Musings and Ruminations

Pen and paper… the tools of lovers, poets, writers, or anyone valuing the delicacy, seduction, and power inherent in language and expression. Gone are the days when touching pen to paper united sender to receiver, with every letter, a stamp of palpable emotion. With each symbol formed, a reflection of the sender’s soul was imprinted, allowing the receiver to feel all the closer for it. No longer do we feel the character and emotion of the writer through the shape of a word.   Today we text, we email, missing the blemish of a fallen tear, a sinuously formed sentence, or the fury of an irregular slant. In a world where it is easy to misinterpret the message without the assistance of script laden with intangible, yet felt emotion, we need to work all the harder to express our hearts. When writing with pen in hand, there is a sense of limitless time. We luxuriate in the formation of a thought, scribbling it down furiously or painstakingly applying ea...

Gone are the days of private conversations that implied that you were dining with someone special who deserved your full concentration. Instead we are in the constant presence of an aural battlefield that forces even the old guard to lift its voice in defense against public enemy number one: the rising decibel level. As someone who loves to dine, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to eat out in public places. The appalling proliferation of shrill, piercing voices, whose tonality cuts through space like the sharpest knife, puts an immediate stop to any intimacy you wish to have with yourself or your dining partner. Vocal coaches speak of a chest voice and a head voice when training singers, with these vocal paradigms supported by the muscles of the diaphragm. Today, voices seem to come from the adenoids, with the added insult that they are applied to sentences often ending in question marks, even when they are statements. And these voices, li...

Great women listen. They have nothing to prove. They know who they are. Of course, this applies to men as well.  Listening implies not rushing time.   A good listener weighs carefully the response, without directing the conversation back to the self. It is about understanding and respecting the need of the other, allowing the energy to remain there until the subject changes naturally. A listener is a good partner in conversation, keeping the flow where it needs to be from moment to moment. The art of listening has to do with honoring the speaker. It is generous, true, and authentic. It quiets the ego and helps deepen the association, the friendship, the romance. As beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, we can also say that one becomes beautiful understanding that the “You” is more important than the “I.” For the Lioness Gazette http://www.lionesswomansclub.com/post/1039

Beneath the coded level Of known things Is the mystery Where we truly reside… Holding the truth Not contained in our daily Language We find ourselves, untended In our raw and pure state Meeting In light

falling into my center finding the flat, strong places inside

the way she nestles and curls folding into all the hollows filling in his space soft and yielding she’s a baby tiger and he… a power point… the axis around which she winds

A Cubist’s dream, with buildings rising willy-nilly, squares and rectangles fitting into each other like a broken puzzle.  But this is only from the balcony, for there are more aesthetic views to be had from my windows. There is the park at the side of the house, with its carousel, the wide expanses of green where people walk their dogs, stroll, and enjoy some ephemeral minutes of city rest. There are the jacaranda trees, blooming a thick purple and shedding their color over the newly placed white tiles that make the pathways.   But it is to the back window that I mostly turn. The Cubist patterns that cut across flaming skies, the antennas making vertical line cuts upwards. The front view is the obvious one, but this one, expanding across my wide balcony allows me to see into others’ lives, placing me in the world of quotidian humanity at its daily tasks.