.

The word “blackberry” looks precisely like an actual blackberry: The brown “b” is dark and damp and borders on black—earthy, composted ink running into the leafy greens of the “l” and “e” and juice-stained with the deep red “rr.” It is dusty from the dry heat, yet to be plucked from the vine and soaked cold water. I smooth the word over with my pen, releasing it to the page and letting the vines spread wild over the white expanse.

Other words match the colors of “blackberry”:

“Violin” is purple, the dark “v” velvety and thick; its throaty song sounds exactly like a blackberry tastes. The “i” and “o” are berries, small and black set against white—music notes strung along the page. The long “l” is deep green; a thorny vine; a bow scratching against the strings. The violet strains waft across fields on warm nights, soothing the earth with their voice

&

“Rope” is the crimson cord of Rahab that hangs still from a tree branch in the windless evening. The “r” is the dark red twist of the twine, looped into a noose and ending with a tail, allowing room for adjustment. It sits as a silhouette against the blue “p” of the evening sky and the leafy underbrush of the “e”

&

“Horizon” is the pink residue of the sun at dusk: the fuchsia “h” is painted in strokes across the sky, absent of golden light after the sun has sunk below the deep brown “z” of the earth. The streaks of the crimson “r” and magenta “n” blend with the purple strains of the violin and fade into the night. All is silent and still on the page and I put my pen down.

Greetings, Hi and Hello.

Since I’ve taken to posting copious amounts of poetry and my followers have doubled in the last month, I thought I’d take some time to write a bit more candidly about who I am.

So hello! My name is Mary, and I’m a 23-year-old writer and wanderer and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I currently reside near Portland, Oregon in the U.S. but recently returned from traveling in India and Australia. It was the best of times and worst of times, or something like that. I have written some creative pieces already about my journey and will be writing more.

I have my Bachelor of Arts in English and Writing, hence why I have no idea what I’m doing with my life, and am currently working toward developing my writing skills and actively seeking to get published. I’ve most recently taken to writing poetry and creative non-fiction, but my dream is to publish children’s fiction (particularly for middle readers) and I currently have a novel outlined and a rough draft written. When I’m not writing I’m most likely looking at dumb things on the internet, walking, at Goodwill or fueling my tim-tam addiction.

I originally began this blog with the intent of writing about my Synesthesia, a brain condition that mixes senses so that I see a color for each letter and number. I want to learn more about how my brain functions and how Synesthesia influences my creativity and writing. You can read more on the about page: About Synesthesia.

I’ve been redoing my blog, making it more accessible and such. You can find my creative writing archived under the Prose and Poetry pages at the top. All rights reserved, of course. My goal is to become better at blogging and networking, since I admittedly have no idea what I’m doing. My hope is to make changes for the better, improve my writing, improve my skills and meet new people.

If you would like me to check out your blog, I will gladly do so.

Thank you and happy reading!

“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
–Ray Bradbury

Beautiful Minds.

When I was young, my father had a book by a Christian author called “The Puzzle of Ancient Man.” The book was largely an argument against evolution, and the sciencey, over-explained creation vs. evolution parts rather disinterested me, but I found the speculation the author presented and the archeological evidence he explored to be extremely compelling. The author used the first 11 chapters of Genesis to explain his belief that people were created by God to be extremely intelligent–much more so than we are today. He speculated that before the flood, people had become just as technologically advanced, perhaps even more, than we are now.

It was pure speculation, of course–but then, so are most thoughts about our ancient ancestors. In any case, the author explored some delightful archeological finds–OOPArts, he calls them, meaning Out Of Place Artifacts. These included anything from fossilised spark plugs to mechanical computing devices, all dating back from before the time of Christ. What it all means, who knows, but it is certainly interesting to think about and fascinated me as a child.

I was reminded of that book of my childhood a few weeks ago as I was watching a documentary on the inventions of ancient Mesopotamia. I dug the book out of the depths of an old cabinet and read it again, disappointed to find that the book itself is very poorly written and edited. I sulkily put aside my “I-have-a-degree-in-English” mindset for awhile, as at least the author’s sources were properly cited and the content was still interesting. I began to ruminate for a bit, pondering our ancient ancestors–a commendable evening activity, I suppose.

I really don’t believe that people have changed too much over time, and, as someone who believes in a God who created all that lives and breathes, I can easily agree with the author’s thoughts that people were once much more intelligent than they are now. God created our minds to be beautiful, to be the minds of geniuses, and to reflect the wonder of who God himself is. Over time, as people fell into depravity, our bodies and minds have declined–I really don’t believe we are all that we are meant to be.

As I thought about all this I related it back to synesthesia–I have written before about how I believe that perhaps God created all people to be synesthetes, to be able to experience the world through multiple layers of perspectives from having all five senses cross-wired. I think, perhaps, that at one time all people did. As our immortal minds declined, our brains began to register the senses separately, rendering us a plain, flat view of the world. Even those with synesthesia now often only have two senses cross-wired instead of all five, simply a small glimpse of the beautiful capacity of the human brain that God created.

I begin my own speculations on how all people at one time were synesthetes, and wonder what it must have been like for the first humans. I imagine Yahweh teaching them the different constellations in the night sky, and I wonder what they heard, tasted, smelled and felt and saw when they watched the Milky Way, named all the animals, ate fruit from trees. I think about how Yahweh intends to renew our minds, restore our bodies to the way he originally meant us to be, and I think of the future and how we will perceive the world around us. Reading the descriptions of the new heaven and earth and the throne room of God in Revelation is a very synesthetic experience for me, and reading it in relation to synesthesia makes me wonder.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that ancient humans were synesthetes, just like God himself.

Beautiful Sunday.

Everything about this is just so…cute. It makes me see grinning flowers and mirthful sunsets.

Rejoice and Lament.

This man’s songs evoke the most beautiful, earthy imagery.

 

I see Christmas colors in the song title: Rejoice is red and Lament is green.

Different Ways of Knowing.

Daniel Tammet talks about how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding.

This, too, is why I am a writer.

Childhood Boredom.

Bend, Oregon: the name is as plain and brown as the dust it sits in. My little legs hang out from the car seat and I press my nose against the window, gazing without emotion at the grayish-green farmhouse looming in the shadows of dusk by the gravel roadside where my family is parked. The hood of the old brown Corolla is up and my father is under it, tinkering. My mother and older brother sit in silence, as the desert sun lowers behind dusty clouds. I ask my mother where we are; I’ve probably asked many times during the day, but I do not understand where we are going. Bend, she tells me. The word is medium brown and small and looks exactly like the Corolla. I shift in my car seat and the memory fades.

~

My family is on vacation, I come to vaguely understand after we have sputtered into a motel parking lot and entered our yellow-shag carpeted room. What this means, and why we are here, in this desolate town, I do not know. We began the day driving in a completely different direction, stopping at a grand waterfall where my father and brother went hiking along the trail up to the big bridge. My mother waited with me below, as I tugged and pulled at her hand, crying, wanting to follow after them. We continued on to a large, snow covered mountain, eating sandwiches in the car while snow swirled around. We toured the museum in the lodge; I stared at the scale model of the perfectly pointed mountain in the glass case, mesmerized. I must have fallen asleep for the rest of the drive, coming back into consciousness to the sputtering of our dying car, stranded along the roadside.

~

I tug on my mother’s hand. I pull and pull, and my father and brother walk further and further ahead up the trail to the top of the extinct volcano. I’m being left behind, again. My mother never wants to do anything. Wait, I plead. Wait for me. My mother sets me down on a concrete wall at the bottom of the black, ashen mountainside and gives me a sandwich. I hate sandwiches; the bread crust drives me to tears. The sky is vast; I’ve never seen such a big sky, with no trees to block any part of it. Nothing on the ground but rocks and dirt. Jagged mountains sit on the horizon, three of them in a row, basking in the sun. My mother is tired, serious, but I think nothing of it.

~

The reindeer are everywhere, their antlers intertwining as they gather at the fence. They breathe heavily, their monstrous nostrils sniffing my brother’s coat pockets. My father lifts me up high, so I can greet them at eye-level. They roar, and they smell bad. I struggle in my father’s grip. My mother is halfway up the dirt road, standing away from the stench and holding her stomach.

~

We are on another gravel road, the only roads I have seen since we arrived here. The red rocks tower over the trees, touching the overcast sky. My father and brother are far in the distance, walking down the gravel toward the massive crags. I whine, but don’t say much. I knew they would leave me behind again. My mother lifts me onto the hood of the Corolla and gives me a sandwich, without the crusts. The cheddar cheese is sharp and wonderful in contrast with the awful, squishy white bread. My mother breathes deeply the clean cool air, gazing at the rocks with her hands in her coat pockets.

~

We drive and drive, out of the desert, through trees and mountains, and then we are home. I sit on the living room floor, among all my toys, joyful to have them back.

Loving in Color.

“I look at the world and I notice it’s turning…with every mistake we must surely be learning…” -The Beatles, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

I first became interested in learning about my synesthesia two years ago, during the winter and early spring. Those were odd days; perhaps the oddest season of my life. I wasn’t myself at all, and yet, in a strange way, was becoming more myself than I’ve ever been. I had recently been abandoned by a man, and was in a very dark depression that lasted well into the summer. I began to loathe people, all people, and holed up in my room when I wasn’t in class or at work. I was majoring in English at a University, and the only thing I loved about my life at that time was academics. I loved learning to write, but began to branch out, explore new ideas, learn new things, and to try and be a completely different person than who I really was. It was, ironically, in trying to be a completely different person that I wound up finding my true, original self and who the good Lord intended me to be.

My sojourn began with a sudden and uncharacteristic interest in quantum physics. I loved the ideas that scientists were working with; they fascinated me. I wanted to force my brain to learn and comprehend these things, to understand the formulas and equations and the intricate inner workings of the universe. I was taking a math class at the time, and loved the tedious routine of working through long formulas and coming out with the answer. The process was so all-consuming for me that I was forced to forget my depression and dark thoughts in those moments. With 96 college credits already completed toward an English degree, I looked into the possibility of switching my major to a more scientific field with hopes of studying quantum physics in a grad school.

This was a pretty far out scheme–I am not scientifically-minded in the least, and the God of the universe knew this and gently nudged me back to my own particular areas of expertise. I had been trying my hardest to forget about God, to toss the idea of him aside like an old pair of shoes, no longer needed. But when I slept at night [and I slept: usually eleven to twelve hours every night] I began to dream about God, and couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop talking to me, with that gentle murmur of a soft-spoken man that I’ll never forget, often with the most helpful and theologically profound ideas I’ve heard in this life. After awhile I couldn’t say no to his guidance: I am much to much of a spiritual being to not believe in a Creator of everything living.

I continued on my quest to be a completely different person: I read fashion blogs from my hometown of Portland, and began to dress in 70’s style jeans, leather coats, flowing Indian-style blouses. My hair was heavy with hair-spray and mousse and I began to routinely poke thick, dark make-up around my eyes every morning. My eyes are sensitive, and always itched profusely. I listened to different music and fell in love with Tom Waits and the psychedelic Beatles. After having “Norwegian Wood” on repeat for much too long, I discovered the Alan Parsons Project and was abruptly reminded of my synesthesia. The music seriously tripped me out. I began to lie on my bed in the dark in my room, listening to the mysterious songs with my eyes closed, watching the colors traipse by. I had always known that I had synesthesia, but didn’t know anything about the experience and the combination of those colors and that music made me feel things that I hadn’t felt before. The sheer oddity of it honestly scared me a little.

That spring the sky dumped buckets non-stop, I wrote 64 essays and a 45 page manual, and three things happened fairly close together that made me stop and think. First, I had an awful fight with my best friend: at the time, I was kind of a horrid person. I hated myself and just wanted to die, and I say that in the least dramatic way possible. Next, we began to discuss God the Creator in one of my writing classes, and were given the assignment to write about Christianity and creativity for one of our papers. In what ended up being in relation to this, I was reading an article in Seed Magazine about quantum mechanics and random reality, and by chance stumbled across a hyperlink to the most profound article about synesthesia and art that I’ve read. I realized I’d never researched synesthesia before, and gobbled up the article. After much thought and making a few connections in my head, I realized that God had created synesthesia to be a wonderful process, and in turn, had created me to be wonderful, and, lastly, had created me to be exactly who I was and loved me deeply.

During that dark time I discovered the Creator in ways I never dreamed I would, and my synesthesia is a huge part of that. God leaves a piece of himself in everyone he creates, and I think that my synesthesia, perhaps, is that piece of him. After discovering the Creator of the universe in that simple way, I was able to learn and grow and heal in new ways, in becoming myself and not pushing myself so hard in directions my mind didn’t want to go. With God’s love I was able to weed out who I was and who I wasn’t. I’ve relaxed a lot, no longer wear thick eyeliner, but still love 70’s clothing and the Beatles. I no longer feel the need to be an intellectual know-it-all, but, darn it, I do wish I could understand quantum physics.

Hopeful Wandering.

Roses are red–sometimes the flower, and always the word. Especially the word. The “R” is dark crimson and soft, like a petal; the “o” and “s” a rosy white and yellow, with a green “e” for a leaf.

I am standing in a vast rose garden on a shining day. Ten thousand rose bushes rustle in the breeze, their scent wafting out over the ridge, and I breathe in deeply. I never give much thought to roses. They are not something I’m particularly passionate about, but they are nice when I run across them by chance. Whenever I think of roses, I think of my mother, and how she isn’t named Rose. Her maiden name was Garden, and her name should have been Rose. She had an uncle Herb, so why not? It would be fitting, especially growing up here, in the city of roses.

I didn’t come to the rose garden on purpose. My friend and I have been hiking, following winding trails through the forests and meadows up on the hill above the city. The day is still and calm, and occasionally I have been brought back into the reality of where I am by the zoo train, a miniature model of an old-fashioned locomotive which rumbles by every once in awhile, its pint-sized passengers squealing.

Eventually we leave the garden and move on down the trail, back into rocky, forested hills. After awhile the trail turns into sidewalk lined with old fashioned lamps underneath the thick overhang of evergreen trees. And then, abruptly, we emerge into daylight, on a busy street in downtown Portland, at a Tri-Met bus stop underneath a skyscraper. My friend suggests we go back.

I have a hard time deciding how I feel today, as I meander along trails and think about life. I hike in much the same way that I live, exploring beginnings of trails to see where they lead, sometimes finding unexpected rose gardens, sometimes ending up where I don’t want to be and backtracking. My life is currently moving through a thick forest of evergreens and I can’t see where the sidewalk is going to come out. I can’t see much of anything, and my heart is a poignant mix of broken and hopeful, and I finally feel like a human again.