A little glimpse
a corner of the eye catch
Double take.
Vanished.
It’s enough to know
You’re still here.
poem-ghosts October 13, 2014
Of course ghosts are real
Haven’t you felt them
swirling about you
like leaves in the wind?
Memories that haunt
spinning through your head
with joys and sorrows
that have no place in
tomorrow.
quote-ghosts June 12, 2014
“The odd sense of calm with which he’d waked was still with him. Something had changed in the night. Maybe it was sleeping…among the ghosts of his own future.”
Diana Gabaldon
Written in My Own Heart’s Blood.
These lines resonated with me. While the character in this scene is being literal, I think we sleep among the ghosts of our own futures on a frequent basis. For example, you know how they say men carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. The ‘hamartia’ or fatal flaw of literary characters occur within our real lives, and who we will be is created by the decisions that we make.
Destinations require both journeys and beginnings. We go to bed with a decision, and we rise with a spectre of our future self as a result.
I suppose this also works in reverse. If we have a ‘someone’ we want to be, we can only get there by the conscious and sub-conscious decisions we make toward that image of ourselves. Just like if you want to be a teacher, you volunteer with kids, graduate from high school, study at university, so there are steps to every image.
If you want to write a book some day, sit today and pound out two hundred words. Tomorrow pound out five hundred. Get your rhythm, Keep writing. Eventually you will have a book, and eventually, you will have readers.
poem- Misty’s shoes April 17, 2014
I’m wearing Misty’s shoes;
her ghost clings to them
billowing behind the clicking heels
in the hallway.
Misty set these shoes
on the foot rest of her
wheelchair, but I’m dancing
to her memory down corridors,
blowing kisses to the sky
through windows
wide with wishes.
.
.
.
A few years ago on eBay I bought a pair of black and white Fluevog Harlows: T-straps on towering spool heels . Misty’s sister told me about how they were selling her shoes after her untimely death from cystic-fibrosis. I was so impressed with what she told me about her feisty sister over a brief correspondance, that I created a shoe-oholic character called Misty in the Grace books 3 & 4. The manuscript is sitting on a shelf, waiting for polishing. Someday you’ll get to meet her fictional namesake. In the meantime, you can admire her excellent taste in shoes:
library ghosts December 30, 2011
Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words.
Diana Gabaldon. The Fiery Cross
Shawn L. Bird 