[{"content":"","date":"13 February 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/","section":"03","summary":"","title":"03","type":"page"},{"content":"","date":"13 February 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/example/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Example","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"13 February 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"Fragments","type":"fragments"},{"content":"She would write with a lupine hunger, hunting the words into the hot breath of the day’s ending. The feral imaginings of her dreams given life in these moments, as the sun cosmic tethers clipped, fell from the sky.\nThis creative hunger gnawed at the edges of her. Ravenous, her fangs would grow and cast glints, catching shards of the failing light. She would stalk the words quielty, circling them, fearful and frightened, slinking low across the forrest floor of her flat.\nRare nights when the words kept themselves hidden in bushy thickets, she would howl and spit hot breath at the empty pages in naked attempt to scare them from the underbrush.\nPatiently, she hunted. Dilligent and dogged, she would embrace the pangs, letting them swallow her whole. Her intincts would flash, the moment she needed them, a gutteral growl, that would pin her prey to the edge of her periphery.\nThis half-glimpse would be all she’d need. She a snarling lunge, she’d sink her teeth deep into the anatomy. She’d shake the words free from their camoflauge, hers now to devour.\nOn this night, she hunted still. From her window, she prowled the lowlight of the approaching darkness, but the words elluded her still, just out of sight, hidden from gaze in the cool dark catacombs of the city beneath her.\nShe drifted and dreamed. Of the hunt. Of prey of dusks past.\nThe words, \u0026ldquo;she that writes the night\u0026rdquo;, escaped her lips, the sound of its intonation fighting to voice iteslf again and again, but the echo of it anatomy was was swallowed whole by the hot breath of the still night.\n","date":"13 February 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/1739418498869-she-that-writes-the-night/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"She That Writes The Night","type":"fragments"},{"content":"","date":"13 February 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/tag/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tag","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"13 February 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags","type":"tags"},{"content":"","date":"11 February 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/illustration/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Illustration","type":"tags"},{"content":"He had always been.\nHis memory, stretching like iron rails of a locomotive toward the heat-hazed horizon, was interminable.\nHe had always been, at the beginning of all things, gazing into the breadth of eternity.\nNow in the present he struggled for a singular memory at the instant of his becoming, a memory he could quarantine and isolate from all others. A memory that marked the first moment. But always as he reached back through the recesses of his mind to recall his genesis each memory revealed to him its ancestor.\nWhen had he come to be? When had the first breath been drawn?\nSadness flooded him, his eyes filling with tears.\nTime let its linear robes fall away as past and future melded into one singular space, one moment that had never begun and would never end.\nA crawling inescapable terror rose in him, seating itself atop his shoulders, unshakeable and resolute.\nHe would always be…\n","date":"11 February 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/1739241888636-the-boy-who-always-was/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"The Boy Who Always Was","type":"fragments"},{"content":"Was this the street? So many years since, he, a frightened boy, so timid and uncertain, had stumbled into this cobbletone corridor, pushed along by the surging chaos and color of carnivale. The shop half as narrow as its neighbors, and hidden beneath climbing vines of bougainvillea, had beckoned to him with the soft tinkle of small bells. As he took a step, he had tripped on the uneven stones, falling into the fragrant floral embrace of the shop’s front facade.\nHe rememberd reaching for the oversized ornate pewter handle, as he glanced up at a sign that read, The Mask Shop of M. S. Irani. He remembered thinking it was an odd name for such a shop. If in that moment he had known that he was stepping across the threshold of the universe, and past the illusion that sustains reality, into the beyond the beyond, he would have dared not enter.\n","date":"5 February 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/1738723019176-the-masks-of-m.s.-irani/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"The Masks of M.S. Irani","type":"fragments"},{"content":" Nothing ever begins.\nThere is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs.\nThe threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.\nClive Barker ~ Weaveworld\nI have always loved this beginning. This embarkation. For some reason I have always remembered these words. I don’t know why I can recall this passage over so many other countless passages I have absorbed in the years since first I read Barker’s story. They have always been with me, words of fiction actualized in some small measure in the world through my own experiences. The words resonate. They have been my constant companions, silent and sleeping in the the small secret spaces of my being.\nThere is a story that needs be told. But please know it has no beginning. if there is no point of departure. It also has no end. No place at which we are likely to arrive.\nThis moment for instance.\n","date":"31 January 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/1738294484076-nothing-ever-begins/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"Nothing Ever Begins","type":"fragments"},{"content":"In his trembling dirt-stained hand he held the first breath of the universe, the initial urge, the finite moment from which the shadow of the infinite had seeped forth.\nHis thoughts came like a torrent. Unable, was he, to quiet them. Had he come again to that distant doorstep that he had stumbled across as a young boy so many years or maybe lifetimes ago? Had he surrender all to awaken the divine spark? Was he here at long long last? Had he crossed the threshold of the beyond beyond and walked into the eternal realization of all things?\nHe was becoming untherthered. His thoughts, an ourbeourus, consuming the tail of the thoughts prior, growing in grandiosity. He had to narrow his focus, pin himself to the soft earthemn flesh opf the earth. Ground himself in something real, in something true.\nBut what was real? What was true?\n","date":"29 January 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/1738124216815-the-first-breath/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"The First Breath","type":"fragments"},{"content":"","date":"4 February 2023","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Categories","type":"categories"},{"content":"The Devil\u0026rsquo;s Backbone State Natural Area is a 950 acre natural area in Lewis County TN. The trail follows Tennessee\u0026rsquo;s Highland Rim accessible from the Natchez Trace Parkway, a 400+ mile recreational road that meanders through the southern states of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. It was a route first used by Native American Indians, and then as you would expect, as Europeans colonized the Amercias the route became well worn by slave traders, robbers and soldiers all in different measure, decimating the native peoples of this beautiful land.\nThe trail begins along a ridgeline and then descends into a valley, the path dancing back and forth across a small creek that snakes back upon itself with such frequency that it almost seems as if it is hand-drawn with oversized crayons by a imaginative grade-schooler. I guess this is where the area draws its name, from this crooked and snaking stream? The creek leads one into a hollow that is home to this totrtuous waterway and then ascends again shuttling the pilgrim back onto the ridge to finish the loop where the trail had begun.\nYou can find the Devil\u0026rsquo;s Backbone area located here.\nDuring my exploration of the area I discovered that The Devil\u0026rsquo;s Backbone area represents second or maybe third growth forest, and there are very few sites in the Western Highland Rim that better represent this region\u0026rsquo;s upland vegetative flora. We decimated the area throughout history but what did I really expect to find? You can trace 10,000 years of human history in this part of the country, dark and bloodied as it appears to have been. But really I think this is the history of man anywhere and of any time.\nThe human virus. The only thing which we give freely and without hesitation is our pain and trauma. We give our pain to other humans. We give it to the animals that do nothing but love us. And we give it to the earth. Were we walk, we leave but nothing save hurt and suffering. And yet somehow natures survives, she remakes herself again and again and I guess will outlast us all.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s beautiful area, peaceful woodland landscape. For early February there are still trees garbded in golden gowns, dotting the winter\u0026rsquo;s ball dance floor. A beautiful a golden color that mimicks the coat of my furry hiking companion. The act of hiking is is a mediation of sorts, an act of mindfulness meditation for me. Parts of me wake from hibernation when I hike. Lost in long dark slumber they come alive and whisper divine truths in my ear. The quiet is comforting. Ocassionaly however, the solitude is disrupted by gunshots racing across the miles and tears through the fabric of this quietutde, I\u0026rsquo;ve hiked deep into the woods to lose myself inside and I am reminded of the Tennessee of my youth.\nTennessee is where I grew up mostly, until my college years. I never really felt at home here in Tennessesse, but to be fair to Tennessee I\u0026rsquo;ve never really felt at home anywhere, at least for very long. There have been transitory homes, fleeting feelings of connection. I think this is something I carried with me into this life. Always I\u0026rsquo;ve been searching for home, looking for where I belong, where I am seen and welcomed across the threshold.\nThe Beatles lyric, you and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead\u0026hellip; on our way back home\u0026hellip; pops into my head, and I sing the lyric aloud, my voice bringing me back to the present moment, in nature, real and immediate.\n","date":"4 February 2023","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/el-espinazo-del-diablo/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"El Espinazo del Diablo","type":"fragments"},{"content":"","date":"4 February 2023","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/illustration/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Illustration","type":"categories"},{"content":"","date":"4 February 2023","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/memoir/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Memoir","type":"categories"},{"content":"","date":"4 February 2023","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/travel/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Travel","type":"categories"},{"content":"","date":"21 June 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/fiction/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Fiction","type":"categories"},{"content":" \u0026ldquo;You should date a girl who reads.\nDate a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.\nFind a girl who reads. You\u0026rsquo;ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She\u0026rsquo;s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That\u0026rsquo;s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.\nShe\u0026rsquo;s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she\u0026rsquo;s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author\u0026rsquo;s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.\nBuy her another cup of coffee.\nLet her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce\u0026rsquo;s Ulysses she\u0026rsquo;s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she\u0026rsquo;s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.\nShe has to give it a shot somehow.\nLie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.\nFail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.\nWhy be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.\nIf you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She\u0026rsquo;ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.\nYou will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she\u0026rsquo;s sick. Over Skype.\nYou will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn\u0026rsquo;t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.\nDate a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you\u0026rsquo;re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.\nOr better yet, date a girl who writes.\u0026rdquo;\n~ Rosemarie Urquico\n","date":"21 June 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/she-who-reads-the-world/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"She That Reads the World","type":"fragments"},{"content":"She would write with a lupine hunger, hunting the words into the hot breath of the day\u0026rsquo;s ending. The wild imaginings of her dark dreams given life in the moments as the sun, cosmic tethers clipped, fell from the sky.\nThis creative hunger gnawed at the edges of her. And slowly she would become the hunger. Ravenous, she would become a fanged wolf stalking the words across the bright night light reflected from the snow-laden forrest floor of her flat. She would pace and circle, catching glimpses of the words, fearful and frightened, slinking low across the world wrapped in winter white.\nRare nights when the words kept themselves hidden in bushy thickets, she would howl and spit curses at the empty pages.\nShe hunted patiently. Time had taught her to be dilligent and dogged, to embrace the hunger, let it swallow her whole. She knew her intincts would flash, the moment she needed them, speaking gutteral with a growl, pinning her to the prey dancing on the edge of her periphery.\nThis half-glimpse would be all she\u0026rsquo;d need, a snarling lunge, she\u0026rsquo;d sink her teeth deep into the anatomy of her prey. She\u0026rsquo;d shake the word free from its camoflauge, snapping its neck, hers now to devour.\nOn this night, she hunted still. From her window, she prowled the lowlight of the night, the words elluding her, just out of sight, hidden from view in cool damp catacombs of the city beneath her.\nShe drifted and dreamed. Of the hunt. Of prey of nights past.\nThe word fofoinho escaped her lips, the sound of its intonation fighting to voice iteslf again and again, but the echo of it anatomy was was swallowed whole by the hot breath of the still night.\n","date":"3 June 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/she-that-writes-the-world/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"She That Writes O Mundo","type":"fragments"},{"content":"Countless nights had he walked these city streets, under throws of equisite Parisian light. Alone in the small secret hours, he would catch whispers of her, the soft quiet of her cadence, dancing on the breeze.\nHer whole heart, for her whole life. These had been her whispered words to him. But then as quickly as she had exploded into his life, her love had retracted, imploding in on itself, consumed by the endless aching hunger of her pain.\nAnd all at once, he was again alone, and it was almost as if she had never been.\n","date":"21 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/minuit-a-paris/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"Minuit à Paris ( Midnight in Paris )","type":"fragments"},{"content":"The bumblebee Ambassador, hurtled head-long into the newly breaking dawn. The taxi heaved and lurched, its horn squawking in constant conversation with the ceaseless torrent of tatas, padminis and rickshaws swimming against the current of its own petrol powered propulsion. The city unfolded vast beyond measure clambering in all directions to the heat-hazed horizon.\n","date":"3 May 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/the-shanty-sea/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"The Shanty Sea","type":"fragments"},{"content":"Into the trees, they walked.\nHeads down, kicking rocks like giants canvassing a vast geography.\nThey spoke nothing, feeling the silence was the fragile bond that held them together.\n","date":"3 April 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/walking-giants/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"Walking Giants","type":"fragments"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/fragments/1654560000000-another-love/","section":"Fragments","summary":"","title":"","type":"fragments"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/authors/","section":"Authors","summary":"","title":"Authors","type":"authors"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/series/","section":"Series","summary":"","title":"Series","type":"series"}]