First of all, yay Britney. Your dad is FINALLY gonna resign as your conservator. Now if we could just let you take out your IUD, make your own money & decisions– that would be _human_ wouldn’t it?
Second, another new poem. Yup, make that 2 days in a row for those keeping track. Am I healing or hurting? Who knows // little bit o’ both. I’m just gonna keep on writing!
Coming out of a haze of bad medications, coming off several bad PTSD throw-back triggers, fighting depression, and battling covid at work. If last year was bad, this year feels like a grave I keep digging with no end in sight.
Yet, she persisted.
So, two new poems over here. If you’re into that kind of thing.
It’s been a year since I’ve been anywhere that’s not work or home (or twice, my friend Ben’s house, to be completely honest). My roommate, also a nurse, moved back to Reno in August so I haven’t seen her in months! We decided that since we both finished our vaccines in January and covid is waaaay down at our respective hospitals, we would try to rent a house on the Sonoma Coast to enjoy the ocean air.
The house was a very ’90s tri-level with some leftover ’90s nostalgia. But the sunrise and sunset from the deck was beautiful. We mostly hung out on the level with the kitchen/dining room.
We baked some bourbon brown butter blondies (delicious), ate all the best carbs (creamy sausage and broccoli pasta, bread with cheese), did a puzzle & drank a little bourbon. Well, I drank just a tiny bit of bourbon. She prefers wine. We did, however, drink one beer for good measure. We decided to finally see what all the hullaballoo about Pliny the Elder is all about. Turns out, it is really good beer.
After two nights, my friend left, and I spent one day/night gloriously alone. Just me & the birds in the redwoods surrounding the house. I ate our leftovers, enjoyed the warm sun through the giant windows overlooking the dining room table, wrote a new poem, and tried my hand at some watercolor landscapes and redwoods (below).
Three days isn’t that long, but it’s just enough when you need to get away and feel like you’ve been gone just long enough. All the driving also gave me the chance to finish 2 audiobooks, both of which I enjoyed immensely– Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix.
I took the titles from the reading list for Jenny Lawson’s Fantastic Strangling’s Book Club, which she runs though her website The Bloggess and her store Nowhere Bookshop. Of note, I’m not a member of the book club but I am a card carrying fan of Jenny Lawson. I just didn’t know if I’d love the type of books her book club reads, ie horror or horror-adjacent. I’m still not 100% convinced on the genre fiction, but I can recommend these 2 books. A little supernatural fun always adds to a vacation.
The one thing I couldn’t do on vacation was play with clay. So since I’m back two nights before I have to work, I’m going to take advantage. I’m going to work on my sculpting skills. Next up: a whale?
I periodically sneak some poetry up on the poetry page without alerting the masses, lol. But I’ve got a couple new ones up in case you’re wondering… Also, I’ve started marking which ones are new since I last announced an update to the page.
So, go ahead and get your moody sad girl poetry on… if that’s your thing 😉
I finally got my act together and posted some new content. I’ve been debating how to post new poetry. I’m not set on the first method I tried since WordPress’s innate “verse” formatting is awkward and causes side to side scrolling. Today, I went with PDFs. They need to be downloaded but then the formatting is set If you have any ideas, please let me know in the comments.
The poems are a group of 6 from January to June of 2012. This was a time when I first started therapy–a time when I was trying to break though years of accumulated grief and isolation and darkness. Oddly enough, it was when I met my current therapist. He was an intern then, finishing his clinical hours before he finished his dissertation, earned his PsyD, and went into professional practice.
I found these poems buried in an old Evernote account that I started in 2012 and actually kept using into 2017 sometime. Finding all these old archives of my former life is really opening up my eyes to the trajectory of my history. I would call it a midlife crisis except I think that all my major crises have passed. Now, I am only left to deal with the fallout. To make meaning of the stories I tell and plot new ones for the future.
But lets not forget the poetry–the newest additions are at the top:
This week my days off, I’ve been waking up between 2 and 4 am. Not so unusual for me, since I work night shift and my body clock is completely reversed. In these wee hours, given how cold and quiet it is, I often find myself want to do quiet but active things. Reading doesn’t quite do it for me. But making art does! In the last few days, I’ve been making these…
Mixed media, a classic form including the collage (which I’ve been calling the fancy name decoupage I just realized), has always been a favorite of mine. I often like to incorporate paintings into mine as well, so a whole canvas might be combined with small objects such as plants or screws or beads or fabric or basically anything that inspires you. There is almost always paper involved as well, whether it be cut up magazines or (gasp! books) or other paintings, etcetera. One of my recent decoupages has an acrylic painting topped with watercolor paintings, handwritten song lyrics, and magazine parts. Pretty typical for me.
That one, which I’m calling Blackbird (for obvious reasons) also demonstrates how inspiration and process come together. I started this morning with several old watercolors–mismatched & different sized flowers, and a red-winged blackbird. My table was also covered with snippets of magazines from a few days of culling. I grabbed a canvas & first decided to work dry, finding my pieces and layout before gluing anything down.
The blackbird was first to roost, taking center stage on a canvas that I chose specifically to highlight his placement. Next, I laid down some flowers, unsure if I would use them all (I didn’t) or where. Then, I had an aha! One of my favorite songs is Blackbird by the Beatles (or any of many other cover versions that has been made). So obviously I had to listen to it.
And here is where the materials I started the project with (a blackbird painting) led to a moment of inspiration (the song) that led to a cascade of moment-memories, thinking about the times when I’ve listened to Blackbird before, what it’s meant to me, and so on.
Did you realize that you can just type “Blackbird cover” into Amazon music, and you’ll get pages of different versions of the song?
Of the many times I’ve listened to this song on repeat, most have been in dark times in my life. Times when I’ve been lonely &/or alone; times when I felt like a small blackbird in the night with broken wings, unable to escape the night. Just darkness in & around me.
But in the past month, my light has returned more powerfully than ever. And this song is so different now. Hearing it now makes me realize that despite the broken wing, the blackbird can still fly. It is a different and hopeful place that I really want to share with you.
And so I dove into my cut up magazines, finding phrases like “giving thanks” and “incurable optimist” but maybe my favorite is just a snippet of a thought–but it is a snippet that I want to define my next year with:
humans at
our most ambitious, our most inquisitive, our most engaged,
our most eternal, our most creative
–“Blackbird” mixed media by Heather Brossard (
post-script: the title of this post is stolen from the title of a Mary Oliver book & poem. Did you know that you cannot like copyright a title? Well, that’s what they told me in grad school anyways. Here is a link to the poem “Why I Wake Early” in GoodReads; it is delightful if you would like to read it.
