Haiku and Love for One Fallen Angel

One Fallen Angel ~be ready for new love now ~ the figure appears from dark.

Heart hears a call sound~ hoo do you sadly measure ~ calling home true love.

A past lover gave me Fragments d’un Discours Amoureaux . I think he stole the book back. If I could find it I would quote to you why love is always out of balance. The lover’s figures are merely gestures waiting for response.

It is like compost.

I met this man who makes Bio-fuel from trash. He’s franchising German plants to islands, to Shanghai, perhaps to Haiti, but that is another story.

The burning dung becomes something treasured; Rumi says to kiss the snake who guards the buried treasure. Open our hearts and kiss him to find new love.

Lover's bouquet needs the gesture of water.

notes: Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse really was stolen from my house but not likely from the person who gifted the book.  My translation of Rumi Harsh Evidence is not the same as Coleman Barks

Keep Working

Peddling along a plan

stop, notice patterns

waves work in sets

bees organize hexagons

sleep deep on your left

be it

use the electrons

in trajectory direction

keep working

the next wave

is on the way.

Create Something New

Show me the terror in your nights.
Demonstrate the courage
to face creating building making
something new.
Not some spread sheet projection~
a trembling thing in your hands~
now.

Golden Rules for Boys

My daughter is away in Ireland and I read an article about “The 20 things I have taught my son” and thought I might give my own take on this. Please add in the comments your advice you would offer as life lessons for boys. Feel free to be creative.

Sign in photograph above is from hiking this morning. This sign is actually twenty some feet from a very steep cliff that dives down into Laguna Canyon. In the fog this July 23^rd you could not see the drop, just a sign that makes no sense. Please leave some sense for teenage boys and share.

       1.       Be kind to everyone, all the time.

2.       Smile and look people in the eye when you extend your hand

3.       Learn to manage money, save half and invest in a variety of stocks, bonds and ideas

4.       Stand up straight every time you walk through a doorway

5.       Play team sports, prepare for game day with all your body and heart, learn to lose with gracious attitude then pick up and get ready for the next game

6.       Defend the weak, the bullied, and care for animals

7.       God and country mean something in your soul; understand what this is to you personally without preaching; show you care.

8.       Apologize when you are wrong, learn from you failures because understanding our big errors and changing is being great

9.       Tell the truth, it is always easier.

10.   Find a mate who is better, kinder and smarter than you are, her genetics will be important to your children, her goodness will keep together your extended family and your mutual respect will change the world.

11.   Read, learn, get good grades in everything, try college classes you might not think are exciting, school is about digging into subjects that are different from what you know and building who you are. Education is a lifetime gift you must continue to allow yourself.

12.   Keep your body in shape, don’t put junk into your mouth or lungs it needs to last through a whole bunch of trials

13.   Random things happen –good and bad, and they all pass over like a river in the big picture

14.   Friends come easy early in life, keep them around by communicating.

15.   Don’t cheat on those you love, don’t talk trash on those you love, and for heaven’s sake if you have friends of the opposite sex don’t cross that line

16.   People at work are your team to be cultivated, they are different than family

17.   Be creative it feeds everyone around you

18.   Find your passion and work a plan, a five year plan a ten year plan

19.   Manners are always important, don’t say or do anything in public you would not want your Grandmother to see or hear.

20.   The gentleman walks on the outside of the curb to protect ladies, children and the elderly.

Also on this same trail the high security dog watering bowl. Note: pot is chained to heavy rock that you would need to carry out. Or could the rock be used to smash the chain? Do I need to add never steal because it is just mean?

I love my heels sunk in astroturf

Hold Them To Your Chest

No worry, all doors are unlocked.

A block where fireflies are not in jars,

A cell phone left outside, is returned.

Look into evil eyes with superpowers to transform.

Under your bed is a shield that bounces bullets.

Hold children to your chest,

give them strength

to face a sad world today.

Prayers for the many families changed by a gunman in Colorado.

Find Your Truth

Finding Your truth

I read a number of posts about Comic-con as the celebration of nerds. Nerds are the new sexy, you know. Getting off the train in San Diego on Saturday I wished I had donned my old superwoman costume, just to scream without words that I also fit in.

We look upon each other as a label. My children are forming their own name tags; they are athletes, scholars and creative persons on a mission to find their prize  here on earth. When we look at a friend, or meet someone new, we ask them what they “do” in order to get a sense of who they are and what to call them. I’m not referring just to the politically incorrect skin color, ethnic heritage or status zip code where they originate. It is easier to give something a name, and context to not think carefully about what is inside.

I have reinvented myself a couple times in my life, by deciding to focus on a part of “me” that has ability. I've been an artist and performance poet who lived in an urban loft, I married my college sweetheart and became a business woman to support my next hat, being a single mother. Along the transformations, I was always creative, keeping journals, blogging, taking photographs, making paintings that I rarely shared with anyone, for fear it might tip the balance of the identity behind which I wore as a mask. The job circle of work partners saw me as only one thing- the leader lady who made them Be great. My children saw me as the Mother whose position was to drive, clean and arrange a fantasy, my ex-husband saw me as a pretty thing to control.

Being one thing when I give my elevator speech, “hi I’m C. G. I am Wonder Woman,” might not sound so crazy at Comic –con, an event where everyone is allowed a fantasy. Walking the talk, speaking only my own truth, every moment of my life, now that’s a challenge.

What if you hold the power to do anything, to make anything to be anything?
I believe you do already have it but just need a nudge. I’m whipping out my magic lasso and granting you four wishes, BUT, now you must do the work.

Be great today my friends, I need to get back to writing.

C. G.

Open Your Eyes and unzip all that is possible

Man Ray sculpture I really like the reflection of myself upon the glass taking the photo.

Pray Big

Dear God:
Keep my children safe on their journeys.
Thank you for the gift of great family.
Let my friends who read this know I care.
I appreciate every wonder moment on this earth.
Thank you for your love.

C. G.

P.S.
Please help me "write great."

Through These Veins We Are Connected

Boundaries Bound  by Mulugeta Gebrekidan

Through These Veins

Anne Marie Ruff takes us on an adventure in the coffee highlands of Ethiopia. The bitter taste of death, sweet almond extract of true love and intrigue are wired together in this epic story.

Ruth and Zahara are two strong women searching for truth. They want to save those they care for from the tortured death by AIDS. A cure is within their very grasp.

Stefano, the Italian scientist, is plant collecting before the forest disappears. He meets a medicine man who has found katannii leaf extract can cure AIDS.

Life replicates fiction- I understand what it is to collect plants, having been a collector of roses and rare plants. Stefano’s passion for rescuing the secrets of the forest is romantic and true. The charming Stefano streams with life blood.

The topic of a cure for AIDS is timely. Timothy Ray Brown is the first person to have had HIV totally eliminated from his body. Will some plant that is burned or cut down hold the secret to something better than a “functional cure.”

Our oldest human relatives come from Ethiopia, a now country suffering with drought, deforestation and death. With one Medical Doctor for 100000 citizens, survival rates are low. Locals hold to superstitious beliefs that spirits and supernatural forces can cause bad fortune, and illness.

Ruff stands apart from preaching to us about Pharmaceutical Companies, corrupt governments or political action. “Pepsi and Coke should start a big political campaign,” Ruth says. Ruth speaks a profound idea.  Ruff’s writing flows gracefully showing the evil forces what they are.

There are passages where Ruff’s images are handsome and bitter as raw coffee, as in, “She wrapped both hands around her wine glass attempting to steady herself, to prevent herself from descending into the abyss of uncertainty.” As if the red wine, or liquid of the glass could save her fall.

Above the image of the beautiful paintings of Mulugeta Gebrekidan. He is an Ethiopian painter using mixed media and oil. His work expresses the same longing to save, to stir greatness without explaining.

Ruff inspires us to conserve this beautiful earth’s biodiversity without asking or waving a flag. “Think carefully about how you can stay true to your values-”

Through these veins we are all connected. Ruff’s novel is romantic, thrilling and uplifting. Read it and be changed.

Anne Marie Ruff Grewal lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two boys. Photograph courtesy of Anne

.

Fear Uncertainty Doubt Oh My

Back to basics, son is off to the Sequoia's with Uncle Jerry and the boys. I've moaned about this before,  how I miss my beta reader...  Now that the next novel is almost ready for editing, I beg anyone who reads thrillers or transgressional fiction to take a whirl at my current manuscript. Thinking of offering bribes, yes cash money.

I read this twitter conversation about FUD, or more exactly how writers but I think also our world wide economy feel overwhelmed with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The best solution for that is to be ready. Write your plan on a yellow pad, break it down into daily chores, then execute. 

Perhaps I post a cardboard sign stating: will read your book in trade...? Anyone write literary fiction out there? Hello ~ 

"Fear uncertainty and doubt ~ oh my, no forget about it."

Gone Fishing

Or Frankly Scarlett, he doesn't seem to care either.

One of those days... thanks Margaret Mitchell, Gone With Everything.

Writing is slow today, son packing for camp, daughter packing for Ireland.

I'm putting up the gone fishing sign on my brain.

Cactus Inspiration

Cactus in Glass Bubble
Our lives become closed in a shell.
Do you long to hear the song of waves inside the shell,
or prefer the comfort of a rain umbrella, a cozy you understand the corners in the dark?
Push beyond the smooth pathway, stand on burning rocks and listen to your heart.

Succulent Scape
Feels like the great eclipse and the diamond glass cutter may shatter?
Embrace the change with a joyful center, though your inner ear balance left you.
Walk on a tightrope of gossamer, for God's sake keep your chin up above fiberglass nets.
I kneel at your courage to rise from punching one more time, your lips part, smiling.

Glass Ornament for dry landscape
The desert only gets too much rain one day or smoke and fire.
It is the days in-between when you hike and work and go longer than ever before.
The word count, the chin ups, the hands shred to exposed muscle.
Then know you have done every inch of great.

Mini moonscape

Caroline Gerardo Copyright 2012
To make these ornament bubbles all you need is
 a couple tablespoons sand for the bottom, pebbles,
small succulents and water once a week.

Love Ready Haiku

Roots of Past

" Mon coeur ne vous quitta jamais une seconde,

et je suis, et serai jusque dans l'autre monde,

celui qui vous aima, sans mesure..."

Haiku for broken ~  

heal a heart with time and joy~  

laugh at soggy past.

Window Panes Repaired and Painted,  and Ready for Sunshine

Cyrano wears a ~  plastic nose hidden behind ~ clog heart abs of steel.

Tree Stripped of Center by Fire Survives and Grows

Look sideways upon ~
his dressing gown rippling waves ~
river wash the sand.

Horsehoes For Good Luck In Your New Life

Chanting pants on fire ~ for he is a crafty liar ~ heat forgives the fail.

Walk Bravely For You Made it Over the Burning Coals, You ARE READY.

All photographs and text are copyrighted material by Caroline Gerardo