It might be Spring?

I went for a walk this morning. The torrential rain is keeping the pollen count down.  The clouds were low on the mountain--the air so saturated that it beaded on my face.  It was like the wind was trying to hold my hand--playfully filling the relaxed palms of my hands, buffeting my hair from my neck.  More like swimming than walking. I could smell lilacs. Oh what a smell.

I have been helping a doctor friend of mine to write press releases and articles for a book. He does not write. He thinks. My job is to translate that. Sometimes it goes well sometimes it doesn't. But I got a chapter done of my WIP. It is about Paganini and French Fries. Once I get it presentable I will post it.

Yay for the Miracle of Everyday Life

Albert Einstein: “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.”

It Has Begun: Writing again

I am a writer who does not write.
That is probably one of the worst things to be.
But not so anymore.
I wrote 2000 words tonight on my WIP.  I am going to try to write something everyday.  It is time to start new essays, and new book proposals.  It is time to be a writer again.  It is time to practice what I preach.  To boldly go where no writer had gone before: the middle school lunch room.

Actually a lot of writers have been there.  But they have never been in the mind of a chronically ill twelve year old  girl who is so sick she misses her eighth grade year. That is somewhere nobody but I has been.  That sentence sounds ungrammatical, but I assure you that it is.

It is also one in the morning and I need to go to sleep.

Another of the Reasons I love Rumi

CRY OUT IN YOUR WEAKNESS 
A dragon was pulling a bear into its terrible mouth.

A courageous man went and rescued the bear.
There are such helpers in the world, who rush to save
anyone who cries out. Like Mercy itself, 
they run toward the screaming.

And they can't be bought off.
If you were to ask one of those, "Why did you come
so quickly?" he or she would say, "Because I heard 
your helplessness."

Where lowland is,
that's where water goes. All medicine wants
is pain to cure.

And don't just ask for one mercy.
Let them flood in. Let the sky open under your feet.
Take the cotton out of your ears, the cotton
of consolations, so you can hear the sphere-music.

Push the hair our of your eyes.
Blow the phlegm from your nose,
and from your brain.

Let the wind breeze through.
Leave no residue in yourself from that bilious fever.
*             *                    *
Tear the binding from around the foot
of your soul, and let it race around the track
in front of the crowd. Loosen the knot of greed
so tight around your neck. Accept your new good luck.

Give your weakness
to one who helps.

Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.
Just a little beginning whimper,
and she's there.
God created the child, that is, your wanting,
so that it might cry out,
so that milk might come.

Cry out! Don't be stolid and silent
with your pain. Lament! And let the milk
of loving flow into you.

The hard rain and wind
are ways the cloud has 
to take care of us.

Be patient.
Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.

Ignore those that make you fearful
and sad, that degrade you
back toward disease and death.