For The Sunday Muse Prompt # 173: Self Portrait with Accordion, (original image by Guido Vedovato) and How To Paint A Self Portrait by Nicole Tinkham. ** First form the silhouette, press the mound of wet earth thin till it yields, pliant, to the probing of the finger and the thumb. Place the eyes, in the space between the first and the middle third, let the ears and the eyes align: two eyes, two ears, one mouth ...
For the Sunday Muse prompt #172: ** When the rain comes breathe in the clarity it brings- savour the stillness you remember from the times it came before, the delights the memories of past days and gone weeks and seasons long disappeared, bring you. Cherish the muscle memory of the steps that draw you along this path to the days of innocence, because drop by drop, the sorrows of the far country are dissolving in the rain.
“Roots” 1943 by Frida Kahlo, for the Sunday Muse prompt 171: ** They say that fiery flames beget cold ash, the certainty of beliefs passed down petering out into the lukewarm ambivalence of doubt and questioning. These roots are the things that hold us still each tendril like a link tethering us to the ones who went before.
For H, and The Sunday Muse prompt #170: ** She lingers like a ghost in the night, this memory of my mother, framed by a distant light: the stately stillness of her furrowed brow, the slight tilt of her chin catching the light, defiant. The moment when the lone tear hangs - perched impossibly as though straining against the world - comes to me again and again in a vision of the night, its lingering like a thread tethering me in my seasons of incertitude.
For The Sunday Muse prompt #141: ** Each whirl of the earth around the Sun’s well of power and of light brings us back here. Like a boat dragged inexorably by the rising tide to shore, the swell of the sea brings us peace, to a season of reflecting, of contemplating and of pause. Time’s rhythm like the faint echo of a distant drumbeat is welcome whisper in our ear. Yesterday ...
For The Sunday Muse Prompt # 128: ** When Neil and Buzz reached the top of the world their feet ensconced in the very dust from whence they came they left in awe at the fragility of things, at how the pale blue dot they left behind hung as though by an invisible thread, shimmering with the ethereal beauty of the light lent it by the sun. Butterflies fluttered on their insides, their hearts ...
For The Sunday Muse Prompt #124: ** The King surveys his realm, from his perch high atop a dry, wizened tree. This is what freedom is, to roam without a care and be one with the earth.
For The Sunday Muse prompt #123: ** Even in the darkness the beauty of lent light shines through, the golden petals of the sunflowers magnificent as they follow the sun. Beauty, hitherto hidden, is called out by the sharing of the light, the sum of its parts many times more brilliant than when it hides alone.
For The Sunday Muse prompt #122: ** We have carried our bodies to a far country, the weight of the burden of the duty of sons driving us like a ship heave-hoing in a stormy gale to the place where our kin were brought before. Each day we toil amongst the living to save the ones we hurt by leaving, the labour of our bent backs a libation poured on dry earth, to appease the spirits of the old ones. This is our penance, a prayer sung to the tune of the songs handed down. ...
For The Sunday Muse prompt #121. After Emily Dickinson. ** Hope is the thing that shimmers in the distance the faint light flickering in the brooding stillness of the afternoon heat, the persistent promise that this thirst, this longing for restoring will be sated by rain. It is the pulse quickening with the lengthening shadows of evening and the return of familiar sights to the eyes. It is home calling the lost son to return to the dangerous duty of tending.