Next Up on the Flower Clock in Everyday Ramblings

I went out walking midday on Friday with the camera. It is rhododendron on the flower clock (and wild poppy). Blooming white flowers, delicate and almost impossible to photograph well, (at least with the camera I currently own) now surround my living area.

The institution that I work for is having a poetry contest. There is a small cash prize for the winner and your poem is displayed in our modern library and a notification goes out campus wide about the winning entry. I am not very good at occasional poetry because the kind of poem that is accessible and meaningful to a broad population is not something I am skilled in.

Billy Collins I am not.

The other thing that is problematic for me is that I have real concerns about the institution as an employee, a former volunteer and a consumer of health and dental care.

But it does contains a fascinating hodgepodge of buildings crammed into the most unlikely spaces atop a small local mountain with it’s tentacles (literally with the tram line) reaching down to the river and metaphorically out to our West Campus that contains the primate center. It has spectacular views from lots of unexpected vantage points.

I might work with that, the buildings, the site, but my guess will be that the winning entry will be some poignant piece of writing about Science and Healing and Hope.

Bleh. Not that overall I have an issue with any of those things. I think we could all do with more of them actually. I have an issue with how the not stellar but the ordinary completely messed up humans that try to carry this out in this parochial town operate.

I was listening to a podcast last night partially about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that was such a clear indication of how we as a country can veer off into what I consider immoral territory.

When it comes to poetry lately I feel like I have lost my nerve a bit. One needs to work at it and I am not in any consistent way doing that. Tonight is our local Open Mic reading and I haven’t been in months.

About this I feel this underlying anger, rage, the privileged anger that Mr. Finch or Billy Collins or Charlie Rose would never understand.

Behind the scenes there are women who take care of, (or in Mr. Finch’s case, past tense) many of the tasks of every day living. The food, the finances, the chores… and often, earning the money.

It is a good thing I love teaching yoga because I have basically subsumed my life as a poet over the last three years into my life building a “retirement career”.

All I can do is hope that I still have what it takes to write the work I want to write, that I as this unique individual embodied as I presently am, can write when I no longer have to get up and focus all my energy on this crazy making energy sucking employment that I currently am engaged in.

I did have some insight in the middle of the night about why the group of unhappy harpies at work I call The Evil Empire may have been able to influence and affect my work life so much over the last 8 years.

It has to do with an Anarchist, a Great Dane and a grief stricken troubled teenager that barely spoke… but that is another story for another post that I may or may not have time to write… :)

Last updated April 10, 2016