Feeling solid, stable, beneath my feet,
some say the earth spins and soars in the void.
Here, near the Great Lakes, I have made my home
near Erie and St. Claire, then Michigan.
Dirt and rock and salted water, with a
thin layer of air. Iron at the core.
This is where home is.
Home is here on Earth.
Cities dot the surface of the land
while arbitrary lines and squiggles define
nations and states, forcing allegiance on
heterogeneous populations.
It’s a lost cause these days.
Earth is now home.
From the Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt: Papery Traces 14APR22
Several members of the group said they liked this piece. Many of them are newer members who don’t recall my early flash fiction and who don’t care for the Knomo Choicius stories. :>(
They challenged me to write the novel. I offer this to anyone who wants to keep going with it. Acknowledge this link, please.
But maybe I will keep going a little bit. Here’s the beginning of the next chapter…
The prompt in our writing group was “Breadcrumbs.” As usual, I fell into the rut of SOC (stream of consciousness) writing.
Pinky’s beads are really cool and I hope that nobody uses them for breadcrumbs. Although as metaphorical breadcrumbs, I suppose they are suitable, so I am going to go against the hope I recently expressed.
Just what is a breadcrumb? I am not talking about a single breadcrumb, of course, or even the scattering of breadcrumbs left next to the plate of a messy eater like myself. Or even the thinner scattering of breadcrumbs that might be found at the place recently used to open a bag of sliced bread, or to slice a loaf of home baked bread. No, I am talking about breadcrumbs in a line, or a nominally one dimensional curvy pseudo-line, intentionally left as a clue to where to find something. Or by metaphorical stretch, how to find something. Or by further metaphorical stretch, how to figure something out.
The point being that someone else has already figured out how to accomplish the target, shall we say, of the breadcrumbs.
Of course calling Pinky’s beads breadcrumbs implies that Pinky herself intentionally left clues. But again, by metaphorical extension, maybe we can still legitimately call the beads breadcrumbs, even if she only unintentionally created breadcrumbs along with the beads.
For how does the one who sees the trail of breadcrumbs know unequivocally whether they were intentional, and thus truly breadcrumbs, or unintentional, and thus simple data? Unless we have separate data as to the intentionality, these metaphorical cases are harder to classify as either true breadcrumbs, or the result of our natural human tendency to find patterns where none exist.
With actual breadcrumbs, it is easier to see that it was intentional, especially, as in the case of the original breadcrumb story from which most of us probably get our idea of a trail of breadcrumbs leading us on. That story being, of course, Hansel and Gretel. But if we think a little harder, we are reminded that the breadcrumbs were a failure, until metaphorical breadcrumbs in the form of small stones were substituted.
Personally, I am struggling to recall the details of the story. Did Hansel’s metaphorical breadcrumbs lead Gretel to risk? These children were really smart, I just realize, to carry out the breadcrumb experiment in the first place, and keep modifying their procedure as needed.
So, back to Pinky’s beads. To me, they are breadcrumbs because we see Pinky’s creative mind at work. They help us figure out a little bit of how Pinky’s mind works. They let us see that she saw a way to make complexly patterned colorful cylindrical beads out of a flat piece of colored paper, through the use of a double symmetry procedure around mutually perpendicular axes. Very cool. And this observation from someone who really struggled to pass her crystallography class in her junior year.
I don’t know if she told Jim Z how she made the beads prior to his explaining it to me, or whether Jim figured it out by himself. My first assessment was wrong. Doing it the way I originally thought after a cursory glance would probably not look as good. Doing it the way she did it, rolling the paper around a chop stick, removing the chop stick from the center of the now cylindrical piece of paper, flattening the cylinder to create a very skinny and thick strip, which she then rolls into a disk with a small hole conveniently left for a matching colored string to create a necklace, looks very good. Before attaching the string, the bead is coated with a shiny transparent gloss coat. Very cool. If I did it, due to my clumsiness, it would not look so nice.
Breadcrumbs to see Pinky’s creativity. Metaphorical breadcrumbs. Is it too much of a stretch?
If you like the idea of these beads, even if the only one I had left to take a picture of when I finally posted this today, having given the other four I bought to friends, leave a comment and I will send you info on how to reach Pinky. Maybe she has some left.
Write about what you don’t know. I just realized that is the opposite advice from what people usually give. Well, it’s not going to be hard for me. Anyway, that was the prompt in my creative writing group this morning. It was good to see several people LIVE IN BODIES for the first time since CoVid. It was good to have real raspberry truffle decaf at Sozo’s. Here are a few things that I don’t know!
If I don’t know what this afternoon will bring, the same is true no less for tomorrow’s delivery.
I am glad that I invented the idea of Celebrating Uncertainty when I wrote my science fiction novel for NaNoWriMo in 2011. It helps drag me up from the deeper doom I would otherwise be forced to explore when faced with difficulties and the choices that accompany them. What, for example, will I do about the tooth that broke yesterday? I don’t know. Unfortunately for me, as a materials engineer, I am exceedingly aware that tooth enamel is very brittle. A chomp on something hard is likely to remove another big chunk. When will a painful crack get down to the nerves? I don’t know. Feeling the uncertainty helps me empathize with those who, like me, don’t have dental insurance, and who, unlike me, don’t have a choice in the matter.
What else don’t I know? Will the few new clients that have come to my business bring interesting projects that will pay the bills? Despite a burst of activity in March, new inquiries are evaporating as the doubt about the infrastructure bill in Congress comes to the forefront of corporate decision makers. Should I, a mere month after I decided I would keep the business, give up and do something else? I don’t know. But I just applied for some PPP money, so if I get it, I will have some breathing room before I have to worry about the fact that I DON’T KNOW!
What would I do, or try to do, if I did close the business? Hopefully, finish my failure analysis book, get it published, and try to follow in the path of Chris Yared, who solicited and received a Forward from a relevant person, published her book, scheduled a launch event through a bookstore, and is now writing articles and accepting speaking gigs to promote the book.
There are multiple other books I would like to write. The Idiot’s Guide to Critical Thinking, for example, although I couldn’t call it that unless Penguin agreed to publish it. Citizen Science for the Spiritually Minded. I haven’t tried that hard, but the Union of Concerned Scientists and Audubon have their own ideas of what Citizen Science is, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of overlap with my own. Why? I don’t know. Would I have success if I write it? I don’t know. Will I have more luck finding people to give me feedback on this potential book than I have on my current projects? I don’t know. One thing I do know. Thanks to the forces of the universe for my writing groups.
Waiting. I am always waiting. Blame Pandora, if you have a need to blame. As the Buddha taught, humans in our inherently socialized condition always have to live with an undercurrent of anxiety and it’s mirror image, longing. So I wait. Waiting is what gives direction to my life.
Waiting is the arrow of time. The length of the shaft may be visualized as the strength of the longing. The arrow’s mirror image? The desire to avoid the anxiety associated with the lack of the object of longing.
Writing this way, in an impersonalized manner, allows any reader to fill in their own blanks. Seeing the arrow of longing speeding towards a desire, or, perhaps by its own heaviness, losing speed and falling to the earth, allows us the opportunity to see ourselves as one of the entities caught up in the human condition.
Once we can see that we are so caught up, and that our desires and fears make arrows, maybe we will be more careful about the type of arrows we craft. Are we making an arrow that will pierce someone else? Is this desirable or undesirable?
Why Yin and Yang? See how one defines the other, even if you don’t realize it at first.
Here’s another version that my writing group said sounded like a professor, less lively. BUT it provides some actionable information on ways to try to escape the pain of longing and anxiety.
Waiting. I am always waiting. Blame Pandora, if you have a need to blame. As the Buddha taught, humans in our inherently socialized condition always have to live with an undercurrent of anxiety and it’s mirror image, longing. So I wait. Waiting is what gives direction to my life.
The process of waiting draws the arrow of time. Time is inherent in waiting. Do tigers wait for their next meal? I am not sure. Probably they are focused on doing what it takes to get the next meal when hunger tells them it’s time to do so. Humans wait. And our domesticated animals.
Back to the arrow of time crafted by waiting. The length of the shaft may be visualized as the strength of the longing. The arrow’s mirror image? The desire to avoid the anxiety associated with the lack of the object of longing.
Writing this way, in an impersonalized manner, allows any reader to fill in their own blanks. Seeing the arrow of longing speeding towards a desire, or, perhaps by its own heaviness, losing speed and falling to the earth, allows us the opportunity to see ourselves as one of the entities caught up in the human condition.
Once we can see that we are so caught up, and that our desires and fears make arrows, maybe we will be more careful about the type of arrows we craft. Are we making an arrow that will pierce someone else? Is this desirable or undesirable?
Or, once we can see that we are fashioning arrows with our waiting for certain things, we’ll take the Buddha’s advice, and start to learn to wait, rather than waiting for a particular thing. Once we see that waiting for a particular thing inherently brings anxiety, we might be open to seeing the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha in a new way. Suffering is universal. The cause of suffering is craving. Letting go of attachments to specific outcomes leads toward liberation from suffering. There is a path that can end suffering.
Here is what I wrote from a different prompt, having to do with stars.
The stars. All the stars? No. A particular set of stars draws her attention. She had waited for years for this moment. The training to sit patiently. The training to direct the arrow of attention with the flashlight of consciousness. Illuminating just what was important. Cygnus, the Great Swan, slowly approached the position that would allow the leap from earth to heaven.
The Great Swan was merely the skeleton that marked the more important subject, the Mother Goddess herself. That was the true tens of thousands of years ago and it was true on the day that Zinnia waited. Cygnus no longer had to work as the pole star, doing the hard labor of turning the universe. That was the task of the Little Bear these days. Zinnia’s heart pointed her eyes toward Cygus.
This little piece refers to the emerging modern understanding that humans way back 30,000 years ago had an advanced religion based on finding our place in the universe. One of the major stars of the constellation of Cygnus marks the exit of the birth canal of the great female figure that is formed by our sideways view of the Milky Way. This star was pole star way back when, not our currently named Polaris. So the mythology of the day had our spirits longing to return to the Great Mother through the star portal. It had to be at a particular time of year. See the writings of Andrew Collins and others.
Well, I might be shocked if someone actually reads this far and shares the results of their subsequent researches!
The notes bounced off of the flat surfaces of the large boulders strewn around the landscape. The pile of dirt and small stones grew longer, and taller. The decibel level of the so called music diminished. The racket from the stones sliding down the slopes of the growing ridge of rock and dirt drowned out more and more of the sound emanating from the window of the blue pick-up truck.
The digger stepped down hard on the upper edge of the spade’s blade, wiggling the top of the handle forward and back, in an effort to pry the annoying rock away from its neighbors.
A loud sigh announced the last bang of the last rock tumbling down the side of the rock pile. Joe grabbed the five gallon bucket from the edge of the rectangular pit, turned it upside down, and tested its stability. Then, stepping on it, he hauled himself up to ground level, and turned toward the truck, pulling the kerchief off of his head and wiping his face.
“Least I can do,” he mumbled, pulling the corpse out of the back of the truck. It did not complain as he dragged it toward the pit, and laid it out atop the ridge of rocks. “Least I can do.”
“Damn self-proclaimed musician should be allowed to experience the same torture he subjected us to.”
Joe walked back to the truck, and cranked up the music. He returned to the pit, pulled out the bucket, and sat down.
“Half an hour. That’s all he gets. Time to be moving on.”
Suddenly, Joe sat upright, hearing something new. The so-called music flowed around him in ever changing combinations as it bounced off of the faces of the boulders. The complexity and subtlety ebbed, then flowed again, each time with a new hue. The barren landscape took on new life.
Joe slumped over. He realized he had erred.
Then, sadly, he rolled the corpse into the pit, filling it in with all of the rocks he had just so recently worked so hard to dig out of the ground. He left the music playing, and walked away, knowing his skeleton, or that of his truck, would open the lock of the mystery of the disappearance of the great composer.
Awesome Writing Prompts #731: Person Place Thing
world’s worst songwriter, freshly dug grave, skeleton key
Faded beyond faded, the color of the roses resembled that of the collapsed mold colony in the center of the ring of tea bag tags.
The dried skin of the corpse smoothed the knobs of the protruding bone ends.
Remains of a slip of newspaper rested in her lap.
Mouse turds decorated the pile of crumbled egg shells in the sink. The corner of a crust of bread remained on a plate, perched on the edge of the countertop.
Jill surveyed the rest of the interior of the cabin. Her eyes returned to the vase, which covered the corner of the folded newspaper, the obituaries staring upward.
Jill turned, and walked out of the door, pulling it shut behind her.
“So,” Jack asked, as he re-holstered his revolver, “is it true?”
“She wasn’t wearing the rose. And there was a whole vase full. But they were pretty faded.”
This prompt, from the site “Prompts that don’t suck” immediately brought Delta to my mind.
A pile of used teabags, an old newspaper with something cut out of it, an egg salad sandwich were three of the six items listed for prompt 733.
The Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt was:
The Glory of the Ordinary People
Ordinary people or ornery people, Mel asked.
Either way, Cathy responded. Here’s my stream of consciousness….
Years ago, one of my clients, who I proposed coming to work for full time, responded with an affirmative to exploring the concept, despite my orneriness. Ornery. Hmm. I think it was the first time I heard that word. I more or less figured out that it meant all my personal characteristics that people complain about. But maybe I will look it up now, that I am sitting in my writing group meeting.
Well, I would have, but the internet is misbehaving. That forces me to continue with my writing. Am I out of luck exploring ornery? Or should I just continue to mull all my bad habits as known to me? Ornery, critical, a complainer, grouchy, won’t willingly suffer people who don’t treat me the way I want to be treated, self-righteous, according to my ex. I could go on, but you get the gist. Twenty one years ago I had a spiritual awakening, and all those characteristics vanished as I walked about the world. They didn’t totally vanish at home, where the bonds of habit are tighter, but suddenly I smiled my way through work and grocery shopping, and participating in my extra-curricular activities.
My vocabulary too, changed. Was my client’s part really cracked? I couldn’t tell for sure. What I actually saw looked like a shadow. Overwhelmed by a sea of beauty, who was I to pronounce their part cracked, defective, useless for the intended application?
The client, to his credit, a former school teacher, was unimpressed. “It’s cracked,” he said. “Call it a crack.” Well, who was I to pronounce their part cracked? Aaahhh, the specialist in cracks?
The next week, at breakfast after the morning prayer meeting, someone tried to sell me some real estate, and then, when I expressed strong disinterest, a small replica of the Calder Sculpture found in downtown Grand Rapids for $24.00, claiming it was enameled solid gold. It was obvious that the volume and weight of gold would far exceed $24.00 worth. Not to speak of the value of the labor of actually making the piece of jewelry. I told him I didn’t believe him. He agreed to let me test it. I told him it would destroy the piece. He said that was ok. I cut the part and mounted it in hard plastic, polished it to a mirror finish, and put it in a scanning electron microscope, then zapped it with an electron beam, which caused it to emit x-rays. The analytical instrument attached to the microscope informed me that the x-rays in a thin layer under the enamel, which covered a piece of steel, were emitted from gold. In other words, it wasn’t solid gold, but mostly iron and oxygen.
Did he thank me for preventing his further lies to potential buyers? No. When I showed him the data, he simply turned away. Of course he didn’t want this information, that now forced him to confront the fact that he had given false information to all of his previous buyers. I realize now that he was subject to the Belief Perseverance Syndrome. New facts be damned. New facts require work to reroute previously laid down neural routes. Entirely too much work for most of us. Most of us won’t even consciously acknowledge that we should do the work, if we want to act out of the truthfulness that most of us still claim to hold as our highest moral guide.
Truth, it turned out, was really more important to me than cheerfulness. Truth, it turned out, really was more important to me than politeness. Or at least that’s the way it used to feel to me.
There are parts of my life that now are reflected back to me as lies. But I guess that the fact that I allow myself to experience the waves of negative opinion washing over me might eventually lead me forward to a balance more in line with ordinary people, who know the truth that cheerfulness and politeness are more important than truth.
Why are some of us so obsessed with truth anyway? Because our parents beat it into us before we had developed logical analytical skills. Because of course our parents don’t want us holding secrets from them. Our parents are responsible for us. Our parents have millenia of cultural practice working in their favor when they invoke the highest spiritual forces to enforce their demands for truthfulness.
“Did you eat that cookie?”
“Did you brush your teeth?”
“Did you break that glass?”
“Did you just feed that Brussel Sprout to the dog?”
Of course a lie, if discovered, would result in punishment, but even if undiscovered by the parental units, would still be known to the omniscient, omnipotent divine forces, who would eventually pay us back for the sin of lying, even if most of the above-mentioned acts do not usually carry felon status. It’s about the cover-up, the LIE.
Yes, it’s easy in retrospect to see why our ancestors found the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient GOD useful as a method of control for their offspring.
Why do some of us hear this verbal call to truth more clearly than we respond to the lived reverence for cheerfulness and politeness? A mystery. Past lives? Just a result of the variety of temperaments dished out by fate?
For now, orneriness is a blessing, a protection. Cheerfulness be damned.
Today is the 214th anniversary of the duel to which Vice President Aaron Burr challenged Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton died 36 hours later after being shot by Burr. The duel was fought at a time when the practice was being outlawed in the northern United States.
Why did a founding father of the United States of America find it necessary to accept the duel challenge? Wikipedia says that the Heights of Weehawken, New Jersey was a popular dueling ground below the towering cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades.
It just struck me very strongly that the fact that DUELING was still popular and apparently accepted among at least some of our founding fathers SHOULD BE TAKEN AS A WARNING.
My opinion of “originalism” in Constitutional interpretation just deteriorated. Not that it was high to start with.
Why “Conservatives” want to conserve the barbaric concepts from the past is something I fail to understand. At the time of the founding of the country, we gave lip service to equality. It’s time to take action to elect and support people who will work to promote equality. And trying to act like we can have equality in the US when it’s not present all over the globe is a farce.
May all beings be happy. May all beings have the causes of happiness.
Also via Scott’s Daily Prompt:
Balance is the core element of all true spiritual paths. The human condition consigns us to be killers, whether of plants, the insects or fungi that would have otherwise have eaten them, or “higher” life forms.
The salient question is what we make of the inevitable pain we cause. Since without evil, we wouldn’t even know what good is, some evil must exist in for good to be recognized.
But balance in real life is much more complicated than choosing good or evil. Most of the time we don’t know which one we are choosing until years / decades later, and even then, what appeared evil may end up being the compost that brought forth the beautiful flower of a later, larger good.
So what else might we consider trying to balance? The food we consume and the energy we expend? Now there’s a huge effort right there! The amount of work we do and the time we “relax”? The amount of money we earn and what we spend? The skills we develop versus the friendships we nurture?
Of course that last one isn’t really an either / or. We can build friendships with people who are working on similar skill development, or those we mentor or are mentored by.
How do we balance our feeling of integrity when fighting for justice against people who disagree with us?
Is the United States setting itself up for a major internal conflict with the appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice?
Isn’t it time for humanity to vomit up the remains of the undigested apple of knowledge of good and evil? It was always a false choice. That was the greater sin. Believing that we could KNOW GOOD AND EVIL, rather than focusing on pragmatic realities for the benefit of all.
I feel depressed and disgusted when confronted by the actions of people who think they are doing good by forcing women to bear unwanted children.
How many people existing today were actually PLANNED by their parents? When I was in the home-birth education course, decades ago, we were the ONLY couple of 10 who had actually planned that conception at that time. Those working against abortion are basically saying “I (or others) suffered, so must you.” Could it be perverse cruelty that drives them? Why is the unborn more important than the born? Only because we are tied to values that date from the time when a group kept its property by having soldiers to defend it to the death. The perceived necessities of group survival morphed into forcing individual behavior.
In most cultures on the earth today, the worst thing that can happen is to be burdened with the care of undesired offspring. I see many friends and acquaintances whose lives and dreams were put on hold for decades, or forever, by having to become parents before they were ready. The price of a moment’s passion or victimization can be steep.
I have never seen any historians specifically state that the need for armies was due in large part to the filling of the parts of the earth where it is relatively easy to survive. This 5000 year old imbalance is philosophically starting to tip back, but without renouncing our belief in the possibility of self-righteousness, I think attaining balance will be tough job.
May all beings be happy, and more importantly, may all beings have the causes of happiness.
To achieve that, we must promote education and basic security for all. That will be much easier if we promote policies that ensure children are born when they have a nurturing space in society awaiting them. Right now, the dominant world culture promotes misery for most.
