22 Comments
User's avatar
Josh Datko's avatar

I find myself talking to things more often :) Its usually birds or when I surprisingly see the full moon, as I did last night. But I don't talk to my plants as often as I should!

Lisa Jensen's avatar

Their poor little ears are just waiting, green and pricked, for a word from you! 🌱

Korie's avatar

Me too. The older I get, the more I talk to absolutely everything. I believe that plants are much smarter and more conscious than we once thought!

Lisa Jensen's avatar

Ditto for me, Korie! I've always talked to myself, but now I talk to everything. I'm reading Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness right now, and the stuff about plant sentience and consciousness is fascinating.

Margaret Ann Silver's avatar

Oh my goodness, those last lines. Wow.

Lisa Jensen's avatar

Thanks, honey! I love a wow.

Victress Hitchcock's avatar

What can I say.. I love this piece. I love words, how you create two vastly different experiences of the same thing with the change of a word. The difference in my reading of words, of sentences and whole books is when is it alive and when is it dead. Thank you for the prompt and the provocation of the two opposing functions.

Lisa Jensen's avatar

Thank you so much, Victress! What a lovely, generous comment and reflection.

Nuria Sheehan's avatar

Thank you for this post. These last few weeks I've been trying to figure out my approach to writing during a suddenly difficult time -- finding the way to play in the language of it is my new assignment to myself

Lisa Jensen's avatar

Weirdly, I think play pairs extra well with difficulty. At least for me, that’s when I need play most and it also seems to be when the strangest surprises emerge from that process. I’m wishing you play and everything else you may need in this difficult season!

Laura Coleman's avatar

Thank you for this wonderful invitation to get out of our habitual ruts and try something different with language, style, perspective - so refreshing. A wonderful poem as well, it is quite interesting to notice how language can add or detract from a pure felt experience. 🙏🏼

Lisa Jensen's avatar

Thank you so much, Laura! I have to remind myself to get out of my habitual ruts too! They’re just so comfy.

LeeAnn Pickrell's avatar

The poem is so lovely. The pink is pinker this year—you bring the art of paying attention to life. And play. I need to play, really, really.

Lisa Jensen's avatar

You also DESERVE to play. Really, really. 💛

Janie Braverman's avatar

Beautiful work - happy to find it in my inbox this morning.

Lisa Jensen's avatar

Thank you so much, Janie!

Torben Torp-Smith's avatar

Taws and Aggies

Taws, Aggies, and a Cat's Eye

A contest much like curling

Happens in a circle in the dirt with marbles

As Tom Sawyer with a jingly voice

And a tear in the custard corner of his eye

Leads you to an almost failing wooden shed

With the pungent bite in your nose

From years

Of forgotten grease and motor oil

A sheltered garden of dust and darkness with

Spider webs and crickets chirping as the sun goes down

Until a murmuration of Starlings

Startles the realization that the true path is not linear

These buried embers are misleading as a resumé

They hold no thought terminating cliché

Of a conceived destination.

Beneath the walls of weathered boards and their vain attempt

To be a fortress, to corral the wildness of the world

The worms calmy mine for dinner in the existential ambiguity of the dirt

And carve the porous boundary between fiction

And an imagined history

That stubbornly haunts the past

While continuing to hope for a future hidden in the fog

Ronald Lanham's avatar

Still hearing your beautiful language and wish I had your gift, rather than my street version.

Lisa Jensen's avatar

I'll gladly share it with you if you can somehow share your gift for photography with me!

Ronald Lanham's avatar

I'll find a way I love sharing!

Maya Sarin's avatar

I love this, Lisa! Your poem is beautiful and I was just thinking about how to mix up my Monday and do something different!

Lisa Jensen's avatar

I love those little synchronicities - how lovely that you were already on this wavelength. Thank you, Maya!