You meet me only on your own terms, describe me and put me into categories based on the systems created by the human mind. You expect me to respond like you do, refusing to grant intelligence or even sentience to my interactions with others of my species, with the world I know, inhabit, understand. You deny me even the dignity of knowing who I am.
The sea calls to you—it is where you came from, what you carry in the cells that form your body. Before history begin, we were all one. You believe in your own superiority, the pinnacle of a tree with many branches that was seeded in the ocean. But the branches are subtle, complex. Our paths are so divergent they intersect only on completely different layers of reality.
You consider the possibilities; I am all potential. You struggle to reconcile body and mind; my brain is everywhere in my body, fully integrated into my entire being. We have no physical equivalence. What makes you think your dreams are better, or more real?
what is a thought? can words capture it? images, colors, patterns—this
is music—transformations into chords of utter joy
It took me awhile to figure out what animal to give a voice to for the earthweal challenge this week from Sherry, when animals speak. But I kept going back in my mind to a book I read last year by Peter Godfrey Smith, Other Minds, about the octopus but also about how life came to be. Cephalopods are truly alien forms of life.
They are their own canvas, their own clay, with malleable bodies that can change their skin both in color and pattern. Their mind is located throughout their body and arms, and they seem to both learn and play. Is it possible to ever truly understand their consciousness?
I was thinking about the painting I did yesterday when I consulted the Oracle this morning. A shadorma for Colleen’s #tankatuesday. Sue Vincent provided the inspiration with her haiku, below.
clouds cover the moon, beyond dawn’s pale horizon sun rises unseen
all most dreamed synthesized otherworldly this hour this hidden light found by shifting seasons like a song already known a secret spellbound heartsown with haunted melodies resonating as echoes returned from a lost refrain
For Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday where the prompts this week were a photo provided by Trent McDonald (above) and/or synonyms for the words “MOVE & MAKE” provided by David Ellis.
My poem, “The Healing of Emptiness” is posted on The Ekphrastic Review today, immediately following Jane Dougherty’s luminous “Horse Dreams”, acting almost like a coda to the ruminations of her protagonist’s mind. The inspirational art is Franz Marc’s Tower of Blue Horses. You can read all the selections here.
My thanks once again to editor Lorette C. Luzajic for supporting my work and the interaction between the visual and written arts.
it’s easy to say no—but what does that word really mean, exactly?—“not now”?—“never”?– “I don’t understand”?—
“I don’t want to deal with it”?—what lies between the letters, the sounds hard and long? if you take away the n
what is left?– only a surprise, a sense of wonder—worlds filled with possibility– the magic of ”o!”
The Kick-About prompt this week features a photo of the Cottingley fairies, above, taken by two girls in England in 1917. Looking at the photo from the vantage point of digital manipulation in 2020, it’s easy to laugh at the fact that anyone could have actually believed that they were “real”. And yet…
