June 12, 2010,
I have reappeared! As if out of nowhere, I am back in this dream-space called the "Blog"/box. It's a big space, I suppose. Lots of room to wander and explore...This is my exploration this morning: Now it begins to feel like summer with the morning heat and coolness a mere thin highlight on its surface while outside the gardener's machines sing loud, the lawn mower's staccato crescendos and sudden diminuendos searing the silence... I slept until ten this morning finally getting some rest after three nights of sleeplessness, and wake now to many paintings waiting to be touched-up or begun. (For those of you who do not know about this fantastic turn in my life, I have become a painter! But more on that another time.) Silver-bellied swallows veer and dip and rise right outside my window. The hollows of the hills turn buff-white and dry, and the Spanish moss, too, has turned light gray rather than being its usual lettuce-green. Flies and tiny gold moths flit here and there on the air. All is summer-still but I would not call it serene because there is a vague agitation encasing the quiet. An egret, white wings a glowing ivory, climbs the sun lit air higher and higher into the powder-blue horizon. The trees tremble a little being tickled by a tepid breeze, lime-green and emerald leaves smile at the wind's attentions. The agitation below the gorgeous summer scene is due to the intensity of the growing heat with its threat of fire. As I write those words down I see all the trees nod their leafy branch-heads in agreement with my observation. "Do something to appease the gods!" they seem to plead. Prometheus, Shiva. Yahweh/Elohim, Binah, Kali! I beg of you, spare this gorgeous globe of life---Your creations. And that's all I can do this morning: make prayers and feed at this trough of words. Like the sleek sienna horse grazing in his pen down in the valley, I graze on these words and taste the morsels of consciousness, savoring the banquet of my mind's images: fantastic flowers on so many canvasses and millions of letters and sentences on the hundreds of my journal's pages---the offerings to my God, the gifts I can give gifts that are evidence that life is worth celebrating---the cerebral flight of the mind flies with Divinity. O' yes! June is a green bride, hot and sometimes dangerous but always blessing us with the seeds of transcendence as well as immanence; an ontological princess throwing her bouquet of fertility to all who stand around poised to catch her multitudinous blossoms of creation. And now to lift-off, too, like the egrets, into my day of paint, photographs, and, always, poems...
About Me
- Laurie Lessen-Reiche
- Born and raised on the outskirts of Detroit, I've been a writer for 35 years. A habitual diarist and photographer, my life's project is not unlike the great German cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. I heartily second his comment that, "Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging." I'm also a photographer, painter, and collagist. Published in numerous magazines in the United States and Great Britain, my work has appeared in such magazines as "Kingfisher," "The Ohio Poetry Review," "Plainsongs," "The Princeton Arts Review," "Poetry Motel," "Bridges Magazine," and many more. I was the recipient of the "2006 Charlotte Newberger Award For Poetry;" awarded 1st place in the University of Colorado's Poetry competition, as well as other awards. I write about subjects ranging from the experience of motherhood, to the effects of childhood sexual abuse, to the rediscovery of forgotten women writers. But always I churn out poetry,even with my eyes closed!