Friday, April 5, 2013

A Writer is Born





Cover of Encore Magazine, picked up April 4, 2013, at breakfast book club.     
At the age of 12, poet George Leslie Norris (1921-2006) says walls began to speak to him and his life as a writer was born! As he tells it, "I put my finger on the wall and it was rough and I could feel the individual grains, and then I put my hand against the wall and little grains fell to the ground, tiny things, and I suddenly knew that my life was going to be the recognition of solid things like this and making relationships of the real world, of the material world, and that the only way to do that was to have the words that stood for stones and rocks and mountains, and that the rhythms would create the formation of such things, and I was going to do this all my life"


I have loved Nature deeply for years, and I now find myself being called to love the Earth as though she is an entity. When I am very still, I can feel her heart beat, and I am inspired to write about the passion I feel as I honor the truth that my life as a writer has also been born.

How is it that my senses are so acute to you? Are we connected on some mystical plane that is hidden from both you and me? 

I breathe and it is your breath I catch. I stretch my dawdling body and feel the sinews of your thighs tighten around me. I am held in the loving memory of your touch!

Does our being together stretch beyond time and space? Can we actually be present with one another when our bodies are separate? Is this sensation of oneness madness at my door or a peek into reality?

I dance with your presence and heat begins to rise within me. Oh, you are able to make me come out and play when my desk is piled with work and my phone is ringing! You can capture my wings and spread my legs at will! You are the devil himself come to force me to face the desire I have long denied!

I cease to struggle against the yearnings. I begin to fondle my thoughts and allow the memories to wash over my barren flesh. Hunger and thirst fade into lust. I long to be held by these memories and to merge into them in such a way that I am blind to anything else…

Double rainbow seen out my front window November 9, 2012. 
Today, as I am here in Southwest Michigan working on the computer, I am looking out my window watching the birds feeding. The male Cardinal seems very red, the Goldfinch makes a lovely match to the kernels on the half-eaten cob of corn, and I see the beauty in the iridescence of the shimmering feathers on the head on the male Grackle. I am wondering if the reason writers thrive is because the mundane has somehow become supra-mundane, and you see more meaning in everything, where ever you are.