Category: Creativity
Silence
“Silence is a true friend who never betrays.” – Confucius
“True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.” – William Penn
“Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.” – Marcel Marceau
–
Silence
That is not what
She is saying –
Music – a passion
But silence – silken, warm
Comforter, blanket, cape
To withdraw –
The cocoon where
Creativity germinates freely
Where her mind
slows its frantic pace
From chaos to
Inspiration
Repressed mantra
–
Silence – her fortress
It has her back
Shelter from the storm
She hears the predator coming
The clacking of her heels
Rattling of keys
Always different from other disasters
Silence, sounds its warning
Flight, the favored response
Hushed cantata
–
Soldiers
Recount lying in wait
As the enemy approaches
Rubber sole alarm
The heart skips beats
Hands quiver, mouth dry
Words, forsake her
Her litany to be alone
Quelled psalms of youth
–
Soil, secure, reticent, fertile
Where seeds finds solace,
Nourishment, sanctuary,
Strength, time – her friends
Adapting, evolving, processing
She bursts forth
Her ode to joy
–
Bisous,
– Léa
Quotes – Pearls of wisdom…
Quotes – Pearls of wisdom? Or perhaps they are the spark for inspiration? If a quote speaks to you, explore the reason it does. If it is something you do not except, why doesn’t it? If quotes were charms for a bracelet I could not lift either arm. Anything that can get me thinking, defending my position, looking at something in a new light, it has served me well. Quotes are a powerhouse and just wait for us to discover them and examine what they mean to us as individuals. Perhaps there are a few you can take for a walk across the page, canvas… It is my hope you will find something among what is offered here and see where it takes you… Often I find my best work when I attack a statement I have strong feelings about regardless if they are positive or negative. In fact, the negative ones are often the most enlightening.
“If you haven’t changed your mind lately how can you be sure you still have one?” Author unknown
“A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.” – Moliere
“We die only once and for such a long time.” – Moliere
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” – Moliere
“Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.” – J.M. Barrie
“I am not young enough to know everything.” – J.M. Barrie
“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” – J.M. Barrie
“For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.” – J.M. Barrie
“Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.” – J.M. Barrie
“We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it.” – J.M. Barrie
“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.” – A.A. Milne
“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.” – A.A. Milne
“You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say.” – A.A. Milne
“Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.” – A.A. Milne
“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.” – A.A. Milne
“Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” – A.A. Milne
“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.” – Lewis Carroll
“I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then.” – Lewis Carroll
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.” – Lewis Carroll
“That’s the reason they’re called lessons, because they lesson from day to day.” – Lewis Carroll
“Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” – Mark Twain
“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” – Mark Twain
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
*
Bisous,
Léa
Un jour parfait
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” – Anna Quindlen
“To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.”
– Walt Whitman
“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end.”
– Gilda Radner
*
Un jour parfait
J’adore
Chocolat noir
And red wine
Woodsmoke on
A frosty morning
The abundance of
Sourires et baisers
Dans mon environnement
Chestnuts roasting
Warm wooly hats and scarves
Un tasse de café
Warming icy hands
That simmering cauldron of soup
Which beckons me
As a day at the easel
Takes its toll
J’adore
Mozart and moonlight
Filtering throught
Ma fenêtre
Glistening reflections
On canvas
Un jour – bien utilisé
*
Bisous,
Léa
Le berre de rivière (The river Berre)
“Look deep into nature, and you will understand everything better.” – Albert Einestein
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” – William Shakespeare
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” – Henri Matisse
Le berre de rivière (The river Berre)
Tables and chairs
Against an ancient
Stone wall
Across from le
Café
Si vous êtes chanceux
A seat can be yours
Pageant of color
Paints the sky
As the sun disappears
West
Beneath lies
La berre
Dried up
Fish to dust
Few remaining puddles
Disappear rapidly
To be reborn with
November rains
Un verre de vin rouge
For now
A book
As I wait
Stars
Take center
Stage
A show that takes
Ma soufflé loin
*
Bisous,
Léa
Material Witness
“Art is not a part of life, it is not an addition to life, it is the essence of those pieces of us that make us fulfilled. That give us hope. That give us dreams and provide the world a view very different than what it would have been without us.”
– Hasan Davis
“Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.” – Julia Cameron
“I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.” – Susan Griffin
*
Material Witness
This is what I get
For attempting to reduce
The clutter in my life
This red plastic toolbox
Filled with long ignored
Pencils, charcoal, pastels
And other tricks of a trade
They were so foreign to
Me
Something I ached for
Yet knew nothing about
Flashbacks to childhood
A half-sisters art supplies
Tossed aside at the demands
Of her fiancée
Now these things
Were in plain site
Demanding attention
To be dealt with
To be used
To skate across paper
Or canvas
All the negative decrees of a
Lifetime want to be heard
Demand their say
Yet something deeper
Wants more
Dare I open the box?
Dare I see what will happen?
Learning to play
With art or anything else
Is more difficult as we age
But if it is given the smallest chance
It will prevail
The evidence is all around
Me
*
Bisous,
Léa
Fight Censorship and thank a Librarian
“We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. – E.M. Forster
“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” – Henry Louis Gates
“Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of ‘The Giver’: the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.” – Lois Lowry
DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR AND READ:
http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/statementspols/freedomreadstatement
*
Fight Censorship and thank a Librarian
It’s banned books week
And if a book hasn’t
Made it on that list
I’m not sure it is
Worth my time
Reading
*
It’s banned books week
If you care about
Making your own
Choices
If there is a book
You like that
Has made the list
Speak out
*
It’s banned books week
Somewhere there is a
Librarian who has stuck
Her neck out
For your right to
Read what you choose
They are the hero’s of
The hour
*
It’s banned books week
Celebrate
Read a book
From the list
Read the statement
Freedom to Read 1953
Celebrate
Then go to the independent
Book store and buy
Banned books
*
Bisous,
Léa
dans le sable des mots / in the sand of words
“To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.” – William Blake
“When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.” – William Shakespeare
“All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the fest of the mind.” – Khalil Gibran
*
dans le sable des mots / in the sand of words
my hands plunge deeply
this insatiable quest
finding the right verbs,
adjectives and adverbs
the preposition
which when assembled
like Rubik’s puzzle
lead me to what is missing
yet words like sand are
flexible
capable of embracing
the power of
la mer
or sliding through my
fingers
so strong, she restrains the oceans
large ships skim
across their surface
she cradles the ravaged
cities swallowed in the
tsunami’s of time
concealing their final
resting place
so delicate
a breeze thrusts them
into oblivion
starfish, shells the
similes and metaphors
dans le sable des mots
*
bisous,
léa
A quote, books and an author…
“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses the rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights up like a bushfire. It’s the crack cocaine of the literary world.” Jasper Fforde – (First among sequels)
This quote comes from a book I just finished reading. For those of you who have not yet discovered Jasper Fforde, perhaps this is the time. His Thursday Next series has been most enjoyable but also a tremendous stretch. I’ve never been into reading fantasy but would follow him right back into the Literary World he has created. The first book in the series, The Eyre Affair, our tour guide was none other than Miss Havisham who trained the intrepid Miss Next. Thursday is an excellent student and rapidly builds her reputation among the Literary Operatives of the book world. To date there are seven books in the series: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursday’s is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot.
You can follow Thursday as she travels around hopping into this book or that, interacting with characters, story and text. Of course there is the evil nemesis The Goliath Corporation and they are always on Thursday’s heels. Due to great advances in the world of genetic engineering, cloning is a popular hobby and therefore, Thursday has a pet Dodo bird. Re-engineered Mammoths can be a menace to gardens in their path.
For those of you who have not yet made your travel plans for August, you can join in on the festivities at the annual Fforde Ffiesta. It is located in the town of Swindon the hometown of Miss Next. This weekend of silliness is inspired by the works of Jasper Fforde. This year, 2013 will be set in the year 2057. For more information on the event and the opportunity to meet Jasper Fforde check out this website: http://www.ffordeffiesta.co.uk/
Bisous,
Léa
Caring for your muse
“To draw you must close your eyes and sing.” – Pablo Picasso
“I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity.” – Gilda Radner
“I do not seek. I find.” – Pablo Picasso
***
caring for your muse
one cannot expect the muse
to subsist on a diet of only
white bread, salad and chicken
the muse requires dark chocolate
black cherries, truffes (truffles)
washed down with champagne or
premium vin rouge
–
a muse will not be confined
to numbers on a clock
nor the position of the sun
on the horizon
she sets her own time
and will be obeyed
her candle burns at both ends
–
muse requires a steady supply
of sensory stimulation
the smoothness of a stone
plucked from the icy riverbed
burning sand between her toes
excesses of silk
a kitten’s fur
caramel stuck to teeth
sexual tension and a lover’s touch
the rhythms of heat
sunlight on her back
–
the rustling of leaves
the crack in a glacier
before tumbling to sea
waves crashing ashore
screaming sirens
60’s rock
hard rock
bolero
mozart
–
hot tar on the newly
paved road
a wet dog
lilac, thyme, rosemary
pine, rose
the damp sweetness
of the chestnut tree
in the rain
–
all food to whet
artistic revelation
if denied
starvation will be
fatal
–
nourishment
is in your hands
will you give her
smorgasbord
or do you only offer
fast food
***
Bisous,
Léa
poetry, photos and musings oh my! 