. . .

Oh the great American black bear, how I love you so!

You have inspired me throughout my years

With you shining black fur, your beautiful brown eyes,

I have been enamored!

Keeper of the ecosystem, guardian of the forests,

You have filled me with much wonder.

Emerging from hibernation to consume emerging vegetation,

Indulging in soft, ripe berries as the summer grows,

Returning to hibernation as the waning of Autumn.

Beautiful creature,

How wonderful you are!

I have a pile of unfinished crochet projects by my desk.

A blanket, a shawl for a friend, a cardigan, a dragon plushie. It is all very messy. I find it difficult to finish projects that I start unless they're small. It's an issue of biting off more than I can chew I think.

There's also my ever-growing collection of yarn. I have a container that used to house cheese balls under my desk with a few skeins in it. The rest are piled unceremoniously next to my desk under the unfinished cardigan, draped over them like a blanket in this cold weather.

So many unfinished projects, I have plenty of time to do them but no motivation. I sit and I stare and I scroll on my phone knowing there are much better things for me to be doing, and yet I just can't bring myself to do them. I have too much on my mind and no words, or maybe too many words, to put onto figurative paper.

My mind is like my pile of unfinished projects. I hope I can finish them one day.

My human wakes up before the sun even rises. The other human usually gets home right before they leave their sleeping-room, they trade off like clockwork. My human will then grab a can out of a box on the floor, and sit at the counter at their screen-device in the sitting-room. I can hear the crisp sound of the can opening, and their screen-device clicking as they touch it. By this time, I'm usually on the comfy chair that faces the Big Screen. Sometimes my human will turn it on and use some device to control it. I enjoy watching sometimes. Other times, I'll face towards the window, letting the rising sun hit my face.

Sometimes, my human will lay down and nap with me after a while. Sometimes they'll stay awake and full of energy all day. The other human sleeps all day in the sleeping-room. He doesn't like me coming and going so he keeps the door closed.

Around mid-day we'll go outside, but they can't stay outside for that long these days. They can't do a lot, but neither can I anymore. My human will leave part of the comfy chair out for me to climb up on, since it's hard to jump that high now. It's my favorite spot in the house.

I sleep most of the day, but in the evening me and my human will spend time relaxing in the sitting-room. The other human leaves, we eat dinner, and then they will usually pick up a ball of thread and a hook and start working on the latest project, and put on a video on the Big Screen. There's a dog in the most recent one. I can't understand any of the words, but I enjoy watching it with them. They'll sing too. They sing A LOT, but I don't mind.

Then at night, my human will call me into the sleeping-room and I will lay down on my designated pile of blankets on the floor, and they will turn the lights off. They leave the door cracked for me in case I want to leave the sleeping-room. I don't sleep all the way through the night, but I know that my human will be up once again before the sun rises.

In ancient tales and whispered lore,

The serpent eats his tail evermore.

The serpent so long, his circle unbroken

The Oroborous turns ever woven.

He's the circle of life, a dance of time,

A sacred symbol of the divine.

In the depths of this old cosmic sea,

The Oroborous turns reveals his mystery.

So dance with the serpent, dance ye with glee!

Embrace the circle, for that is the key.

In the rhythm of the Oroborous' tale,

We find solace in the endless trail.

From birth to death and back again

In a cycle that will never end,

The eternal dance of Oroborous

Guides us with his ancient chorus.

Dust to dust and ashes to ashes,

Slithering as his scales he flashes.

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,

From earth we came and return we must!

Oh Oroborous!

Dancing round and round he flows.

Infinite loop, guarding his secrets,

Oh Oroborous, to where do you go?

My grandma lived with me and my parents for the past few years of her life before she passed of Alzheimer's.

It was bittersweet, she had lived without my grandpa for some time, but the way she went I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Alzheimer's is a bitch of a disease. That's not what's important here though, it's the fact that she left behind the space I now live in. To describe my family's house briefly, there are two sections: the house proper, and the added on suite. The suite is where I live, and where my grandma once lived.

Moving in was surreal almost. I had spent years looking after my grandma within these walls, listening to her as she told me stories, she had a lot of stories to tell. Stories of her childhood, stories of her and my grandpa, stories of her and her siblings. She repeated herself a lot but I didn't mind, I knew it was a part of the disease eating away at her brain.

She ultimatley died in a hospice facility, finally finding peace within her clouded mind. I was 16 then. I'm 21 now, and living in the space she once occupied. Sometimes I think about it, but I prefer not to. The bedroom I sleep in was once hers, the furniture in there too. The rooster-print curtains in the kitchen serve as a reminder of her everyday, they were hers too. We have a recliner, although it wasn't the one she had. That's my dog's favorite napping spot, as it was when my grandma was alive.

I believe writing is a powerful way to process grief, even with things you thought you were done grieving. So here I am at nearly 5 AM writing this piece, sitting in my living room where my grandma once spent her days watching her favorite cowboy western TV shows, and processing that I now occupy the space she left behind. It's not a space I can completely fill, there are little gaps here and there.

I don't think I want to anyway.

I've always struggled with finding a "style" when it comes to writing. I felt like I needed a specific one, I guess that's a better way of saying it.

I've always been an academic writer, not able to be as flowery as I'd like to be. I feel like that comes through in my writing a bit, a certain... simplicity in how I write. I've always admired those who create beautiful, eloquent prose while my writing is simple and plain. It's always been hard for me to get into writing in that style, it just doesn't come out right when I do it.

But, perhaps, that's a good thing.

My writing is simple, yes, but it's familiar. I write about the mundane, a cup of coffee, dreams, memories. Things that make me human. Things that make us human. It's writing in the morning while drinking my coffee, it's thinking about what to write as I fall asleep. It's writing about living.

I may never be a poet like Dickenson or Frost, but trying to compare myself to them is unfair anyway. I am myself and my writing is my own.

I am four or five years old, sitting in my grandparents living room in Kentucky. My grandpa is there with me, showing me the music he wrote. He always showed me the silly songs he wrote, things about my grandma and her strange little habits. This one was about how their garage was completely full due to her pack-rat tendencies (a trait I inherited). It's a sunny day outside, I'm sitting on their soft couch, velvet I think, having the time of my life.

I am now six years old, my parents had explained to me that grandpa was very sick. When I walked into their living room I cried, I was scared and confused. He was hooked up to a bunch of machines, and was wheezing. He had developed lung cancer. It was dim in the living room, only illuminated by lamp light because the big light hurt his eyes. He was weak from chemo, and extremely thin. I think I ran out of the house.

I am seven years old, sitting at his funeral. I had been crying for what felt like days. I knew what death was, but I didn't want to believe it. They played his music through the speakers, his gospel music instead of his more light-hearted stuff. We drove to the cemetery about 30 minutes away, to me it felt like hours. I was angry at his hospice nurses, since I didn't know what their job actually was. It was a pleasant afternoon, the sun was starting to hang low in the sky. We were at the cemetery until after the sun had set, the plot he (and my grandma, about a decade later) was set to rest in had a huge slab of rock about a foot thick only a couple feet under the ground.

I'm 20, and it's around Christmas. My parents come over to show me some things they found. It's three CDs and a record. The record was a song my great uncle (grandpa's brother) wrote about his time in Vietnam, the two of the CDs were of my uncle's music, and the last was my grandpa's. They're sitting with the rest of my music collection but I can't bring myself to listen to them.

I'm 21, and writing this. I'm realizing I'm still grieving. It seems kind of silly to grieve for someone who died almost two decades ago, but he is probably the main reason I love music as much as I do. You know, he left his guitars to me, alongside his favorite pick (it's the only one that actually sounds good to me for some reason). They're a red Fender Stratocaster and a red Washburn. Red was his favorite color, and his nickname.

There's not much I remember from my childhood, but these few moments are some of the most vivid. Remembering is a strange thing. It's like cupping my hands and gathering water from the lake I visited with my family as a kid, most of the water slipping through my fingers and back into the murky lake, but there is still that bit of water that remains in my palm that I can carry with me until I'm ready to let it go.

To me, a good cup of coffee is made of medium-roast grounds, brown sugar, and milk.

Today I was adventurous, I added some cinnamon, turmeric, and vanilla extract. Cinnamon doesn't dissolve, due to it's hydrophobic nature, so I mixed it in with the grounds. When my coffee was done, it had a pleasant earthy, but warm scent. I added it to my cup with the vanilla and brown sugar, and filled the rest with milk. I noted that the color was slightly more orange today due to the turmeric.

I took a sip of my beautiful concoction, and folks, this is the worst coffee I think I have ever made.

The nature of some spices, especially cinnamon, gives them a tendency to overpower. This is something I had forgotten when adding the cinnamon to my coffee grounds. I can't taste anything else, besides the base coffee of course. I was worried about the vanilla overpowering the rest of the flavors, as it tends to do that, but this dash of cinnamon has made it almost impossible to taste anything else.

So here I am, typing this out, drinking this overpowering, bitter cinnamon drink, and reaping what I have sowed.

The dead of night,

An unrelenting peace,

Above me

I find a sea of stars.

It is a cold winter night,

But I know

In the end

There will be rest for all of us.

Have you ever had a dream where you got up, and went about your morning?

You get dressed, maybe get in your car and start driving to wherever it is you go. You notice the car is harder to control today than it was yesterday, maybe a problem with your wheel? Either way you keep driving.

You get to wherever it is you go but everything is off. The people seem different. The furniture is strange. You can't put your finger exactly on why, though, so you go about your day as usual.

Then something happens. You can't exactly tell what, but you know your're scared. Something flashes out of the corner of your eye, dark, and instilling a primal fear in your gut. You try to move, scream, anything, but you can't. You're stuck where you are, this unknown threat lomming just outside of your field of vision. Maybe you regain control of your limbs but it feels as though you're running through a deep body of water. Your legs restrained by the atmosphere that seems to have thickened around you in the past few seconds. You still can't see the figure from before but you know its there. You can feel it watching as you struggle to escape.

You awake with a start. Looking around you can see you are in your bed, safe. You go about your day, the dream quickly fading from your mind. The dread may still linger, but you can rest easy knowing it was never real.

Music has always been in my life, ever since I was young.

I think one of my earliest memories was from when I was just a small child, in my grandparents living room. My grandpa had his electric guitar plugged into an amp and was playing music he had written. I think it was one about my grandma. He had a lot about my grandma.

After he died, I got that electric guitar. It's a red Washburn guitar he bought in the 90s. The fretboard is worn down and the red body probably isn't as vibrant as it was over 30 years ago, but it's his. I don't play the electric guitar all that much, I'm more of an acoustic person myself, but it's a nice reminder.

I also got his favorite guitar pick, probably as old as the guitar. It's a small cream-colored thing. The end is worn down to a nice rounded edge. It has an American flag on it with the words "united we stand" on it. He used that pick to make so much music. It's the only one I like playing with, it just sounds much better than any of my other ones.

I study music now. I'm not majoring in it since my university doens't have that yet, but I'm getting a vocal performance minor. It's weird to think about how if it weren't for that early exposure to people making music, and enjoying music so thoroughly I wouldn't be the person I am today.

I have music to thank for being alive.

The ticking of the clocks,

Their simple rhythm,

The gentle tick, tick, tick torturous as I lay sleeplessly.

The room is spinning though I am laying down.

It's too hot, too cold.

Is this what hell is like?

I'm being sucked down

Deeper

And deeper

Into the pit of my mind.

I'm going to be sick.

But where am I going?

I can feel my body laying still.

The clocks are still ticking.

I don't think I'll be getting much sleep tonight.

Every morning on my way to school, there is a specific route I take that gets me there quicker.

You would think that driving out to the highway, and then hopping on another highway, then taking yet another highway would be the fastest route for someone so far out into the county, but it's not. It's the safest which means nothing to me.

My way takes a right turn at the church I was baptized in, whose roof got blown off in a tornado last year, and finally reopened in time for Thanksgiving mass. Something to be thankful for indeed. I still make the sign of the cross every time I pass it though I no longer consider myself to be Catholic. The road is named for the church, and it stretches all the way to the highway where I turn to get on to the one that leads to my university.

This is, for lack of better term, a curvy-ass road. It's the one I learned to drive on and subsequently had a panic attack on. It is full of hills, has multiple 90 degree turns, and passes through numerous fields. The speed limit is 40mph and it really shouldn't be, but I drive it at that speed anyway. I have to slow down about 20mph for every sharp turn just so I don't spin out or crash into a field (which happened once, I know the family but I never told them).

It's as scenic as Southern Indiana can get in my opinion.

In mid-September when everything is almost ready to be harvested, I like to leave a bit earlier so I can watch as the dew on the crops evaporates with the rising sun, casting a golden and hazy light on everything. There's this one specific tree in the middle of one of these fields, in a deep valley, where this is the most prominent. Even in winter, or in the rain, or just after the harvest, I look at that tree and everything is alright. I sometimes slow down, if it's been a particularly hectic morning. That tree also symbolizes the fact that I am now halfway to school, and about to face the highway once again. It is the boundary between my home and the urban sprawl of the city that I hate so much but will deliver me from the life I've longed to leave since I was young. Sometimes I see that tree and feel dread, but sometimes I see it and a wave of peace washes over me.

I can only hope that the peace lasts through the day.

For me, writing has always been a love-hate sort of thing. I am most certainly not a words person, but I like challenging myself. I love writing academically, but I also love writing about things I'm passionate about. I've posted many a blog posts about random topics I can think about. I think by joining this club I can expand my writing style to more than just this kind of academic vibe I've noticed myself falling into. If you were to actually talk to me in a random conversation, you would notice I do NOT speak how I write.

It used to be different.

I used to write exactly how I spoke. But of course that was NOT good for an academic setting. I was told my writing was too informal, and that I needed more "sophistication" in it. And I attribute that to how I write today. My blog was a good start I think, before I kind of abandoned it (not for long!!!! I have Plans), but being able to write without worrying about having to be formal felt so freeing.

Of course I had my Writings page, and I posted some of my work there, but I'm not happy with them. I still have some of my zines up and available (I still need to format some of them to be readable without printing them), but some of them were just kind of... meh? I guess? I don't know.

I do actually write in my free time, but it just so happens that I hate everything I write. Every artists greatest pitfall. I have countless fanfics I have written, but have I posted them? No. Will I? Maybe. I don't know yet. It really is just a matter of confidence for me.

I think, though, with time I will be just fine.