Hello all,

post your writing exercise here and tell Cynthia and Greg and Leah and all the baristas, I’m sure they’d enjoy them, especially the one about the blender’s feelings . . .

Writing exercise: Look around the room, pick an inanimate object, write from its point of view
Writer’s Workshop, Thursday, Sept. 20 at Chelsea Coffee Company
“My name is Café Buselo. I’m a bright yellow and red package of coffee. I sit on the top shelf of Chelsea Coffee Company.
I’m lonely on my shelf. Below me are lots of bags of Sweetwater Coffee - black bags, red bags, silver bags.
People come over to look a the coffee selection. Greg and Cynthia and Leah and the other baristas talk knowingly about their favorite Sweetwater coffees and they pick up the bags.
But they never pick me up. Customers nod knowingly and pick up a Sweetwater bag, carry it over to the counter and buy it. What about me?
I have fine aroma. I’m Cuban to the core. Put me in a café con leche and hear me roar.
But here I sit, waiting to be noticed, to get a smile and a hand reaching up and someone whispering “Come home with me.”

Author Madeleine L’Engle, whose novel “A Wrinkle in Time” has been enjoyed by generations of schoolchildren and adults since the 1960s, has died, her publicist said Friday. She was 88.

Oh, my, such a loss. Have you read “A Wrinkle in Time” It was my first exposure to a tesseract - a blip in time - you go in, live in a different world and come out at the same spot. Amazing.

when I was in college, ee cummings came to read  his poems. I’d looked at his work and wondered why he stripped out all capitals, all punctuation. Hey, I’d just spent 12 years in grade/high school getting PUNCTUATION drilled into me so what’s with not using it? The auditorium was packed. People sat silently. It was so quiet I hear a watch ticking nearby. Cummings sat on stage at a small desk with a green reading lamp.

Then he began to read a poem called springtime

“springtime

is  your time

is my time

is our time”

He lingered over the word “springtime”, drawing it out. I smelled flowers . The air felt pregnant with possibilities.

“is your time” he put the accent on the word “your” and I knew he was talking to me

“is my time” and “my” got the emphasis

“is our time” and he tied the knot with making “our” the strongest word. Ah, so romantic, delicious. I wanted to dance in a field of flowers.

I got it. He didn’t need punctuation. All those years of reading silently, I’d missed something. For the the first time in my life I realized words were music, lyrical things, meant to be read and said out loud, rolled around the tongue, drawn out, emphasized. To this day I try to read what I write out loud, and hope once again for the magic of springtime.

Hallowed be Thy Name…Hallowed in Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, is defined in its primary root as “pronounce as clean; consecrate (be set apart) ; be kept holy.”  God and His Name are holy, hallowed ,  a sanctuary.

The Koine Greek of the New Testament explains the noun hagiasmos as “purity, purification, the purifier.”  The root is “to make holy, purify or consecrate; to venerate, to be holy.”

 His name has been given to His followers.  It sets them apart (consecrates them) and He becomes their portion.   His name has the power to pierce the darkness, to bring light and healing where there has been pain and bitterness.  To use His name in vain is much more than to use it in a spouting of curse words.  In vain carries a soul-searching response in its meaning…”to be counted worthless, of no value.”

Here’s our gal Lucy making pancakes for the lucky folks attending the Silver River State Park Citizen Support Organization breakfast this morning at the park. Bluegrass and sausage and pancakes and eggs in the middle of a sand pine scrub … what more to ask on a summery Florida day? Dad and I wandered through the museum, and I was suprised to see it had more than doubled in size since my last visit, with lots of historic artifacts about Silver Springs and the Silver River, including movie posters, a milepost with Roman numerals from an old wagon road through the Big Scrub, and one of Ross Allen’s old uniforms. Quite the collection of ephemera to accent the already-excellent museum on fossils and habitats. Go, visit, be inspired.

I’ve been trying to focus more on the meaning of words, using the thesaurus to find similar words and this gives me a bigger picture. for example, in the Our Father, an early line reads “Hallowed be thy name” but what is hallowed? The thesaurus says “sacred” which is all right but doesn’t seem to cut it. Surely  hallowed has more ramifications. Any thoughts?

Borrowed from Natalie Goldberg:  write for 10 minutes starting with the words “I remember…”

I remember a wind across the sugar cane field, a bitter cold breeze that caused the stalks to pitch and moan. It was a February morning, and huddled against the low stone wall, I wished for a warm mug of coffee. The night had been clear, stars sparkling in the darkness above, with blasts of chill off the lake rousing me again and again, the wool blanket no match for wind and cold and frozen ground. At least it wasn’t raining. A bald eagle circled, lazily, in search of its morning meal. I’d have to search soon, too. There was little to sustain a body in this half-wilderness, forest uprooted for dark black muck.