A Life Not Unencumbered

  • A Life Not Unencumbered

    By Ken Delpit

    A life without encumbrances, now that would be something. Can there possibly be such a thing? Among mortal human beings, it is hard to see how. Living encourages encumbrances. Living entails encumbrances. To live is to be encumbered. Encumbrances are the baggage fees that we pay for our journey.

    Encumbrance-free living for most ordinary humans is a foreign concept. For some, it may be a distant dream. For many or most, though, it is beside the point. For these folks, navigating the encumbrances is what life is about. “Next,” as a primal motivating force. Where to go next, what to do next, what to think next.

    The trouble with navigating head-down from a mental map, however detailed or vague the map, is that it necessitates a removal of self from the process. You are not the observant traveler. You are the bus driver. You transport yourself here and there, mentally as well as physically. You check boxes in your mind as “Done.” You relax when you’ve accomplished something, but just for a couple of seconds. Then, you close the bus doors and it’s on to the next stop.

    Periodically, we celebrate people who have taken a different path. Gandhi, Thoreau, Buddha, Jesus, they speak to us of shedding encumbrances. They advocate not just leaving the luggage behind, but not even packing in the first place. They teach us to trust what is within. They preach that the self is wise, if only we would listen.

    I’ll have to take their word for it. I’ll think about all of this later. Meanwhile, I’ve got a hundred things to do before 4:00 o’clock.

    Ken Delpit has been writing for quite a while, that is if you count computer programming and technical documentation as “writing.” Since leaving those professions behind, Ken has discovered an exciting new world of creative writing. He is now giddily exploring new devices, such as adjectives, subtlety, mystery, and humans with emotions and feelings.

    Marlene C

  • Wind. Prompt #575

    Image by Matt Artz, Unsplash

    The way the wind is blowing.

    Marlene C

  • Blessings

    By Cheryl Moore

    Despite the pandemic, despite the looming drought, despite the growing tensions in the world—we are living in a wonderful time.

    On clear mornings, I see the warm pink in the eastern sky where the sun is about to rise.

    This time of year, April, it rises between two tall palms across the street—in June it will rise behind Sonoma Mountain.

    This is the most beautiful time in the garden —leaves on trees just breaking open, giving a lacy feel against the blue skies. Rose buds are opening and iris unfolding on their tall stalks.

    California poppies are everywhere and fields are full of mustard.

    Bird song fills the air as males find mates and begin nest building. Soon there will be small yellow ducklings trailing their parents down at the river and fishermen will sit on the bank to see what the incoming tide will bring.

     Besides a cozy house and garden, I have good health, enough funds, and loving family and friends—so many blessings. I cherish them all.

    Cheryl Moore grew up in the Midwest then lived in San Francisco to finish high school and attend college where she studied biology. During the late sixties and into the mid-seventies she lived first in Sweden for a year, then for four years in Iran where she served as librarian in a small research library for wildlife biologists.

    Nature and science have always been among her interests. Since returning to the U.S., she has lived in Petaluma and has dabbled in writing stories. Since retiring from employment at Sonoma State University, she has taken up painting

    Marlene C

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  • Waking Up on a Spring Morning

    By Deb Fenwick

    On spring mornings, after a long brittle winter, the truth is everywhere. It begins at dawn. Not that I wake up that early anymore. These days, I sleep until the sun is high in the warm sky.

    But I remember thirty years of sunrise drives—drives where a glowing, golden-pink ribbon stretched languidly across Lake Michigan. Like it had all the time in the world. Unhurried. Unlike me.

    The sky had no need to rush to work. To meet deadlines. To prove its worth. From the driver’s seat, I watched the morning clouds, dumbstruck some days, because they seemed to delight in their own essence. Those early morning skies seemed, somehow, to speak to something truer than the life I was living at the time.

    In those days, I didn’t have time for walks where I watched the earth wake up to its magnificent self. The glory song of forsythia bursting into bloom was muted. Of course, there were hyacinths, tulips, and spring snowdrops emerging—calling my name, beckoning me to take pause. But I pretended not to hear them. Even though their joy was riotously loud, I played deaf. I was preoccupied with the slow-strangle-everyday crush of the mundane.

    Learning about the nature of truth and living the dharma is the work of a lifetime. Some say many lifetimes. We can choose a religious faith, a spiritual tradition, a guru, or a master teacher. Take your pick. We can obsess over finding the perfect prayer or the most meaningful mantra. We’re taught that we have to search for truth. We’re taught that it’s elusive and that unless we’re willing to renounce our worldly goods, shave our heads and check into a one-star monastery, we probably haven’t earned it. But the irony is, it’s everywhere once we decide to wake up on a spring morning. There’s an all-access VIP pass. It’s in our pulse. It’s in that redbud branch that’s blasting its neon pink blossoms into the breeze.

    The truth patiently whispered in my ear for many years. Then, it shouted. 

    These days, I sometimes see truth so real that it burns my eyes. Right now, there’s a blaze of life outside my window. Right now, the fragile, translucent petals of lemon yellow daffodils are exploding into spring sunshine. There’s wisteria on the wooden gate. It creeps slowly—just waiting to share its wild purple life force. The dogwood’s unfolding leaves are ever-so-patient in saying yes to the warmth of spring.

    Spring reminds meto say yes to this moment. This one. Right here, right now. Can you believe it? There’s a now. And it’s alive with possibility. What will you do with me? it asks, almost like a dare.

    Look away from your screen for a moment. Poof! That now? Gone. It only lives in the past. A new now, blank-slate opportunity is always being born. What good fortune!

    So for today, I promise to pay attention to my now—to listen to the truth of the sky. I say that in such a cavalier way, right? Like it’s easy. Like the grocery list and the laundry chores aren’t going to derail me. But when they inevitably do, I’ll remember to trust the now and the beauty of the sunrise. Even if I sleep right through it.

    Deb Fenwick is a Chicago-born writer who currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois. After spending nearly thirty years working as an arts educator, school program specialist, youth advocate, and public school administrator, she now finds herself with ample time to read books by her heroes and write every story that was patiently waiting to be told. When she’s not traveling with her heartthrob of a husband or dreaming up wildly impractical adventures with her intrepid, college-age daughter, you’ll find her out in the garden getting muddy with two little pups.

    Marlene C

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  • I was the kid who . . . Prompt #573

    Your Deepest Core by Maggie Rogers:

    Throughout my life I’ve thought of vulnerability as a shield. My logic goes something like—if I tell you my whole truth, everything I’m feeling, then there’s no ammo left for you to hurt me. It’s been my default defense mechanism for as long as I can remember. I was the kid in the second grade telling everyone who I had a crush on instead of trying to keep it a secret. 

    Prompt: I was the kid who . . .

    Prompt inspired from The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad, “A newsletter for people seeking to transform life’s interruptions into creative grist.”

    Marlene C

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  • The Hum

    By Camille Sherman

    It startled me. The devices were powered off, the lights relieved of duty. The street below offered no atmosphere or background detail. All is still. 

    I whip my head, crane my neck, squint my eyes. The hum does not become louder, more apparent, more directional. It almost becomes maddeningly softer, like a drop of water has come and diluted its color so its wayward edges are harder to spot. 

    It doesn’t quite have a pitch. I rule out the heater, much more ostentatious when it kicks on to rescue cold feet. I come to terms with the fact that it is likely the refrigerator, reassuring me that it is trusty and functional.

    I put my mug in the sink, grab the blanket off the couch, and slide into bed. Lying there, I realize the devices are powered off, the world is asleep. The low hum is the sound of myself, alone, sitting still.

    Camille Sherman is a professional opera singer from the Bay Area. She trained at The Boston Conservatory and the San Francisco Conservatory of music, and served as an Artist in Residence at Pensacola Opera and Portland Opera. She currently lives in Portland, where she continues to sing and develop projects with local artists.

    Marlene C

  • A Type of Disconnect

    It’s been a difficult thirteen months during shelter in place. From March 2020 to now (April 2021) many of us have felt a spectrum of emotions.

    Alison Flood eloquently captures what many of us are experiencing:

    After a month of lockdown, William Sutcliffe wrote on Twitter: “I have been a professional writer for more than twenty years. I have made my living from the resource of my imagination. Last night I had a dream about unloading the dishwasher.”

    Whether it is dealing with home schooling, the same four walls, or anxiety caused by the news, for many authors, the stories just aren’t coming.

    “Stultified is the word,” says Orange prize-winning novelist Linda Grant. “The problem with writing is it’s just another screen, and that’s all there is … I can’t connect with my imagination. I can’t connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what’s going on in the world.”

    Grant describes waking up in a fog, and not wanting to do anything but watch rubbish TV. Her mind is not relaxed enough, she says, to connect with her subconscious. “My subconscious is just basically screaming: ‘Get us out of this,’” she says, so there’s no space to create fiction. “I don’t have the emotional and intellectual energy to give to these shadowy people to bring them out of the shadows.”

    William Sutcliffe . . . has been trying to dream up his next book, and “that kind of work is really, really incompatible with lockdown and with this stage of pandemic fatigue.”

    Others, such as writer Gillian McAllister, are most affected by the lack of serendipitous glimpses of other lives. “I think authors take so much inspiration from things like the clothes a stranger is wearing, the smell of their perfume, their body language, seeing a couple interact in a bar,” she says. “I’m having to mine my memories for this stuff, which is less authentic and lacks a kind of specific detail that I like to write about in ordinary times.”

    Linda Grant has also felt “completely cut off from material. I felt I was forced into this interiority, when there was no exterior, no outside to engage with,” she reflects. “You don’t have those overheard conversations on buses, there’s no stimulus. It’s just a sort of sea of greyness, of timelessness.”

    As Grant points out, this is “a once in a blue moon example of every writer being affected by exactly the same situation.”

    So are we likely to be deluged, in a year’s time, with locked-room mysteries, or stream-of-consciousness novels about unloading the dishwasher? “It’s a massive problem for contemporary novelists, most of whose novels are set in a non-specific version of now,” says Sutcliffe. “You can write a novel set in 2013, 14, 15, but 2019, 20, 21, these are three completely different worlds.

    Excerpted from “Writer’s blockdown: after a year inside, novelists are struggling to write” by Alison Flood, The Guardian, February 19, 2021

    Marlene C

  • Studio Apartment

    By Deb Fenwick

    She’s ready to set the world on fire. She’s got the requisite credentials: a freshly printed MBA from Wharton and a studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Yes, it’s a studio, but it’s a nice studio—spacious with carefully curated accessories. She even has houseplants.

    She can’t get to the gym or her Pilates class right now, well, because . . . Covid. She meets up with girlfriends for gossipy, boozy, Zoom happy hours on Fridays where everyone looks great from the waist up. She even puts on lipstick for the calls so that she can see the after image of her lips on the wineglass long after everyone logs off. It’s proof that she had fun.

    She and her friends are in that sweet spot after college but before the gorgeous weight of marriage, mortgages, and children (in that order) that will bind them to suburban homes with good school districts. 

    Her parents love her. They’re generous. They worry. Mom pays for the cell phone plan, so the least she can do is answer her parents’ texts and call them once a week. She calls her mom and dad on Sundays. Well, FaceTime, actually, because it’s good to see family—to see the moment her mother bites her lip when she hears that the job search seems to be stalled. And then the quick pivot and recovery as Mom forces a bright smile and adds sunshine to her voice, saying, “Something will turn up, darling. It’s Covid.”  Dad will smile silently like the sentinel he is. At the end of the call, he’ll ask if she needs money. She’ll mention that she could use just a little extra this month for groceries. Just until the job thing comes through. Just until things open up.

    When she ends those calls on Sundays, she doesn’t quite feel like setting the world on fire. Maybe just her apartment. The four walls seem to be closing in on her. Late afternoon New York darkness descends and devours any space for breathing.  She’s been here alone for over a year with her well-curated accessories. Alone. It’s the first time she’s ever lived by herself. She bathes, prepares meals, and scrolls in solitary confinement. It’s an endless loop except for the job rejections. Who knew she could grow to hate this apartment and everything in it?

    It was once all she dreamed about. Getting out on her own. Owning New York. Fast-paced work with a hedge fund firm, maybe. Clubs, theater, and dining with girlfriends. A boyfriend. Romance. Not Zoom calls. Not lipstick that she won’t wash off the wine glass.

    Tomorrow is Monday, she thinks to herself. A new week. She’ll follow-up on leads. Check-in on LinkedIn. For tonight, she’ll turn on the small ceramic lamp that sits in the middle of the mid-century modern end table as dusk turns to night. She’ll water two plants with leaves that are yellowing just a bit at the edges. She’ll make a bowl of noodles and stare out the window of her Brooklyn Heights brownstone as frost forms on the windows of the dry cleaners’ across the street.   

    Deb Fenwick is a Chicago-born writer who currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois. After spending nearly thirty years working as an arts educator, school program specialist, youth advocate, and public school administrator, she now finds herself with ample time to read books by her heroes and write every story that was patiently waiting to be told. When she’s not traveling with her heartthrob of a husband or dreaming up wildly impractical adventures with her intrepid, college-age daughter, you’ll find her out in the garden getting muddy with two little pups.

    Marlene C

  • Can’t Live Without . . . Prompt #572

    Write about an appliance or a gadget you cannot live without.

    Sentence starts:

    I have to have . . .

    I cannot live without . . .

    Marlene C

  • First Lines From Books . . . Prompt #571

    First lines from books can inspire writing.

    Choose one, or more, and Just Write!

    “My name is Ruth. I grew up with . . .” — Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson:

    “This was probably a mistake . . .” —Letters from Paris by Juliet Blackwell

    “With wobbly knees, I stood at the edge of the three-foot diving board.” —Beyond Recovery by Shawn Langwell

    “Marsh is no swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky.” —Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

    “The biggest irony about that night is that I was always scared to fly.” —How to Walk Away by Katherine Center

    Marlene C