Use these words in your freewrite: cook, chant, winter, smear, blue. Try to incorporate sensory detail.
You know the five senses: see, hear, feel, smell, taste . . . and that elusive sixth sense.
The sixth sense is known by various perceptions: common sense, telepathy, intuition, imagination, psychic ability and proprioception (the ability to sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium).
Proprioception is further intriguing with this definition: The unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself. In humans, these stimuli are detected by nerves within the body itself, as well as by the semicircular canals of the inner ear.
Example of proprioception: Right now I know my ankles are crossed under my blankets. (Thank you, Kathy, for this example).
Wikipedia definition of sixth sense: a supposed intuitive faculty giving awareness not explicable in terms of normal perception. “Some sixth sense told him he was not alone.”
Thank you to my Facebook Friends for helping with the definition for the sixth sense. . . Karen, Kathy, Sarah, Rich, Katie, Terry, Ransom, Brian, Robin, Jordan, Elizabeth, Ginger and many more . . . many thanks!
Ke11y
My life, you should know, is a banquet of fun and foible. A place where every heart beat reveals itself. Every tasty new word tingles and tantalizes my artistic palate, is then chewed upon, tough or tender, gritted between teeth and spat out on the page as expertly as a wine taster expels wine to a bucket. A way of writing, an experience, sometimes painful, but it feels like a more honest way of ordering existence.
I enjoy nothing more than to put a lid over cliche, watch it simmer beneath a blue flame, in the same way my mother watched cabbage boil, till its goodness was gone. It’s just a feeling, something in the pit of my stomach. An idea. The chewing gum of writing. Often losing its freshness, but every day I wake up with this literary appetite as if the blank interval was but one long winter, and yet the stove in this writer’s kitchen is still warm.
Frivolity (oh the word itself!) has never left me. Not in winter. Not before the chanting of the cows’ mournful drawn out expression across a frosty morning. Not in front of funeral candles. Is this me? Am I a writer? Surely not, but a ham wearing a blue apron smelling the flowers on the windowsill of Heaven, waiting for the rescue ship of literary souls.
Is this it for me? Am I to be carried away like a child? I fear nothing. I have lived the life of a castaway on the page. My life has never outweighed that of another. I developed my happiness with a devotion to duty. Is it the end, I wonder? Is this my face on the page? Sure enough, a writer is in fact staring back at me. But why the grimace, the wrinkled nose, the lip curled as if it were a knot?
I didn’t know when I wrote; my life has been a banquet, I would end that life here, on the page where I have lived these last ten minutes.
My wife complains she can hear me chewing on the gum, so I die a momentary death.
I am reborn in reason. Settled, loving domestic bliss. What an old maid I’ve become.
mcullen Post author
What a joy to read these words and live in this moment with the “old maid.” Complete, sheer loveliness to read these cooked up charges and chant the blue bygones . . gum smacking, savory delight!