Today your weekly dose of culture-building poetry comes from the talented Ben Brizell, a writer, poet and blogger. Check out his other work at: Benbrizwritings
Enjoy!
Further
Looking back through
all these memories;
ticket stubs,
scrawled notes,
stacks of poems,
leaves a painful taste.
All I can do is wonder
If it all really went that well.
I’m a cynic at heart,
which leaves a little room for bias.
Ben Brizell
Throughout history numerous wars have been waged between opposing forces. Dark and light. Good and Evil. Nature and Nurture. Life and death. Star Trek and Star Wars, Marvel and DC… TP rolled over the top or under. (Only savages prefer the latter.)
Opposite ends of spectrums that often are viewed in our tiny human brains as opposing sides of a coin. The polar ends of a hard line. The divisiveness of the universe that plays out in a constant cosmic game of tug-o-war. One such spectrum is the dichotomy between Fate (Destiny if you will) and Free Will (Choice).
Do our choices determine the path of our lives, or are our “choices” merely preconceived steps towards a destination we’re meant to arrive at? Does the idea of free-will make us feel as though we have more power in our lives? Or does the idea of Destiny free us of the responsibility of how our lives pan out?
I’m honestly asking, because I don’t know the answer.
When I was young, I believed in fate. Because fate is more romantic, and epic, and dramatic. It made me feel like I was on the path to something amazing. It made me feel that one day I’d fall into the life that had been preordained and made especially for me. That it would all work out, because it was foreseen by some great hand of Destiny.
Then I grew up.
And I started to realize that every single choice I was making was branching me off in an ever complicated tree of life. Going to a party or not, where I may or may not talk to someone who would, unbeknownst to me, cause waves of change in my everyday life.
Stepping into a dojo on a trial basis, no intention of becoming involved. Even going so far as recognizing that one heated moment in a shower could lead to a phenomenal, empathetic, intelligent beautiful being who shares my house and riles my bassets up with her french horn practice.
Every single moment I was living, I was making choices and those choices made my path. There was no destiny, only the narrowing of options as I peeled away the possibilities with strokes of priority peppered with chance.
But some days, some cloudy Wednesday mornings, I swing back… back to the idea that maybe… maybe every choice I’ve made, in this ‘long and scattering set of tracks’ has led me exactly where I’m supposed to be.
And I like feeling that way, not because I feel it relieves me of responsibility, or that everything will work out to be something decided long ago, but because it helps me to know that every pain, every ill, every challenge and heartbreak I’ve suffered has built the scar tissue I needed to be where I am and to be the person I am.
Did the universe know I’d be this person? Did the universe need this person? Am I meant to be here for the fate of someone else, to be their lesson, their ill, their challenge. . . their heart break? Or am I here for something better? To be the hand in the darkness. To be the mender. To be the balm for broken hearts, and the gentle touch after life’s severity? I suppose that, too, is a choice.
Fate or Free Will?
I’m not sure it really matters. Except that you can’t let your life be decided for you. And if you wait around for your destiny to find you, it might not be the one you expect or want. Sometimes, in that glimmer of knowing what you’d like to see your life manifest as, you must weave through the murky waters and make the choices that lead you to the end you want.
Life’s not much more than a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel. There are about fifty ways to kill yourself prematurely, and only a few paths lead to success, but most importantly, it ends no matter what choices you make along the way.
So make the choices that bring you happiness, that bring you beauty. Make the choices that fill your cup.
Vim and Vigor. Piss and Vinegar. Spunk, Spark, And the Immortal Divine.
I’m talking about Muse…not the band…I mean the illusive, seductress…who steals into your thoughts and whispers sweet plot lines into your ear like naughty suggestive teases.
One of my favorite older movies starred a young Julie Andrews and even younger Mary Tyler Moore. It was based on a Broadway musical and was set in the roaring twenties when women were toying with independence and embracing a more modern sense of sexuality. In Thoroughly Modern Millie, the main character, a stenographer, comes on to her boss by lounging across his desk and rasping out the line; “Well, when you’ve got it, you’ve got it.” (In context she’s referring to Tom Sawyer’s innate mojo despite his tender age of 12)
So when I think of that evasive and tease, inspiration, I think of that line.
When you’ve got it, you’ve got it.
The problem is that so many of us think we cannot create without ‘it’. That unless the muse is on our desks, lounging across our scattered post-it notes and circling the rim our cold coffee cup with a delicate finger, we won’t be able to create anything substantial.
Can I let you in on a secret I’ve learned? That blank stare against the wall of a writer’s block doesn’t come from a lack of ‘it’. It comes from the expectation that having ‘it’ is the only way creativity will come, and that anything other than madly typing away the best idea we’ve ever been gifted, is simply a waste of our time and divine talent.
Let me tell you something about my muse. He’s a well-upholstered, balding guy in a basement, with a half-smoked cigar hanging out one side of his mouth and a sneer that could stop a very determined freight train on its tracks. He’s an asshole. He doesn’t come out when I sit down at my lovely little desk with all of my office supplies neatly aligned in
OCD perfection. He sneaks up behind me at airports and gooses me like some over-entitled politician. He wakes me up in the sweetest six minutes of sleep before the alarm goes off by hitting me in the face with his meaty hand and a pale idea of how to fix Chapter 8. He’s the one that whispers, in dark undertones, questions about unassuming passerby’s that turn into vibrant characters. I cannot summon him to lie across my desk and pull up his smooth skirts seductively.
He’s got it, all right, but it’s never what I expect.
The one exception is this, and the point of my post this week:
That bastard shows up every time I give up hope on him and just sit down to write anyway.
The first few sentences on my own are stumbling patches of weeds, filled with gopher holes and tripping hazards. But if I ignore the imperfections and keep at it, one paragraph becomes a page, and so forth and so forth.
I don’t stop for clerical errors like misspelled names, or fudged facts. I forget the use or non use of oxford commas and just let the words go where they go. I don’t allow myself deletions, even if I’m painfully aware of the stupid that trails behind my keystrokes.
It’s like emptying the hot water from the camelback tube on a hike. You have to draw out that nasty part before you can get to the refreshing cold stuff.
Before I know it, I can smell cigar smoke and salami and that cagey bastard is behind me…nodding in a nearly impressed manner.
Creativity is part vim and vigor. It is part mojo. It is part magic and a dash of spark. But it is mostly work. Even when the playing is done and the book is written, she’s just a dowdy, ill-fitting dress until you nip and tuck her into shape.
Maybe creativity lives in my basement because a dash of it goes a very long way. It’s the elbow grease we have to buy by the barrel full. Because long after Muse is sacked out on his brown plaid recliner with one hand down his polyester waistband, the work still remains and that’s when we really find out if we are indeed full of vim and vigor.
. . . If we’ve got ‘it’; the magic that turns muse into story, story into book, and book into experience for you and your readers alike.
So don’t pay too much mind to capturing that sultry vixen. Just write. When she whispers at you in crowded stores, or on quiet trails, be at the ready with pen and paper (or…ugh, yes your cellphone if you must) to catch her teasing giggle. But for all of the other 97 out of 100 times, don’t let her be the excuse you aren’t putting your ass in the chair.
After all, a muse is best attracted when she’s being ignored.
Happy writing, Kids.
Happy VerseDay! Beginning next week, I will be featuring some of the amazing stuff that you have been sending in. Until that time, please enjoy this triplicate of Haiku.
The feeble heart stroke
Little beats against her ribs
Sparrow trapped within.
Rush of blood to brain
Thoughts misplaced; edged with remorse
For words said, too late.
The trouble with love
Is the world in which it’s borne.
Death springs from context.
I missed last week’s blog post. I’m not sure if anyone out there even noticed, which is fine. I tell myself that I don’t write to garner a following. I write to hold myself accountable to the passion that shapes me.
But last week…
I was fresh out of passion and had given up on myself. I was feeling shapeless.
This is not a new story for myself and, probably, for all writers, artists, musicians, and those who contribute slices of our brains and hearts to public scrutiny. There are days when the offering of our thought, time, and energy to the craft is returned with silence, or rejection. Most days we let it go and move on.
But even for more sane people than myself, a long drought of success, can cause us to question the path. We question if it’s worth putting our hearts in the hands of others. We start to wonder if a nice, minimum wage job in a cubicle somewhere isn’t the better option. (At least the coffee is ‘free’, and I’m done at 5).
So, last week, I didn’t bother writing a post. I didn’t even think about trying. I just said, nope, fuck it, what’s the point?
Because sometimes life is like that. And sometimes we need to throw up our hands and surrender to our own suck-itude, (sure its a word).
But this week I’m back. Not because I’m feeling any better than last week, but because writing is what I do. And I’m not quite done with life yet, so as long as I’m drawing breath I’ll be drawing thought. Some days those thoughts are vibrant and inspirational. Some days they’re like walking in a bog of hopelessness, and I apologize to those reading when I drag you along behind me on those darker days…but no human is a ray of sunshine all the time. (Unless they’re one of those freaky-uber-happy-Suzie-sunshine types and nobody really likes those Pollyann-kool-aid-drinking assholes…but I digress.)
The point is, I was in a hard place last week. And I don’t know if it’s much better now, but at least now I’ve mustered enough fucks to sit down and write, pour out my self-pity and self-doubt and let you all make your own judgements about what I’ve got to offer.
Whether you write or not, we all have days. Days when we’re tired of fighting and tired of trying. Days when we’ve fallen and we don’t care if we stay down. Days when the battle hardly feels worth the effort. It’s part of what makes getting back up so beautiful. To win the battle over apathy and despair is a shade of divinity particular to humans. Not only just for physical survival, but for our emotional and psychological longevity.
I’m not all the way back up, but I’m not dead yet. And I guess that’s something.
I don’t know about this one. It’s a little rough. I think it needs something. Severely lacking in hope and warm fuzzies, to be sure, but something else. What do you think?
Time
Time is moonlight through the branches
of a tree that once sat lower in the window
It’s the gray hair in the washbasin you notice while brushing your teeth.
The teenage screams of “I hate you” and the slamming of doors,
Doors that once could not be shut for fear of being too far from you.
Time is the ache that once whispered,
And now holds you hostage.
Time is the moon and gray hair
A change of pace,
The wobble of temperament,
And the cruel device flashing revelations in pops and crackles of bone and joint.
Time is the tired vacancy of your parents’ eyes and the sudden realization
That you will be an orphan in less time than you’ve already lived.
It is the knowledge that they will be gone…
And so will you…
And that howling teenager, once so sweet a baby,
her too.
And we think it so unfair…so sad.
But our thoughts and laments do nothing to change it.
Nothing we do will ever stop it…
Because Time is an uncaring bastard,
who marches by and leaves you along the side of the street,
waving your tired little human flag.
And nothing matters really.
We humans are so infantile, never growing in our short span of century.
Cry babies for truth and justice,
Never grasping that we lack the ability to really understand there is no truth…
Justice nothing more than a construct of simple neurons needing to find order.
We are not ready for truth, we are not big enough for justice.
Nice try, pea brain.
You can barely remember where you parked your car.
Here’s a thing….
Atomic Hit and Run
I am in need
to feel your atoms against mine.
Even though it is short lived and often
unintentional.
Because your matter on mine,
matters.
Gives my particles cause to spring up from apathy.
As if I shared your stardust once, so long ago.
As though we had a place in time long before this,
When oceans were gas, and metals made mountains
Comets careening off of placid moon-dusted plains.
Somewhere back there,
You careened into me
And my soul still remembers.
It drives my poor lizard brain to ache
just once more
Maybe I’m just looking for the particles you stole,
when you astral side-swiped me.
Like exchanging insurance numbers.
A slight streak of sanguine against metal.
Small token of our shared space.
It is miserable
and noble.
All at once.
Time is a boundless roundabout
And all exits bring me back.
I tell myself it is a finite dance
I can only spin so long,
Until the friction of physics halts my motion
And particles lay in defeat.
I have to tell myself it is finite.
I need to know it ends.
I need to know it ends.
A plague is upon my house.
Must have been all that divine-smack talk from last week.
We’ve been set upon by a viral invasion from the petri dish that is the pubic education system. I’ve been fighting it off with sheer force of will, exclaiming to the ear-less, microscopic, entities that I’m simply too busy for their nonsense and to go pedal their crazy someplace else.
In the meantime, I’m emptying out the trash cans every two hours and trying to explain the gentle art of using more than a nostril width of space for each tissue. (Yes, they are ‘disposable’, but that doesn’t mean we need to dab and toss as though we were participants in some game-show challenge. Unacceptable tissue usage
For god sakes, even the lady at Costco is giving me the eye for how often I’ve been stocking up…
This blog is sometimes about life and sometimes about writing, and today I was inspired by the less-than-beautiful aspects of life.
Take my dogs…please.
Anyone with lovable, furry companions knows, they’re a plethora of bodily fluids. And, as with any creature in later years, these leakages seem to come more frequently. My bassets are mass oil producers; through their skin, through clogged pores, through bursting, bleeding cysts…gulp back that bile taste in the back of your throat…it’s actually quite fascinating.
What’s the point of this? Well…the giant mess that is life I guess.
I remember when the idea of a child’s slobbery hand touching my skin would make me want to bathe in hand sanitizer and invest in a personal HazMat shower.
Now…oh now… can I tell you gentle readers how I sometimes use the puddle from a melted ice cube my child has left on the kitchen floor to wet my sock before mopping up some random bloody streak from my dog’s tail sore? Disgusting you say? I say…efficient.
Can I tell you how I can pluck a booger from my child’s nose with illusionist prowness (move over Criss Angel). How I can be sneezed on, coughed on, pooped on, peed on, vomited on, and still somehow maintain a soft focus on the words. “Its ok. No worries, baby”. How I now can look past the moist factories of human and canine function and see a moment in time. A very fleeting moment.
When I am needed.
That sounds narcissistic and I suppose it is. I know that a stable, self-sufficient woman doesn’t need to be needed. But I also know that a deep part of fulfillment for me (lets bound into the hippy side of things and say it’s the Earth/Nurturing Energy I’m predisposed to) is in being able to provide for others. To help them, to comfort them, to clean up after them and whatever that trail they’re leaving behind them is made up of.
Someday those trails will be gone. The house will be spotless, and puddle-less, hairless, and smell-less. And what an awful thought that is.
Someday, I am going to miss the loud and crazy sneeze fest. The croaky little throats asking for juice. The whining howl of a dog in the midst of a squirrel induced nightmare that causes wet flatulence.
Love life for the mess, not in spite of it.
The mess is where the magic is. The imperfect and chaotic is also the joy. Because it pulls us out of auto pilot and makes us pay attention…Because it tests what we are made of, what we can handle, and how we handle it. Because it makes memories and memories are how we count time, relate to others, and look back on a life well, if mucousily, lived.
I could live a beautiful, picture perfect life. With clean floors, and quiet halls, and never have to ask “What did I just step in?” or “Is that poop or chocolate?”. But god, what a horrible life that would be. Give me the mess. Give me your booger. Give me the bleeding, oily cysts. Give me the tiny arms and fevered foreheads pressed close in times of need, and the saggy brown eyes of an uncompromisingly loyal companion.
Give me all of these things, and I will not cringe. I will embrace. Because mucous makes memories.
Now, if you’ll excuse me…I feel a sneeze coming on…are we out of tissues?
Okay. So this is a weird one.
The picture alone is disturbing. Sometimes in life we stumble across things that are perfectly normal aspects of the natural world, but they affect our human emotions on strange levels. Mother Nature’s everyday can make us feel uneasy and strange. Maybe it’s our too-advanced brain reading depth where there is none. Notions of mortality and empathetic wondering.
In any case, I acknowledge that it’s strange, and a bit unnerving. But then again, so is life.
Evisceration
Yellow stripe teardrop burrows deep into her leafy green belly
Once so full of harvest and good planning.
The seeds to feed the hungry nesters
Spilled across the glass table top,
Like a cornucopia
A feast for jagged takers.
Did she feel much after the first piercing sting?
Was it just all black?
Or did she feel the tugging pull of her insides, turned out?
What if Katydid?
First…an important disclaimer: this post isn’t about sugary egg whites. (Might I suggest Pinterest? You can find anything on that fucking site. Good Ol’ Fashioned Divinity)
No, this post is about an often-divisive subject, so if you’re easily offended, PLEASE keep reading and stretch that narrow mind. I promise your brain won’t fall out, no matter what the bumper sticker says.
This week’s post was inspired by my daughter’s study of religion in her 6th grade Social Studies class. What I can deduce from her thoughts on the class and the homework itself, there’s a definite sway towards Christianity happening.
And that sticks in my craw.
I have no problem with her learning about religion in school.
But I do have an problem with one religion being given more attention than the rest.
I have no problem with kids of other faiths sharing thoughts and ideas about their beliefs, in fact, I encourage the exchange of ideas.
But I do have a problem when other kids criticize my daughter because we deliberately do not attend church. Persecution, even from the under 12 crowd, should not come as a shock in our current state of affairs, and yet witnessing it happening to your child first hand for something so deeply personal makes me ill.
I choose not to attend church.
It doesn’t not mean that I don’t know about world religions, or hold any misgivings about what they espouse.
On the contrary, I minored in Religious Studies and majored in Anthropology. If anyone has a good handle on different peoples, cultures, and faiths, it’s me. It’s because of this knowledge, that I don’t practice Christianity. I could write an entire book about the whys and why nots, but that’s a discussion for another week.
So when my daughter asks if its wrong that she doesn’t attend church I have to take a deep breath and explain…
No. It is not wrong.
Your dad and I decided when you were born, that we would let you make up your own mind about what you believed. If you ever want to go to church, I will gladly take you. I will also ask that you attend other services in other religions, so that you can understand them across the board.
I would like you to believe in something, whether it be divine intervention, natural energies of the earth, physics, magic, god, goddess, Zeus, Harry Potter, Giant Donut in the sky, or aliens…as long as whatever you believe makes sense to your heart and feeds your soul.
Because religion practiced out of fear of eternal punishment does not do those things.
Because religion that bases its forgiveness and kindness towards others on if they’re judged worthy of these gifts, does not do those things.
Because religion that puts you in your place, makes you feel less than, or takes away your autonomy or ability to chose what’s right for you, does not do those things.
In other words, I want you to understand that Divinity resides in you. The system of belief that you surround yourself with must honor this Divinity.
Because you are the Divine.
Your brain is capable of phenomenal things. It visualizes and conceptualizes. It controls your body, it’s thoughts, your will and it drives your existence. It’s so amazing that it can create gods, and myths, and religious systems, and therefore, god is in all of us and we are god.
So You Are The Divine.
And when you understand this, you will also understand that so is everyone else.
Divinity resides in all of us.
(I call this the “Everybody loves their babies and mommas” theory. No matter what faith, race, ethnicity, country, political party—all of us love our babies. All of us love our moms. Not a one of us wants harm to befall those we love—no matter if we pray five times a day towards Mecca, or say fifty Hail Mary’s for last Saturday night).
We all benefit by recognizing the divinity in one other and understanding the connection we share.
We would not hurt the divine.
We would not alienate them for what they do or don’t do on a Sunday morning. We would not spew hateful rhetoric in their faces for who they love, or for how they show their divine, or the color of the carton they’re contained in.
We would treat them worthy of their divinity just as we would treat ourselves in ways worthy of our Divinity.
So gentle readers, I don’t care if you worship in a synagogue, a church, a temple, a meadow, or in your boxers on the couch watching Star Wars all Sunday morning (Side note, Star Wars; highly Buddhist…look it up, fascinating stuff. Buddhism and Star Wars.)
I don’t care how pious you are or what percentage of your paycheck you’re throwing into a golden plate every week.
I care that you are honoring what should be the cornerstone of every religion; treating others as you would like to be treated. Loving one another. Forgiving one another.
I care that you stand up when you see injustice. When you see someone hurting another, when you see someone defiling the divinity in someone else.
That’s all that really matters.
That’s what the beautiful divine in each one of us is for.
So study the religions, know what they’re about and what they espouse. Then come back to your own heart and, as Whitman once so artfully wrote,
Stay Divine.
Sarah Reichert Author 