.  This greening vine is a special symbol

of all that is built up here, and for the future. 

Love, Monika (Imogen)

(copyright Imogen Crest 2008.)

The Ravens are Speaking

The Ravens are speaking and they are saying

 

Happy Birthday, Heather.

 

Love, Lori

 

L. Gloyd (c) 2008

 

A Gold Medal Performance

In honor of the Olympics, a gold medal performance:

Enjoy.

Lori

Go with the Flow, Lemuria-style

            Gravel Gertie’s cottage was just big enough for Gertie and her pets.  She had two cats, “Here” and “Now”, and a little beagle named “Whynot”, which Gertie told me was short for one her life philosophies, “Why the hell not?”  When she opened the back door, all the animals came streaming out, a knee-high but determined speeding train of cat hair, dog slobber, and rambunctious good will.  “Do you business, and get back inside,” Gertie commanded.  The pets obediently ran and emptied their bladders, but they were not ready to go back in the house right away.  Gertie called them, “Come, Here!  Come, Now!  Whynot!?!”  The dog did a few freedom laps and the cats ignored us, until Gertie yelled, “Come, Here, Now!” and finally, the parade returned and we all went inside.

            The back door opened to Gertie’s tiny kitchen, a small room painted sunshine yellow, with red gingham curtains on the windows and overflowing herb pots on the sills.  “Sit down, I’ll put the kettle on,” Gertie said, lighting her little gas stove.  I sat at the aluminum and red formica-topped table, no retro chic remake, but an original from the 1950s.  My chair was covered with red vinyl, rubbed white in spots from years of wear.  What meals had been served, what intriguing conversations had taken place at this old table?

            “Here you go, good old Lipton tea,” said Gertie, setting two white mugs on the table.  “Oatmeal cookies?  They’re a little stale, I don’t get out much,” she apologized.

            I sipped my tea and nibbled at the hard cookie.  “Thank you.  Everything is wonderful.  You didn’t have to go to all this trouble.”

            “It’s my pleasure.  A toast:  Here’s to Kezza, and her trusty Were Pen, and whatever adventures lie ahead!  May your days be interesting and your nights be safe!”  We clinked our cups.

            “But, Gertie, I am a little worried.  I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go, or how I’m supposed to get there, or what I’m supposed to do.  I want an itinerary, a program ,or an outline.  What’s the A, B, & C of all this?”

            “No one ever gets their lives mapped out for them,” said Gertie.  “I try to live in the Here and Now, I remind myself of that every time I see the kitties.  They live from one sunbath to the next.  We could learn from them.  We should be flexible, go with the flow, you know…”

            “I hate not knowing what’s coming next!  I can deal with something if I know it’s coming.  I can plan for it, study up, get ready, prepare myself.”

            “And how often do you get to live life that way?  Almost never.  No, it’s better to embrace the unknown, not fear it!  ‘Nothing more constant than change.’”

            “But what if something bad is coming?”

            “What if something good is on the way?  You don’t know.  You might miss a good opportunity because you’re afraid it will be something you won’t like.”

            “I can handle what I know; I don’t know if I can handle what I don’t know.”

            “You don’t know you can’t handle something new until you try it.  You don’t know your own strength, until you have to use it.  Then it’s like adrenalin – you can lift a mini-van off a child.”

            “I don’t know…”

            “It’s not easy, but we can choose to say yes to life, whether good or bad, or live in a hidey-hole and hope everyone leaves us alone.  I don’t know about you, but I need room to grow.”

            “But what if I fail?”

            “So?  What if you do?  Then you try again.  You think these silly cats of mine give up because I stop them from running out the door once or twice?  No – they just wait till their next chance, and then they try something sneaky.  Sometimes the cats win, sometimes I do.  It’s a game – the important thing is to keep playing, win or lose.”

            “But I’ve failed before.”

            “You and everyone else.  You just keep trying.  Don’t live in the past.  Respect where you’ve come from,  but move on.  Look over there.”  Gertie pointed to three plates that hung in a scrolled ironwork holder.  The top said “Honor the past”; the middle read, “Cherish the now”; the bottom plate, “Create the future.”

            “Whynot,” Gertie crooned, calling her pooch.

            “OK, OK.  Past, present, future.  Balance.  I’ve got it.  But it still doesn’t tell me where I’m going.”

            “Does the destination matter as much as the journey?”

            “I don’t know, Gertie!  I was taught you always started out with a plan.”

            “Plans aren’t bad – it’s just that sometimes they change.  The trick is knowing when to stay the course and when to go with the flow…Let’s take a walk outside, Kezza.”  We went out the back door, accompanied by the happy petting zoo.   I followed Gertie over to the clothesline.  “These homemade quilts are so beautiful!  The colors – the designs – the fabrics!” I exclaimed.

            Gertie touched the quilts gently, like the dear old friends they were.  “I could show you the slip-ups I made on each one – there are so many – but I learned from each and every mistake.  The important thing is I kept on sewing, learning, growing.  Stitch after stitch, till my eyes watered and my fingers ached.  Sometimes I had an idea in mind and sometimes I didn’t.  Sometimes I started out doing one pattern, but it didn’t look right, no matter how hard I tried.  So I quit forcing it, let the work have its own way, and then things flowed – turned out better than I could have ever planned myself!  Often we just have to get out of our own ways, and let things happen, let the creative force flow its natural course.  If it turns out, great!  If it doesn’t, we start over again, tired, maybe, but smarter, we hope.”

            I fingered the soft cotton quilts.  Maybe there were a few tiny flaws, if you looked very close, but overall, they were phenomenal.  “Gertie, these are wonderful, just the way they are.  When you see the whole picture, the whole quilt, it looks as though you planned every scrap, every stitch.”

            “But I didn’t.  I did my best, made adjustments along the way, and it all worked out, more or less.”           

             “The results are beautiful,” I agreed.

            Gertie smiled.  “Thank you.  I think these are dry now.  How about you help me take them down, fold them, and bring them in?”

            Gertie and I folded the quilts and lay them in her wicker basket.  “Time to go,” she called.  “Come, Here! Come, Now!  Whynot!”  I picked up the basket and followed her back inside.

 

© 2008 Kerry Vincent

If you were a were pen, where would you be?

So there I was, on the isle of Mudjimba, Old Woman Island, where somebody was supposed to meet me, and make all things clear, and show me the way to go.  At least that is what I had hoped would happen when I got to Mudjimba – so far I was just hot, tired, frustrated, and I had lost my beloved were pen.

I sat down on a bit of stone wall and looked out to sea, hoping watching the waves would calm me down.  “This too shall pass,” I whispered, as the Sand Dreamer taught, although I was still upset.  I tried to meditate, but my monkey mind kept jumping from topic to topic.  I tried to relax and focus on my breathing, but I got get an itch in the middle of my back I had to scratch it now, but I couldn’t quite reach it.  I tried rubbing my back against a tree trunk.  Just as I was starting to get the right spot, I heard a loud, throaty  “Unh-uh-uh.”  Embarrassed, I stopped immediately, opened my eyes, and saw a dark woman wearing a bright flowered sundress dabbing a wet cloth on her ample, wrinkled bosom, staring at me.

“I heard of tree-huggers, but I don’t know what you’d call what you’re doing to that tree – tree humpin’?” she said in her deep, raspy voice.

“I’m sorry, I just had an itch, I couldn’t reach it, so I thought the rough tree bark…”

“You don’t have to ‘splain it,” said the woman, laughing.  “It’s obvious, you needed someone to scratch your itch, but you should have asked for help.  I love a tree same as the next person, but you just actin’ silly.  She smiled broadly and said, “Hello, I’m Gravel Gertie.  Turn around, child.  Where you need that scratchin’ done?”

I turned and pointed to where the hooks of my bra were irritating my back.  Gertie gave me a good scratch, exactly were I needed it, and it was all I could do to keep from thumping my foot like a happy dog scratched just right.

“Sometimes you can help yourself, and sometimes you can ask for help.  This was one of those ‘ask for help’ times.  What’s your name, child?”

“Kezza.  Thank you, ma’am.”

“You’re welcome, Kezza, but please call me Gertie – ‘ma’am’ makes me feel like I should be an old woman in a church dress and rolled-up stockings.  I don’t mind bein’ old, but I don’t want to be prissy.  I’m a tough old broad and proud of it!  My wrinkles prove I’ve done some hard livin’ – I haven’t just been takin’ a nap down here on this planet.”

“No, Gertie, I can see you don’t take the easy way out.  No offense.”

“None taken.  How about you, Kezza?  How are you feelin’ now?”

“Pretty good,” I lied.  I was feeling a little bit better, but I was still worried.

“Pretty good is hard to beat!” said Gertie, smiling.

I couldn’t help but smile too.

“But something is troublin’ you.  Tell old Gertie about it.  You’ve lost something – something near and dear to you.”

“How did you know?”

“I know lots of things.  I’m almost blind in both eyes now, but I can see things other people miss.  It’s all a matter of paying attention.  Maybe I can help you find what you’ve lost.”

“But I don’t even know where to start looking, Gertie!  I’ve lost my Were Pen – there’s not another one like it in the whole world!  My Pen has been with me through thick and thin, good and bad, highs and lows…I always keep it with me, so I can write in my journal – that is, if I ever get inspired again.  It’s been ages since I’ve had an original thought,” I complained.

“I’m sure you’re exaggerating, you have all kinds of interesting thoughts – let your readers decide what ones are good or bad.  Words take on a life on their own after you speak them or publish them anyway.  Like kids, when some words move out of the house, they never look back.  Readers bring their past experiences to your work, so the stories that you put down may remind a reader of something that happened to them years ago, that has nothing to do with what you wrote, but it means something special to them.  We never know what our words might mean to someone else.  Give your readers some credit – trust them a little bit.  The good ones will amaze you and the lazy ones don’t matter that much.”

“What you just said – your words – are wonderful, I wish I could write them down!”  Out of habit, I reached in my backpack and pulled out my journal.  I gasped.  As usual, my Were Pen was clipped to the journal’s spiral binding, right where it should have been.

“But, but, I could have SWORN I checked that again and again and it wasn’t there before!” I said.

“What’s all the racket?” grumbled the Were Pen.

“I thought you were lost, gone forever, and I’d never see you again, Were Pen!”

“Don’t tease,” it said.  “I’ve been here all the time.  You must not have looked very hard.”

“Sometimes we try so hard to find something we look right by it.  Sometimes, the things we need, are right there with us all along,” said Gertie.

“And sometimes we’re taken for granted,” the Were Pen muttered.  

“Gravel Gertie, meet Were Pen.  Were Pen, meet Gravel Gertie.”

“Pleased to meet you, Were Pen.  I believe this problem is solved, Kezza.”

“Yes, thanks.  Now if I can just figure out where to go, what I’m supposed to do next.  But first, I would dearly love a nice cup of tea.”

“It’s not much, but my home is only a little way from here.  Why don’t you come home with me?  I’ll put the kettle on, and later, if you’re hungry, I’ve got a nice pot of mustard greens that have been simmering all morning.”

 “I’m starving!  If it won’t be too much trouble…”

“Not at all.  I don’t get much company these days; I get tired of talking to the same four walls.  It’d do me good to have visitors.  Besides, it will drive my nosy neighbor Izzy crazy wondering what’s going on!”

So I carefully re-packed my Were Pen and followed Gravel Gertie home to her little white cottage by the sea.  She had a beautiful garden, packed with color, best described as “controlled chaos”.  Beyond the flowers was a trim vegetable patch and a clothesline where the loveliest, most colorful cotton quilts I had ever seen were blowing in the gentle breeze. 

 

(c) Kerry Vincent

Searching for Triton

Talking with the people gathered at Rainbow Beach, Thalia heard mention of others who already departed to travel to Mudjimba Island and the Triton that one has to meet before being allowed entrance.  First arrange for a ferry, then be literally dropped off into the water to meet the Triton and appease him in some undefined way, and then, hopefully, finally getting to the Island.  What a long drawn-out process. The ferry is away on a trip so I would have to wait for its return and then do my own bargaining.   I wonder if there isn’t a quicker way so I can catch up with the others.   Sounds like the more adventurous are already there.  And who is this Triton?  What does he want from me?  I just have some odds and ends in my satchel—I can’t imagine there would be anything he wants.

 

She sat down on the lovely sand, specked with the now-crystal Crayola specks from the Crayola Rainbow.  Gathering up a few of the crystals and watching the interplay of color and light, Thalia decided to look for at least one crystal of every color. 

 

 

How long will this take?  But how beautiful they are.  Definitely worth the time to create a ‘Crayola’ box of 64 light-crystals.  Just read that the box of 64 is now 50 years old after having been introduced on the Captain Kangeroo TV show in 1958.  Crayola says more than 200 million of these boxes were sold containing enough crayons to circle the earth 24 times.  Maybe that is where my Crayola Rainbow Ride came from. 

 

I love the quote by Robert Fulghum?  “Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon.  A happiness weapon.  A beauty bomb.  And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one.  It would explode high in the air – explode softly – and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air.  Floating down to earth – boxes of Crayolas.  And we wouldn’t go cheap, either – not little boxes of eight.  Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in.  With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest.  And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.”   

 

Yes, wouldn’t that be wonderful—bombs of Crayolas—of color to delight instead of bombs to kill.  Look at how they catch the light and shimmer.  It’s like a kaleidoscope, a light show.   She held the crystals this way and that, becoming totally immersed in and mesmerized by the sparkle.

 

*****

 

Atlantis rises again, just as they said it would.  We measure the rise in barely perceptible increments, thus allowing us time to formulate plans and, perhaps, time for us to adapt.  As the ancient ones always said, a world gained is a world lost.

 

We go to survey the changes, Sssss-irl and I.  We will then return and report to the engineers so they can calculate how much time remains now before new evacuations are needed.  Swimming to the rising Atlantis, we scramble over chunks of marble gleaming in the moonlight to the apex of the high temple ruins and measure the distance to water’s edge.  Each moon-pass saw us there, walking a heartbeat’s distance further down the slope.  The incoming waves scour the marble one final time, a final smoothing-out of edges originally rough when entering the deep, and worn smooth over the millennium by the peace of the water. 

 

 

 

I remember playing amongst the original columns and buildings, running lithely, the one who is now Sssss-irl chasing, never quite able to catch me.  Those were the lifetimes when we could run gracefully on land.  Now, all has changed.   We have changed.  But still we play amongst the ruins, swimming and frolicking with ease, enjoying the light filtering through the water as flocks of multi-hued fish glint colors as they bank from one side to the other.  Sometimes the big fish, the Sharp-Teeth Eater, would appear, scaring us into hiding amongst the marble half-hidden by plant-growth.  We wriggle down into the algae, becoming as still as the ancient skeletons of lost civilizations entombed with us. 

 

As we wait, the shadow of Sharp-Teeth and old times passes over us, and we remember.  It is the transitions that are hard.  Over time, we move from one form to another, initially not remembering the others.  But during moments of quiet and awareness, the impact of the whole can overwhelm.  Questions swim and dart like a flock of fish as we wait.  How long will it take?  How long did it take?  What will happen to us this time?  Should we even try to adapt – once again?   We haven’t totally completed the last transition, and now another? 

 

With a long out-breath, hiss of water over gills, I turn to Sssss-irl and observe her legs almost blended into powerful back flippers, remnants of fingers showing from front flippers, eye membrane complete over eyes that have gradually migrated sideways to increase visibility to 180 degrees.  Yes, over the ages we adapted to our watery surroundings, and now?  Now what?  Do we stay below and continue this process, or rise above and start the reversal?  Atlantis rises again. 

 

*****

   

Whoa!  What was that?  When was that?  Who was that?  But it gave her an idea. Why wait for the ferry?  I can change shape and swim to meet the Triton.  Who knows what sights are in the waters around here?  She carefully gathered all the lovely crystals.  Tucking the largest jet-black crystal into her pocket, Thalia placed the rest into a plastic baggie from her satchel and returned the bag of lights into the satchel, feeling sad as their sparkle disappeared from view.  She walked to water’s edge and sat down with her legs extended into the blue world.  Thalia then took the black crystal from her pocket and wound it into her long hair. 

 

A moments pause, focus, intent… and she shifted, flipping to face the water, then squirming deeper into the brine, satchel diagonally across her scaled body, legs now fused with tail flipper.  Another wriggle and the satchel settled into a better placed for long travel.  She was on her way to search for Triton.

 

 

You Little Pirate!

I made my first altered book/card for my friend Tim Cook’s baby, who is due next week – using a “You little pirate!” theme, since they met Captain Jack recently.  Here are the pages: