Last night my writing group met over Zoom. It had been a long time -- I'm not even sure how long. "Have you written anything?" asked C, and I started to hang my head and say no, out of habit, and then I remembered, wait, yes I have!
"I've done two months of daily posts on my blog," I said proudly, starting to wonder if trying to post daily was why I have been feeling so stressed and overwhelmed lately. (Narrator's voice: "But it wasn't the daily posting that was the problem. In fact, the daily posting was one of the things keeping Ruth sane in a very trying period of her life.")
Today I fear I have nothing new to share with you, so I am going to link you to my two months of daily posting and call it good. In October I posted a daily bird poem (Birdtober). And in November I posted a daily gratitude haiku (Gratiku).
This week I wanted to write about mikans, a citrus fruit grown in the south of Haiti and usually everywhere at this time of year (that's the Japanese word -- long story...). Because of the gang activity on the roads between here and the south, though, this year we're not seeing many. My husband was given some for his birthday last week, and we enjoyed eating them so much. I even wrote a Gratiku about them here, but I want to write more. I read a Naomi Shihab Nye poem this week about onions and thought I could maybe use it as a mentor text. For now I'll just have to share her poem, because I haven't written mine yet. (Of course it is better now, as a vague cloud in my mind, than the actual finished poem will be!)
Naomi Shihab Nye's poem begins:
When I think how far the onion has traveled
just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles...
You can read the whole thing here.
In December, we'll see if I can manage to write anything at all. I hope
to share more on my blog in January about the craziness going on right
now in my life, but for now suffice it to say that things are a bit
chaotic. It will have to be enough to read snippets of other people's work, and to try to notice at least some of the "small forgotten miracles" around me.
Mikans on my breakfast table in Jacmel long ago...
