Bolete [Haiku]

soggy forest floor:
bolete stands in the mulch
with crimson cap.

PROMPT: Best Excuse

Daily writing prompt
What is the best excuse you have heard lately?

“I was tossed by a bison.”

Relentless [Free Verse]

DAILY PHOTO: Waterfall & Mossy Rock

Image

Photograph of water falling around mossy rocks. Taken on Seoul's Namsan greenspace.

PROMPT: Who We Are?

Daily writing prompt
Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?

Is a salad lettuce or is it tomato? [It’s both, yet it’s neither. It’s an amalgam that cannot be spun out into component parts any more than one can pluck a solitary fart out of a football stadium — i.e. the fart, the whole fart, and nothing but the fart.]

It sounds like this is meant to be a restatement of the nature versus nurture question, though I’m not sure I understand the question. I would argue that it presents a false dichotomy. Who is one (if not an experience-having machine?) I can’t answer because I think the question assumes a simplification that doesn’t exist in the real world.

I’ve just been reading David Brooks’ book, How to Know a Person, in which he offers a relevant quote from Aldous Huxley: “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” I can’t say whether Huxley was entirely correct, but I believe that how one experiences what happens to one is inseparable from who one is. (Also instructive is Brooks’ definition of a person as a point of view.)

Reading Clouds [Haiku]

at rest on a hill,
clouds form & shift shapes;
i read their story.

Hoosier Discovers the Deluge at a Distance [Free Verse]

I’ve been caught in
many a sudden downpour.

And I’ve been warned by
the sweet scent of corn,
swept in though a
screen door,
or over the pasture.

But nothing in my flatland youth
prepared me to look down upon
the underside of a cloud —
to see its neatly-edged opaque
wall, defining the area
of deluge.

It wasn’t until much later that I’d
see the massive cloud columns
rising above the base layer
of a cloud floor —
warmly lit as seen from a
jetliner, though I knew it must
be brutally gray to
ground-dwellers.

The deluge closes slowly,
and yet I can’t escape it.

Know the Weather [Free Verse]

Steamy [Haiku]

DAILY PHOTO: From Netravati Peak

Photograph of green hills in the Western Ghats taken near the Netravati Peak in Karnataka, India.
Photograph of green hills in the Western Ghats taken near the Netravati Peak in Karnataka, India.