Sarah’s Writeblr

Sharing my random writing tidbits | main: @thereisnocabbageinbasingse

[birds-and-friends]

Full Video: Riekko mukana hiihtoreissulla, Tolkuton Willow ptarmigan included in ski trip

[comixextra]

For the love of god, PLEASE UNMUTE!!!

[bombcollar]

ptarmigan: [in a deep, croaking voice] awow awow awow awow awow awow awow. awow. awow. awow… awow… bup bup bup bup bup bup. pow. pow. pow.

[bakwaaas]

does anyone else have a deep underlying sadness that never truly goes away and probably never will or is that just me haha

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

I cannot draw. I have not seriously attempted to draw anything since I was a small child. This is, beyond all measure of doubt, the worst and most accursed thing that I have ever created.

But my brain somehow latched onto the idea of this visual pun (because “Todoroki...Toad...Toadoroki...” is an example of the kind of thought process which occurs regularly when I need to be doing other things) and simply would not let it die.

Naturally, I must now unleash it upon you. Good luck.

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

Softness in a hard, cruel world is not weakness. Oh, no, it is anything but weakness. But you must be careful, soft one; for the hardness of the world will see your softness, and it will take aim. It will care nothing for your kindness, take no note of your goodness. It will exploit your vulnerability. It will make you feel the sting of rejection over and over. It will test the limits of your capacity to forgive - it will test your very ability to carry on. Do not give up your soft heart, my beloved, for their bitterness will never be your loss.

You are so strong, staying good in this world that needs you so badly. Do not ever think that you are too weak to push onwards. Your softness is a testament to your willpower, to your integrity, to your heart.

Oh, soft one, never let the world make you less than who you are.

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

Sometimes when I write or when I think about writing or when I read others’ writing or anything at all - and these things comprise the bulk of my life - I feel an ache deep within me, an ache that yearns to write something that means something to someone, to write something someone won’t ever be able to forget, to write something that is but a fraction of the blessing to the reader as the feeling I get when I write - the feeling that I am doing what I was born to do - is to me.

And that is why it hurts so much when I cannot write well: because deep in my heart I ache to reach others just as deep in their hearts, and I cannot do it. I am not good enough. I do not know if I will ever be. I am a woman with an aching heart pouring that ache all over the paper and it hurts that my head cannot keep up. It hurts like a first heartbreak, always.

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

power of the pen

There is nothing like a good movie trailer.

I know it sounds trite and a little strange, but to me, nothing speaks to the power of stories like a two-minute opportunity for a filmmaker to prove that the story they’re telling is worth paying $10 to see. Think about how the trailers for your favorite movies made you feel. Think about watching the previews. Think about the way a well-crafter trailer, a minute or two of music and images and as much of the story’s emotion distilled into a video whose length is but a tiny fragment of its runtime, makes you feel...alive. How it energizes you.

A good trailer will often make me feel like I could run five miles without breaking a sweat and that is why I love stories.

And that’s why when I sit down to write, I feel as if I’m doing what I was born to do.

That heart-pounding movie-trailer feeling is right up there on the list of my favorite things to feel, along with the warmth of laughing with friends on a long car ride, and the simple joy of singing my heart out, and the cleansing fire I feel in the pit of my stomach every time I face my demons and defeat them and break down in tears on a retreat, and the hopeful flutter of a new romance in my chest. It’s the feeling that I can always count on to make my life feel like more than it is.

And to make others feel that is the highest goal to which I, being who I am, feel that I should aspire.

People who want to help others often say they’re going to be doctors or counselors or teachers or get involved in politics. They want direct access to the people in need of help and that’s a kind of nobility I fear that I could never have. But that isn’t the only way to serve others because our souls need as much help as our bodies and minds, and stories have the power to feed and surround and uplift and touch and calm and enliven and encourage and better our souls like almost nothing else. If I’m asked what I want to do when I graduate college and I’m being practical, I’ll tell people I want to be something acceptable; if I’m dreaming I’ll tell them I want to be a writer -

But if I’m being honest, I’d say that I want to be a caretaker of souls.

In other words: I want to be a storyteller.

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

The sea is a dull blue-gray today, untouched by the sun. Grey looms above me sky and laps at the shore beside me. I can hear the roar of the waves over the music in my ears. Most people would never go to the beach on a day like this - it’s cloudy and overcast and cold and a chilling breeze blows in off the water. I found parking in five minutes when it usually takes me twenty because no one loves the sea like this, when it’s not bright, not inviting.

People are like that. They like what they see only when they see what the like, and they run when what they like isn’t showing. But this is how I like things, because this is how the world is supposed to be.

Real.

It would be disingenuous to claim that this is not how the beach is supposed to look on a June afternoon, because if anything, it’s exactly how it’s meant to be. It’s wild, it’s authentic. Even the inviting cottages and little shacks selling food along the boardwalk can’t mask the fact that the sea is wild, untamed if not untouched. It’s a contrast that I find beautiful in people and in scenery.

People aren’t meant to be shaped by human minds. Nature isn’t meant to be shaped by human hands. People are not meant to be subjugated, and the sea is not meant to be tamed.

And it is a beautiful day.

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

Flow

When the ocean comes rushing in this way, you don’t fight it.

Most waves can be outrun. The little ones on the bay, tame and questioning, give warning. They let you know they’re coming, give you a moment to get away. By the time they’re lapping up against the firm, damp sand below the tide line in a shy greeting, you can be high up the sand, safe. You watch them and smile, but you forget them.

But others don’t let you rest that easy.

Some waves, the real ones, out on the oceans, the envy of surfers everywhere - those don’t ever even give you the chance to run. They’re relentless, pounding the sand fine along the shore, and you couldn’t get away if you wanted to. You can run but you’ll find yourself swiftly overtaken, splashing cold seawater up around your legs as you raise your legs to knee level just trying to keep yourself moving. Your shorts get soaked and you get to dry land a minute too late. You’re reminded that the sea’s power eclipses yours when it’s not even remotely trying.

Because it isn’t. You can’t outrun the wave, but it won’t hurt you if you let it kiss your feet. It’s just water; it’ll dry. Even the gross crust of salt that’ll be left behind after the water evaporates off your skin won’t do anything but feel strange. If it meant to hurt you it’d suck you out to sea and never spit you back out. It can. But here it’s not. It doesn’t want to; it wants to know you, not overtake you. It’s saying hello.

So you have two choices. You can be irritated at your own lack of control, complain about your wet clothes. Or you can smile, because something with all that power is choosing to do this with it. can try to run from something that isn’t even going to hurt you, or you can stand and let the water pass peacefully around your ankles. You can feel its pleasant chill and the calming rush of the current winding its way around the obstruction that your body creates. Don’t you want that? Wouldn’t it be nice to stand in place letting things happen, not trying to dodge them? Don’t you want to hear that gentle roar in your ears and know that you don’t have to be in control here?

You can get your clothes wet or you can surrender and smile.

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

Cape Éveil

I was thirteen when I decided that we live in a world stuck in perpetual inertia.

​Of course, then, I was too young to know quite how to put that thought into words. But even before I knew what it was, I have always felt as if I inhabited a world that is full to the brim with malaise, and I have sought the places that still feel as if they can be bothered to care that I am here, alive, on this earth, mind empty, heart weary, senses waiting to feast. This rocky outcrop of Maine coast is one such place and I’ve flocked there since childhood, summering like a delicate bird come north when the weather warms.

​

​Once this place was my greatest joy. I would fill my backpack with the yellowed books from my grandmother’s shelves and jars of fresh berries, crumbly blueberry bars, leftover corners of cobbler or buttery shortbread or pillowy muffins, all wrapped haphazardly in cloth napkins that bore the blue-stained evidence of my adventures for years to come, and I would throw a blanket over my shoulder and walk down the grassy hill towards the edge of the cliff on which my grandparents’ home was perched. I would lay down my blanket, or maybe sit at its edge if I was feeling daring, dangling my feet over the cliff ledge as I shoved blueberries in my mouth with abandon. My mother warned me not to get too close, that the rocks could crumble under the weight of even the waifiest of young girls.

​(My mother warned me of many things, few of which I heeded. Those which I did heed, I regretted. I have never regretted the feeling of kicking my heels against the rocky underside of the cliff ledge, the sea pounding the base of the cliffs, gloriously real, thrillingly powerful, and I am glad to have ignored her.)

​But most days, I would stay safely in the grass. Even in my favorite place on earth I preferred the ones to which those dusty pages could convey me, and in the hours upon hours I spent on Cape Éveil, I travelled, feasting my senses. I can taste the soft sweetness of streussel topping cut through by the tartness of plump blueberries straight off the bramble even now; I can hear the water crash against the cliffs the way it used to then, for I have learned that the sea never changes even when it seems to do nothing but. I feel the pages of those books beneath my fingers, smell their perfume, see the little puffs of dust that they kicked up when I turned them.

​And I can still feel the thrumming of my childish heart, awake and alive in this place, even though now it beats only as quickly as it must to survive.

​But still, I’m here, though nothing is the same. Familiar hands haven’t rolled out a pie crust in the little house atop this cliff for years, and it hasn’t been ours since I was a bright-eyed undergraduate. The books I once loved have long since made their way to antique shops, save the copy of Jude the Obscure that I pilfered at Gandmother’s wake and used when I wrote my dissertation for the degree that lies unused at the bottom of my sock drawer. My heart hasn’t beaten for the joy of being alive since –

​When? I can’t even bring myself to recall. But then a part of my mind that I hate forces me to admit that I do know, that I can remember.

Not since Bourbon Street in July. Not since the weight of the moisture in the air hung around us like a blanket, hemming us in, keeping the night in and the weight of my life out. Not since blue eyes and the black dress I can’t look at anymore. Not since I was drunk on my senses and the inexplicable feeling that I had something to celebrate.

Not since the end of that night have I felt my Maine-feeling again, and though I return here, it is but a hollow imitation of the feast for the senses I have searched the world in vain for.

And when I pull the blueberry pie I bought in town from my bag, lay out a beach towel, and tell myself that this is enough, my traitorous brain cannot help but remind me that this cliff is but a microcosm for a life that is always and never enough.

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

the song of the winds

Some people always seem to know when rain is coming. Some smell it; others feel it in their bones, as if the gift of meteorological foresight is meant to be some sort of consolation for bearing the burden of a bad knee or hip. But my mother, who has this gift, does neither. Rather, she hears the rain before it arrives. She says that rain makes a sound; prides herself on knowing its familiar rustle by heart.

When I was a child, she wanted me to hear it, too. “Listen,” she would instruct me, her hand on the small of my back directing me to the open window. We’d sit, listening to a cacophony of winds that meant nothing to me. “You can always tell when it’s going to rain if you listen.”

I would ask how, and she always had the same answer.

“Rain sings a song, Lucy,” she said, glancing to the horizon with a softly faraway look. “Hear that?” She’d pause, and I’d strain my ear to listen, but I’d never hear anything but meaningless weather-sounds, incomprehensible to me. But she didn’t seem to care; she’d go on. “Hear how the wind moves through the trees? That’s how it tells us it’s coming to visit.”

“But can’t we just look up at the sky and see that it’s going to rain?” I asked once, puzzled, when I was seven. It made sense to me, that way. I couldn’t foresee a storm the way my mother could, but once the clouds settled in for the hour, I knew what was coming. They were like workers settling heavily into couch cushions at the end of an interminable workday, and I knew the sighs of relief and discontent they’d let out in the form of raindrops were coming. But that was never enough for my mother.

“Of course we can, Lucy,” she told me with a furtive little glance that told me she was surprised at my way of seeing the world. “But we miss so much when we can only see what’s in front of us.” She said it with a sad little sigh, nesting her chin in her open palm with her forehead pressed to the window. “Listen to the wind - it plays the trees like an instrument.”

“What?” my mother’s way of thinking never made sense to me, but right then she seemed even more cryptic than I’d come to expect in my seven years of life. Once, at fifteen, I remembered that exchange, and I thought perhaps she’d been trying to draw a parallel between my own life and her way of seeing it - referring to music to explain something I didn’t understand when the black-and-white simplicity of a piano’s keys had always, always made sense to me. But I was young. That was perhaps a failing of my mother’s - her brilliance, the way her mind constantly leapt to make connections, its ability to spin words and thoughts and feelings and ideas into poetry - and the way she tried to parent me as if I shared it.

I never have, and I see it over again every time I think of that moment. My brain was binary, stark; brilliant in its way, but never in hers. She never seemed to understand that - about me, about anyone. It must have been lonely in that palace of beautiful words and shimmering thoughts that few, if any, would ever want to hear, let alone understand in their ripe fullness the way she wanted them to. And I know now that she wanted me, her only daughter, to be the one to unlock the castle gate and take her thoughts into my arms and embrace them, when I was never ready. Would never be ready. My father wasn’t, her parents weren’t; she loved them, and they her, but did not connect, didn’t understand. She walked through life as if she had the gift of tongues and had been given no one with the gift of interpreting them.

“Listen,” she told me, more emphatic. “Hear it sing. The rain’s coming.”

She left the windowsill then, and I found her in her office hours later, a pale pink box next to her and photos and papers - the ephemera of her entire life, laid out on a teak desk that had never looked lonelier - spread out across the surface. The rain streaked down the windows.

I never told her that I saw her that night.

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

seaglass: a fragment

Soft rock pipes through my speakers, though there’s nothing soft in the music itself. It is as biting and caustic as I am myself, but as my car wends its way up twining roads lined with pines bent and twisted by the beating winds, it seems wrong to spoil so pristine a moment with thumping bass and the full might of 1960s anger in musical form.

This coast is as close to home as I have.

Pulling into a rocky half-marked parking space beside a patch of wild grass and a few especially grizzled conifers, I step out into the seaside air and breathe in, relishing the smell. It’s why I come here, to this rocky point an hour from home, and not to the ones close by that my friends frequent. When I’m here, on the untouched coast, I can feel its wildness - in the roar of the waves breaking through the total silence; in the winds whipping salty air about my face; in the endless gray sky; in the cormorants on the wing and the seals basking on rocks worn flat by the relentless pounding of the waves. I make my way down crumbling stairs to the sandy strip between road and sea, a medium between man and nature.

It’s not a beach. I refuse to call it a beach. Anyone can go to the beach; it isn’t special. A beach is a strip of coast shaped by man into a pale imitation of what nature has wrought somewhere else.

This? This is the sea.

Stepping carefully around rocks poking up out of the grainy, damp sand, I make my way down to the water’s edge, combing the tide line for color. A shell fragment, its inside the enamelly pink of Mother of Pearl, catches my eye first; I pick it up, examine it, throw it back to the same waves which spit it out. Part of me, the same illogical part that runs to a craggy outcrop an hour from home when I live ten minutes from the beach, wills the sea to accept it again, though I know it makes little sense and I know it won’t. Then I bend to look closer and comb my fingers through the wet sand, sifting for treasures -

My fingers grasp a corner of something and I pluck it from the sand. It is green, smooth, has a pleasant weight in my hand.

Sea glass!

I give myself only a moment to admire what I’ve found before I slip it in my pocket, maybe to hide it or maybe because, though my quest for sea glass drives me here so often, I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to think about the mason jar that sits on my desk at home, half-filled with sea glass fragments after only three months.

“Find the beauty,” my grandmother would always tell me. So every time I couldn’t I would come here. Every rejection, every failure, every reminder that I was not enough since the beginning of my senior year, I’ve put the keys in my ignition and made for the coast without looking back. Every time I’m searching for this - for beautiful glass fragments to fill my jar of disappointments, in the hope that if I get something beautiful out of every disaster, I’ll start to see the beauty in them that my grandmother was so sure was there.

But kneeling in the sand with an aquamarine piece of sea glass in my palm, thinking about what she told them I did, I wonder when that’s going to feel true.

[chaoticwriteblrenergy]

first law of thermodynamics

I think feelings are like matter.

Once they come to be, feelings cannot be created or destroyed, only change forms. It’s why nothing can force you to change the way you feel - because you can’t crush a feeling, only turn it into something else. And that’s not so simple as they want us to believe. Perhaps feelings can change form, grief and heartache to resignation and acceptance, but the feeling - the missing - it’s still there, pounded into something else by relentless pressure and time.

So much time.