Writing Wings For You

Marie Lukasik Wallace ~ # I LIVE Poetry – I'm passionate about life and writing and all things creative and poetic!

Monthly Archives: September 2015


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REMEMBERING

daddy journal

For Christmas of 2000,  I had given my daddy a journal with the inscription:  “the best gift we can give anyone is intimacy, sharing our thoughts and feelings.  Please jot things down once in awhile for me so I will have them as a gift forever.”

For those of you who know me, I’ve been working to get to know my dad for quite some time. I hadn’t realized it was this long. He passed in March, and as we were cleaning things, I found this journal with only 2 entries (above) that were written, a year or so llater.  I never knew he had even written anything in that journal…  And now, 14 years later, his words mean so much more to me.  Below are two of his journal entries if you’re not able to read the above.

To Marie,

I found this book while digging in my library closet 9-11-2001, the day New York City was bombed by terrorists…Hope to have better news later – Papa

9-17-01 – NYSE opened at 9:30 EST looking good – We’re doing better already…love to all my children and grand children…God Bless All of you and God…Please bless all of the world….America needs you now.”

There’s so much that I notice here!  Without knowing, I use ellipsis all the time and didn’t know why except that I like that kind of pregnant pause.  I must have learned that from him or at least picked it up by watching him. Seeing it in this journal was super cool.  Another thing I noticed was that since his death, I have found little notes like this. He often thought about us and prayed for us, even though we never knew it.  The VAULT speaks on paper….I’ve probably not said this before, but when we were younger, my dad wrote a lot…and I know that my desire to write comes from watching him spend much time doing this.    I do wish he had done it a little more because he was so good at little quips of history and dating everything!   (newspaper articles, cards, letters, etc.)   I don’t date things enough, but know its value.

So the advice I leave with you there is so much we don’t know about a person.  It takes time to “find gold in the soul.”  Sometimes it takes years for the intimacy to appear.  Notice…learn…be patient…and just enjoy…Little things will be revealed in their own time.

God Bless America and its beautiful people on this day and years to come.

I LOVE YOU so much AMERICA!!!


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If You and I were Having Coffee continued

coffee cup

If you and I were having coffee, I would tell you the story of why I became obsessed with sunflowers this summer.  I grew these ENORMOUS plants with strong stalks and deep roots from tiny seeds. The best part was when I left for my Trip Across America, they were not very big.  When I got home, they had gone over the roof of my solarium,  Honestly, I gasped out loud, and oh, what a reverence i held for their beauty.

Next, I would tell you, that every day since that day I have watched these beauties, I began seeing them as metaphors for life and began studying all their unique facets, not book knowledge, but detail knowledge.  Sunflowers caused me to pause and to look closer and to ponder.

Here’s one way you can live as a sunflower.  Sunflowers live LARGE and MAGNIFICENCE with no apology.  They are uniquely themselves in all their glory.  In a way, they are spiritual, always seeking their source, their energy, their vitality, the sun.  Even as they die, they die with grace and ever seeking the sun.

If you and I were having coffee, I would tell you that I feel so incredibly blessed for our friendship.  I know that you are the kind of friend that I could lose touch with for 30 years, and talk with you, and it would feel as if we had spoken yesterday.  I could tell you anything.  If I faltered and misspoke or made a mistake, you would know I was human and hold me in Divine love like the word “Namaste.”     And I KNOW you know I’d treat you the same.

If you and I were having coffee.  I would be fully present and devour every moment for I find you extremely amusing and truly cherish our friendship.  We could tell each other dreams of peace and a better world, and because our space became enlightened and sacred, the world began to shift.

If you and I were having coffee, it would be a most glorious day.

May you have a most blessed weekend my friends.   Here is a Throwback Thursday of a poem with Michael at Poetry Channel – If You and I were Having Coffee

Namaste,

Marie

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More Sunflower Textures

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Hard to capture this because of the angle of the sun, but it reminded me of Salvador Dali…melted face of a sunflower.

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Beautiful  strangers I didn’t plant but arrived.

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These were shook off some, but the stalks and roots are enormous! One stalk was about two inches in diameter!

I will miss these treasures. The last storm, left me only a handful…feels like a summer goodbye…barefoot & my face to the life source.

Today’s contribution to Tuesdays of Texture (de monte y mar).  


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The Value of Run On & a Tribute to My Daddy

In my experience of writing, often the muse is elusive.   I do Poetry Therapy, which is healing through writing.  Our writing is on demand.   Talk about an elusive muse!   However, Natalie Goldberg, in “Writing Down the Bones” talks about the power of first thoughts and she encourages run-on sentences.  In my group work, it’s imperative to keep on, keep on writing, without critique, without the inner critic, getting to the first thoughts, the raw, ripe emotion of things.   In other words, it allows the writer to “get real.”

In honor of my dad, who has now left this earth for six months, a man, I was just getting to know, and didn’t get to say as much as I wanted to say, I decided to do a run-on.  (By the way, taking dictation for Alzheimer’s patients and asking them to just keep talking and not stopping works well too!)   Not only do I get first thoughts, but there is ‘Gold in them hills!”   I can always go back and underline what strikes me or my reader or has great emotion or provocative, intriguing language and rewrite from there.  Nothing is in stone!

Here goes my vulnerability:

I want to tell you daddy….

  •  That I started a garden with all your favorites:  tomatoes and cucumbers and green beans.  I have sunflowers too with big bulbous heads and radiant petals and some intense jalepeno peppers and onions with ruffious heads, so I can make your wonderful salsa.  You would love the spot…maximum sun spreading its goodness all over those plants.  It’s going to be a good crop daddy.
  • I want to tell you that last summer when we got lost and stopped at the Dairy Queen and slurped ice cream sundaes together to relieve ourselves of the hot sun and long car ride was one of my favorite memories.  I got to have you all to myself.  I don’t even ever remember a time I had you ALL to myself…and no one could call us and bother us…and no t.v. and no dogs or anything but you and me.   And I want to tell you that the other day I went to Dairy Queen just to spend time with your memory…it was most lovely.
  • And I want to tell you that I miss you terribly and that I want to call you all the time and tell you things…but I can’t…they say…just talk to his spirit…he can hear you…but it’s not the same…Joe preserved many of my tapes with you…that was nice…I can hear your voice now and again…and I want to say I’m so frustrated sometimes that our time was so short…we were just getting to  know each other and have great conversations…and now…well…you know…

This wasn’t great writing, but there are jewels in there and places I can write from that I want to explore or know more about.  The beautiful part of this journey is that I can keep practicing writing…I can keep working on my dad’s book..  This is also great for if you only have a few minutes.   I believe in the book “The Artist’s Way” Julia Cameron has writers do “morning pages” which is much the same thing.  And by the way, the TRIPLE ADDED BONUS is that it’s therapeutic too…no longer running around in my head.

Happy writing to you.  And may the power of run-ons forever be yours!

Marie