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1974:

2006: At 31 years of age one would hope I’d have grown up by now; learned a few things, figured some of the all important puzzles out…. but, no. In the getting of wisdom I’ve gotten burned and it’s always a too-close call with bitterness – the last thing I want. Strange to wind up with calluses from caresses and kindness. What can I say? I’m working on it. All of it. I’m either an incredibly slow learner… or something of a masochist!

2007: I wrote that introduction – poorly – almost two years ago. I’d deleted the blog it belonged with and had assumed my access to this site had also become null and void. I’m happy to discover it’s still here.
At any rate, I’ve been tinkering elsewhere but returned here after realising just how limited some of the forums I’ve frequented are when it comes to writing. Limited is perhaps the incorrect word. It was more a case of having the wrong audience. Unfortunately, for the time being, I’m simply going to be moving various posts from one site on the web to here, so fresh content may be lacking until I’ve cleaned out the cupboards, so to speak.

For the most part, I tend to write poetry… unless I get in a ‘mood’ about something, in which case, you’re going to be exposed to some barely comprehensible prose.
Let’s hope that, somewhere along the way, I learn the knack of coherency and gain an ability to be concise.
Pet topics are (surprise, surprise) Love in its many incarnations, relationships in general, gender roles in today’s society, the stresses of trying to be a hermit in a world that won’t let me be…. or, perhaps, I won’t let be, and I’ve been known to get a little uppity about organised religion at times, also.
To be slightly more precise, it’s intimacy that fascinates me. I guess that’s what makes it impossible for me to truly become a hermit – I cherish my most intimate relationships, not just for the comfort and acceptance such a thing offers, but for the heightened senses, the steepened learning curve and the passion!

Jeanette Winterson wrote:

“I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations, but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.
The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off this body and its desires and being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don’t say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.”
(‘The Passion’)

In the end, it is our humanity that has me so enthralled. We put on this body in order to learn and to love. We wear this body in order to express that love… and yet society has warped such expressions in a myriad of ways and untangling those distortions and, I suppose, perversions has always been a very large part of why I began writing in the first place. If I continue, I’m going to have eight posts encased in what is supposed to be the “about me” section, so I’ll hold this right here and, hopefully, follow those tangents into more detailed (and concise – MUST learn to be concise!) accounts some time in the very near future.

Until then, please have patience with me while I get myself settled into my new/old home.

2008:

…
          V.

You call this     home? It’s
in the heart. — What literature!

For love is flesh, it is a
   flower flooded with blood.
Did you think it was just a
  little chat across a table

a snatched hour and back home again
  the way gentlemen and ladies
play at it? Either love is
—-A shrine?

                        or else a scar.

        ~ From ‘Poem of the End’ by Marina Tsvetaeva

© Melinda Chambers. All posts are the creation of the author and, as such, remain the author's property with all rights reserved.