Gratitude and Odes

At work, on the street corner, on the television we find slander, complaining, greed. As an act of rebellion, or a cultivation of gratitude, I plan on contructing my next couple of blogging posts as Odes, singing praises. Here is my quickwrite ode to gratitude:

Gratitude, you golden thing. The sky is blue and I am breathing. In the garden this morning while my mother watered, I pruned the choyote. Some of its leaves were browning, drying and falling to the ground. What it needed, my mother commented, was a trellis, something to grow on. A lattice, a structure that its curly tendrils of new life could cling to and climb, higher and stronger. In my life as I grow, as a writer, as a worshipper of God, as daughter, sister and friend, I too need a trellis, something that helps support the space for new growth and further research. I think Gratitude can be that foundational thing. A pause of appreciation that I awoke this morning. A pause of appreciation for my clever body and this clever world I live in spinning on its axis and today is summer. An appreciation for my friends, an appreciation for the process of repentance, an appreciation for growth itself. An appreciation for past, future and present. All this appreciation, these pauses and exhales, allow me forward. Allow me here. Allow to be more worshipful, helpful and loving. Allows room for work, temperance, discipline. And to take note where I do not see the birds singing, the hardness of heart, that stumbling block to love. EARTHQUAKE!!!!

Purging

Makes me think of bulemic girls and library inventories. But also of splinters in my heart and unworn clothes in my closet. As i am leaving this apartment and this Los Angeles I am leaving behind the Pacific Ocean. It will not fit in my pocket. I am also leaving a trail of history: ethernet cords and routers, the black tank top that never fit, blankets that I never knew where they came from. A jar of Guava jelly, half used. The dvd player, curtains and curtain rods. Measuring tape for Malika, chair and couch for Janice. Recyclables sorted into the studious carts of homeless men addicted to glass bottles and the things that come within. Trash for the dumpster, the mountain not lived on in the country except by the rats and birds. Divide my life into seven my new assignment and I will leave that paper behind perhaps by match and flame. Some day I will be purged my bones and muscles left behind as new wonder and garden grows, to the heavens and brightness my soul will go and all the nitty gritty details, the sweeping, the empty pens, the unread books, the html i never learned the stools i searched so long and hard for will be fragments of life, shreds of eternity available and probably forgotten like a tattoo is not permanent in reality eternal. Tomorrow is streetcleaning.