Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Look before you leap...list

(or why I use elipses so often...)



This year's leap year and I saw a Honda commercial the other day touting a leap list. Like all good ads the term leap list kept rolling around in my head until I was forced... to...go... to the Honda website:

http://automobiles.honda.com/leap-list/my-list/?item=&goal=1

So the leap-list campaign is a pretty snazzy one aimed at 30/40/50 somethings who aren't quiiiiteeee ready to do a bucket list.  Before you make your next "leap" in life make a list of 10 things you'd like to do/accomplish.  The most popular ones are:

travel to Europe (done but always ready/willing/able to do more....)

learn a new language (hopefully to tie in with numero uno)

buy a house (i'd just like to QUALIFY to buy a house at this point)

start my own business (in a different economy)

live abroad for an extended period of time

go skydiving (would probably help with item number two, I'm sure I'd be saying a few new phrases)

run a half marathon (see my blogstream of consciousness remark above)

graduate college (overdone)

get married (getting married is easy, it's the staying that's the hard part)

run a marathon (would prolly entail more new phrases than number two or the half math, besides every morning by the time I do everything that has to be done before I sit down at my desk I feel like i've run the gauntlet)

So it hits me, aside from the running and skydiving, I've DONE alot of these things, and truly given my caffeine intake really don't need falling through the air with the greatest of un-ease added to MY list.  I suspect the people compiling the Honda list are slight bit younger than my demographic also...

So here's my list:

1.   publish something (this is akin to skydiving in my reality)

2.   take a consumer detox (especially challenging when you have a kiddo)...live on cash only

3.   speaking of, travel with her (and I don't just mean to Disney)....make it include sleeping under stars

4.  take her to Manhattan / Ellis Island  and look up our ancestors

5.   travel to Hawaii, walk on then collect some black beach sand

6.   take a Gondola ride with my love

8   cruise the MED

9.   meditate in sedona, then count shooting stars (see 3)

10.  swim with dolphins

11. roadtrip for at least two weeks with no destination planned

12.  ufo watch out west on the ET highway

13. walk in a crop circle or three

14.  visit arecibo (yes CONTACT is one of my favorite movies)

15. get the tattoo

16. rock a bikini

17.  practice yoga daily

18.  drink in Doheny and Nesbitt's in Dublin

19.  take my daughter Savannah to Savannah

20. see the pyramids and cruise the Nile

21.  eat at an automat in Toykyo

22.  live transparently while retaining my southern belleness

23.  own a home that is a home (that's WAY different from buying a house)

24.  learn to ride a bike (secret shame, enough said)

25.  cook...and enjoy the results

26  climb to the top of a Mayan temple

27. meet a tibetan sherpa

28.  see billy joel in concert one more time (sing LOUD)

29.  karaoke in japan, visit harajuku

30.  take really good photos of it ALL (except below)

31.  make love with my love in a wheat field

32.  sleep in a haunted castle; i'd love to see a ghost

33.  spend a few months in an ashram



I will say this,  my biggest leaps are the people I love and everyday magic moments with them... THOSE are the things layered in my elipses...my pauses as I'm gathering thoughts....and why I use them so often...

what's on your list?  it doesn't have to be limited to 10 btw....those are Honda's rules, not mine...















Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Meet Harper




One of the sortof intangible things I collect is reclusive writers. They attract me because, well honestly, I am one of them? That's one thing that makes blogging such a challenge for me because I have to crawl a little out of my shell....and it's hard, so very hard ~

Emily Dickenson wrote about this in one of my favorite poems:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!


That's one of the great ironies of writing and enjoying writing is whole idea of exposing yourself in public? If you do it well, you're naked. Of course Emily and I are in some exquisite company with the likes of J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee. Today I'm thinking of Harper Lee because my boyfriend sent me an amazing article about her

And if you ever find yourself in Monroeville Alabama, hearing someone say, "Meet Harper," just don't mention the mockingbird....


Tuesday, February 14, 2012


through my looking glass

i collect moments,
shouldn’t happen but did
not because of you or me
or anything we said
but because it’s meant to be
that way. . . it’s
Synchronicity


it’s our relationship you see,
this casual causality
this everything is nothing and nothing
can’t be random
ordinary moments
finding spaces in the pattern. . .
remembering forward


not because it feels right
not living on a line
but being in a space instead
that feels so intertwined
wrapped loosely around the paradox
there is no space or time
Coincidentally?


We're doing major reconstruction in our library and my temporary office is actually in a rarely used classroom/ curriculum lab for Tteacher Ed.  As I walked in the other day, a professor was preparing a lecture and asked me, "Quick, name one word that describes you?"  Before I could answer, he said, "Flux, Right?"  And I laughed and said, "I was actually going to say Enigma."

I don't like being labeled or boxed or time-lined but have actually been called an Engima before.

Quick, what's your word?



Sunday, February 12, 2012

I am a little sailor girl....or a pirate looks at 44


I have obsessed recently with vintage sailor things? I don't know exactly why though? My dad was in the Navy, and I've always been fascinated with his two tattoo's (as is my 7 year old.) I live on the Gulf Coast and love the water. I'm a Cancer, born July 18th....and oh yeah I'm about to turn 45? Maybe that's it! That old Jimmy Buffett song, about Mother, Mother Ocean has been swimming in my head lately? hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Here's some of the fun vintage sailor-y things I've recently collected:

Firstly there's this little guy ~ a World War II sailor bank. I have him perched at the beachhouse on my dresser and he's fitting there just fine♥ Suddenly I notice my bedroom there kindof reminds me of what I romantically imagine a bedroom in an old lighthouse to look like? Cool blues, a quilt hanging behind the headboard. Maybe I was a lighthouse keeper's wife in another life?


Then there's the clothes.....ah the clothes, so many nautical clothes. A sailboat skirt here ~ a cute little crop top there that pairs nicely with some Wal-mart red shorts (when's the last time I owned red shorts?) It's madness I say!





I won't even go into the I love SAILING tote that I loved all the more because it was vintage AND from Halifax....a sailing tote from Nova Scotia...how cool is THAT?





Now with all I've plundered maybe this feeling will pass...maybe I'll book a cruise...

and maybe I am just a little sailor girl♥

Friday, February 3, 2012

why we do this...revisited




why do we do this?

we do it because we love it.

this dance of words...
courage hurled upon a page,
persuading ourselves
despite our constant parade of humanity
that calamity of life is wonderful
amid those fragile shells

we tiptoe around ~
the silent sounding thoughts;
the echoes in our collective head…
that secretly dread the day when east meets west
without apology and we are facing
that omniscient horizon.

what will we find then?

when time no longer matters and the
days are scattered out before us
without that thin line that grounded us along?
how will our rhymes sound then
amid the babbling den of everything?

or nothing?

I’m wondering? will the temptation arise
to double back within the loop of space
erasing all the waiting from before and
seize the day’s open door of opportunity
in that stunning gift of frail human possibility
once we finally grow and know….

why we do this?


I wrote this of course about writing, and the collected words I feel compelled to arrange and rearrange all the time. But the image that always comes to mind when I read this poem is vintage typewriters. I have one vintage typewriter, but would love to have another--especially a color.

Grace Light's lovely name reflects her really interesting blog called Poetic Home that combines the idea of living with poetry nicely. She describes her blog as dedicated to poetic interior design, and that's certainly the kind of space I crave. I also love she has a whole category devoted to "typewriter love."

If any of you love and live with vintage typewriters, show me the way.