B is for Block

B is for Block

All of us have been creatively blocked. That is an understatement for many of us. I write this today because I am blocked. Ideas are eluding me even with the wealth of prompts being presented to me on the blogs. Words won’t come. Images won’t coalesce in my mind. I cannot focus to read. My mind drifts.

So what do you do? My suggestion is the standard cure of writing about the block. But sometimes that is even hard to do—like right now! If you should also find yourself in this situation, even if it is just going through the motions, even if what you write or draw is absolutely awful—do it anyway! If you get out of the habit of creating, you will have a hard time getting back into it. Do not lose momentum in your creativity because some jackass in your life has kicked you in the teeth. Do not lose what you have gained because life has thrown you a curve ball. Pick up the blasted ball and throw it back! (Metaphorically speaking!)

Step away from the problem or person who is stifling you. Go on a vacation if you can afford it. If you can’t, walk to a park. Breathe. Meditate. Pray. If you are a spiritual person and have a particular faith tradition, draw on it. If you have a higher power, call on it. Use the block as a means of transmutation of your creative self. Make it an alchemical process of the soul.

But whatever you do, do not put down that pen, that brush, that whatever. Do what you need to do to keep your creative spirit alive. It's a matter of survival.

LGloyd © June 29, 2006

Emissary from the Sea

Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis)

I have been feeling a little down in the dumps this week and today particularly so. But, it was a hot and beautiful day so I decided to go down to the ocean, to an area that I've been wanting to photograph. I literally came around a corner and found this pelican sitting on a railing. I kept waiting for it to take flight but it let me approach. When I got about five feet away, I became fearful (these birds are BIG) so I stopped.

It was almost as if this magnificent bird had a message for me, but I don't know what. Look at that expression! Does anyone understand Pelicanese? Anyway, I felt very much encouraged after the encounter.


Image: L Gloyd (c) 2006

BURNSTONE

A few weeks ago Heather sent around a post with handprints on a cave wall. I've been going back to that picture over and over again and what I liked was that the handprints looked burned into the stone.
I thought Burnstone and this is the story it inspired!
amm



In Burnstone, Washington one of my favorite places to visit is the Tymbal Cemetery and Funeral Home.

Tymbal is a pauper's cemetery from the old days so it's not great shakes. No fancy monuments, no fancy gates but there are trees and they’re covered with ivy which is nice because the trees have been dead for years and they don’t put leaves out anymore.

The sad thing is everyone forgot the Cemetery was there and for awhile the City of Burnstone Streets Department used Tymbal as a storage place for their work trucks and they used the Funeral home as office space until someone realized all those garbage trucks and lawn mowers and a bunch of other maintenance tools were leaking oil all over unmarked graves.

So before you could say ' desecration ' the City decided to build a new maintenance facility for the Street Works Department and without as much as a backwards glance they left the graveyard to choke on weeds and nettles and blackberry bushes.

Looking back, it was sort of odd the way the weeds came back so fast.

Anyway.

About a month after the big move a young woman named Tamus Bloodroot slammed her car into one of the dead trees near the cemetery entrance and she never left.

She never left because no one ever found her.

They found her car, they found the door open and they found a large pool of blood about three feet away from the crash sight.

But they never found Tamus.

The day after they found her car stories about an injured woman, who was identified as Tamus, asking for help at the side of the road started up. Some people said they actually stopped for her and picked her up and talked to her and she always said the same thing, “ can you help me now. “

When they turned to reassure her that’s what they’re doing she’d be gone.

You can imagine Tamus Bloodroot's family was pretty upset that they're daughter had become an urban legend and people were suppose to be talking to her ghost.

" I doubt " her Father had screamed into the face of a reporter doing Halloween stories for the evening news one year, " that if my daughter could come back from the grave she'd spend all of her time asking drunken teenagers for rides to the hospital."

That was true, in life Tamus wasn’t the sort of person who asked for anything, she’d tell you exactly what she wanted and if you didn’t come across…heaven help you. The girl had a temper and the holes in her bedroom walls and her trail of broken relationships were solid proof of that.

Life went on after that… even Tamus Bloodroot went on, people never stopped seeing her and they all knew she was out there asking for help.



Bryony Middleton and his family live out on Cemetery Road. He’s lived out there his entire life
And he knows that stretch of road so well he could drive it with his eyes closed.

That’s something he did almost every Saturday night after and evening on the town with his friends. He’s sort of famous around here for that, you might not know Bryony’s name or anything about him but you’ve heard of the ‘ guy who drives passed the cemetery in his sleep on Saturdays’.

Anyway it was one of his 10 or was it 12 kids that said to him after finding him and his truck at the end of their driveway one morning " if you're going to drive when you’re sleeping Daddy, at least wear your seat belt."

Not to be mean, and Bryony loved his 10-12 children a lot even if he forgot their names and didn't know exactly how many of them there were, but on more then one occasion Bryony was heard to say, " Geeze, my kids, you know they're okay as far as rug rats go but they sure aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, if you get my meaning."

But this time Bryony’s kids were right and on that winter evening out on Tymbal Cemetery Road his kids were the sharpest tools to be found in any shed anywhere on the planet.

The roads were iced over when Bryony left the " Corner Tavern " only he didn't notice. I mean he was sliding and tripping a lot...but you know he'd chalked that up to the liquid refreshments he'd indulged in for the past four hours.

So Bryony got into his truck and tried to buckle himself in, but he couldn't make the lock work so he put the belt on and tied it closed and then he took a roll of duct tape and somehow managed to tape himself to his seat.

I'm not kidding I wish I were. Like I said, Bryony loved his kids and he'd do any for them even if they only had a handful of brain cells between them.

Then he turned the key in the ignition (he always left it in because it was pretty hard for him to fit that key into that little hole after a long evening out) and he took a sloppy left and turned out onto the unlit road, marked as Old Burnstone Highway but known unofficially as Cemetery Road by the locals.

He was halfway home and nearly asleep when he came to Tymbal Cemetery and saw the Funeral Home with the tape on it’s cracked windows. Bryony mistook it for his house and in a panic he jerked the steering wheel and sent his truck into the ditch that surrounded the cemetery.

Like I said, Tymbal’s is a Pauper’s Graveyard and there are no frills about it. The people out there were forgotten in life and they were forgotten in death too.

So the residents of Tymbal's have numbers, not names and they have pine boxes made at the Prison in Fallen not fancy caskets with brass handles. And there is no fence surrounding the cemetery just a ditch cut into a “V” shape and it's lined with jagged sharp rocks that were once the face of an old Mansion that burned to the ground about 100 years ago.

The Old Mansion was wasn't a good place and it’s owners were sort of an embarrassment to the City so after the fire Burnstone hauled off a mountain of debris and they decided to put it to good use.

Anything they could salvage went into the construction of The Tymbal Funeral Home and Cemetery.

The " fence" is what Bryony hit that night. His truck went into the ditch head on and then it flipped and rolled and finally stopped almost in the middle of the graveyard.

Taped and tied to his seat Bryony was bruised and beaten and good thing he was sitting upright because if he'd been in any other position he'd probably have choked on his own vomit, of which he apparently lost a lot of that night.

When he was done he considered his options.

He could cut himself loose but more then likely he'd end up stabbing himself to death because at the moment one of his eyes was swollen shut and the other, well you know Bryony should probably be wearing glasses but he doesn't.

Plus the crash had done nothing to sober him up he wasn’t sure he could find the business end of the knife if he wanted to.

" Poor Daddy, " he could actually see one of his many children saying to his unborn grandchildren " he survived the worse car accident ever and he ended up stabbing himself to death trying to cut himself loose from his car seat. No, he wasn't trapped. Somehow he taped himself to his seat. No I can't explain it. I loved my Dad but he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed if you get my meaning."

So Bryony figured all he could do was sit there and more likely then not someone would see him from the road in the morning. Resigned to a long cold smelly night he was about to try to catch some sleep when he saw the woman standing next to his car.

She was facing away from him and the way she was standing was wrong. Her shoulders were twisted and one of her arms seemed to be hanging a little lower then the other. At first Bryony thought she was tilting her head to the side like she was listening for something, but then he realized her head wasn't tilted it was flatter, much flatter then the other side of her head.

All Bryony could think to say was, " heck of a night, ain't it? "

" Can you help me now? " she said to no one " can you help me now?"

She started to turn and Bryony knew, he just knew that the front of that woman was going to look worse then the back and he didn't want to see that.

So Bryony did all he could think of to do. He turned the key, gave his battered truck some gas and there is a Heaven because it screamed (more then likely it was Bryony doing the screaming) to life and Bryony drove it blindly through the cemetery and towards the road…and the fence.

Only he never hit the fence, he never even made it out of the cemetery because before he hit the ditch he hit a tree and when he did the world around him exploded.

It was three of Bryony’s kids that found their dad and his truck the next morning. No, he wasn't dead; Bryony is made out of tougher stuff then that. Plus, I'm sure that with his dietary habits of fried food and alcohol he's pretty much preserved himself alive.

Which was good because Bryony had a story that people from all over the county wanted him to tell over and over again.

First of all the woman in the Graveyard, Bryony figured, wasn’t saying " Can you help me now " she was saying " Can you help me down " and he figured that out because on the night Tamus Bloodroot hit the Tymbal ‘fence’ she wasn't duct taped to her seat the way Bryony was so she smashed through her windshield and was thrown up and out of her car...

And straight up into a tree covered with Ivy.

That’s the story of Tamus Bloodroot and that’s how it ends…with parts of her raining down onto the hood of Bryony Middleton's truck.

The story about Old Burnstone Highway hasn’t ended. Earlier this year it earned this label as the most dangerous stretch road in the entire state of Washington.

It’s not a main highway and you can’t find it from any major roads but over 300 people have died along it this year alone. I mean, people from Arizona and Texas visitors from other countries in rental cars have met their end out there an if they don’t die in the wreck they can’t explain why they were there…at dark.

They never say though that they were lost.

Funny, isn’t it?

On Labyrinths

On Labyrinths

Spirals and circles are recurring shapes in nature: nautilus shells, sand dollars, the moon and sun, human DNA. It is not surprising then that circles and spirals show up in the art and religion of many cultures throughout the world: the Tibetan mandala, Native American medicine wheels, prehistoric petroglyphs and European labyrinths.

A labyrinth is a circuitous pathway spiraling to a center. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has a single path to the center with no dead-ends or detours. There is only one way into a labyrinth and that same way leads back out.

Labyrinths were created in Europe and the Mediterranean region well before the Christian era, but the most prominent ones were constructed during the medieval period, many in churches. The most well-known labyrinth today is found in Chartres Cathedral. The Chartres labyrinth is constructed of colored tiles and laid into the floor of the cathedral's sanctuary.

In the early medieval period, many Christians made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. As travel became more expensive and dangerous, labyrinths were constructed in these cathedrals to provide an alternative to the pilgrimage. Walking a labyrinth became a symbolic journey to Jerusalem. Later, labyrinth walking became, more broadly, a metaphor for the spiritual walk through life and became a form of moving prayer or meditation.

Labyrinths fell into disuse after the medieval period; however, in the last ten years labyrinth walking has experienced a resurgence of popularity in some American churches. Labyrinth construction projects have sprung up across the country as parishioners and other spiritual seekers enjoy the benefits of this contemplative practice.

The process of walking the labyrinth is simple. The walker begins a slow, deliberate walk into the labyrinth. Many of the American labyrinths are based on the Chartres model that has a full course of about two-thirds of a mile. Walking this distance, spending time in the center and walking back out can take anywhere from half an hour to several hours. It is entirely up to the walker. There is no right or wrong way to walk a labyrinth, but the pattern that many walkers use is spending time during the walk towards the center to meditate or pray about a concern, make a personal confession or reflect on things that could be made better in the walker’s life.

Reaching the center represents meeting the divine presence and usually involves the walker spending some time meditating or praying in the center. Finally, the walk out is a time of spiritual, emotional, and, according to some walkers, physical healing or refreshment.

Walking a labyrinth can be adapted to whatever spiritual or emotional need in front of the participant. Labyrinths can be found in urban settings, manicured church gardens, by the sea or in the wilderness. The location is not important. It is the journey that matters—a symbolic pilgrimage towards spiritual wholeness.

Image and text: LGloyd (c) 2006 This labyrinth is on the grounds of a church on Palos Verdes Peninsula, California.

The Alchemist

If I were an allegorist,
symbolism would prevail.
But I am just an alchemist,
mixing words creates my
tales.

A voracious writer I have
become, greedily capturing the
written word. Where would I
put my thoughts, if I couldn’t
make them heard?

Poems I find do well for me, as
I give my pen dictation. Words
have a chance, ideas birth, I
allow them their gestation.

Each day for me begins anew and
offers endless choices, of what I’ll
put upon the page, as I give my
feelings voices.

I look around wherever I am at the
possibilities I see. Word painting
efforts abound in me, unfolding
mysteriously.

On my love for words I’ll quit my
praise, and speak of them no
further. I’ll still write them down,
without a sound, no more
utterance or murmur.

gret ©

Dinner with the Captain

A couple of young crewmen, swarthy, fit, and no doubt hand-selected by Captain Wilder for their ability to handle all manner of shipboard tasks, helped me on board and directed me to my private cabin. After stowing my gear, I found my way to the galley. The cook fixed me up with a steaming bowl of salmagundi and some hardtack and then directed me to the captain's dining room. Apprehension overtook me-- I had heard about Captain Ebony Wilder-- she was also known as the Wild Wench of the West Winds-- sometimes she blew soft and fair and other times with gale-force fury.

I tapped lightly on the door. "Don't just stand there like a little mouse! Come in! We don't stand on pretensions around here!"

I opened the door, carefully balancing my bowl of stew and hardtack, and entered.

"Ah, it's YOU! I've heard about you! Sit down."

"Yes, maam."

"Captain, if you will, I'm too young to be a maam."

"Yes, maam, er-- captain."

"How do you like the Salmagundi? The goat meat is a little gamey but the anchovies are fresh."

I swallowed hard. "Good-- real good-- I love gamey Salmagundi." I took another spoonful and forced a smile.

"So", said the Captain as she leaned back in her chair, booted feet propped on the table, "Matilda tells me that you've pinched a few of her tail feathers." I felt my stomach ball up in a knot.

"And, that horse of yours left her to pay quite a bit of a bar tab." As nervous as I felt, I still had trouble stiffling a chuckle--Albert!

"Well, Captain, if you would like me to pay... how much does he owe?"

"Four-hundred and fifty-seven Lemurian shekels."

I gulped. "Um, there may be a bit of a problem with that--I'm having a cash-flow problem....."

"Tosh! I won't hear anything of the sort." Captain Wilder leaned forward and winked her unpatched eye at me, "I love it when someone pulls one over on that old bird. She deserves it most of the time."

In the distance, a squawk sounded and a voice said "I heard that!"

"Shut-up, Seed-Spitter!" the Captain roared and then she turned back to me, "Now, I hear-tell that you are on your way to the Abbey and the Cave of the Ancestors."

"Yes, that's true. I'm told you are headed that way."

"Indeed. Did you also hear about the Bog People?"

"Ah, a little something. Can you tell me more?"

"Vile people. They live in the bogs along shores of this inlet and on an island in the midst of it. Very difficult to get around them. We're going to have to fight our way through. You up for a little excitement, darlin'?" The Captain chuckled again.

"I can hold my own," I said, lifting my head with more confidence than I actually felt.

"Good, because if they take you captive, you will regret it."

"Why? What do they do to captives?"

"Feed then alive to the Taraka?"

My eyes widened.

The Captain laughed again. "I love to tell people that to see the reaction. It's not true."

I relaxed a bit.

"The bog people strangle you first, then feed you to the Taraka. Ha!" The Captain nearly fell off her chair. When she had pulled herself together, she said, "Not to worry, dear. I've sailed this inlet a hundred times. They haven't gotten me yet..... crewmen-- that's another story, though!.....Darlin' have a glass of wine, you don't look so good."


LGloyd (c) June 5, 2006.

Sea Oats Plein-Air

Sea oats stand at attention resisting brisk,
salty winds with their fancy footwork as
they create an alchemy of pleasure revealing
heaven in more than one place.

As if Monet whispered in their ears their
silky, golden tendrils, like fine sable brushes
watercolor the early morning sky with hues
of magenta, burnt sienna, and aquamarine.

These artisans of the sea awaken the yawning
sun as breezes form opalescent waves that foam
along the silver strand as their alfresco masterpiece
beckon to the waiting dawn.

gret ©

Bon Voyage

I bid Albert goodbye at the landing in the Pirate's Cove. As much as I wanted him to come with me, he assured me that a horse at sea was not a good situation for all parties concerned. Also, he seemed to suggest that there had been a parting of the ways between he and Matilda and it was best that he not be on board-- something about owing money-- I didn't pry further. Albert promised that he would find a way to the Abbey and would meet me there.

I kissed him on the forehead and scratched him behind the ears, then I boarded my small skiff and headed out towards the Calabar Felonway, anchored in the cove.

As I rowed onward, I noticed something glimmering in the morning sun light. It was cobalt blue, bobbing in the water, and as I got closer, I could see it was a wine bottle. I grabbed the gaff in the bottom of the skiff and reached for the bottle. When I finally got hold of it, I held it up to the light. Inside was a small scroll.

I pulled out the cork and removed the scroll. It was parchment, old and stained, and the writing was somewhat hard to read. In dark brown script, which looked like dried blood, were the scrawled words: "Beware of the Bog People......"

Before I could finish reading, a voice from the Calabar hailed me: "Avast ye scurvey wench, what's takin' ye so long." I shoved the scroll into my knap sack and quickly rowed on.


Image and text: Lori Gloyd (c) June 4, 2006

Write a story for a bottle

You have all heard of messages in a bottle. Well now it is your chance to write a story to go in a bottle that le Enchanteur can keep in her cabin on board the Calabar.

After yesterday's tantrum Enchanteur seems much more tranquil and her cabin appears idyllic but it would be well to be cautioned that she is a shape shifter and can change with the breezes that puff up the Calabar's sails.

Keep Enchanteur happy by doing a bit of the Arabian Nights style story telling and create some stories to go in bottles. Of course it would be fun to have decorated bottles to match the stories.

Faces

Faces...yesterday, today and tomorrow

image gretchen L. (c)