13- Showers

I love showers, but I esspecially love Outdoor Showers. My grandparents lived on Cape Cod for my entire life (they moved this past summer to florida- highly disappointing). Since they lived practically on the beach, they had an outdoor shower (of course!) My grandfather built it himself, right up against the house, sandwhiched in by one of the numerous flower gardens my grandmama kept. It was made of wood, painted a light blue-ish gray, and open enough that green leaves would poke their way through the planks and cause you to feel as if you were showering in the jungle. With the sky blue and bright over head and the breeze gently finding its way to you through the cracks in the walls, the prism-like column of warm water became space-era tube of transportation.

12- Poppies

Poppies are one of my favorite flowers. This is saying A LOT because I love flowers. When drawn perfectly, they almost inspire me to get a tattoo (but that would never actually happen as I am far too frightened of needles). I own a pasta pot and a large frying pan that are covered with a beautiful poppy print. When I cook dinner with them I feel the need to wear high heels and pearls and an apron just because it makes the world so perfectly wonderful and adorable. My current journal is by the illustrator Jill Bliss. Obvi there are poppies on the cover and many of the inside pages as well. I highly reccomend her journals and everything else she makes. Her style is unique and colorful and floral- whats not to like?!

http://www.jillbliss.com/

My good friend Jon is from California. The poppy is California's State Flower. According to this recent video, California is at this very moment a Wizard of Oz Wonder Land. Watch it- you willfeel magnetically compelled to hop into the car and speed off Westward.

11- Poems about Death

Speaking of poetry..... I wrote a ton of it this semester. Here is another one:

Laying in the bath
she is
pink and puckered
like a strawberry rinsed under the faucet of the kitchen sink.
Supple, still, and silent
Her breasts her thighs her eyelids
speak for themselves
Half-submerged
as the final air-bubble-messenger-of-life
makes its way to disappear at the surface.

It is kind of upsetting since it is about a girl who has just drowned herself in the bathtub.... but I still like it a lot. Around the same time I wrote this one, it is also about death. You can tell from the last line when the speaker says "I have been saving up my oxygen."

You are my Space-Age dream
I want to experiment with the anti-gravity of your breath
Whisper into my skin so that I may float upward
I’ve been feeling heavy lately
My head is not even underwater
There is moldy dirt dripping out my ears
Soil moist in the corners of my mouth
and under my tongue
Scrub me clean with your sterile heartbeat
Probe me
I am following the fish with my eyes but when they turn they evaporate into the air
The red one is my favorite
When are we going to leave for Mars?
I’ve been saving up my oxygen.

I find this specific poem to be exceptionally sad because at first it seems that the speaker is going to be saved through the love from this other "Space-Age Dream" person, but then it turns out that it is too late. They are hallucinating and haven't been breathing.... they have been buried and laying dead in the earth for too long. The poem is someone's postmortem thoughts.

I think often poems must be controversial or disturbing in order to be effective. My creative writing teacher once told me that all good poetry is about death. I appreciate beautiful, spiritual, and straightforward poems just as much as upsetting ones. Either way, they are all beautiful, inspiring and full of truth.
Poetry always, always, speaks to my heart.

10- Poetry in Third Grade

In third grade we memorized 100 lines of poetry per quarter. I still remember specific parts of certain poems... specific couplings of lines. One of the poems that frequently comes into my mind is a poem from Shakespeare's The Tempest titled Full Fathom Five:

Full fathom five my father lay
of his bones are coral made
those are the pearls which were his eyes
nothing of him doth fade
but doth suffer a sea-change
into something rich and strange....

That is typed just from memory so it might not be entirely accurate. Im pretty sure there are a couple of more lines at the end.... something like: sea nymphs hourly ring his knell. hark- how I hear them, ding dong bell.

The fact that I was taught the importance of poetry at such a young age has certainly shaped my life. I love poetry and can instantly recognize a bunch of famous poems upon hearing their opening lines.

9 Its a Dry Heat

The other day it was newly hot outside as well as incredibly DRY. i am an east coast girl, through and through, to the core. even more, i grew up breathing in air heavy with humidity. not surprisingly, this dryness nearly killed me. and the kicker is.... no one else even noticed anything! i felt like i was being sucked and shriveled dry. i felt as brittle as my grandmother's Christmas Season peanut brittle. i was miserable and whiny about it all day. i longed for the beach. i longed for the coast. i longed for the heavy, wet, suffocation of east coast seaside air.
So I wrote this:

I’m a plant. I am a pretty little colorful flower and I will only grow- I will only exist and survive and be- if you sprinkle me with salt water. If you drizzle the ocean onto my head and bless me with throbbing whispers of creaky ship-prayers and gasps for oxygen. How am I going to make it if I am not pushing myself up out of sand-soil? Seriously, I don’t think this all-natural process of photosynthesis, of self-feeding and fueling, is going to take place if I do not have these additional, necessary, life-supplying elements.

8- Interior Design

do you love interior decorating as much as i do??!

check out this awesome website for ceramics:
http://www.sydneys.us/

aren't they just perfectly lovely?!

here us another fun website:
http://www.osborneandlittle.com/
[it focuses on fabrics]

i could look at interior design and decorating websites for eternity.

7- Romanticism

Nature has always, always been my main inspiration when it comes to poetry. In class our teacher asked if we had ever experienced the sort of divinely inspirational poetry-inducing experience that Wordsworth had obviously felt and alluded to. My answer is Yes. Yes, of course.
The first of these incredibly memorable experiences took place when i was in the 4th grade and my family was vacationing in Switzerland. I had bought a beautiful new blue notebook which i had glued a fantastic postcard of two white tigers onto the front of especially for the occasion. I was dying to write in it, but i wanted it to be good writing, i wanted it to be special. Thankfully i did not have to wait long before i experienced the monumental life-affecting thing i was looking for. Trummelbach Falls is a series of 10 waterfalls which wind in and out of the mountainside. They can be viewed from the inside of the caves they have carved over time, or from the outside. Standing in the mist of one of the falls i felt it. Inspiration took over me, forcefully. And i began to write. I wrote pages, literally, of poetry regarding the waterfall. regarding switzerland, love, my family, the lush countryside. I stood in the dark wet cave, water dampening the pages of my perfect notebook, and i wrote so intensely and deeply that i cried. Eventually my patient and accepting family encouraged me to come out and continue writing in the sunshine as we went on along our touring. I went, but i did not stop. I continued this epic poem non stop for the remainder of our trip.
This would definitely be the first documented experience of nature inspiration that i have had but it is definitely not the first to have taken place. I recall sitting in the middle of our huge rhododendron bush as the sun set one late afternoon and watching everything around me turn golden and sparkling in the light of the setting sun. this also made me cry and i immediately ran into my house to retrieve a pencil and notebook in order to capture the experience. unfortunately when i returned not only had the sun set, but i was unable to accurately express either the beauty or how it made me feel. this threw me into such a deep and startling sadness that i had never before felt. i remember writing instead about how i was not able express the experience. instead i managed to memorize the moment in my mind so it could be drawn upon at an instant later in life. i was 7. the lasting disappointment has always followed me around and is probably why i feel such a strong need to write about things immediately when i feel them