I am often asked where ideas come from.  In reviewing my life with journals (why was I so detailed about feelings?) I see where poetry came to life.  I seem to have lived a life in conference, in conversation on a level understood with matched souls.

The photo is of our home for 45 years and I tried to explain to my oldest brother my feelings.  I wrote ‘the walls hold the sounds of my beloveds.  The hurts, the laughter, the tears and whoops of joy, the secrets and not so secrets;  all the living and dying of feelings and thoughts proving nothing is lost.

There is a vibrancy of life that is eternal.  The energies of all who walked within these walls stay contained within them.  Much alone, why I am never lonely.  When I think that I have been part of it, I realize that this is immortality for those sensitive enough to recognize it. ( the entry continued with)

Ophelia, I will say, do you think I am dead?
I sit on the very breath you breathe.

I will waft an orange fragrance o’er your head
and you will see me take form.  I will crash
the air with cymbals and you will hear me enter.

A cat cries in the night and you will hear the infant.
The moon will send its shaft of light through the north window
and you will be plagued with memories
you will scarce remember.

You will warm yourself with the sun from
the south window and it will nudge a time and place
on the edge of those same memories and
you will know and still not know.

I have taken you to my bosom, held you and
pushed you away.  And at once tightened my hold
so you will never be free.  You think I am dead?

I ask you, Ophelia, who indeed is dead?

And Ed said that he has never felt that tie to a house.  A mystic you are, he says.  Am I indeed?  Is a portion of my brain activated or aware or is it pain in the moving away?  A cutting of the umbilical cord or am I my phoenix, consumed by fire of my making to arise again with the freshness of the pubescent and the agony of acne?

(another time I will write of the breeze coming in the south window then with the promise of Fall.  All this was part of the entry, with the poem lifted from the entry I titled Listen, Ophelia…which I put into format.  One mind or a concert of compatriots?  And in the meantime the clock told me of schedules to keep and children to tend who said their childhoods were enchanted.  The only permanent fixture of life to me was the everlasting laundry and exhausting pressing and ironing that had to be done.  Such is life for today’s mystic. )