Tag Archives: end of the year

The Changing of the Guard

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As December draws toward its end and a new calendar year lies just over the horizon and out of sight, there is always a sense of anticipation. It’s a many-layered thing, too, this look forward, carrying my constant consternation at all of the possibly awful unknowns like some sort of a scratchy underlayment to the innocent eagerness to discover great and wonderful things ahead. My own small history has taught me that both will hold true to one degree or another in 2015, just as they have for every day, season, year, and chapter in my life, little speck that it is in the equally fearful and fantastic unseeable future of the whole of existence. Knowing that these things will come to be regardless of any worry or wondering on my part never stops me from either of those things.Graphite drawing + text: Change of Heart

The one very best aspect of all of this is that I find every modification does move me to grow and change. I, along with the days, seasons, years, and chapters of my storyline, can be made better by their passage if I choose to keep my mind and heart engaged. Newness ahead can mean new life ahead. Today is a day when the beautiful potential of the best kinds of change should shine most brightly on the horizon of anyone who longs for it.

I Don’t Mean to Scare You, But . . .

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Even though Halloween itself has never been a huge event in my life, you may, just possibly, have noticed a rather dark tinge to my humor (if such a thing exists) that pervades the year regardless of its official celebrations. So I’m hardly above taking advantage of the approach of a publicly sanctioned excuse for some of my own cheap brand of funereal jocularity. I plan to shower you with gloomy silliness as the holiday nears, so if you’ve any fearful tendencies, pull up the covers and plug your ears.digital illustration from a photo + text

A Grackle
May cackle

Creeping down into October and its necromantic nights,
thrilling, chilling masqueraders revel in the season’s frights,
both imagined and uncanny, sweets in surfeit, pranks and scares,
work to raise each other’s hackles, catch out courage unawares–
And the bat and spider, ghostly visitors and ravens reign;
even crows can briefly boast the power to enchant the brain
with a Halloweenish horror, freeze the unsuspecting nape
the suggestible door-knocker turns to sky while dressed in crape–
All a-cower, cowards wander in the dim light of the moon,
hold hilarious their hauntings lest they all prove true too soon,
everyone immersed in darkness, celebrating cyclic fear
as the month and season trickle, bloodied, off to end the year–
All this rampant spookiness, however, leaves the Grackle cold:
black and iridescent bird, she perches, watches, and of old,
knows the crows‘ and ravens’ moment passes, quick as life, is gone,
and her rule o’er earthly foment, like her tail, goes on and on . . .