Sundry Sunday: On a Beautiful Sunday Morning in Las Vegas

On a beautiful Sunday morning in Las Vegas,
I am thinking about other things
besides writing.

I am thinking about making a bowl of Jell-O© with mixed fruit. I have one package of cherry or strawberry flavored Jell-O© gelatin mix on the shelf and one can of mixed fruit. After I mix the gelatin I will put it into hot tea glasses because it is easier to control the portions. If let it set in a large dish then I will eat it in a couple of days, but if I put it in smaller dishes then it will last five or six days.

On this beautiful Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas,
I am thinking about writing
a poem about food
and the taste of cold gelatin desert
on a hot summer afternoon.

I am thinking that even when I think about other things then writing I always get an idea for a story or poem. I cannot think about anything without finding an idea to write or blog about. Now I understand what Anais Nin meant when she said "If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it." 
 

Weekly Writer’s Quote: Ideas in the middle of living

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living. ~ Anais Nin

I looked out my window and I saw the neighbor’s cat sitting on their front porch waiting to go into the house. I wrote a poem about the cat waiting for someone to let her in while the wind was blowing. All right, I do not get out of my house much on the weekends, but that does not mean I stop living.

I wish I could get out more on the weekends because I would find more to write about then the living going on in my house. Right now, my mother is sitting on the couch wanting to remove the oxygen tubes from her nose. I know there is a story or a poem in what I call “The Battle of the Oxygen” and it is not a science fiction story.

It is a story about the devastation of Alzheimer’s disease not only to the person who suffers from it, but to the family as well. I have written poems about Mom and Alzheimer’s, but I have not put it in a story yet. I think that is the next phase of my writing. The problem is that it is difficult to write about this disease.

As I write this post, I want to cry. I want to cry because of what is happening to my mother. I also know that I have to write about the Alzheimer’s disease and its affect my mother and me. I am in the midst of living with it; therefore, I must write about it.

The Process of Becoming

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Anais Nin

In the process of becoming

loss occurs

at first it is little things

like a silver friendship ring

given in grade school,

which was dropped between the laughter

and the tears of growing up.



As we mature and age

larger items are lost in the process

a photo of an old lover,

a pet buried in the backyard garden

of a house in the Midwest;

a house once shared by parents and siblings.



Finally,

as one approaches the end

of physical life

the last things to go

are short-term memory,

the ability to see the beauty of a rose,

the ability to hear the cry of a grandchild,

and then the individual passes

into the next word.



Is the soul born into the next world

as the body was born into this world

naked and crying?