Meanderings

Now dawn comes with its heartbreak
above benign Bouton
the mother and her last son wake
as light climbs the Piton.

When we grieve,
solar plexus feeling
that soreness
as if someone carelessly overstuffed a bag and all sentiments want to ease out spill out out out out out out unzip the constriction, un zip zip zip
we lament the dreamspackedtightlyunabletobepulledoutofconstriction.
But more than that,
we grieve the loss of our selves,
selves we had poured into that person for safe-keeping and nurturing,
the ways only that person knew.
Our selves zip tighter tighter as if to contain who we are reluctant to lose more because there’s an incomplete part of us that we trusted that person with and we can’t retrieve it so we have to zip zip zip up what we have now what we know now who we are now.

When we grieve
solar plexus feeling
an emptying,
that even though we reach inside to try to touch memories, images, voices, the absence

is so wide,

we wonder,

how and when did this person take up so much space in my heart, how did I not know this?

Did they know?

When we grieve
solar plexus weeping
for the inability to say to them how much they meant to us, and we vow to tell all the living how we feel

We curl inward and outward, filling and emptying, feeling and emptying, filling, feeling, fill, feel

I am learning to hold hurts gently.

 

 

©galiciablackman

Maxine Greene

Learning involves a willingness to pose disturbing questions, to take risks, to look through new perspectives upon the familiar life-world.

…in English, for these experiences:

 

• feeling cranky, dejected, or miserable for an unknown reason and when a reason to feel like that actually comes along soon after, you feel quite ok
• the irresistible urge to pet/scratch/fondle a dog
• the extended periods of time set aside for hair maintenance
• losing a well-liked(not favourite) pen
• the random stranger smile which is unsolicited, unwelcome, and sometimes creepy
• the counter- a random stranger smile which is warm and restores faith in humanity
• hearing a song/rhythm which evokes a time from the past and carrying the fog of that past around for a few hours (it may be pleasant or unpleasant)
• finding yourself speaking, gesticulating, dressing like a fictional character, or speaking like the book you have been reading
• the ambivalence of believing something which you think is ludicrous, but you can’t stop believing it anyway (not to be conflated with superstition)
• the ideal temperature at which one enjoys one’s favourite hot drink

leaves falling like confetti

want to run through them

ruffle their tranquility

 

 

©galiciablackman

 

Failure is interesting partly for the fact that successful thinkers actually make more mistakes than those who give up easily and therefore preserve their unblemished record of mediocrity, and also for the fact that mistakes can usually be set right by trying again.

Martin Covington (1992, p. 231)

Covington, M. V. (1992). Making the grade: A self-worth perspective on motivation and school reform. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

I can’t say that I read the original work. I encountered the quotation on page 30 in:

Felten, P., Gardner, J. N., Schroeder, C. C., Lambert, L. M., & Barefoot, B. O. (2016).The undergraduate experience: Focusing institutions on what matters most.San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass.

Occasionally, these classic one-liners (although this is a long one) capture something you need to hear, just to get you out of a slump, or just when you feel a little defeated. Because those days will come, even when things are going as you’d like them to. If you have the support which will churn out these necessary platitudes, then that’s great! Sometimes you just need to sink your teeth into the comfort food of a boldface platitude, bite, chew, and swallow with gusto!

I like the expression “to slay.” It evokes the triumph of accomplishing something challenging, à la  slaying dragons and all that. Not HBO-GOT’s dragons, because these creatures are too magnificent to be wilfully destroyed. And I don’t mean the use of slay to compliment someone on getting dressed well.

But I think I’d like to start saying, “I’m going to Simone Biles this challenge coming my way.” Not because Biles is trending and not because I just want to hop on the bandwagon of admirers (and there is much to admire in this young lady’s talent), but because I wonder what would happen if we tried using words and expressions, metaphors with less violent roots.

Every time I think I am ready to let this site go live, I pull back. I look at the content here and I know it is already in the public domain. Somewhere out there, there is a record of all the information on the pages here. However, there is something a little bizarre about putting it on display. It is the same sentiment that has made me extremely uncomfortable with social media. There is some kind of connection between this discomfort and my reluctance to be public with my creative writing that I have not quite understood, but I am hoping to make sense of it, or even get past it.