our calling, our passion

 your man in the alcove today, his face into the wind, was there to sell enough books to make it worth the drive. They- that ubiquitous they- had convinced him to drive the two hours, promising a table and a marketer's tent to showcase his works to the hungry masses...hopefully hungry for a collection of historical works. His competition featured an active potter, creating a vase...a half dozen mostly fine, and a couple of fading, beauties, selling candles and candy...and various sellers of trinkets and more dubious treasures. 

but the crowd this day at the street festival was largely peopled by characters of short height, and sometimes shorter memory- children and old people. The children gravitated toward food, fun, and the fascinating, while the older folk did actually stop to talk with the kindly man selling word-pictures from the past. He lacked the comforts of the promised tent, which had gone to another event for children, but did retain a tiny table, just big enough for a dozen smaller books. 

we had a pleasant conversation about the nature of our mutual malady, this passion that compels us to wake at strange hours with strange arrangements of words. Some, like melodious gas in the middle of night, pass eventually, and allow us sleep. There are others that take hours from our slumber, and when we do sleep, we awake having been through more than a few turbulent, tumble dry cycles. 

though mutually feeling disheveled this Saturday morning, we shook hands, and i shuffled off for the theatre. Inside the inner sanctum, i once again marveled at the monstrosity they called "the stage," a piece surely from the "industrial revolution" that would be perfect for a Dickens play. 

students were displaying artwork in the back aisles of the theatre, yet no one else managed to push through the theatre doors. 

it was the same across the street at an actual art gallery. Beautiful paintings, with impressive composition. But no admirers.

a few stranglers wandered around the food truck corral, but more wandered around the marketing tents fiddling with trinkets. 

i returned to my vehicle thankful for the hours i spent in and off the sidewalks, but with a refreshing reminder of why most of my colleagues and i create. we do it because it is our calling, it is our passion. We, Christian creators, create because we reflect our creator. And the more we create, and in what we create, we hopefully, share that passion that comes from the heart of a loving God.

 

earthbound

the trouble with autumn...

when leaves fall, it is i who falls.

this gravity, this pungency,

here, confined to a purgatory,

i am earthbound.

i've scratches on my legs

endlessly applying lotion

as the flies come and go

their lives endlessly slow

i've no escape from the pattern.

i do what i don't want to do

i say what i don't want to say

i am still earthbound.

silence still

it is in the ears, this quiet so sharp it is tangible, 

like a gentle breeze without the whisper

it has presence without form, power without speech

an abyss without depth, space, or time

it keeps me company when i am alone

like the empty rocking chair beside the fire

as i watch the embers, it sits silently still

then slithers away from the fireplace grill.

grandma's roses

the whole house smelled musty

an acquired taste for a twelve-year-old boy.

it lingered even in the flower bed 

where thin limbs wore green gloves

and she cut you with her sarcastic wit

for they were supposed to be her roses

though all i saw was something 

half dried, half barely living

as if trying to find another breath.

they belonged in between the pages

in a book with velum paper

not the memory of a wide-eyed child. 

i come from a long line of storytellers

 i come from a long line of storytellers. our history has been passed down through family tales, accounts recalled from a relative, with a frequent aside added, like meat to the skeleton, to explain what the original may have lost. Frequently, little was lost because of the necessity to store it mentally. When one is repressed by a foreign occupier, that foreign censor, who sees his own culture as superior, may attempt to obliterate any hint of color, of personality, to the subject's speech, including an ancient language predating their own.

This is what happened to my people. Written histories were destroyed, burned. Oral histories, along with their accompanying stories, survived. And thrived. And those stories passed down one to another, relative to relative, until this day. 

In the company of a great uncle, a seanchaí, I drank in the stories, made them a picture memory, a word memory, and a written memory. His body lies buried in a cemetery now...but the storyteller's tales, those remains linger in my mind. 

it is why my own tales tend to echo an oral storyteller, and i may actually reject what fifth grade grammar asserts is kosher. I cannot make a sacrifice on the altar of that drivel, because storytelling cannot be reduced to what may have been grammatically pure to the elementary student, or his...or her...teacher.

if the story cannot be read aloud in a way that, combined with a good imagination, paints a picture within the reader's mind, then it cannot be called a story in the sense of one told by a storyteller. While the written word- that product from our time- may vary greatly in form- there is still a connection worldwide to the basic storyteller's story, and I intend to continue to use this style to take the reader to another place, another story.