Craving for something....NaPoWriMo #8

I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter today! It was a quiet one for us and that was very good for me. I was happy for some time to slow down. The pictures are a few of the favorites I snapped of the chalk drawings our Sunday School kids did at church today. It is part of our "tradition" and I look forward to that art every year as it also opens up my heart wider to possibilities seeing the children tell this Jesus story.

Easter Sweets

Fresh mowed grass

Bare feet wiggling in the cool wet

Running pell-mell to find more

Yellow ruffled chiffon dress

Bouncing up and down

Stopping only to seek

Multi colored plastic eggs

To find treasures of sugar delight

A height of childhood innocence

Jesus is my friend come to save us all!

Easter was sweet

In a van listening to The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe read aloud

By the silvery, deep voice of my theatre proff

Hours leaning and sleeping on friend's shoulders

Visiting the northwest for the first time

Staying up all night talking

Giving out testimony and taking other’s lives in

Performing night after night

In churches, to church suppers, and then homes

Of strangers and those we sought to serve

They served us

Took my first ferry ride

Returned to my Iowa apartment

After drama team tour to find

Someone had left a huge basket of chocolate

To break my Lenten fast on Easter morning

Easter was sweet

In a church in Paris a surprise

They ask if anyone would like to sing

The Hallelujah chorus at the end

Come down front

Just as I had been doing

At my home church

For over ten years

And sung in my high school choir

For four years

It is a part of me

Soaring with the regal strains

“The kingdom of this world…

Is become…

The kingdom of our Lord

And he shall reign forever and ever….”

Handel’s penning had pierced me through

With joy once more

Easter was sweet

Today, a remarkable call

Drawing close

By nothing remarkable at all

Reading more

Sitting still

Finding help

Leaning

Seeing

Seeking

A revelation between the confession time or sermon

As if it is all for the first freshness

As if it is a still small voice rekindling

As if the sweetness is not squeezed out

But blossoming to fuller fruit

He finds me here

Not there

Not anywhere else

Waiting

Wanting

Watching

Willing

Easter is sweet

Between the cross and a big rock that will roll....NaPoWriMo #7

Saturday Night

Certain of what went before

I was secure

He meant that he would be here

With us

He came and tore us

From what was before

Our lives

He called and we followed

To walk

With him healing afflicted

Made whole

The men born blind

Now see

The woman that bled

She believed

The crippled and lame

Were untwisted

Now he is twisting and I shudder

He bleeds

His eyes are shut in pain

He needs

A cry out as he is afflicted

He shouts

And I do not know what will come as

He dies

Is death the final call?

He knew it all

He told us to believe

He said to wait

1849 Currier and Ives Lithograph

He said that he would be here

With us

The Good of Good Friday

Good Friday had me thinking all day about why is it called good? What is it to be that alone? What is it to be mocked by those that know nothing of you one day and all of a sudden you are famous? How did Jesus stand it or how does anyone stand there and take it? When you are famous everyone seems to know who you are and has an opinion. This got me to thinking about all the many celebrities and politicians that are the “soup de jour” and what happens to them as last year’s scandal has faded away by the next year. So, a mixture of humanness and what it is to be alone. Here are a few of my thoughts mixed into poems of the day. NaPoWriMo #5 and #6

On That Hill

What is good about standing alone?

We are told to stand together, stand united, stand tall,

But don’t ever stand out

If you are alone or the lone voice in the crowd

It is not easy

People remember you for good after you are gone

But while you are there voicing that one opinion

That is not popular, believed, or easy

You are alone

Or supported by such few

That you feel very small

Not like the huge thing inside of you

That makes you shout to the heavens

“Father, why have you forsaken me?”

Or us, as the case may be

You represent the voices of more than just you

But you are “it”

Alone, you stand looking at a sea

Of angry people that know nothing really of you

Except that you represent “it”

Christ being beaten from John 19
charcoal by Sarah Stillion 2001

Whatever that “it” is

“It” has set you apart

On a hill

In the middle

Very much

alone

Fifteen Punchlines

All famous people move on

And become punchlines to jokes

Even if they were respected

We think we know them

So we take what we know

Turning it on its head

Laughing all the while

Because they had a moment

We all knew them or thought we did

They become ours

No longer theirs

No wonder they fight hard

To hang onto normal

Or do the opposite and exploit what they can

As they do what they do

We watch dreaming of being them

Meeting them or hating them

For we are not them

We are removed from the spotlight

So far that it isn’t funny

So we make fun of them

As they will never know

Old Shoe Blue Lights Up the Room

NaPoWriMo Official Poem #2 and Unofficial #3 & #4

Last night I actually read a couple of last year’s poems in a pub for open mic night. I never read my poetry publically as it feels so close to me. It is like opening up my head for others to peek inside, which is really scary.

Tonight’s postings are little bits of the scribbles I wrote at the pub last night (during the music and a loud birthday party---so be kind) and also my ten minute poem that has been brewing in my head today.

Today is World Autism Day, but my mind kept getting more personal than the whole world---always going back to my whole world and the first two lines wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote the rest tonight.

The Perfect Stranger

“Congratulations it’s a boy!”

Words that used to bring such joy

Now gives me pause

Pondering if there will be cause

To pass on books and resources

Late night bolstering of souls

Connecting this joy filled couple

To worlds that seem at other poles

No cause to stumble,

as there is reason to celebrate

Not dissipate

the misty ring of hope

The news of a male heir

fills this air

With laughter and jokes

From most of the folks

They say he’ll have his mother’s eyes

They poke at his father’s unusual nose

They will be fine as long as there are ten fingers and toes

They all agree he will be beautiful!

That is a fact

True, I do not yet know the second act

It is pre-show

And all mother’s know

They must ready their darlings

Get them prepared to go

On the world stage

Turning another page

In the Creator’s book

“Look at this boy!”

Says another onlooker of joy

Putting the picture of a sweet, tiny face upturned

Outlined in white against fuzzy black

Into my hand

However he develops, I am not concerned

In this circle, they have his back

He is part of the exceptional expected clan

Ring a Frightful Rose (pub poem #1)

The monster ball

Invited the flowers all

They danced and danced

It was a tremendous romance

Until the rose’s pedals fell

The roses called out

The monsters did shout

Bringing silence to that Fall

I Never Was Good at Rubrik’s Cubes (pub poem #2)

Rude poetry will be the death of me

A burp, a fart, a fizzle,

A whistle, a wart, a worm

I squirm from the pictures racing ahead

And come to a full stop

Plop! I hear the sound of fat raindrops go splat

Onto the sidewalk of my empty brain in pain

Wandering down spooky halls

And around crowded, ugly malls

I march, march, march,

Waiting to munch a mushy pen top

Writing way too slow to know

What is what and who is who

Where is where and if cows moo

I stew

Boiling, burning, blistering HOT

Nothing

Plop! Plop! Fizz! Fizz!

Oh what a relief it is NOT!

Happy NoPoWriMo 2015!

It’s that time of year again folks where I attempt to write a poem a day for 30 days!  I think it was the first year I participated they suggested only giving yourself ten minutes to write it and I have used that as a rule ever since. The challenge is called NaPoWriMo standing for “National Poetry Writing Month.” On the web site for this challenge they have everyone that is participating’s web sites listed. It is a fun way to browse some interesting poets or you don't have to have a web site to participate. Anyone can join in! Let me know if you are doing it as I'd love to follow your poetry journey too.

This is my third year participating and I’ve made it the last two and hope to again this year. Happy April 1^st!

On the First of the Month

The end is before the beginning

Bleeding into each other, yet apart

Once we crash towards crushed against the deadlines

The other we turn the crisp clean page

What shall we write in this new empty space?

The first makes way for the middle and then the end

Nothing more bothersome then when there is no middle

Just ending on that note of panic or satisfaction

But only remembering that last lingering note

When the sounds began slowly to rise

Raising the hair on the back of my neck in anticipation

Of what would come or could or I expected to meet again

An entrance from the wings on opening night

A card that says, “thinking of you my friend”

A hand fumbled for during the movies

A song of a single robin at Spring’s first light

A baby tasting chocolate for the first time

A first quick unexpected peck on the lips

For the first moment of knowing you are exactly where you should be

Finally feeling you’re comfortable in your own skin

One becomes not the loneliest number

But one to cherish, fresh

In that single instant

Tracked by an action, feeling, sight, or sound

Taking our collective breath away once more

Autistic Voyages in Sea-Worthy Vessels

Autism is confusing to children and parents. The first thing doctors tell you is the worst case scenario and so you work hard to improve things for your child and adjust what life looks like for your family. You keep working. You put your heart and soul into changing the future into a better scenario and some days you believe it will be the best scenario. The child knows none of this, but puts one foot in front of the other plodding along with their head down seeing the steps----matching up the footprints to the feet and backtracking along the path to pick some flowers too.

The more you work at it everyone weighs in with opinions and stories, so much so it is hard to keep focused on the work or what the goal of said work is and the child is still your child and they want to be your child no matter what tomorrow is or is not. Someone reminds you to be in the moment together.

So you sit with him or her and sometimes that feels like work. Until that melts away and you are blown away by this person staring back at you or not, but they are there wanting the same love that you want to come back at you. It may only be a fleeting second or a slight flitter of a love wave coming from the child, but it hits the parent with a force and both of you know it.

As a parent, you live there forever, now clinging to the past not wanting the wave to roll past, but to ride it all the way in----frozen at the crest where you can see for miles, days----a clear future----a new plan, place----a promised land. The child is there and where are you parent?

The child is underneath the water, perhaps exploring other fish and creatures that are much more interesting than the wave. Or they might be looking at you wondering how you got up there on top of the wave and how can they get there too? Or they might be wondering why haven't you, the parent, haven’t ridden in into shore already? Or if you take in that instant, you might see for that millisecond, you are there riding together. You want to be there longer, but you'll cherish the millisecond and ride on in and wait on shore for your child to come in too.

What if they don't come to shore? You worry. You pace. You decide to gear up and go find them. So you dive into the work again and again and again. You see the amazing fish under the water and whole other world that your child is exploring and you are fascinated. You study it with them. You learn so much. You are under so long that you both seem to be part of Atlantis or growing your own gills---it feels like the world has changed to this new exploration. You don't realize you aren't so much a part of it until you are both interrupted by a new diver or a submarine passing you by and you remember where you are and now the land up above this undersea world seems farther away than ever. How do we get back? Should we go back?

If surfing above together, it is tiring for both of you as you ride in and go right back out again and again. You are both fit and able to do this for a very long time. But you are seldom on the same board or wave again. It must seem more like a competition than a shared interest anymore.

My analogies go back to the sea often. I don't know why. I have never surfed, but admire those that do. I don't scuba dive either, but have wanted to learn. I think it is the rolling nature of autism and the challenges, joys, and discoveries----as steady as the tide.

Someone said today to never give up on our autistic kiddos and their future of what they might become. As a parent, you think to yourself, "or course not". But then I saw the sweet release of a friend as she said she had to change the dream of what her daughter's future looked like today. I thought this was such a wise statement of reality.

Her sweet daughter is sixteen and has come a long way, but and that but is always there in that sentence when it comes to her daughter, and that isn't a bad thing....autism is just going to be there and she accepts that. Her mother is doing what is best for the moment. Her daughter is on the “severe” end of things for lack of a better term. She is intelligent and delightful in many ways, but silent and locked away in her own private undersea exploration.

Her mother is being in this moment with her daughter. They might be on the beach already or they might be going back out to try to catch another wave. They've spent a lot of time exploring underwater together already. I think now, they are both coming up for air.

I like to think of them both in their own lifeboat rowing hard for an unknown destination, but there are plenty of supplies to last quite a while. No one is worried that they both will get where they need to be. Perhaps they both feel lucky to be floating along in a boat with plenty of supplies. There is a map they both clutch that might turn out to lead to hidden treasure. I'm not sure either of them can read it yet, as it still looks like just a bunch of symbols, not making a whole lot of sense, but I can see them bobbing up and down puzzling over this new destination. This is what they both have discovered in the swimming, diving, exploring, and surfing phases of the last sixteen years.

They knew they were "off the cruise" long ago. Some said to the mother that they were shipwrecked, but not in the mother’s estimation, the cruise part or ship was never really there. But today, somehow these tiny vessels did appear with their names blazoned on the side of these two little boats. They climbed in to captain their own destinations.

The mother is still there bobbing beside her daughter, but the daughter’s boat isn’t tied to the mother. The girl is a young woman steering her in a new direction away from the mother. They are settling in to travel in the miles and miles of water they had just been treading in, but it is now a partner with them in getting somewhere even if it is still unknown. This sea of autism holds them up in their dinghies of destiny. As they keep rowing...and rowing....and rowing into an unknown sun and they hope they can spy land once more.

Rainy days bring poetry....

Sonic Tectonic

Cold, slanted rain pelts my window

Like a beaded curtain swinging shut on summer

It is dark.

Blocking all rays reaching towards my memory

Of a lemon filled sky in a Caribbean sea

With white Greek bleached flour sack cloud islands to be visited

The autumn trees make my merry moment in the sun a ghetto

A former shadow of itself and unsubstantial, dark

Your rivers of words about facts and fun

Have become a downpour of abandoned feelings

Over flooding the land of reason

Vacation spots, if there weren’t volcanos popping up everywhere

I hope these are harmless

Dormant and dead with no active lava

Though if one blows,

I will cheer on the rain

To cool off and harden

So we can explore this moonscape

Navigating what is here

Still alive

To thrive after some more time goes by

And the sun returns

To dry reason

Where we stand

A Sense of Order....

Remember about a month ago when I came back from a meeting and the Boy had voluntarily put away the dishes out of the dishwasher? He only did it one time much to my slightest disappointment hoping that it was one of those summer obsessions starting, but no. Well, I didn't connect that to the 3 plates missing for a month. I thought we'd broken a bunch or something.
I found them today where he had carefully put them. They were hiding in plain sight in with the dishes, but just hanging out with non-plates---artfully stacked with fancy serving bowls and tucked in sideways. I just don't open that side of the cabinet often. It didn't occur to me as he had put the other plates where they belong.

Ignore the spilled ground coffee there (not dirt). He turned the white plate with the blue rim upside down over the bowl so the flowered plate would have a match. And tucked the one small all white plate in by the black serving platter.

I noticed these were all the "odd" ones out that are single strange plates that have somehow come to live with us and are "one of a kind". So, he logically put them with the "one of a kind" serving bowls that I don't have any that match each other.
I thought about it and how it is a step in the right direction of having a sense of order that makes sense to him. I think this was the clearest message he's given us about how he would like things ordered. We don't have order in this house and he  has told me of late he doesn't like that. I do understand. I try to work on it as I'm sure my sense of "order" doesn't make sense to anyone but me.
I guess that is part of what autism is too. An order and sensibility that is not only one's own, but makes sense to the individual. It puts all things in order for them.

My stack of blue plates without those plates. I always nest them by size, but with those odd plates stuck into the stack usually.

I'm sure there was a reason each plate had it's own home sideways stuck in, upside down on top of the bowls, and sitting alone in one part of the cabinet. I'm sure it made him very happy to see them there and not with the stack of blue and black plates on the other side of the cabinet. I remember how proud he was when I got home that day he put everything away---to arrange his own world---for him----for me---for all of us.
If he does unload the dishwasher again anytime soon, I'll know to look. And I'll keep searching for those missing items that really aren't lost at all.

It rains and I turn to poetry again...

This was written for our sudden cold stormy snap in July. I keep saying to myself, “It is still summer, I know it!” 7/25/2014

Febuly

Dropping twenty degrees

Puts me on my knees

The summer wind, cool as the cucumbers

Growing in the garden now slumber

Leaves falling in July

Filling the sky

With dust of another time

Feeling I have to climb

Up and out

I want to shout

It should be warm

On the horizon a storm

Blows in mush

A winter-like hush

Surrounding us

The Lifecycle of a Boy

It seems like it takes forever for spring to get here, but when it does the wonders never cease. I feel the same way about our little boy. He was a baby a long time and then in an instant it was gone. In many ways I long for that time again, but I remember it as turbulent as pleasant. Spring can be like that.

Today I was often reminded that even though our guy is approaching his last year in single digit numbers in age, I will look back on this too wistfully at some point wanting that season to last longer. Instead, he is fascinated by the reproduction cycle at the moment: humans, birds, bugs, and plants. It reminds me that those fascinations will pull on him at some point drawing him into a whole new budding world.

Last night in the pool’s locker room my husband heard him lecture on the human life cycle how we all begin as an egg meets sperm deal. He asks such startling questions like, “Mama, why did you want your egg fertilized by Papa in 2004?” I have become accustomed to most of these questions asked in a nonchalant manner, but it does startle strangers to hear our conversations out in public. His voice is very loud and carries far---I am used to it, but others turn in mild curiosity at the boy with the loud questions about the human life cycle specifically his birth cycle. Last night my husband came out of the locker room laughing as he said our boy went all the way in his description of the life cycle as to include being dead, buried, and turning into fertilizer for the plants. I'm sure the men in the locker room were thinking what kind of kid is this?

This fascination has happened every spring with him for a couple of years. It begins with the butterflies arriving in his classroom and the cycle of the butterfly. Then he gets out his ladybug book to check on that life cycle too comparing the similarities. Then the loud spring birds remind him, along with Easter, about eggs. This brings us to eggs outside the body, his favorite to track are chicken eggs. Coming back to those inside the body that come out---bugs. And then babies, usually beginning with pigs and sheep or kittens, which eventually ends with comparing them to humans.

This year instead of rushing through all of those things a week at a time, they are all mentioned at some point throughout any given day. The main lecture on humans and then picking one side focus. This week since the butterflies in his classroom have hatched, it is all about the butterflies and ladybugs. Today, he had a day off from school, so I picked up some ladybugs with him at the garden store to be released at sunset to our garden. I took pictures as he pontificated on the life cycle of the lady bug.

“Mama there are 1500 lady bugs in that bag there. You water the plant with aphids so they have a drink of water after they are released.”

“Here hold this while I cut the bag,” I say to him. He grins and holds it making his excited groaning noises. I take the bag from him and cut carefully as the little buggers are just waking from their slumber. We took them out of the refrigerator a few minutes earlier and they are sluggish still. I release the bugs. They are so beautiful as they struggle out of their sterile white mesh home and into the world. I decide to grab my camera from the house to take pictures.

“That is a good idea Mama, to take pictures of the ladybug release!” He jumps around some more and follows me into the house for a moment.

“Mama, do you think any of them will be on top of one another mating?” this thought sends him into running excited circles.

“Well, I don’t know. I would think they might be hungry just after waking up, but you never know.” We head back out to the waiting bag.

“Mama, look…l….l…look at all the ladybugs. They will eat the aphids on your roses and get fat. They will get on top of each other and then about a week later they will find a leaf and deposit eggs. Then those eggs will hatch and we will have thousands of ladybugs in our yard. Do you see any of them mating?”

I look carefully through the lens contemplating this question seriously. “Oh, look those two aren’t just crawling through the group. They have crawled off and yep, seem to be on top of one another.”

His eyes are shining now, “There will be baby ladybugs soon!”

“Maybe,” I say while I keep snapping pictures.

We watch for a while and he launches in from ladybugs to his own birth asking particulars. The light is fading quickly. I tell him we’d better depart while we can still see to step over the pile of bugs and not squish any. That thought horrifies him, but I reassure him that I promise not to harm any ladybugs in the making of these pictures.

We spent the rest of the evening picking out our favorites of the pictures (posted here). Surmising what we might find in the morning----if indeed the bag would be empty. And how many babies there might be.

He reminded me that they could fly away. "They have wings Mama, and might fly away after the aphids are gone or it gets too cold." I felt sad thinking about if our little garden couldn't provide enough for these tiny travelers. I felt sad thinking about my little guy and if he'd fly away some day or not---where would those wings take him? Just to the fence and back or beyond? Would what we have keep him content or would the call of spring make him take wing to another adventure? 

Ladybird, ladybird,

Fly away home,

Your house is on fire,

And your children all gone;

All except one

And that’s little Ann,

And she has crept under

The warming pan.

----Mother Goose