This is totally irrelevant, but today’s date is cool; revel in it and tell your friends!

The more important news is that it’s October, my favorite month. (My favorite used to be my birth month, September, until I realized my birthday was in the summer, not autumn, and promptly chose a more autumnal month as my favorite.) October’s a rather stubborn word, and it fits the month in all its fighting glory.

I’m realizing the more I write, that the less of importance I have to tell the world, and the more I just want to revel in it. You can tell a tiny bit about an artist from their work. Simple as it is, I believe everything good is from God, and his piece of art is this big, beautiful world we get to walk around on. I tend to look and smell little things a lot, and I love making them feel appreciated and new.

So, that’s my mission statement for this blog. Bold, I know.

Walker makes fun of me for personifying the world: “stay strong, rose, stay strong!” or “you’re hurting the pillow’s feelings!”. I know it’s silly, but it livens the world up, and that tendency is the poet in me looking from other perspectives, trying to make things new. Poets never really create; we take from what we see and smell and match that image with sounds and shapes . . . and bam! something new is there on the page, something that, even at the time, we didn’t notice.

People ask about my writing sometimes, and I don’t feel too guilty saying I haven’t written a poem since Valentine’s Day, and it was junk.  I’m collecting, though. I’m collecting the light on my windowsill, the worn stones on the street, the calm rain. I may or may not use these fragments in any poem, but life is better for noticing them. And not everything needs to be used.

I don’t think everyone should be a poet, but I think everyone should examine life as if they had to push their experience into a few words, the few things that mattered. My whole day boils down to this: pots and pans of sideways rain, jeans wet up my calves, a fridge full of groceries, and warm apple pie with friends.