First SnowFall

A view from outside my office during the first very light snowfall of the season.

November Sunsets - Ocean Beach Ponguogue

The sunset skies have been stunning this past week or so. So many evenings, driving home westward on Sunrise Highway, I am faced with colors too vivid to stare straight into...cloud layers, vapor trails, all manner of special effects... and me without my camera!

Last weekend I stayed at a friend's apartment in Hampton Bays while she was away, and made my way, finally, to the ocean to take some sunset shots. I was intrigued at how the scattered fishermen were able to stand so still and patient in the deep chill of ocean water and gusting wind...I took my shots from the shelter of the dune paths and even a few from my car, parked across the road from the entry to the Ponquogue bridge.

The colors were so intense, so blinding, that when I viewed them later on my laptop, they were too much for the little screen to handle; too many shades of reds and orange layered and streaking across the screen. This little camera of mine captured exactly what it saw as the molten yellow sun slid down into the ocean side horizen.

NaNoWriMo

I have decided to make the grand attempt at writing a novel in 30 days, joining the ranks during National Novel Writing Month. Slow going thus far, but I have a general idea of where I'm headed and some interesting "people" are emerging from the far, far recesses - the back of my head. This is how I visualize different levels of consciousness...the great unconscious as the "back of the head", consciousness as the "front of the head" and dream state as the pool between the two spaces where ideas float about, waiting to be hooked and reeled in by conscious mind. Simplified, but it works for me.
I used to think that I couldn't meditate, that it was something hard, something that needed a users manual or some intricate form of direction to acheive. Other people did that; I was too busy to learn the trick. Eventually I realized that I was meditating constantly without realizing what I was doing. The pattern emerged as I gave myself over more and more often to the writing. I noticed that when I needed to write on assignment, I found myself suddenly exhausted, heavy headed and in need of a catnap. I usually wound up face down on my couch, drifting until a line for a poem or the first sentence of a story came to me. Suddenly I was clear-headed. I would jump up and take that line for a walk - literally - out the door, down the road and through the wooded path to the neighboring roads. I would work out the lines in my head and then sit down to write when I got back to the house. Eventually I realized that my "catnaps" were alpha states and that I was indeed meditating my way into the process - grabbing the word ideas as they floated up from the deep. When someone asks where I came up with a story idea or where a particular line of poetry came from, I just smile and say "oxygen deprivation." Hmmmm...all that time face down on the couch...
I am fighting a seasonal head cold right now and feel sluggish and confused...not optimum conditions for writing, but I intend to push through and get done what gets done...hopefully a good seed will have been planted and, with a little nourishment and hard work, will eventually produce fruit...

A Picture's Worth...

Wandering

Yesterday, in a meandering, deep-thinking state of mind, I took the long, slow ride out to the furthest end of the North Fork...out to Orient Point and then into Orient Park. It was a brilliant, sunny day with the wind blowing across the water on both sides of the road. In East Marian, I stopped on the Orient Harbor side of the road to take pictures of the sun shining across the lightly ruffled waters...(the photo at the end of this site is of that exact spot in early September, sailboats drifting off in the distance)...across the road the Sound water was choppy and wild...the wind almost knocking me over when I stepped out onto the beach to take my pictures. It was the best of both worlds and all on the same east-west roadway. I passed vineyards and farmstands and just beyond them on the opposite side of the road, inlets and bays. A small farmstand sits close on the road with the water just a few hundred feet behind it. There are two lavendar farms heading east toward Orient with deep patches of lavendar visible from the road; one serves tea and hot soup. The apple farms were serving fresh squeezed cider, produce farmstands selling roasted corn on the cob...hoards of pumpin pickers cruising the seasonal fall festivals, winery tours, corn mazes...antique stores, farm houses, B&B's and motels on the water...people fishing along the roadway, daytrippers snaking along the same path I had taken...a long, slow crawl heading east along the narrow roadways...the natural world spread out on both sides, so much to notice, so much that could be missed.
I am getting the urge now to make some kind of move, to step off from the crossroad, pick a path and start another journey...I am thinking about this, mulling ideas that are surfacing from somewhere far back in my head...not quite ready to become, but a stirring of the pot, a simmering and bubbling...

Lead Toe Stomp - Thursday Poem

Lead Toe Stomp

My father whistled
and danced about
with barefoot children
attached to his shoes.
Right to left
Left to right
he shuffled and thumped
over wooden floors,
barefoot children
attached to his shoes.
Wrapped to his knees
we giggled and jounced
to the lead toe stomp
my father whistled and danced.

Taking my lead from Kerrdelune, I am posting this for Poetry Thursday. Still feeling my way around this blogging thing...
This is a memory poem...standing on my father's shoes as he danced around the room...the thump and shuffle, face pressed against his knees...laughing... slipping off, stepping back up and shuffling off again...dancing, we called it.

Question

Don't know why....this poem has been running a loop through my head all morning...cantering along at a steady pace...

Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you have fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

May Swenson

Mutterings

Sitting here trying to decide what I want to write about, squeeze into a square, post to the www, save for posterity...and again it happens. I think too much, ponder too long, and finally exhaust the time I'd meant to spend working on the blog. Maybe I should just post a few more photos of the brilliant sunsets and cloud masses that are a Blessed trademark of Long Island's Autumn. The light is amazing...the colors breathtaking...I hold my camera over my head and frame shots through the LED. Water reflects the jewel tones and clouds. People are silhouettes... reading, walking, standing thigh-high in the water casting their lines, reeling them in...dream time. The photos always surprise me when I download them...what has been captured. Some appear impressionistic, almost as if they were paintings rather than photos...

Today it is overcast, not a good hunting day for light surprises...the leaves are turning color...it has been unseasonably warm...this spell of Indian Summer...

If the weather holds, tonight we will light a fire outdoors, sit together in circle and expand this time, this space, a little longer...

The Great Shape has No Form...Lao Tsu

Wild Soul

Wild Soul
If yours be a wild soul, come with mine
into the darkness to gather wood.
Set flame to twig, and twig to blaze,
stir reddened heart coals with the poking stick.
Stare down the flames, absorb the heat
wear ash and pungent smoke to sleep.

There are no stars
under ceilings and roofs.

The Language Issue

I was given this blog as a birthday gift by a good friend and co-worker. Val had apparently grown weary of hearing my endless babble about wanting to start a blog and not having the time to get it started...so she created it for me, named it and sent it to me in an e-card. Way to go, Val! I like the name, and feel honored that Val "gets" me. (I think we are from the same tribe.) I've worked on it a little since receiving it this week, copied and deleted her birthday message blog, most of her profile words (she referred amongst other things to my penchant for taking cloud pictures) and added a lot of my own. Like most things, this blog is a work in progress...

So now I would like to launch this gift blog with the words of a wonderful Irish poet...words that I responded to immediately the first time I read them...

THE LANGUAGE ISSUE

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,
then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh's daughter.

Nuala Di Dhomhnaill