I connect you to the words that connect you
to yourself.
You already know the words.
You already know the words to everything you are ever going to write.
You have already repurposed 26 letters into thousands of expressions of thousands of ideas.
You’ve already said what you know how to say, and now you want to say something new, something different, something you can feel but can’t quite put into words.
I’m Paula, & I like metaphors. I’m a writer, teacher, Gen-Xer, cat-lover, thrifter, organizer/reorganizer, planner, & change-maker. I am a wife & mother.
Giving sagacious women poetic license to rewrite themselves on the world.
Find what you thought you’d lost
or what you did not know you had.
What is it about the yellow flowers along the rim of that tea cup that makes it your favorite to drink from on summer, but not winter mornings?
You bought slippers online a few years ago, and while they weren’t expensive and they are nothing to look at, when you put them on all is right with the world.
A robin’s egg blue stapler occupies a point of pride on your desk. You are a bit embarrassed to say it, but it’s your favorite stapler.
Why?
They are metaphors for who you are, what you value, and the space you want to take up in the world. And in this space, on this blog, alone and together, we will find ours.
Welcome to my web, my capturing device, my frayed asterisk at the corner.
Capturing Device, the website and the blog, is for me what I hope it will also be for you—poetic license to rewrite myself (yourself, ourselves) on the world. As a poet, teacher, & changemaker, I capture the everyday, every day & give it back in startling & familiar ways.
We already know the words. We just need to find the ones we want and put them to hard use.
But does it have to be a blog?
Some words feature their ugly with a sound and mouth feel that lingers after the word is gone (sludge, gusset, fetid). Like acid colors and triangle patterns in nature, they warn you to stay away.
Others engage the sickly boniness of their aristocratic inbreeding (pulchritude, bucolic, effulgence) to simply scare you off & save them from doing work. And some are linguistic carrion flowers that lure you in with their liquid sibilance before springing their deadly denotations (acquiesce, hirsute, silverfish).
But a word like blog doesn’t threaten or disdain or tease. It doesn’t do anything but sit, like a tepid lump of beige (not even griege)—unformed, flabby, & tired.
Blog is the sole-surviving syllable of a shantytown portmanteau: weblog. Blog has survivor’s guilt. It’s a purposely ugly word, blog. There has to be something better.
So today, and probably tomorrow, I will explore other words to denote and connote this weblog of musings, missives, and meanderings. This confluence of ephemera, this commonplace, this capturing device.
This space not complete but drawing your attention; marking out a space. It is violent, strategic, and imprisoning. It is beautiful, vulnerable, and strong.
Give me a sign!
If everything around me is an answer--which it is--then I need to consider the questions I am asking. And rather than attempting to read the whole world as augury, I need to learn to accept the obvious answers: the anomalies, the repetitions, the clovers.
1,440 Minutes (less 60)
So, now that you see them, what will you do with your 4 minutes each day? Can you intentionally spend 4 minutes every day on something that you wanted to do last year but could not fit into your everyday?
The Coffee Shoulds
Now that I have this pile of should in front of me, I need to start shoveling.
The one with the coffee & the Jesus
My two-day work week, like posting on Wednesdays, is an ideal, a goal, a good idea. But I don’t actually do it; I just say I do.
I'm going on a cold turkey techcation
Google “digital detox”, “phone diet”, or “technology break” and you will get millions of hits (but if you search for techcation, you won’t get anyone using the word the way I am). I have a few different approaches to weaning myself from technology bookmarked but really the only approach to anything that has ever worked for me is cold turkey.
If everything around me is an answer--which it is--then I need to consider the questions I am asking. And rather than attempting to read the whole world as augury, I need to learn to accept the obvious answers: the anomalies, the repetitions, the clovers.