Frosted Roses

It was 28 degrees at 8:30 a.m. in my woodlands area of California yesterday morning. Ice was thick. I had heat in the house, thank God. Hot water, too. I enjoyed the rose buds frosted over; imagine, roses in December.

I'm on a magazine deadline this week, and researching like a mad dog, writing like a person typing with a pencil. Finished a piece on greenhouse gases and personal choices in the afternoon. Thank God Copenhagen is in session and the EPA made its announcement about, surprise, carbon dioxide is harmful to Americans (in the very least), because I had been searching for story lead, and there it was in the morning paper.

Fighting stress is an exhausting business. It can be fought, though, with remembering to breathe, remembering to pray, remembering just to focus on the next indicated thing. My friend didn't want to stay sober, but I did all I humanly could to reach out and remind her of my love and her choices. The rest is in the hands of Man Who Made the Water, as the old song says.

My radio debut of last week has been archived. The topic was "Ears on Art: the Gift of Art." The link here takes you to the local NPR station's archived program. It takes a few moments to download, but I'm five minutes into it, the second reader, and the first is a woman friend of mine with a lovely poetic voice. The KCBX radio link: http://kcbx.org/mp3archive/eoa091202.mp3

My reading is of the experience of writing poetry while in the psychiatric ward being treated for major depression. It was a gift to find the poetry within me at that time especially.

One of the poems I read is this:

The Visitor

When you came to me in the mental ward
you appeared like an angel to tell me
I was pregnant with possibilities.
Redemption was mine at that moment
when a power greater than you and I
flowed like a spark of creation through
your fingertip pressed against my own.
In that hallowed instant I ceased
to be wretched and became a woman
ripe with life.