Finding my voice

At times when I get tired of the 'deep' writing I find refuge in humor.

 

 Funny sayings, amusing pictures, and on some especially rainy days I even manage to pull out a humorous writing piece of my own. Those occasions are exhilarating. If I can squeeze a chuckle from my audience I know that as a writer 'I made it'.

 

I see those few pieces as my best attempts at writing.

 

If writing is meant to communicate ideas and feelings, the best way to be sure that you were heard is the grin on the person across the room.

 We only smile, or better yet, laugh when we 'really' get it. It is much easier to talk about feelings or describe places, people or events but to bring into the picture a 'twist', an out of the box point of view, and get the other side to 'see it' that in my opinion is a true victory of language over mind.

 

Humor is also so culturally dependent. I am not sure that I could see the humor in this juxtaposition if I haven’t lived in Maine for the past few years.

And for a moment I understand

“…And for a moment I better understand the one who draws, and the one who takes pictures, or writes. That he needs to carve out a sliver of infinity from the constant flow and transformations and fix it in a frame for keepsake. To incise a picture from it, to engrave a chord, or an ache, so it will become a tiny piece of eternity in of in itself that he will be able to wrap around himself in the years of want and scarcity.” Ester Kal

Where people once lived

Where people once lived
And the trees hovered over,
Where rooms were filled with life
The quiet lay heavy

Dolores Monet

Abandoned Houses

Empty houses gone to seed

Empty kitchens with no one to feed

Where once was laughter, spiders spin

Forgotten dreams ... an off key song

No cat in the window... everyone's gone

Where sheets once danced on a line

The tire swing replaced by poison vine

Wildflowers where the roses grew

Where is the family that loved and knew

Where sunlight painted a bright design

Floors once swept now warped with time

The slap of a screen door, the shout of a child

Little secrets and presents piled

But daffodils still bloom in spring

Robins, wrens, and bluebirds sing

Do ghosts knit sweaters or answer the phone

Do ghosts light candles when they are alone?

Abandoned houses, forgotten lives

The house sits empty, nobody's home

what it is about houses

All houses are haunted. All persons are haunted. Throngs of spirits follow us everywhere. We are never alone. Barney Sarecky



Pictures of houses,mostly old abandoned ones or barns.

Using quotes as inspiration

“Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost.” white flowers

Kevin Patterson

 

At times I am 'lost'.  My mind feels empty of ideas,of words, and the frustration of sitting and gazing at an empty screen is getting to me. On these times I search for outside inspiration, anything that will get me to move and out of the frozen state of things.
I roam the internet for other people bites of inspiration. Quotes, pictures, saying said by others before me anything, anything will do.

Vantage point of distance

“Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.”Charles Lindbergh

Inner flow

 

The scenery
Always such a big part of my inner flow

 

And as I settle back

 




When the adrenaline level declines  my mood darkeness and old question come back to haunt me.

Going on vacation delayed the process but did not stop it.

The glass wall

My new class familiar, yet untouchable. Words, once the brick and mortar of my professional life, so familiar. Yet when I try to touch them they slip away from me. They supposed to breath new life into my writing,  but I feel like I am watching through a thick glass wall unto a land that was mine once but no more.

That who I once was,
That was me long time ago. Education, and education theories, is what I breathed in and out almost every moment of my day, for thirty years. Hold it, way before that, in a house where both parents were teachers and teaching is what was discussed around the dinner table.

Am I back now?

Or is this just a detour through the land of words that brought me to this point. Ironically back.

Home?

Home
is where the heart is and when I realize that I am pulling inside closing on the outside wintry stiffness. I realize I am back . Slowing down, relaxing into a slower pace living from the inside out.It seems that being there I am overwhelmed, bombarded with everything that is on the outside trying to reconnect. When I am here I go deep inside to pull out the images. Are the inner landscapes formed from there and framed by here ?

I am back

Back,

The cold air is once again breath stopping, the scenery white and stiff, and the house as I step in looks somehow different.

After a full hour of trying to reclaim it, scrubbing floors and toilets, cleaning the kitchen, talking to my cats, it feels a little bit better. With a deep sense of relief I take a long hot shower and with a deep breath sink into my bed savoring its familiar feeling.

Still,

The sense of ambivalence never leaves me and going back and force just makes it stronger.

The air that feels like it is so soft around me, the sounds, the smells, and the colors, the people who knew me from the day I born and the history that we share, going way back over thousands of years. But most of all the language; that wraps around me caressing, accepting, signaling “here you are never foreign.”

 

My inner landscape

 

Here I am again rolling the same words over and over.

These three words seem to capture everything in a nicely packed package.
 I so easily connect to symbols and metaphors that originate in the world of physical scenes and concrete landscapes. A mountain, a stream, the ocean, the vast unending desert.
They go right into me and stir up the words.

More Visuals

 
The inner landscape

 
What an intriguing concept.

 I have to stop and think about it for awhile. The more I do so the more it seems like a key that can help me open the door to a rich reservoir of images, memories and sights.

My inner landscape, at times I feel like this old building dwarfed by the new, yet standing its own ground.

I saw it one day in a middle of a busy street in the center of Tel-Aviv and had to stop and take a picture. There is so much beauty in its architectural lines; reminders of times when the athletic conventions were different, less glass and less external luster. I wonder about the shutters, closed they make the house appear as if it is sleeping all curled into itself.

Inner landscape, the sentence keeps whirling inside my head.

As I look at the views they tug at inside cords. The external landscapes evoke an intense resonance inside me and revive images long forgotten.
.

Visuals

Saturday Jan 19th

The shiny blue sea,

I like these words, so predictable yet soothing.

It is rocking gently

Up and down, like the rhythm of my own breath.

The sail boats on the horizon

Light like feathers.

The bright sunlight in my eyes

Blurring my sight.

Everything appear hazy

Like a part of a dream

Or a mirage.

The description.

Every trip calls for a description. Some inner thoughts, for sure, and the landscapes that at times assume a quality of a drawing. Offering the reader a picture of what is being seen.

So what kind of visual artist am I?

The one who draws the scenery so accurately that the end result is like a photo? Or the one who inject enough of himself, to color the obvious landscape with unique shades, and make it his own and unlike anyone else's.

I have to avoid the clichés, and the obvious, and expose a less apparent angel.

Landscapes

Sitting on the beach on the Tel-Aviv promenade.

Warm, caressing, winter sun

 and shiny blue water.

It can't get better than that? Oh well,

Why can’t I be completely here when I am here?

Faraway visions of dark green forests

Images of another blue ocean

Keep floating in front of my eyes.

Can't be entirely there,

 When I am there

I long for the air that engulfs me,

I miss the well-known language ringing in my ears.

 

Fragments....torn sentences....familiar smells...what was and will never be again.