For the first third or so of our lives, we say a whole lot of hellos. New people. New experiences. New things that excite our senses. We are in full-on … Continue reading Hello Goodbye
Author: Mimi DiFrancesca
Former columnist for the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel covering metaphysics, she got to interview the likes of Brian Weiss, The Amazing Kreskin and Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell. Mimi’s love of words became obvious to her parent’s at age four during high mass as she stood on the pew seat to rally the congregation- “Hey! Let’s everybody sit down!” She’s been a tour guide out west and has *too many* years of tourism marketing consulting, designing promo collateral, commercial scripts for TV/Radio, freelance writing, resume and bio coaching and large event planning. A poet, artist, world traveler, mom of two phenomenal kids; in the wee hours she has three finished fiction manuscripts, a published book of erotica, and two blogs and is a self-confessed Pinterest addict. Owner of a fabulous destination wedding and event venue in northern Michigan and a board member of the Northport Chamber of Commerce and Leelanau UnCaged Music & Art Street Festival planning committee. Currently writing a non-fiction book of unusual blessings that her friend/agent is kicking her rear to finish. Member of RWA, MMRWA, CCWA and former CCWA Board. www.wordninjagirl.com
Poetry Day: Road of Stars
Road of Stars
That night,
we walked a fathomless
road of stars-
There were no heroes-
No champions
Only the clean courage
Of grown children
Leaning on each other’s
Resolution while
Everything we knew
Was thrown into the wind-
All promise
Or expectation-
Leaving only this
to walk upon-
This endless starry highway.
Arms clasped
Wrist to wrist
Pulse to pulse
We have pledged our souls
to this loose band-
Come what may
∞
Write like that…
A good story should bring us into the lives, the homes, the kitchens and boardrooms, the mind, the bedroom, the dreams and the nightmares of our character.
We need to write about real life and not just some hermetically sealed. extra light, fat- free, flavor-free version of life.
Because life is not a continuous loop of polite tea parties where characters glance knowingly at one another or blush in sudden thrall from behind their open fan.
Life is outrageous. Life is humans at their lowest lows; gripped with rage or desperation making horrible decisions for horrible reasons.
Life is humans being their very best selves; putting other people before them and risking everything so that those others can live their own outrageous life.
Life is experiencing the soul shaking surrender to a lover who guides us to deep and wondrous places in ourselves that we never dared imagine.
Life is wringing out the last drop of compassion for another and reaching that place where a required action is business only; no emotion.
Life is heart wrenching sweetness and heart crushing pain.
It’s messy and raw and ugly and beautiful. And it 99% deeper than another shallow police procedural or drably written script where characters follow a Girl Scout approved path from their parents door to their spouses.
Thank fuck that it is. Anything less and we would all perish in a monochromatic, Xanax fog without ever breaking a perfect nail.
Write like that or don’t write at all.
Poetry Day: Red Road
Red Road
I do not walk the Red Road in this life-
not being a path this body’s ancestors followed-
though I feel that road…over here.
In my bones
there is sympathetic harmony
rising
when I hear the drums
measuring the heartbeat of the Earth.
In my world,
the one that has spent so much time
silencing that heartbeat
using white noise and non-sense;
though it cannot fill up every quiet place,
some still hear its voice.
I have heard it and now it cannot be unheard.
My own medicine wheel has shown me how to walk another road.
I move with humans to my left- where I can feel their presence
animal world to my right- where I can touch them with what flows through me-
Spirit at my back- encouraging me to take another step
And the stars ahead of me-
flung out far into the Universe
lighting my way.
Not a Red Road this time
but one of every color.
In Praise of Flowers
Can I talk about flowers for a minute? Gee. Thanks.
Owning a wedding and event venue, I see a lot of flowers. A lot. From rare and exotic to the roadside weed, baby’s breath.
I love flowers. I love to grow them. I love to get them as gifts. I love to take photos of them. I love to go into flower shops and talk them into letting me enter their cooler so I can hand pick specific blooms for whomever I am making a bouquet or for whatever event I am embellishing with natures little beauty pageant contestants.
Sometimes, I hear the tired and sad logic of non-flower fans, “It’s such a waste. They just die anyway.” My heart hurts every time I hear that and it makes me wonder if these people have pets (who die anyway) and friends (who die anyway) and long term relationships (that, eventually die when one of the participants exits planet Earth.)
Flowers are proof of the existence of whomever or whatever dreamed up this whole three dimensional experience of life. Flowers are small freaking miracles. They are little works of art; each and every one of them. When I see them, they remind me that there is a much larger and grander overall plan for this world. Larger than binge watching an entire TV series on Netflix in a weekend. Larger than some sophomoric company whose goal is to gather a bazillion dollars and be the king of the hill- until the next king comes along.
Flowers are constructed of aerodynamically perfect proportions, balanced to exacting measurements to catch rain water and sun rays and the attention of bees and birds that go about the busy work of pollinating the heck out of anything that needs their sweet nectar. They grow in cracked cement in unlikely places as readily as in the greenhouse of a master gardener.
They announce seasons and wave their colorful faces like a viral Tweet from the Universe… @Mimi! Look over here! I’m being beautiful, just for you, right now!
Sure, they’ll die soon. And they would anyway in a field or a greenhouse or a backyard. The point is, for the glorious moments they are visible, they are treasures we can hold and smell and look at and they cause us to halt in our steps to look again at their perfection and be, truly, in the moment. They are an organic Zen moment if we honor them by acknowledging their short and perfect existence.
Some of the non-flower people I know spend a lot of time and money on courses in enlightenment and proudly parrot people like Ekhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now. “I just stay centered and in the moment and that’s how I find my bliss.” Bullshit. You totally missed the lesson. You are focused on the future, when the petals start to fall and you are missing the actual NOW of the brief life of a bloom; a source of beauty and joy right in front of your face. If you missed the flower’s life because you can’t see around its impending doom, what else are you missing out on while you’re “centered in the moment”… well, future moment, anyway?
I had run in with breast cancer ten years back. Tons of fun. I was there and now I’m not. I remind myself each day that NOW is the very best moment…ever. And I’m truly grateful for now. And I celebrate each subsequent now with noticing beauty- anything beautiful- each and every day. I don’t do it for anyone else. I do it for me because I know that this now is the only now I am guaranteed. And if I squander it by turning my nose up at small, affordable treasures like a hand full of flowers to brighten my day, then I am a damn fool.
Buy the roses, clip that blossom and put it in a glass by your bedside table. Bring the neighbor a bundle of wonder. Send that bouquet to the one you are thinking of. I once had a *someone* who sent me a rose every day to my office. It was such a small thing but it let me know he was thinking of me and it made me feel like a queen. Do that for someone you think of. Do it now. It’s the only now you are guaranteed.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…”
Poetry Day: The Bones of This Place
The Bones of This Place
I am still a flower pin worn on a summer hat in this little village…
Not like some who have become the tanned skin
or deeper yet, the flesh of this place.
Earned with years of faithful returns to the waiting cottages
with fine dust on tables
that floats in the slanted sunlight
as the windows rise again.
Others, here around the seasons
are now the very blood running through the street veins-
keeping the fires burning and
nodding a farewell to us when winter walks this way.
The longest here; the ones whose names sit on stones
in silent spaces…
on signs that guide us on…
on barns that have gathered the cherry harvest for
More than one hundred years-
They are the bones of this place-
They are the framework that holds it all together
no matter the changing shape of everything around
as it grows and thins from year to year,
starves and flourishes-
Stands naked in hard years or
wears a flowered hat when the bank is full-
The bones… they hold the memory
of why this place is even here.
The Navigation of Grief
There is no engineer designing the temporary structure; no operating manual or planning meetings. Instead, the whole thing rises in a matter of hours, like a gossamer tent large enough to hold the people, the food, the photos and the gigantic emotions that will gather shortly to hold sacred space together.
Poetry Day: Yellow
A hundred billion dandelions
lay in the field
like Saturday children,
faces towards the sun,
drinking in the beauty
of this spring day.
Chewing on The Immigration Gumballs
The 1996 Immigration “Explained” in Gumballs video is making its way around the internet again. It’s an interesting theory, but it ignores the singular element of what is *humane* in terms of humanity’s caring for each other.
As a species, we face a few overwhelming problems; Over Population and Poverty/Starvation for most of the Earth’s inhabitants.
We can not turn away the most ambitious of the masses who seek asylum here (Gumball guy, Roy Beck’s words; not mine) AND simultaneously remove funding for birth control for a planet that is obviously too stupid to only have as many children as they can care for.
Simple solution: Mandatory MALE birth control. For example; if a male has fathered two children with his legal spouse, a mandatory vasectomy should happen the same day the second child is born. A global mandate of this kind means an instant reduction in the “pink gumball” numbers and, over time, a normalization of the number of humans to food ratio until the world is able to take care of everyone.
And here’s why men would make sure that won’t work: men think their sperm is their property, but women’s bodies are somehow *co-owned* by others. Something has to change and it’s about damn time men started taking responsibility for birth control.
Those over crowded nations and horrific living conditions immigrants flee from might just improve over time with a normalization of population growth. With a population under control and all the pressures of overcrowding reduced to a dull roar, a return to home lands could realistically happen. Not through deportation, but through a welcome move back to a new beginning. Many immigrants move here with every intention of going home one day. And we are not the only nation where people long to go, but we like to pretend we are.
Over population is our singular, over arching issue globally. Access to affordable and effective birth control is the first line of defense for over crowding and growing poverty areas dependent on support from others.
In states like Colorado where birth control is readily available, teen pregnancy and unplanned pregnancies dropped by 40% in the past six years.
We should be following suit with a male birth control campaign in our own country as well to reduce the always growing numbers of those born in poverty that stay in poverty.
Beck’s plan at NumbersUSA.com is not to maintain legal immigration. It is to shut the borders. Period. So if your children or grandchildren are not already US citizens, brace for a battle when attempting to bring them here, no matter which country they currently hold citizenship in.
We are already a nation of immigrants, just like Trump’s wives. And frankly, I’ll take a migrant worker who might get desperate and commit a crime like any American person could over a President who commits treason and endangers millions by making back door deals for his own ego and monetary gain any day of the week.
So here’s the gumball video. It’s very interesting and I’ve gotta say, the visual aide is impressive. All that’s missing is him ending the presentation with the wrap up line he silently implies: “… and let’s get real people. Who really gives a shit about the other useless three billion people anyway?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE
Top 10 Reasons School Choice is No Choice
It’s just a scam to make private schools cheaper for rich people, erode public schools and allow for-profit corporations to gobble up education dollars.
Word Ninja Girl 