Weather of Spring - Why

the weather waffles quicker than
thoughts through my mind
smiles then cries in toxic haste
intolerable beauty,
poignant and suggestive smoke
that appear as the roofs of cartoon trees
without their knees - flamingo clouds,
where are your feet?
sobbing reply; do they defend
the sun, or hide its light
thou shalt not covet, or cover it,
they shelter me in lies
how politic, pedantic, pregnant
with foolishness is our sky -
or perhaps it only reflects in the sea
of eyes below
again, I'll never know
anything, unless I find my own feet
instead of woolgathering
beneath the sodden cotton clouds
wondering whether, when, and why
spring resurrected into rain when
we just remembered sunlight
but still it's lovely

Advent Rain

There is no timeplacemoment like the rain. It's a symphony of sound, euphonious percussive bliss as the rain splashes around me, slapping into puddles like a snare, pattering against mailboxes like hat cymbals, gusts of wind brushing chimes like triangles. The bass beats in thunder and each step thrums a marching time, and rain encompasses you until you've transcended earth into a cloud of misty music: you are the river, you are the tides, you are the storm and the waterfall.
Have you ever been in a tent in such? It is my favorite dream. The winds crash and howl through towering pines and douglas firs brushing the teeth of mountaintops, and whistles a haunting nocturne while snap the canvas and flaps of the tent, flicking about this flimsy plastic which defends so bravely against the elements warring outside. And the rain, the perfect rain, singing the siren's song. I've tied a flashlight onto the tent's apex, and it sways, flickering around the inner walls and telling stories in shadows and flashes. Smells of pine, aspen, fir, and the sodden needles that carpet the forest floor rise in redolent clouds, and lightning strobes pictures of the outer-world against the tent, like phantoms of the forest, briefly alive and fallen, faster than the blinking eye of love.
You see the sun in its pinnacle of life in midsummer, staring down upon the world as a blazing brazier of heat and fire, but this, friends, is what clouds live for: those wintry days the colors of elephant skin. This the counterpoint: storms, rising up and falling down in shimmering waves. Hold out your hands, the rain fills them; tilt up your eyes, it cries and washes away your pain; close your eyes, and each puddle's an ocean, a river, a cloud to whisk you to a distant place, high in the mountains or low beneath the ocean, where nothing, except grace, remains.
Here my love grows and dies, lives and cries, in the locked and lonely places of the mind. It was never meant to move this way, a fortress, a moat, an army created every day. These feudal emotions for futile devotions, but, I tell you, the ocean is her guise and the cloudy day her mantle, and this swinging pendulum, dear grandfather, clocks when I see neither.


I can't even explain how good it is to be reading again, and writing hours less each day. I'm not planning, coordinating, defining story lines like intricate graphs of cohesive data. I can simply open my window and listen to the rain; or sit outside beneath the awning and read; or walk about beneath the waterfalls of the clouds. The rain is beautiful tonight, and just walking through it, stomping in puddles and listening to the gutters gurgle - it's enough. I need to remember to shut the window before sleep, or I'll wake with frost between my toes.

Rainy Night Writing

I often wonder if I would still have cherished writing so much if not for nights such as these: the rain in the eaves and gurgling in the gutters. Would I have snuggled up in the window-seat, layered in blankets with a steaming mug of cider, prepared with a splendid book, listening to the pattering percussion of nature - would stories have enamored me so?

 We're getting tired of this writing marathon, I think. I'm struggling more and more to come up with cohesive sections, pieces of the story that reveal just enough, but not too much, of the unraveling mystery. When I was a child, I did not enjoy television as much as everyone else seemed to. However, when my mother turned on Perry Mason, or Matlock, or Diagnosis: Murder, or any number of the murder-dramas that she enjoyed, I often plopped myself down and enjoyed the show. I craved mystery and diagnosis, problem and solution, hypothesis and conclusion. It contained everything I loved: a fairy-tale simplicity of good vs. evil, with good eventually outwitting evil, and tripping him/her up in the deceit; the tension of hurt and hero; justice; and the chance to match my wits with that of the investigator (I always really liked that part - in Scooby Doo, it was always the first person you saw, and not the grumpy, angry person. That person was usually just a grumpy, angry person)

Unfortunately, I have not READ much mystery. I've read some thriller, all the boxcar children (I loved Benny - mostly for his name), and not much more. Not an impressive mystery resume, huh? On top of that, I decided on a whim to write a mystery less than two weeks before NaNo began, and to do so in concert with Matthew. All this is a silly disclaimer for the fact that my writing has deteriorated greatly this past week, everywhere. My journaling looks like a tiny, heart monitor of bumps down the lines of the page; my blog blather is aimless and blubbering, and my story has a very confused inspector, who probably should know more than he knows, with only a few days left before the mystery has to be solved.

I think I'm ready for December, though. For reading, and more casual writing and blogging, and for more time for whatever. 

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

~ Sylvia Plath

A little encouragement from Sylvia Plath. 

I think if Sylvia Plath was still alive, I would follow her around crying piteously until she taught me to write. 

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

~ Sylvia Plath

So very much to learn,  yes. If I keep reading Sylvia Plath too long, I may get morose, cynical, or dark of humor.

In the summer, flowers are commonplace, beautiful as a natural gift of the season. In the winter, it's the solitary blossom, a snowdrop peeping its head out of the snow, the camellias, pink and bright even without sunlight, the tiny trumpets of winter paper bush and the vibrant reds of holly berries. Snowdrop, my favorite flowers, like the joyful tears of winter springing up from the ground.

Inundated

Inundated

seas outside,
who requests this moat, tonight?

Once a house, a boat

soaring on an inland sea.

In undated lands, we

flow over, overflow

low mountains, clouds, drifting

below the flood, below

gold-leafed mud, shining

tiny cities, water-whelmed;

rising, the ocean breathes

salty dreams alkaline,

brine bitter as wine clams

over hearts tonight

locked behind window, pains

bleed over the sill, puddle

in your eyes, faltering

hands fumble, still

desperately distinct.

all your answers lie

in my heart tonight.

Where you are in always

time, there is, love

never sleeps, ever

dreams.

Lyrique

Thunderstorms rage outside as I listen to melancholy musique, tearing up at the somber poetry and its symmetric outpour. Do not decry those tears; rain seeped through the window into my soul. I pen, in the silence that is the storm.
Where I stay up all night / And all that I write is a grey grey tune
Even the dim light of this laptop screen draws moths towards the window - night creatures eager for light. The bats soon swoop in for the feast. A great silk moth latches onto the window, and in my fright, I thought it a bat. Are they here for the light or the shelter beneath the eaves?
Are you looking for answers / to questions under the stars?
Dimly, the street lamps flicker through the valley beneath, illuminating needles of heavenly weeping falling onto unyielding asphalt. The souls of a thousand faces, spread across countless spaces, struggling, fighting, praying. I imagine a web of intersecting colors, illuminated by the cracks of lightning splitting this sky, a network of all our spiritual supplications. I read the Genesis, I read Psalms 23, I read Philippians 4, and I read Revelations 22. Listen, the storm is a song.
Oh I'll never know what makes this man
With all the love that his heart can stand
Dream of ways to throw it all away
Dreams collide, dreams of balloons and skies and transparent goodbyes, but distant, distant, as though a painting of a photograph of someone else's lives. It is a speculum of silver and stained glass, showing clearly nothing of love and hope and love, and the drums of the stormy night rage unending, though it is not rage, but the humming of bass strings.
All I ever learned from love / Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.
Small rivulets burn their whispering paths down the hills into the valley, into the creek in the hammock of the hills. I suspect the salmon leaping upstream to love and death, inextricably bound, mind this not. I can hear their splashes, a counterpoint. A coyote howls, an owl shrieks, the creatures stand still. But not the rain. I smile, and wonder what whispers the wind to comfort the clouds. May those words be carried far and fair this night.
Won't you come away with me tonight? /  We can fly past the moon and the starlight
What the water wants is hurricanes,  / and sailboats to ride on its back
And I ride the storm into slumber to swim with the salmon, gallop astride the lightning, and follow these rivers unto the vastness of the ocean, so I may gaze in its reflection and witness the sky.

And then, there are no words. Only the weeping of violins as bows breathe across silver strings.

And the rain, rain, rain came down, down, down

In rushing, rising rivulets.

Still, it makes my backyard look positively splendid (albeit soggy). And I lovelovelove that maple. I think it's my favorite backyard tree.

The Most Telling Move

Late. On a day of complete freedom, with few predetermined appointments, I still failed in running until far too late into the evening, and thus haven't started writing, reading, or preparing for work tomorrow as yet. I went to a games store (and bought a card game - I haven't done that in some time), went to a used bookstore (and bought only 3 books. What restraint!), played some disc golf, read a bit of Everything is Illuminated, skyped the guys, ate dinner, played a board game that lasted all night, and only just now finished running in the light drizzle for a while.
In other bright news, I fixed my desktop drivers and wireless such that I can use it again (I can work on dual screens instead of lappy386 all the time). A pleasant day. As I was running and listening to my audio book (best way to run ever), I was contemplating subtlety and cunning. When I compete, I often pick what I deem the most effective strategy. I know some people who always play aggressive, always play sneaky, always play through knowledge. I pick the most effective strategy, whatever it happens to be, and mold my tendencies into that strategy. Yet, if I had to select my favorite, cunning was always my preferred method of conquest - winning through intelligent process and careful analysis.
I enjoy games, but I enjoy them far less than people, now. This was not always so. And in the games today, as I lost and my opponents asked me how my horrible game felt (they are competitive sometimes in a bad way. I was there once), I simply smiled and said, "It's good to be outside with friends." They had no response. In the greater game, I made a move they could not counter with their existing strategies, and it captured their hearts a bit. Sneaky? Perhaps. But a good move, I'd like to think. I've made another move today, the most telling one, perhaps. Now we just have to wait and see whom it heals, and whom it breaks.

A friend of mine's mother may be dying soon. Pray for them, and her. And everyone else. I've a tough decision to make here soon, so pray I make the wise one. Lord, please help me make the right one.

Rain

There is something satisfying in rain, in watching behind the window-screen, hands underneath my chin, as droplets plop into the grass and trees, gravel and streets. and against the eaves and tiles. And going outside into those tiny streams, drops collecting into damp sections and dampness into puddles, and puddles into tiny rivulets that pour downhill along streets towards grates or channels. The soggy grass yields beneath my feet and the puddles soak my shoes. It's easier to write in the rain, easier to think and dream and sleep and breathe, sometimes. I feel like the moisture pulls the the smells of life right into the air, and the sweetness of earth and vines, wood and pines.
I like the rain, though many may not. I love the sun as well, and snow - hail and sleet less so, though they are a novelty, sometimes. But rains at night are one of my most favorite things, a beautiful musical prelude to sleep. If only rain combined with stars, I believe I'd be in heaven's arms.

to be continued.