My current blog is called 'the dark & the light'.
You may find it at:  http://thedarkthelight.blogspot.com/
The design is still in progress but there are morsels of writing posted nearly every day. Thank you for your interest -
Linda C. Foss, Ph.D.

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the end.

The poem 'story and soul' is the last creative entry for whalesbreath.blogspot.com. I am in the process of moving, will start up a new blog at some point and post the new URL/address here. Thank you for your interest in my writing!

Sincerely,
linda 

(Linda C. Foss, Ph.D.)

story and soul

story and soul
 

time unwinds
like an old reel of film
jumping and crackling
on a tattered white screen
(oh - the acrobatics of the mind.
pause to repair
the broken story
we don't know
what part went where
each day becomes
terra incognito.)

let it go
let it go
breathe out
and feel that
the soul does flow
we float as one
like the surface of the sea
where there is no reason
only rhythm, rhyme, and Thee

the weaving of trails


The leaf started at point A
and floated down the concrete creek
to a rock and a twig
hanging out at Point B.

One grackle flew over the busy street,
flew from Point C to Point D.
another grackle flew from Point D to halfway across the street
and back to point D. He flew near Point B
splashed his big black wings
in the shallow water.

A car crossed the intersection,
Point E to Point F.
and another came down the street toward me
Point F past Point D and on to Point G.

A little cloud slowly tooled across the sky
Point H to Point I
and crossed a branch
before my eyes -
Point J the crossing.

the weaving of tangled trails
of leaves and birds
people and clouds
whispered threads
of our existence this morning
like the strings of a cat's cradle
in my mind
a pulsing pattern
from points past
to points future
all of us blithely flowing
toward some common destination
some common creation

our street

 

'Let's see, now.'

The girls are thinking. Brenda and Madison are going to tell us about the street they live on.

The Mercers next door have a very tidy front yard with a flagpole. No trees - and the grass is always short. We play croquet and marbles there sometimes. They let Joey and Mike throw the football around.

The Powers have a yard covered with shrubs and vines and things. You can't walk through their front yard. All through the spring and summer, they've got tall flowers like hollyhocks and things growing, and there are lots of butterflies, and some bees sometimes. I saw a hummingbird there! Their orange cat Porky sits on the front step and watches.

The Behrs have a big oak in the front yard - the leaves are all swept up and the grass is short and there's ligustrom making a hedge between them and the neighbors. When the ligustrom has flowers, it stinks! The flies and bees and these little butterflies love it!!! In the fall, there are acorns, and there are squirrels that collect them and there are squirrels that plant them in the dirt.

The Meyers don't have much, they're away a lot, but there's a honeysuckle vine on the fence. They don't mow their grass very often, and there's leaves and clover sometimes and dandelions and thistles and other flowers I don't know. Sometimes, there are blackberries by the mail box.

There's water in a dish by the leaky faucet, and the birds and butterflies go there. one time I saw a frog.

The Yees have this really big smooth driveway. They let us roller skate and skate board on it The dogs come out and bark at us, but if we hold still, they sniff us and wag their tails, and we get to stay. In their back yard - whoa! They've got this big garden and they grow flowers and have an apple tree and they grow pumpkins and squash and green beans and - what's that called - bok choy.

One year they had two chickens that laid eggs, but they gave them away. Somebody called the police or something and you can't have chickens in town or something.

At the end of the street, the fence is broken, and there's an old sofa with holes in it and there are things growing on the sofa. There's a jungle on one side - a big owl sits up in a tree. The shades in the window are all tangled up, and you never see who lives there - just a shadow walking by the window at night. That's the spooky house!!! We stay away except when a ball flies into their yard, and we make Walter go get it because he's the youngest and he won't get yelled at for going there.

And that's the street we live on- we like our street a lot!

Northern Exposure

Two episodes of Northern Exposure, the 1990s sitcom set in the fictional town of Cicily Alaska, came to mind today. The first has O'Connell and Fleischman walking through the forest one night, among the giant and steady trees. They're listening to hear the trees converse. One of them can hear trees conversing. The other does not believe in this at all, but tries to hear anyway.

The other episode shows the town's residents in a state of frustrated stuckness, their minds and bodies irritable as day by day and night by night they are holed up in a seemingly eternal winter. The episode ends with the breaking of the ice in the local river, the yearly mark of spring, the water rushing through the town again, bringing life and fresh air, relieving the state of tension.

Art and photography enthusiast that I am, my eyes follow the dark. My eyes follow the light. I'm looking at a hanging light fixture in the library, cylindrical in shape.  A square window of cloudy gray sky creates a pleasing background. The fixture is on, and it is glowing...like a lampshade shaped like a soda pop can.

Yesterday, a little later than this, I watched water funneling upward in the center of a fountain in a shallow pool. The late afternoon was cloudy, little direct sunlight, but the water cupped light like a chalice, or as a white poppy or lily might hold sunshine.

The light from the fixture is generated from a bulb within. The light from the fountain - I looked for several minutes and am uncertain how the bloom of light and water works.