A shower of light at sea

Knock on the sky and listen to the sound. -Zen proverb

 

i carry your heart – e e cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

 

Don’t Exhale

She closes her eyes, inhales. Slowly. Deliberately. Wood; dark, mature, a story to tell. Light; cloaked in dark shadows. Mist; rising like the dead. Myrrh; electric spice entering her body, small specks attracted to her skeleton. The sensation trickles in her blood, warming her the way fiery embers toast a fireplace log before the flame settles, until its message flows throughout her fleshy body. Intoxicating. She feels his hand on the small of her back. His lips on her stomach moving up, sensually, to her mouth. His other hand a mystery before he is in her. The room becomes more colorful, bright oranges greens reds blues getting brighter by the second. Her body radiates. God. Gold. The hues swallow her in and she sees what color really is, how smell arouses her, how touch makes her feel alive. It gets brighter and brighter. He is with her, in her, of her. The room is almost light. Don’t turn white. She holds her breathe.

Alive

There is a sea of words

making waves in the

chilly winter of my stomach…

It quakes.

Restlessly still

gradually swelling its expanse

urging against the silent Truman Burbank film set of my skin.

Each wave robust,

each wave epic,

each wave a quiet power steering

my energy.

Amazonian strength against the censored silence,

Valkyrian devotion to override the thawing calm,

Something is coming

They are ready to surrender to triumphant release

Blue like an oil spill and grey like lead, with frosty lips to match.

Is it coming from the core? my uterus walls burst

bubbles from the fever,

flush with awakening.

The nest crumbles only to be rebuilt.

creation,

destruction,

creation,

destruction.

An ecstatically gentle persuasion, a firm one.

Everything must go.

My heart rocks like the sun;

Stealing glances from behind the smoke-filled, bee-filled, butterfly clouds

of my lungs

illuminating the water with broad silver brush strokes

as though the moon’s eclipses could make us forget…

The throat knows the heart, it feels its melody

pa-ra-pa-pam-pam

coaxing it with irresistible rhythm,

Alive.

A life.

It’s almost there, its almost ready, and

when the urge to let go finally conquers the barriers of space and time,

It will travel beyond the solar system,

beyond the northern star of my epiglottis,

beyond the planets,

the stars,

the milky ways of my mind,

and in the end…

It will burst into everything and nothing through the

black hole

of my mouth.

Published: A Beautiful Heart

Lauren Del Vecchio was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease at the age of 19, followed by a failing heart 7 years later in 2007. She is on a mission to heal herself, and raise awareness whilst doing so. She has designed a gorgeous bracelet to raise some money for her substantial medical costs.

Read the full article here.

 

Gills are Given (via Slow Muse)

A lovely poem celebrating this blogger’s 31-year anniversary.

Together The water closing over us and the going down is all. Gills are given. We convert in a town of broken hulls and green doubloons. O you dead pirates hear us! There is no salvage. All you know is the color of warm caramel. All is salt. See how our eyes have migrated to the uphill side? Now we are new round mouths and no spines letting the water cover. It happens over and over, me in your body and you in mine. –Maxine W. Kumin A poem for Da … Read More

via Slow Muse

Reflective closure

So I’ve made decision. I’ve decided to make ‘Catching Up on Silence‘ my secondary blog. I’m switching over to The Ψ Project.

This means two things:

1. No more posts on Facebook (but I will keep the updates on Twitter).
2. Only short stories and daydreams will be posted on here. You got that? This blog will be full of short stories and fiction. For real life, mosey on over to The Ψ Project.

So I guess this is an end of sorts, which means I have to ‘reflectively‘ say good-bye.

• What did I meet when I first started this blog?

I had always wanted a blog, simply because everyone else had one. I’m greedy like that. This isn’t my first blog, it’s my second-the first one has been deleted. I always thought that a blog should have a topic, which the first one did. Inspired by The Happiness Project, I set a theme per month to focus on, starting with Energy; how to have more over a consistent period of time.  So I read this book called The 7-day Energy Surge and kept a record of my progress for that week. And it worked! The results were amazing, I had crazy amounts of energy! So much so that I couldn’t sit down for longer 5 minutes.

That was the death of my first blog.

I was reluctant to start a new one since I didn’t have a specific topic to write about. But upon discussion with friends, they advised me to start writing for the hell of it, who cares if it’s about something specific! Just see what it becomes. Thankfully, I took their advice, and ‘Catching up on Silence’ is the result of that.

To answer the question, I guess I met a window of opportunity to be anything I wanted to be, even if it was through a blog.

• What did I like?

I liked the freedom of writing whatever popped into my head at any given time. I liked that I was (and still am) good at it. Discovering that boost my confidence.

• What did I dislike?

I disliked the fact that in my freedom, I lacked direction. I didn’t know what I wanted this to become. I was uncertain, and it made me uncomfortable.

• What did I learn?

I learned that having distance from something does not mean good-bye. I will keep this blog alive, however infrequently.

I learned that having a space for my imagination to grow and thrive is important to me. It needs to exist somewhere, which is another reason (and perhaps the most important one) why I am keeping this blog alive.

I learned that as important as it is for me to have this blog, I want (and need) grounding in order to give my dreams the best environment in which to grow. My dream is psychology and everything psychology entails. Given it’s vastness as a subject, it needs it’s own land, it’s own country. And this is precisely what The Ψ Project offers me.

Anyway, I hope you keep reading regardless the change in structure, and if you’re at all interested in psychology, subscribe to my other blog! Thanks!

Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist

I recently stumbled onto Penelope Trunk’s blog. As a writer for Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the London Times, Penelope has had a wide and varied career and her blog focuses on career advice.

I love her for the following reasons:

1. She offers clear career advise (duh) that is suitable for all, eg, a  list of social skills a solid career requires and recognising patterns in problems
2. She is fearlessly honest and not all shop-talk; From her fears of parties to having sex with her(aka someone with Asperger’s), she tells it like it is.
3. She gives great advice on blogging! Some of her advice? Measure the success of your blog by how it improves your sex life (definitely making me rethink a thing or two); stick to one blog, don’t start a second one (oops); pick and stick to one topic (number 2 on the list) and see how it goes (another oops). I wish I had read this before I had started my blogs!

Frankly, she is the kind of person I would love to get to know.

Her latest endeavour is Brazen Careerist, a career management tool for next-generation professionals. Sufficed to say, I love her.

I strongly recommend you check her out.

Pencils and the Snow Bees

Probably needs editing…

The Goddess of Pencils lived in a cave in the clouds. The location was great; she loved it. The clouds were fluffy and attentive enough to ensure an accident-free game of hopscotch. They always took care of her. Since she was a mathematician at heart, she had an abacus. A jewelled tool made of a variety of beads and tin and wire; A couple of papers; And of course, the thing that started it all… the pencil.

Her home was largely made up of pencils with. Except her floor -thank goodness for the versatility of clouds! Otherwise it would be impossible to keep them indoors! And the abacus. And the paper. And her dress. Her dress was made up entirely of 6s. Six of clubs, six of hearts, six of diamonds, six of spades. She never understood why they didn’t think to use the entire deck of cards, such a waste! Perhaps they thought that 6 was a significant number for her? Pish-tosh, no time for such nonsense!  To finish about the dress, it was a patchwork of a deck of 6s.

She wore glasses so big they made her eyes match the sky, and a pencil crown atop her golden hair. Her cheeks were rosy and her voice sounded just like Mary Poppins (though I would keep that quiet, especially since her and Mary had had a bit of a feud over a cloud Mary allegedly stole-but you didn’t hear it here).

Anyway, if you hadn’t already guessed, there were pencils everywhere. Pencil tables, pencil walls, pencil coat rack, pencil chairs, pencil sofas, pencil plates, pencil bottles

pencils

pencils

pencils

all in a wide variety of colors and sizes.

No description of this house would be complete without mentioning the electric pencil sharpener, charged with lightning bolts the clouds provided.  She loved to sharpen pencils, and at the end of every day, she would take the sawdust that had gathered and plant it in the clouds at night. Oh, how she would wallow away the hours, humming along to that buzzing little drill. In my opinion she sounds a little nutty, but what mathematician isn’t?

Every full moon, she would summon the Great Goose to bring her messages from the land. I had mentioned that she was a mathematician, but I never told you what she calculated.  Ever since she was a wee goddess, she had had a knack for working out the specific success rate of each peculiar couple. The result was based around ‘x’. And when the Great Goose would come, he would give her a list of couples that had requested her scientific forecast into their future, and she would frantically work and calculate using her abacus and paper to come up with and award each of them with an ‘x’.

The truth is, as talented as a mathematician as she was; she was no fortune teller. The ‘x’ she provided was never really the future. After all, she based the quantitative framework around certain assumptions such as the lifespan of the species involved. Her most important assumption was that each partner lived up to their potential AT ALL TIMES. Can you understand now why her result was not a concrete picture of the future? Such broad assumptions are the curse of our time; Nevertheless, they must be made if we are to learn anything.

So! If ‘x’ was good, she would keep the pencil. If it was bad, she would sharpen the pencil in the hope that the next time, the tip would offer a better result.  Sadly, there were a lot of ‘bad’ pencils and subsequently ‘bad’ results so she had to sharpen quite a few of them. (Honestly though, I doubt she minded all that much. With the sharpening I mean! Not the result, no no, the result upset her when it was bad and thankfully the sharpening provided a distraction)

Where was I? Oh yes! Upon the Great Goose’s arrival, she was utterly taken aback with the oddity of the next couple she had to calculate ‘x’ for. Nevertheless, she sat down and started the calculations. My word, a fish and a lion? Have you ever heard such nonsense! Right, well we will try to have to get this done before tea. Head to the grindstone, she worked on the strangest ‘x’ she’d ever encountered.

As she was mumbling to her self she requested the Great Goose to feed the clouds with the pencil dust. That’s fairy-tale speak for  ‘take out the trash’. The Great Goose quacked under his breath, muttered something about lead poisoning, and threw the dust onto the clouds.

What neither of them knew was that the  nurturing environment of the cloud would transform the pencil dust into snow bees, which would depart from the dark side.

+++

 

They only did this once a year, when there was enough demand from the snow bees for a ball.  it was important they all lived in harmony up there, life’s hard enough without creating friction for oneself.  The snow bees could then don their glad rags and tango down to earth.  The snow bee was excited about the ball. She imagined what she would wear, the music that would play, who she would see. But mostly she focused on which other snow bee she would dance with.  She eventually wore her finest white lace dress with glass slippers (inspired from a story) and gently fell off the cloud. All the other snow bees were there, at times spinning with breathless frenzy, at other times slowing to a waltz. She saw snow bees everywhere, but not one single partner. This saddened her greatly, so she went to find a quiet place to melt. As she was leaving, something nudged her, and she turned around to see…. A feather!  The feather was a silver feather that rustled in the breeze. Just to make sure, she made eyes at it, and it bowed. Oh! He was definitely hers! She knew it! In the wind he whooshed around her lifting her up and taking her down and dancing to their hearts delight! She glistened and chit-chat flirtatiously and he strongly but silently waved. The ball was a huge success. She was crowned Snow Bee of the year, and every anniversary of that night, you can see them tango when they falls.

Can’t you save me some time?

I’ve been feeling nervous all day. Biting my fingernails much much more than usual, getting so absorbed into getting rid of that.one.cuticle. Nothing else exists when cuticles do. I had a story all planned out. But before I started doing so, I read Hope’s latest guest post.* At the end, there was a very insightful question to be answered simply. Which I did to the best of my ability; but it wasn’t exactly without frills. I did try, honest! The answer I wrote took me beyond nervous. I held back the vomit I knew was coming up as much as I could (sorry for the imagery). Which came first, the nerves or the vomit? In any case, the nerves seem to have an explanation, whether I knew it or not throughout the day. It’s like they knew this was coming.

Something inside me has been dying to come out for a very very long time. No not dying, something very much alive. For the record, I’m not crazy (yes, I’ve checked). I don’t want it inside me. What’s more, I know how to get it out. Yet I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s like jumping off a cliff. A cliff I have been standing on for quite. some. time.  I am still avoiding it; so much so that I take cigarette breaks at every given opportunity.  I avoid it in a way that makes me think how fucked up am I for being more comfortable with the pain of keeping it in.

This is so hard.  The more I think about it, the more I realise that I can’t really write this here. I’m sorry for creating drama to those of you that could do without. But I do need to write it. And just so I don’t leave you abruptly(another thing I take issue with), I will give you the jist of what I have to say to someone who was once so special to me: I’m afraid the next person I meet will have to waste precious (precious) time convincing me that I am not invisible. Can’t you save me some time?

For the record, they still are special. Just not for me.

 

 

*Hope IS special. And wonderful. Her existence and presence is vital. If you’re smart and/or lucky, you will get to know her.