Jules Rolfe
Giving Hands
Inspiration piece

Lake Effect
Barbara Bever
Response

The cold broom of Canada’s winter sweeps across Lake Erie and dumps a dustbin of powdery snow on the southern shore. Weathered, match-stick fences strive to keep the beach road passable for the heavy-laden woman braving the bitter day. Her white-whiskered Labrador snuffles the fluffy depths in search of a burrowing winter hare. It’s not the woman’s thick coat that keeps her warm today, but rather the flotsam and jetsam of her life bobbing upon the shore of memory.

She recalls the toddler in a tulip-shaped sun bonnet sitting on a faded cotton bedspread that once blanketed a grandmother’s wedding bed. She’s sipping icy Kool-Aid from a waxy paper cup and nibbling on a sandy Sunbeam sandwich. Silver dollar poplars rustle restlessly above weather-beaten picnic tables hosting families frying eggs and bacon on summer Sundays. Sea gulls screech overhead as children squeal at the water’s edge, toes testing the memory of the artic waters of winter. Plastic sand pails, shovels and castle molds litter the beach with their bright color. Yet her memories easily disintegrate like forgotten toys left to the harsh summer sun and brittle winter winds.

She once read a story about bright yellow rubber ducks that broke free of their container ship and traveled round the world. She, too, escaped this place of her birth in search of distant lands, washing up in rocky ports and welcoming harbors. But the travel took its toll on her and those ducks. Over time, the ducks become nothing but round little pellets of faded glory on the sands of Alaska, Hawaii, or Scotland. Nothing is left of her own brilliance and beauty. But unlike the remnants of the ducks, she will not remain on the coast of life forever. When her ashes are strewn into the body of water from which she came, all trace of her will be gone.

The old dog noses her thick glove and urges her back to the warmth of the hearth. She turns away from beach as a gray cloud passes over the winter sun. The snow crunches under her thick boots as they head home.

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Jane Hulstrunk
Response

Cave Dweller
By Terah Van Dusen
Inspiration piece

I tiptoe back
into my cave
here I know
no love
and my dreams
are slaves
the walls they’re
painted with
a man and child
that have no faces
I am unaware
of the setting
and rising of
the sun
because these
walls prevent me
from seeing changes
notes of promise
are left at
my doorstep
letters dated
weeks before
by men
who’ve waited,
but wandered,
ignored
I must emerge
for work and play
but the delights
of the cave
forever tempt
me to stay
where I can
dream in
the dark,
write by
match
and
flame

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Jane Hulstrunk
Response

Celebration
By Lisa Lynn Biggar
Inspiration piece

Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh.
~  from The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley

This time I run deeper into the woods.  I maneuver around branches.  I jump across fallen trees.  I run faster and faster, my heart pounding, so that when I come upon the white canopy that is up to my waist the stop is hard. I nearly tumble onto the canvas.

I squat down, shield my eyes from the setting sun.  I peek under the canopy and see a crowd of small people—they’re like fairies, beings of soft blue light, as if projected from a screen. But they’re three dimensional. And they have no wings. No one seems to notice me, this large being peering in at them.  They go about their business, spreading table cloths on miniature banquet tables for copious tiny steaming plates of food. It’s a feast. A celebration. I long to join them, but my foot is the size of one of the tables. I rub my eyes.

“Welcome,” one of them says. He’s wearing a black top hat like a mayor. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

I look around.  “Me?” I say, placing a big hand over my stilled heart.

“Who else?” the mayor says, then takes off his hat and bows. “This is your special day.”

My special day? It’s not my birthday.

A lady walks up beside him and curtsies. She’s wearing a crown of yellow flowers. “We’ve prepared all of your favorite dishes,” she says.  “Roast beef au jus, macaroni and cheese, potato stuffing. . .” She continues with the menu, many of the dishes I haven’t had since my childhood.  My mouth waters. Everything smells so delicious.

The path is suddenly widening, trees and bushes growing fast, and I realize that I am shrinking in size.  I now easily fit under the canopy.  I step inside and I’m immersed in this sea of blue light. I feel free, unencumbered. The joy of the celebration dances within me. I sit down at one of the tables.  Wine is poured.  The mayor makes a toast to me.

“To the one and only,” he says.

My name escapes me, but the smell of the food brings back memories.

My mother is making potato pancakes, grease sizzling in the cast iron pan.

The factory smell on my father’s dark coat.

Honeysuckle in my wife’s blonde hair.

Our son running on the coral sand, the rush of the waves. . .

And then it all fades away, back to the blue, to the vines and the moss and the tangle of earth’s roots. In a circle we dance and dance for what seems forever. It’s hard to break away, my resistance like a force of gravity. But somehow I extricate myself. I thank the mayor for having me. I step outside the canopy and regain my size.  My bones ache from the expansion.

I turn back, to go home, and realize an eternity has passed.

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Brian MacDonald
Inspiration piece

Disconnection
By Paula Kaiman
Response

“Your primary problem,” said the healer, “is that, energetically, your head is disconnected from your body.  In other words, you’re not grounded.  You’re not fully present on the Earth plane.”

She’d heard versions of this all her life.  Admonished in school for gazing at length out the window, having failed to stay on task.  Caught short in meetings at work, enraptured by the vaulted picture window of her mind.  “Where’s your head?” they’d ask.

She couldn’t help it.  She perceived the world in her own unique way, navigating by the light of a secret inner beacon.  Every cell of her being thrilled at the magnificent and recoiled at the hideous, in the smallest of details and briefest of moments.  Miniature miracles and minor atrocities of which no one else seemed to take note.

The healer lit a smudge stick.  Fanning its smoke through her aura with a brown-and-white striped feather, he called to the spirit of the plant, the spirit of the bird, to bless her with their sacred magic.  When the ritual was complete, he gave her a polished crystal to help protect and reconnect her to the Earth.  The rest was up to her.

She wrote out a check and thanked him, then left for the station to make her way home.  All around her swarmed the differently disconnected.  She couldn’t bear to look.  She fingered the stone in her pocket, then buried her head in a book.

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Blown Away
Aimee Fullman
Inspiration piece

Lay Out
By Uma Gowrishankar
Response

The story of earth
is cycle of becoming.

Path of light
enters
the eye at birth,
exits
in column of water,

surfaces,
breaks through sheet of silence

to lay
out ,
bleed a pool of wetness.

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Inspiration Piece

Brushed Blue
by Kathleen Jordan

Like a lint Roller the wind
Picks up leaves and earth and the tiny delicate last petals of summer
Rolling them into a painting of our lives at the moment
Temperatures rolling and waving from near freezing
Into the 60s late summer warmth and back
Down to the chill, the reminder
That we are in November
And the dark comes very early
The time has changed
Our clothes have changed
And jacket blanketed we face the wind and prepare for
Cooler times and the dark
Which we would like to avoid.

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Inspiration pieces:

Prayer
By Uma Gowrishankar

Life is a large poem, I live out day by day,
words strung as prayer beads. The warm seeds
from the ancient tree in the Himalayas press
my nerves, blood vessels; take secrets to my heart
like the underground river that carries in its cells
knowledge of the valleys and hills it does not get to see.
I kneel on my grass mat, roll a word in my finger,
let it fall between silence to search for my voice.

Just beneath existence
By Uma Gowrishankar

When words vaporize, speech freezes
and muscles atrophy in the hollow chest,
prayer is hard to extract. Then I step
into the chamber of pain, kneel down,
surrender like heap of clothes a washer man
piles to wring. In that dark stillness
I stoke the coal, it glows like an amber bead.
Soon vapour-like dawn breathes out
from the neck of a heaving volcano.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Inspiration Pieces:

Prayer
By Uma Gowrishankar

Life is a large poem, I live out day by day,
words strung as prayer beads. The warm seeds
from the ancient tree in the Himalayas press
my nerves, blood vessels; take secrets to my heart
like the underground river that carries in its cells
knowledge of the valleys and hills it does not get to see.
I kneel on my grass mat, roll a word in my finger,
let it fall between silence to search for my voice.

Just beneath existence
By Uma Gowrishankar

When words vaporize, speech freezes
and muscles atrophy in the hollow chest,
prayer is hard to extract. Then I step
into the chamber of pain, kneel down,
surrender like heap of clothes a washer man
piles to wring. In that dark stillness
I stoke the coal, it glows like an amber bead.
Soon vapour-like dawn breathes out
from the neck of a heaving volcano.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Greg Lippert
Brainwaves
Inspiration piece

Robert Haydon Jones
Like a Picture From a Fairy Book
Response
©2013, RHJA, LLC. All Rights Reserved

I’m a writer by trade. I am not sure why I waited 53 years to publish the story of the most astonishing thing that has ever happened to me.

Just to put things in perspective, in 1972, when I was a TV reporter, I broke the story of the Munich Olympic massacre with a live report from Germany on U.S. network TV. I was the first to announce to a world anxiously waiting for word about the Israeli Olympic athletes being held hostage – that the terrorists had killed them all. The AP confirmed my bulletin.

This is a bigger story. Much bigger.

Oh, I’ve told the story out a few times. First, right when it happened, I told the story to people in my family and to some of the people I worked with. Looking back, I realize now that no one really paid any attention to what I was saying.

I was claiming I had foreknowledge of the ghastly, midair collision of two airliners that left the charred corpses of 133 people strewn in the streets of New York City with the gaily wrapped Christmas presents they had brought for their loved ones. The fact is absolutely no one paid any attention to my story. It’s not so much they didn’t believe it – – I don’t think they really heard it.

Down through the years, once in a while, I would bring up December 16, 1960. Often, I would do this in company with my wife, who was at the center of it all. Carol was painfully shy about everything – but she wouldn’t object when I repeated the story and in her laconic, soft-spoken way, she would confirm my account.

Every time I told the story, people were polite. No one acted like I was fibbing. People mostly shook their heads and gave a little smile. Looking back, it reminds me of the opening lines of Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Happiness.”

I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.

So, now, I’m going to tell the story out to you.

Early in the morning of December 16, 1960, my wife, Carol, woke me up in our bedroom in Connecticut. She was very upset. She told me she had just dreamed she saw two airliners collide high above a city and plummet down thousands of feet and crash into the city and burn. She said she could hear a lot of screaming as the planes fell to earth – it took quite a long time and it was terrible.

Carol began to cry and tremble. She said everyone died except for a boy who was thrown clear of one of the planes on to a snow bank on the street. The boy was conscious but badly hurt. Carol said the boy was rushed to a hospital. She said she dreamed that the chaplain at the hospital was the minister of the church she attended as a girl when she had lived in Louisville, Kentucky. She said that the boy was conscious and talking but afraid. The chaplain was trying to reassure him.

Poor Carol was badly shaken. I did my best to console her. I told her not to worry – that it was only a dream. I called Carol’s mother who lived nearby and asked her to come over. I had to take the train to my job in New York City – and Carol had our two-year old boy and our month old infant son to care for.

When I got to work, I called home. Carol’s mother answered. She told me Carol had gone back to bed and was sleeping. I told her Carol had been upset by a bad dream. She said Carol had told her about the midair collision and the boy in the snow bank and the minister from Louisville comforting the boy at the hospital.

At about 10am, I left the office with one of the secretaries and took the elevator down to Madison Avenue for a coffee break. Actually, we weren’t going for coffee. We jumped into the bar on the corner of 48th street and each had two quick ponies of medium sherry.

At 22, I was already an alcoholic, albeit a “functioning” one. Judith, the secretary, was a good drinking companion. She was from England and had an open mind and as it turned out had a crush on me.

When we got back to the office, everyone was crowded around the TV in the conference room. Two airliners had collided on approach to the city. One airliner had crashed on an open field in Staten Island. The other had crashed into the street in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. It appeared there were no survivors.

As I recall, I told Judith about Carol’s dream and she gave me the smile I would become used to. I’m sure I told some other people at work – and I remember telling some of my friends on the bar car on the way home – but like I said, they acted as if they didn’t really hear me.

It was nearly 9 when I got home. Carol’s mother went right out as I came in – it was clear she was not pleased at my late arrival. The children were sleeping – Carol had just fed the baby. She had slept until late afternoon. She and her mother had learned about the crash on the TV. She was very upset.

I poured us a couple of stiff highballs. Carol drained her drink and started to weep. She said she was overwhelmed with guilt – that she should have warned the airlines. She told me she had seen the names and insignia of the planes. If she had called, perhaps the crash could have been averted.

Well, what could I say?

I told Carol she couldn’t know the location of the planes she had seen in her dream. I told her that no one would have believed her. And then, I’m sorry to say, I told her it was only a dream – a strange coincidence.

It was Friday night. We had several more drinks and nibbled at some meatloaf her mother had made. We watched the late news on TV. The crash was the lead story. It turned out that there had been a survivor of the plane that crashed in Brooklyn.

An 11-year old boy, from Wilmette, Illinois, had been thrown clear into a snow bank on the street. He was badly hurt but he was conscious and talking. It appeared he would survive. His parents were headed to the hospital to be with him.

The boy said that right before the collision he had been gazing out the window at the snow falling on the city. “It was beautiful. Like a picture from a fairy book.” Then there had been a loud bang – and the last thing he remembered he was falling.

It was very disturbing to hear this. I had quite a few more drinks. I got pretty drunk. Carol couldn’t stop crying. I went to bed. As I drifted off to sleep, my poor wife was still sobbing.

On Saturday morning, it was all over the front page of the Times. The still photos were even more graphic then the TV. There were enormous pieces of the plane jumbled through the street. A big church had been utterly destroyed.
200 brownstone houses had burned. There were a number of candid shots of firemen grimly carrying stretchers with body bags. 83 passenger and crew had been killed, most burned beyond recognition. Six people had perished on the ground.

There was a photo of the boy, lying there on his back on the snow bank. A woman in a leopard skin coat held an umbrella over him. His face is grimy with soot. His eyes are wild with shock. He is holding his right hand out from his body as if 
in supplication.

Carol and I took solace from the fact that the boy on the snow bank had survived. His parents were reported to be with him at the hospital. According to the Times, the churches were crowded with people praying for little Stephen Baltz.

Later that afternoon, NBC TV ran a Special Report. A famous anchorman said the disaster could have been averted. The nation’s Air Traffic Controllers were not equipped to handle the volume of airliners in metropolitan areas in the Jet Age. (Jet passenger service had just begun in 1958.)

They interview a pilot from United who regularly flew the DC-8 Jet model that had crashed in Brooklyn. The pilot says that he and other pilots have experienced an ever-increasing number of “near-misses”. He says the problem is the Controllers don’t have instruments that tell them the altitude of the planes they are tracking.

Suddenly the broadcast is interrupted by a bulletin, live from the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. A group of doctors and a minister are clustered around a microphone. The minister announces that the survivor, Stephen Baltz, has just died unexpectedly from respiratory issues. He says the boy went peacefully and his parents were with him.

“Oh, God,” I said to Carol. “How horrible.

“That’s my minister from Louisville,” Carol said.

Well, I got goose bumps when she said that. To tell you the truth, I got goose bumps again just now when I wrote out what Carol said.

It was 53 years ago this month. Carol made other uncanny forecasts over the years. Some scientists from Duke wanted to study her – but Carol didn’t like the attention.

A few years later, we were at a party in Greenwich Village when Carol started talking a strange sounding kind of English that was hard to understand. As it happened, a lady standing near us was a professor of Medieval Studies and a Chaucer expert.

She said, “Your wife is talking in Old English.”

I said, “What is she saying? “

The lady told me Carol was saying she was an old woman who had been through a life full of pain and she was tired.

Then Carol said, “Is that what I was saying? I could hear myself talking but I couldn’t understand what I was saying.”

Carol was special. She had this unique gift – and she was so modest and unassuming. She certainly tried her hardest with me – but my alcoholism got worse and worse until finally she asked me to do the decent thing and leave. I did very reluctantly. We were divorced and Carol remarried and lived happily for decades until her death a few years back.

I finally did get sober. Part of the recovery process is learning that you can’t change the past – but it is hard to accept that. This very attractive, intelligent, gentle woman with a unique gift — loved me and gave me three wonderful sons –- yet I made alcohol and drugs my priority over Carol and my family. It is sad to think about.

I guess that’s the big reason I held off on telling my story of December 16, 1960.

I’m clean and sober and happily married now for decades. But every time I think about the morning when Carol told me about that dream, I feel a stab of pain.

What do I make of it? I’m a Unitarian. My minister, Frank, says that some times in life you run into things where’s there’s more there than meets the eye. I can leave it at that.

I’ve attached some URL’s that will connect you to the TV and newspaper coverage of the midair airliner collision of December 16, 1960 that Carol foretold. Warning: Some of the coverage is pretty graphic. The picture of poor little Stephen lying on the snow bank is particularly disturbing.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086028/Photos-1960-Brooklyn-airline-crash-sparked-new-era-black-boxes.html

http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/01/a_horrific_plane_crash_over_st.html

http://youtu.be/NjYyBCuysG0

Tora Estep
Oil on canvas
Response

Arroyo
By Adam Cornford
Inspiration piece

The house says ours but with its wide rooms and windows
waving slow tree shadows I don’t seem to know it, the air
dim blue before dawn you’re there dear father somehow
unapproachable, bigger than me as if in your fifties again
solid and strong unspeaking You lead me from the house
along a narrow arroyo over big boulders pale and smooth
down there unlit water rushing the same way we clamber
stream voices pressing their near-words into grey silence
What are they saying why won’t you answer me father
your broad back in pale jacket is turned to me, the boulders
covered with moving black flowers no they’re butterflies
wings patterned intricate black on grey stirring windless
You’re far ahead down this muttering channel of shadows
in colorless light where small wings flutter round my feet

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