Sheila Rambles

As you may have noticed, I have successfully updated this blog after a little over a year of silence.  One entry I’d already written, to be fair, but I also restarted with new material. The thing that held me back was the lack of time.  I am currently working two jobs, sometimes three depending on the season, and I still have my Ten Thousand Flowers Project to attend to, as well as learning guitar and writing fiction.  Finding an hour or two, as most writing advice recommends, is not something I can do on a daily basis.  Even twenty minutes is too much to ask most days. So I experimented with five.  Five at minimum, sometimes more.  My technique is to sit down to work and glance at the clock.  I calculate five minutes from there and start to work.  Periodically I check the clock and stop when I’ve hit the five minute mark.  Sometimes I get so absorbed in what I’m writing I breeze past five minutes.  The point is to do something...

This is a piece I wrote for an event called Write Club, in which pairs of poets compete by writing pieces on opposing themes.  I was given War, and another writer given Peace.  Peace won, which I will take as a hopeful metaphor to console myself. One—The Imagine Fallacy John Lennon’s dream was a world without war and his roadmap to such an achievement was best summarized in the song Imagine. I can’t recite the lyrics without crossing the boundaries of fair use, and I don’t feel like being sued by Yoko Ono. But I’m sure you’ve all heard it enough times that it’s already an earworm in your head as I’m reading this. At any rate, permit me to summarize. If we no longer had religion to fight over, there would be no war. If we no longer had countries to fight over, there would be no war. If we no longer had possessions to fight over, there would be no war. John Lennon had two sons, but they were born to two different women and raised on two d...

This is a sequel, of sorts, to  The Ugly Handsome Man .  It is a true story. I was in meditation class, listening to a recording of the Dalai Lama and his entourage chanting at the sickbed of Vaclav Havel.  Somewhere in the midst of breathing and listening, I saw the Ugly Handsome Man in the eye of my mind.  He was in a dark room, lying on a stone bier, slit open straight down the middle.  Around him were gathered gremlins in mourning.  His body was completely hollow.  Then he abruptly caught fire and burned until all of him was completely consumed.  The flames then flowed into me, giving me back everything that he had taken.