Just Write: Between poetry and plain

I've been writing in poetry lately.  I've been wanting images to do the speaking for me.  Because there are times I just don't want to say it plain.  You know, as it really is.  It's at least a little prettified and artsy with colorful imagery and photos and sparse, succinct words.  Sometimes, I prefer that.  And I've been wondering, why.  Not really the poetry itself, but why this forceful pull back to simpler times, back to childhood - memories of Papa, children's books, the lingering there in nostalgia, as if I've reverted back twenty years and want to stay there awhile.  Is this just the autumn season, or is it more?

But of course, I can answer that, in part.  I am, after all, educated in psychology and counseling.  I know enough what lies beneath all this.  And I still don't want to write it.  I, who am prone to introspection; I, who am painfully self-aware, observant; I don't want to dive into this pool.

Heather wrote this on her blog today, too, in her own story.  About that pit of anxiety, ever-present, that she walks around, picks up, puts down, comes back to, each day.  She didn't write the whys.  She didn't write the shame-on-yous.  She didn't write the I-need-to-pray-mores.  She just wrote the trail of thoughts, the thinking about thinking, the wrestling and wrangling to stay present in the moment, to breathe, to look, to see what's right here, even if the anxiety lies just a breath beyond.  And oh, how I relate to all that. 

This is all so cryptic, I know.  I fight the urge to wrap this up neatly, but I can't.  My writing today, I'm afraid, is not about understanding or enlightening or making plain what is.  It's simply admitting that it's nice, sometimes, to hide within poetry and pictures and children's books.  I'll come out in awhile.

And here, let me finish by indulging, yet again, in a picture.  

We were at the pumpkin patch on Sunday, Ricardo and Mom trailing behind me in the fields while I hunted for the "right" pumpkins to take home.  And the child Amber just couldn't walk past this one, couldn't leave it to rot in the fields alone (as if a pumpkin's "feelings" need to be validated, I know). 

As I type this, an old man sits with his wife here at a table in Starbucks, spooning chocolate drizzled whipped cream into his mouth from the top of his mocha, his translucent, wrinkled hand shaking.  A baseball hat rests on the table, beside him, with the words "Holy cow, I'm 90!"across the front.

There are things about us, too, that don't need to change with age. 

*Joining up today with Heather's blog and all the writers at Just Write...