Shinrin-yoku

I turn off paved road onto gravel, cruising down the one lane road until I reach the parking lot. Every season is a marvel to behold, but there is something magical about the early days of spring. The buds have just birthed green leaves, with spring beauties and trout lilies heralding the arrival of steadily warmer days. Five steps into the preserve, I breathe in the scent of the trees around me. Fifty steps in, the tense spot between my shoulder blades caused by too much time spent hunched over a screen loosens. Five hundred steps in, with the noise of the streets left far behind the chorus of insects and birds, immersed in a chapel of trees, the light in my eyes testifies to the contentment of my soul.

In the forest’s peace

I am cleansed of pollution

and baptized by green.

Song Choice: Return to Innocence by Enigma

This poem was inspired by the prompt given over at A Dash of Sunny's Prompt Nights: When Besotted by Green

Triad

I remember being small,

and led to believe

reality and perfection came in twos.

Twos are easiest.

When everything is a binary,

there isn’t time wasted in questioning.

Yet my eyes are drawn to asymmetry

and the unexpected beauty of three.

Where two topples, three fortifies.

There’s a grace to three.

Stability wedded to balance wedded to form,

creates a sublime alchemy.

Three is the dance between souls,

and the stars that guide me when I am lost.

Three is home.

By Rommy Cortez-Driks

Song Choice: Three is a Magic Number

This poem was inspired by the prompt given over at Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads: Kerry Says Let's Count With Our Fingers. Hop on over for more great poetry.

The S Word

I pride myself on being a relatively intelligent person, but know I can be a stubborn one as well. For some some time now I've been thinking it might be best to go on a s-s- *cough* schedule. *shudders* (OK one of my friends has been strongly hinting it might be a help and I've finally decided to listen).

I don't know why the idea of a schedule (ugh!) makes me cringe so. It may be a tiny bit of defiance left over from my teen years where I insisted I was clever enough to get everything I needed to get done in time (usually at the last minute) and still get A's. My youthful arrogance got a hard smack of reality once I hit college. Oh I still did well, as long as I kept some sort of system to organize things.

So fast forward to today. I have so many things I want to learn and do in this lifetime and it has become sadly apparent I can't do them all. I need to prioritize (*pouts*) and organize (*cries*). I love writing, but I need to keep "office hours" that stay more or less steady and mesh with my other responsibilities (work, being a mom, being a wife). Organization sounds overly confining and limiting, especially when talking about artistic endeavors, but it also is a pretty good way to make sure I have time to enjoy doing what it is I like doing. 

I started feeling better about this whole organizing business when I put down my writing hours for both prose and poetry (as one of the newest Toads in the Imaginary Garden, I'm stoked to regularly participate there and over in Dash of Sunny as well). I scheduled in some review time for my other interests (shimmy drills, Japanese tea ceremony postures, and doodling all get their quick bursts of review time as a reward for other hard work). While a lot of my daily spiritual practices are reflexive at this point, I set aside some time for some extra development of knowledge bases I was interested in exploring. I even managed to formalize the way I do chores a bit better.

Yay, doodle time! 

So yes, I'm still a little leery about the whole schedule thing, but I've promised myself that I can be flexible and adjust things as time goes on. I also plan on giving myself goof off days once a month just to know there'll be one day I can bum around and do nothing if I want to. I'm cautiously optimistic this will all work out and that far from being rained upon, the passions in my life will march on in an orderly parade, rather than bang into each other like angry moshers. 

By Rommy Cortez-Driks

Song Choice: Don't Rain On My Parade