There's A World Outside My Rockin' Chair

There's a world outside my rockin' chair

from the front porch to the stream

where the rocks and ripples chase each other

and the winds in the branches sing

it's a pretty stretch of piney woodland

a fine saunter by flowers in spring

but I'm eighty years old a draggin' a walker

let's see what next year should bring...

There are too many brambles, briers, and cares

from where my Pa built a house and a shed

too many tangles in the mire of my mind

when i think on them kinfolk that's dead

to that wire gate and them plots of fate 

the winding path in the meadow I dread

where i'll lay down my cane in this very last frame

and finally find some peace for my head.

My grandkids come here, play dress-up in pearls,

When their mama's depressed, down in the holler

Their daddy spends his time selling possums and squirrels

Then visits the bars and spends nearly every dollar.

That man had a talent for paintin' building-sized murals

But ran through his money till it left them in squalor.

Still, I'm blessed with granddaughters dolled up in curls

Though I am old and frail and my young'uns are taller.

Down along the creek lives a dimwitted woman

near a shack with a loner, and his two baby bears

a Pentecostal preacher with his three-legged dog

and a mechanic who got fired for stealing some spares

That family in the home falling slowly down the slope

And that geezer, with five kids, and too many heirs 

Dear Lord, I repent, you have spared me such trouble

So, I'll get off my rocker, for you've answered my prayers.

i've too many pills to take for my pains

can't keep track of my printouts and notes

too many schedules and too many 

Silentium Aureum

 Golden silence. The curtain falls and you are no longer in foreplay. You are no longer seething with passionate muse. You are alone with page and vision; the exact act in your mind as you write the word-pictures only you and your audience follow. You are no longer parallel with the work, you and the audience are on the same line.

At this point, the two of us, you and I, have entered the new world. We are creating together- me with the words that formulate what follows in my head, you with what your background, knowledge, and interpretation bring to that paradigm. 

I cannot revel in dangerously poetic classical music anymore. I am beyond that. 

The adolescent- in composition, not age- must mature beyond what is present and enter what can be future. 

It is why composure, at this juncture, can be so draining, without the winds of divine inspiration. One can research, organize, synthetize work into art, or one can use all the components and surrender form and process to what cannot be contained in the mind. It spills to the page because it is as if it was written for you.

The most creative writing is not process-driven drivel, it is writing driven to be a connection with the audience that is deeper than purely in the mind. 

 

Status Rerum

When was the last time you read fiction, written in this century, that was vivid, that was revolutionary, that left you wanting more?

Chances are you do not have a long list. It is not as financially rewarding to publish work that breaks barriers in style. It is less accepted to create not just a work, but a whole philosophy, breaking with standard publishing norms, while expecting a significant worldwide response. But it has been done. And once the floodgates open, the old ways will have to give way to a new standard.

 That is why I have left normal behind to embrace something more poetic, something more vivid. 

I am engaged in the creation of an 85,000 word journey at present, so I ask that you have patience and expect fewer posts here while engaged in this work. 

In the meantime, enjoy these posts...and expect a random post now and again...

The ruthless writer

 Of the four Ruths that I have known in my life, two of them were often quiet and calming. They were the opposite presence of what is necessary for creating a well-delivered, readable story- ruthlessness.

How ruthless must I be to craft a quality piece of readable literature?

compassionate ruthlessness.

Compassionate because the story is your love. You have woven a web of wonderful words and phrases that may even leave an audience breathless after a few pages, but.... without ruthlessly extracting what is not consistent, not in continuity, the reader, the listener, stumbles over a stone in the path. And, we don't want that, do we?

The trouble with creating a salient work of art is that it must consist of only the images formed from the words used. It cannot assume. It cannot fail in subject and number. It cannot fail in form. It cannot leave one scratching one's head wondering what on earth the author is trying to convey.

On the other hand, I am not responsible for the level of one's intellect. If I write for a graduate-level audience, I am not going to explain what I am writing. That detracts from the story.

The most famous Ruth of all my days was a woman with phrases from another era who enlightened me with archaisms like "your tongue is loose at both ends." With that in mind, I shall not be like that character, but shall return to the ruthless revision process one needs to employ to create a finished story.

So long for now- slan go foill.

Momentary blip...pardon me

I have removed "The Struggle." I wrote it in the style that was particularly common before the incoherent random style invading "Western" poetry sites today. I suspect that much of this random-sometimes-incoherent disconnected poetry is actually the work of artificial intelligence. The latter is a term I think we all can agree is dubious, particularly when analyzing attempts at poetry and music.

Like some of you who still embrace the strictly human, when I fail it is because I have strayed from my own styles. I shall refrain from becoming nebulous, unless it is within a body of work to humor my audience. In the meantime, pardon me while I concentrate on the novel in progress. The coming week's forecast is racist against freckled people, so I will be inside, hiding from Venusian weather.

Slan go foill...

   

Renaissance

 There was a time, in a corner of a shingle of Christendom, when more than your fair share of men were "pregnant" with opportunity...bearing  weight, pressing against the repressive confines of a fixed, but expanding wall...pregnant with purpose. 

They were realizing a fundamentally inadequate position in the fallible human structure of a religious entity...so much so that your man was unable to break free without a supernatural birthing that shattered the pagan structure imposed upon him and those with him who did not fit into the structure assigned to him by an aristocracy out of touch with members, active congregants, and those seeking to do God's will.

It was, frankly, a pathetic period of regression, when whole denominations decayed, when vomit-worthy nominalism forced many from those within the movement. This egress from that denominationalism freed the expectant and birthed a more organic house church movement in the flailing West.

But, I am not fixated on that time, venue, nor the aftermath of that era. I am alluding to the same kind of repressed passion in the sense of a Creative in a complicated, anti-creative tech-friendly social environment that makes that Creative feel like a baby stuck within a womb, more than ready to be birthed onto the stage, into relevancy, and freedom.

Some of us have spotted that glimmer of hope, that foreshadowing that we shall come out of obscurity, pregnant with message and purpose, to speak to the hearts and minds of a generation drowning in mediocracy. 

Wherever humanity embraces God-driven creativity, not the warmed leftovers of artificial intelligence, the soul is once again awakened by the written and spoken word, and imagination blooms. Character grows, compassion grows, community grows. When creativity is once again on stage, in action, fervent and connective, we all benefit, we all grow. It borders on a touch of the heavenly because our intellects break free from programmed thought.

Wherever men and women gather to interact with a purveyor of that compassionate Creativity, culture finds a home, and we rise above the downward movement of a society losing touch with the divine and the human.  

I call on all those who desire to break free from this anti-creative, pro-machine world, who have a compassionate creativity to share with the world. There is a growing segment of western society longing for the creative word. It is time to return to a place of performance poetry, prose, and remembrance, to enrich society and bring back culture, a component of today's world that will die without a literary and vocal renaissance.

Mission Oaks

They told him "you can't grow that here" so many times that he purposely planted flowers, trees, and bushes in the ravine behind his house that defied every local landscape artist and every garden center.

Walking along the sidewalk outside the low wrought iron fence around the house lot, Bert planted Banana trees, orchids, and stuff that isn't supposed to grow in Ohio.

One day I was blessed to be able to meet Bert, his wife Susan, and photograph the house and gardens. And while they were inspired by a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show in London in 1990, it sounded like the local attitude toward his plans was what drove Bert to create Mission Oaks Gardens, acquire more land, and establish a Smithsonian Institute recognized American urban garden that has inspired the creation of many community gardens throughout the world.

                            Mission Oaks in May 2021

                            

                            Japanese Red Pine and Bald Cypress,

                            2018

Bert Hendley Jr. was a successful financial planner and a Master Gardener. He and his wife were instrumental in the founding of the Muskingum County Park District. Bert passed away in early 2024, and  the gardens have shifted more toward the conifer and rhododendron plantation, away from some of the more stunning exotic flowers that once lined the garden trails...

But, Mission Oaks, maintained by three wonderful people I met last week, remains Ohio's premier urban gardens. 

                                            in the conifer garden today

                            

 

when the vines creep and none are cut

you are caged by codes and regulations

all in the name of Health and Safety

power-mad manipulators ruling by control

ignorance and theft on a daily rampage

stealing your dignity, stealing your identity.

there is no freedom when a bully reigns

when your officials create illegal vendettas

destroying your every choice, your every right,

suppressing creativity, speech, and history

in decisions made in temples of immorality.

who fell for the science when the science wasn't fact?

who fell for the mantra when the mantra was a lie?

who fell for the checks when they printed worthless cash?

Drunk on Tyranny

while you were sleeping,

it slithered through your grass.

now it lives, with more slithering things

in your yard, in your house, in your garage

while it feeds on fear and tyranny,

the original sin clothed in governing.

but you have not been crafted for peasantry

nor woven in the depths with hostile hands.

 

she hides in plain sight

 

She hides in plain sight,

her brown blending

with earth...suddenly not so horizontal.

it is only because I stop to attend to my own nature,

that she appears at all…

which begs the question…

what else did I miss on my journey?

it is a question few ask until that rugged edge of time-

passing into an unplanned quadrant-

suddenly without a spouse, without a plan, without a head of hair.

somewhere between someone’s somewhere, and someone's nowhere.

on a road regularly driven in the center, to avoid wandering off

to fall precipitously hundreds of feet below

an unexplainable statistic

for this unfortunate soul, nature was kind to her

to cover her with creeping vines, soft leaves, and soft moss

where one can genuflect the vacancy marked by a cross.

For thou art more neath round yonder sun

Thou art more than dust and roses

Thou are the reflection of a Creator

Though thy bones rot beneath the sod.

Live to love

If you woke up this morning, God gave you another day on Earth to do the right thing. You are not promised tomorrow. Today is the day of salvation. 

If you are awake now, ready to go to bed, to sleep, remember, you have been given another night. If He wakes you tomorrow morning, will you give Him thanks for every person you meet? Will you share His love with those people you meet?

We were made to love as the creator loves- selflessly. While the enemy of our souls seeks to sow fear and hatred, reject the way of the worldly, and be the person God desires you to be. Love as Christ loves. 

In the library

 As a child, I would sit on the carpeted floor at the county library reading through juvenile books while my father would wander "the stacks," a cramped area where adults had to search through smaller books in a labyrinth of rows. It amazed me that I could, if given the opportunity, read through two or three books, then find others to take home, all while my father found himself lost in the stacks.

So many years later, I still remember the titles or faces of some of those books, with occasional flashes of memory, or a strange name appearing in my mind at the most unusual of times.

If I did not read all the books of Eilis Dillon, it wasn't because I did not want to. If I did not read every Madeline book, it wasn't because I tired of the little French watercolor, it was because someone had checked out the book I wanted. 

I have fond memories of that library and the beige carpet. It was in that space that I found so many stories that probably helped contribute to my own storytelling skills at such a young age. 

But it was not always that way. I remember the first readers in school. I remember some phonics, some mixture of sight recognition, but no one method of acquiring reading skills. 

This was before I found solace on the beige carpet. I'd sit in the circle as we read aloud. "See Flip run. See Jane run. See Flip and Jane run." It was dull. It was stupid. And I was bored out of my mind. I could not understand why we only read three or four pages at a session. 

Finally, one day, I took my book home with me. That day I read the rest of the entire reader. I went back to school the next day and wondered aloud why we weren't moving on to other books. 

I went through On Cherry Street so fast the teacher was embarrassed. I went to the school library. While there were books in that library, there were few interesting ones, and certainly none with the kind of story that would enthrall a child who had passed all the reading levels "allowed" in his grade.

The education system there was so poor that many of us lost interest in the texts used. 

But in the county library, I was free to roam like a buffalo on the plains. I had a home to roam while my father...or mother...was preoccupied looking for that one book. Meanwhile, I was accumulating enough books to need a bag to carry them all home.

If the books in that library helped give me a desire to be a reader, imagine what you can do by taking your child to the library. Let your child search through the level-appropriate books. Encourage them to take several books for the week.

Your son or daughter may not become an author, but they will gain an appreciation for reading, and thereby, an appreciation for learning. And reading is just the beginning of that journey.

A Reminder

 The works presented on this site are mine, created by me without any touch of artificial intelligence. All individual works, in the form of posts, are copyrighted by International Copyright Law and are the property of Daithi Fleming. No portion may be used as part of a whole of original creation of another, in any disseminated form, but each passage must adhere to standard copyright laws, citing ownership of the passage quoted, and adhering to international law.  

My profile narrative contains one line meant to remind readers of that protection. I am disseminating this information in this form because there are many throughout the world unaware of these international creative protections under the law.

Beef with Onion in a Mustard Cream Sauce

 

Beef with Onions, Garlic, Mustard, and Sour Cream...

For a quick and easy lunch:

1/2 pound beef stew meat

1 medium or large onion

1/4 cup butter

1 tablespoon of a red wine

6 cloves of garlic

2 tablespoons Dijon Mustard

1/4 cup sour cream

black pepper and salt to taste

In a stainless steel sauté pan, add beef stew meat, and chopped or sliced onion, peeled and chopped garlic, butter, and salt and black pepper. Cook on low to medium heat. Add red wine in the process. Test the beef to see when cooked, do not overcook. Remove the beef from the pan to finish the sauce. Add in mustard and sour cream, more butter if desired, and sauté the onions to desired completion. Warm the beef in the pan. Mix with the sauce. Pour the sauce on top of the beef if not mixed before. Enjoy your lunch!

Servings: One. For two, double the amounts.

Moving On from The Humane Part 2

I have yet another upcoming phone interview with a transient company wanting to hire at a rate that will not even pay for the mileage accumulated to do the job. I'll listen, I'll discuss, but it may be as futile as expecting a reboot of the American senate or house of representatives in my lifetime. It's not going to happen. 

It is startling that a company can offer such a job. It means that there are people who work jobs that send them into an economic spiral, and a departure from everything standard. It is an accelerated phenomenon, for a greater percentage of the populous, to a point that it cannot be explained away. It is discussed in private circles, amongst neighbors, in the not-so-blessed economic potholes on the highway to decadent wealth.

I live in a region shadowed by this prevalence. It is called Appalachia. It is a geographic region and cultural region, the latter mainly because of the former and the effects that such topography inflicts on the inhabitants.

Instead of economic expansion, companies shrink or disappear. Emigration exceeds immigration. The sad song, like a dark version of "Jolene," tells you all you need to know. You may try, but someone has already taken your dream. They are in the flatlands, a cultural wasteland where wealth and debt work together to create a stability. While the mountaineer has a faith in the supernatural, the urbanite has a blind faith in a man-made economy based upon premises that don't work in the region, mainly because Appalachians own less resources than those who parasitically take from them. 

And while Appalachia suffers from this tragedy, many other areas, in between the money-debt system centers, share the same fate. The same lack of economic incentive. And it is not just in the countryside. There are hundreds of thousands of ex-urban migrants escaping to campers and mobile homes because their prospects have disappeared in the technological change shaping the entire nation. While the unaffected, including those broadcasting a particular narrative for the country, enjoy the benefits of that increasingly technocentric system, there are many migrating into a survival mode that would terrify the ones who retain wealth now.

But as technocentrism touches nearly all industries, will the ones who acquired such vast wealth be the next victims of the ever-changing paradigm, or will their businesses be excluded from the purge destined to come when more humans within the system are replaced?

Moving on from the humane

 I've spent a significant amount of time interacting with people of all sorts of professions- from truckdrivers to Dollar General cashiers- in the past two weeks. Also, I've been blessed to be part of discussions with thousands who have suffered from a changing economic landscape threatening the economic safety of hundreds of thousands of American citizens. These have been targeted by an increasingly hostile, anti-human agenda, proliferated by a technocentric advancement. 

Companies, in this environment, care less about workers and more about technological advancements that squeeze out human labor, and human-dependence, and bypass them with apps and advanced technologies. Instead of a cashier doing her job at the grocery store, I am forced to do her job. 

At the same time, those who have benefited from technological advances in their profession or those who have isolated themselves from human interaction, now pay insane fees to be able to sit at home and have a driving servant class bring their meals directly to them. Most of these making money from this relationship are currently humans; however, many companies have been using drones or robotic delivery in other areas to extricate the humane from the economic transaction.

Those replaced by an automation, or a new paradigm (making the customer work for the company they are paying for a service), find themselves in a world few predicted. Standard fields of employment disappear...often shocking quick, with no warning. 

Many end up still employed, but so underemployed that they cannot make ends meet. And lately, I have heard from so many of these. I have heard their heartbreaking stories. More than ever before, men and women in their 50's and early 60's, who cannot retire with full social security benefits even though their employers have collapsed or are collapsing under the weight of this technocentric change. 

Instead of paying people back for what they put into the social security system- they, and their employers- the government has taken years away from prospective retirees, shortchanging them, and putting restrictions on them while making money off of the taxpayer's own income.

In response, many have sold their homes, land, and resources and gone off to live a simpler life that the rest of the first world would not recognize as "an American lifestyle." There are whole communities of RVs, campers, and tiny homes scattered across the Rockies, the West, and even scattered here and there between the cities in every state. They live that way because they have lost everything to an out-of-control Pharmacological Elite who can and will surgically remove your savings from you while charging you medically incorrect billing from people coding at 2 AM in a little house down the road. (From one of those I personally met and would never trust to handle my hospital bill).

But that is only one aspect of the story. One slice of what is causing a great country to become more divided and more out of control than ever before.

Part 1

When Cultures Collide

 Pork Dijon With Wild Leeks

When you're an American, it is easy to mix cultural influences. Ask anyone, staring in the refrigerator after returning home from the grocery store....or as most Americans would say, "the grocery stores." The world feels like smaller place when one can dine on Korean food one day, Amish the next, and Phillipine cuisine the next day at lunch. And, with a touch of creativity, whatever you find in the grocery stores can create a new world of flavor.

Even if you reside somewhere else in the first world. And sometimes the second world... maybe even the third world.

Today, after planting some new Peppermint plants in the garden, I returned home to a small butcher-paper-wrapped set of pork butterfly chops (not made of butterflies) waiting on me in the refrigerator. I had a hankerin' for something with country Dijon mustard. In the fridge, I had some Ramps (wild mountain leeks- a delicacy here), some regular leeks, garlic, and peppers (capiscum  for some of you). The result of today's lunch creation is in this recipe.

1 set of Pork Chops

1 Leek

2 Ramps (or more Leek)

2 cloves of Garlic

1 Medium Pepper

Olive Oil

Fresh Parsley

1/4 cup of Dijon Mustard (Country Style)

French Tarragon

Cut your pork into small strips, place into steel sauté pan and add olive oil, garlic, fresh chopped or sprigs of parsley, sliced leek, sliced pepper, Tarragon to taste, and diced Ramps (one may substitute with a stronger tasting ingredient like more garlic) Cook, attended, adding the 1/4 cup Dijon Mustard about five minutes after starting the meal. Continue until pork is thoroughly cooked

and hopefully, your meal looks something like mine.

Digging Deeper

Digging deeper,

the humusy soil yielding

to my strokes and claws,

the prong harder than steel

yet made of wood

slicing, cutting the roots that bind

the tangled past unearthed

revealing bulbs, purple stems,

the green frond that salutes

the wind whipping the meadow,

cherishing the ramp as I dig.

and yet here i go again

sitting beside the exposed trunk

massive tree engulfed by a lake

watered with a garden hose,

producing mud by the pailful

as the plastic boats

spin out of control.

My hands dig deeper

into the soil of my youth.

what beckons me that I should

bruise the knees of my Wranglers

and drag a sack against the ground?

I am as the baby who delights in wonder

the toddler taking precious steps

the newlywed gathering roses

as I gather the bouquet 

of the green, the purple, and the white.

I have been here before

in my secret dreams.

I am playing in the dirt

and I am free.

c 2012, Daithi Fleming