Prompt 4: Celebrate

12/15/2022

Welcome to Prompt #4 of the Covid Writing Recovery Project online.
Jump in here with a comment/reflection and add to comments on Prompts #1, 2, and 3.
Perhaps you'll choose to just read through the site.
However you feel inclined to celebrate what is here, we welcome you.

This time of year has been called the "deep winter," imposing its mystery on us even as we light countless candles, gather (maybe) by the warmth of fires in fireplaces, and drink beverages latent with their own magic. We can easily become enchanted by the celebrations we see and hear all around us. Whether they are religious celebrations or community and family traditions, it is easy to feel the pressures of expectations and obligations.

To CELEBRATE also means:
To praise widely or to present to widespread and favorable public notice.
To praise and draw attention to.

Invitation to Write:
During these days of allure and ambivalence, what do we celebrate? What do we have to praise at this point in the Covid Writing Recovery Project? What do we want to draw to our own and others' attention?

Help us celebrate a community of creativity and resilience.
Contribute your own vision of what we have to celebrate this deep winter!

To share your reflection, click on the word "Comments" below
then scroll to the bottom of the page and use the "Reply" form to submit your work.

5 Comments

Melissa

12/18/2022 05:43:18 am

Writing in general is such a great healing tool. Today I celebrate writing! I wrote a Christmas letter for my friends and family. I celebrate my weekly writing group and this bi-monthly writing project, also my ongoing tarot book project. I am a writer, even if only in my own mind. I write! I really do!

New writing I want to learn to do is daily journaling. Touted as an effective mental health tool, I find it very hard to sit still long enough to delve into my own thoughts and feelings about me and my life and to express it coherently in the written word. Journaling works for many people and I just know it would work for me, if only I'd sit down and do it.

Oops! That's it for my writing time. I've got a meeting, then many animals to take care of, then Christmas bustle to hustle.

Karen Jessee

1/15/2023 05:24:35 pm

"I'm a legend in my own mind!" a friend of mine used to say. And it's true. Whenever I write about my life, I take another hike along the Hero's Journey.

Journaling is just a fancy way of saying "I'm writing the Journey, its challenges and discoveries." I can celebrate the fact that I've notated a lot of my life's progress... and also celebrate that I haven't tried to record all of it! What a chore! I wouldn't want to read it.

On the other hand, writing always helps me discover the truth, whatever it is. So I try to write as often as possible, regardless of what form I choose.

12/23/2022 09:05:52 am

This morning, my cat sat straight up in our room on the second floor, looking out the window, her front legs like Doric columns. We are high up there, half way up the tall, tall trees—poplars, oaks, pines, beech. Ivy was watching their crowns sway and tense as the winter storm moves in. Her body rested, poised and perfectly relaxed in a way I can never achieve no matter how I try.

Her gaze—THAT I recognized, of a child, or my own mind wed to the sight of something wonderful, beautiful, fantastically more than can be imagined. Her cat eyes shone. Her face lifted as if receiving a kiss. Then, out of nowhere, she yawned. The roundness of her face stretched taut, her teeth bared in a way they just never are, four piercing spear points hiding inside a fuzz ball.

In order to celebrate public moments—festivals, holidays, house concerts, pot-lucks—I need to be able to celebrate private moments, noticing them, aware and patient, relishing the truth of experience even when it yawns or shows bona fide fangs.

Celebrations, their sway and excitement, sometimes bring out the yawn in me, too, and the unexpected bite which hurts other people’s feelings. But, always, celebrations draw out the gaze which helps me receive their beauty and meaning. I practice every day for them by staying alert, overcoming inertia, evolving into patience, and relishing what I can manage to notice and attend to.

May we all experience the blessings of deep winter.
May we all be Light for each other!

Coleman

1/12/2023 11:59:00 pm

Naked Moon

I crunch out to the powerline .
A wide skirt of light falls in a circle 
from the phone at my waist, 
but I don’t need it.

The Moon, half eaten by eclipse 
casts the world in chalky whites
 bright enough to pick out every leaf.

My first thought as I reach the shorn field adjacent to my house is that my eyes have gotten worse. Closing my left eye, I see three overlapping moonprints. My right, just a watery smudge against the dark. Graciously, with both eyes open, my brain is somehow able to parse the conflicting information. The glowing image of a halfling moon comes into focus, waning.

It is quieter than most mornings. The songbirds are hours from waking, and the owls are falling asleep. Only a pair of crickets sound out over the stubble grass, trading chirps across the powerline. Above me a flock of vultures cling like gargoyles to the metal framework of a transmission tower.

It is no wonder to me why the Lunar Eclipse has captured human imagination for millennia. The normal cycle is rended apart so that thirty days of clean edges and even shapes will take place over just a few messy hours. Seeing the moon this way, I have a hatchling sense that I’m meeting her for the first time.

The earth’s shadow seeps in. Longer wavelengths of light are able arc around our atmosphere, and so her face becomes a gradient. White to yellow red. Part of her, still warmed by the sun, shines even brighter to compensate. All of her light is juiced into the outer arc, which bends more and more dramatically as the shadow gains. It is the kind of fingernail crescent you only see in cartoons, painfully bright.
And it is swallowed.

The change is gradual, then immediate.
Imperceptible, then suddenly total.  

A naked moon

 Hanging now as a paper lantern
from the shadowy arc of a power line.

I’ve read of feudal lords and ladies removing their crowns for a night each year to dance among the commoners. Now, with her light dimmed, the lowlights flourish.
I see meteorites racing, and stars so faint they can only be seen in the edges of my eyes.

The moon sways suddenly, and my attention snaps back. Did I imagine it? No, there it is again. A dip to the side, as if ruffled by the wind. I wonder what could cause this illusion. Changes of pressure, humidity in the atmosphere maybe, or involuntary movements in my eye? 
Or maybe she’s dancing. 
Peach-skinned moon.

A flashlight seems almost insulting as I make my way back over mud-black earth, but now it is necessary. I climb the scored wood steps, past the hungry cat pawing me for food. The birds begin to stir.
Later the sky will park into blue, orange light will top the east-facing trees, and she will be gone. Already on the other side of earth.

It will be three years until we meet again, naked moon. 
I hope to see you then.

1/15/2023 05:13:04 pm

The eclipsing Moon casts the world in a gradient of chalky whites... while I see three overlapping moonprints with my aging eye.

Beautiful!

What is shadow, is shadow! What is light, Light!

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