I alone remain to tell the tale or rotten eggs are a part of everything

“I alone remain...”

            Everything connects at a level where time, if it exists, is more like a friend in a correspondence waiting to know your thoughts.  How will I communicate these thoughts?  Who will listen?

            I know that I exist through the telling.  This journey is one way to bring it all together.  I want to communicate in wholeness yet I’m often left with only fragments.  Writing is a way to re-member, to fish the deeps, to bring what must come up to the surface.  It’s a way to hook up with the soul, as Psyche is sometimes known.  As she resides in the developing stage of her being she is the chrysalis-fish waiting to sprout wings or waiting to raise hell and take the deeps with her to the surface world.  When Psyche speaks to me in my dreams, I listen. 

             It’s like she’s saying, “Drop me a line.”  Drop her a line and if you listen good, she’ll hook you up to something really cool.  So let out the microphone lines and get connected.

            After all, I think that’s what there is besides space and time.  The need, and deed, to create, to connect to the really deep places.  To communicate.  To show how the world belongs to you and how you belong to the world.  How you and the world merge.  To express yourself, which is as much a part of the world as the world is a part of you, is to express the world through your use of space and time.  Rather than feeling fragmented, which I have often felt, I can use my time to create. And in this creation blend with the tale.  As you would being a part of the whole - like a piece of the hologram, broken off, but no longer a fragment only a piece of the whole.  Light caught on photographic material or time trapped in amber.  What is the difference?  In the end we tell the tale whether deliberately or not.  Maybe the tale tells us.  Maybe it’s like that kid’s game and the last one in is a rotten egg. 

Except from Conversations with Nic by freda karpf     Conversations with Nic on Kindle

Not ready for spring

Whispers flew past her ears like streamers.  Did someone call her name?  Was she touched by a god?  Something was in place for her though she was apart from it.  It was knowledge of the world, of this and that.  The recipe for her golem heart played in her head ‘You take the wet sand on the beach and form it into the shape of a heart. You ride it out fifty years into the days of discovery, finding heat in flowers, noticing the return of the blue jays, hearing the fuse of the owl calling, the creak in the door sending it away.  Dried and falling down the heart becomes one with the sand and the returning wave existing in refuge and succumbing to rhythms.  The heart will ride out to the sea to become a fish or to swim in the Gulf Stream delivered to another shore.’

There’s a space in her heart that she fills and gets free refills, again and again.  Nobody knows how it has the ability to empty or knows the chamber it’s emptying into. But it must be going somewhere.

The heart is also tidal. It will return.  Still, knowing this felt like standing on land surrounded by a sea of thoughts. Each thought can lead you to the flower at the tip of Jerusalem grass where each blade is a road to its own spring. 

She knew this, and she also knew she was not ready for spring.  

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

Wisdom emerges extracted from riding the waves

     Sometimes, without looking, you find a birds’ nest.  Wisdom has us collect things. We don’t know why. If it is a natural thing it is a way for us to connect with the world that is not manipulated.  Are we guided by the animal still faintly alive in us? Claire collects birds’ nests.  Mrs. Scattergood might wish for the secrecy of the egg.  Up in the trees close to the sky, the world of becoming.  The eggs direct from the fecund fertile darkness of yin. Encased in the yin night.  It would almost be insane not to want to collect birds’ nests.

    

 Wisdom is like water; seeks its own level beyond the consciousness we know, beyond the scope of language. Most is always unspoken and some comes in a language we don’t know. “My mother’s first language was Yiddish and mine,” Mrs. Scattergood followed, “was the ocean.”  Even as Mrs. Scattergood was living her life in Newark she was waiting for the time she could go down the shore. 

Years later, missing her mother, she would write the River Lena, for if her mother was not named after the river, surely the river, was a metaphor for the connection she felt to her – flowing when she was alive, and though frozen in the winter since her death, a road she could travel on to be with her.   

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf