The Lunar Halo Edition

In May, I made quite the lofty pronouncement . . . I wanted my joy back! A slanting sparkle I lost long ago when I gave up part of who I used to be to time. Now after many mangled drafts, I am happy to share the Lunar Halo edition of Stealing the Dark Moon: 

I must confess that this single piece took me months of messing around on Artweaver. While not a perfect mirror of my initial idea, I learned a lot from practicing. And I have so many projects I look forward to tackling next! I want to illustrate three of my mom's poems. I have a backlog of children's stories and novels I wish to create art for in the future.

I hope with each new experiment, I gain a pixel's worth of confidence. 

 

The Luniferous Gazette #17: A Review of The Changeling by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Rewilding Hearts in Bent Oaks Grove

 

If I was banished from Earth with just one book, let it be this one.  

I believe I was about twelve when my parents first introduced me to Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s splendiferous Green Sky trilogy, but The Changeling will always be my favorite book by her. This middle grade novel juxtaposes the transcendence of two children's imaginations against the brittle harshness of reality. Yet it's not just about escaping reality, but rather, learning how to grow up in it while not losing the inherent wildness within. 

Martha Abbott is a lonely, timid girl who forms an unlikely friendship with Ivy, a member of the notorious Carson family known for causing trouble in town. Martha is fascinated by the peculiar, almost otherworldly Ivy, who claims she is a changeling switched at birth with the “real” Ivy. As they grow up together, the pair get into all sorts of scrapes and weave an intricate dream world where both belong, but neither can stay. 

The story is told from Martha’s perspective, and the reader learns very quickly that she is a shy and awkward child who doesn’t fit easily into a daily existence that often feels scary and confusing: “The rest of the Abbotts fought quietly and politely by using words that said one thing and meant another. It was a dangerous game with rules that Martha could never understand, and so long before she had started crying instead” (Snyder 29). 

In fact, Martha is teased as a “champion crybaby” who bursts into so many fits of wailing that she must seek refuge in her very own place of tears—a luggage closet jokingly given the nickname “Marty’s Mousehole” (30). The raw honesty of Snyder’s portrayal of this cowardly protagonist only makes Martha more relatable in my eyes rather than weak-willed or unlikable. After all, how many of us have also been a weeping and fearful “Martha” at some point in our own life? Even after we are “all grown-up,” being human means being Martha sometimes. 

Meeting Ivy gives Martha the tiny push she needs to embrace a lost spirit of courage and curiosity. In a chance encounter at school in second grade, Ivy helps Martha to remember her imaginary friend, “Lion,” who comforted her in the dark as a child until she was forced to abandon him because of her family’s teasing. A bond of friendship is forged as the two children search for him together, and “[…] Martha always remembered how excited she felt—as if she’d already found Lion again, or something even better” (25). 

The two girls spend much of their free time outdoors together in the woods of Bent Oaks Grove imagining an elaborate fantasy world that draws on similar ideas inked in Snyder’s Green Sky trilogy. Accidental mischief and mayhem follow them as they rescue ducklings covered in oil and attempt to kidnap a beloved elderly horse to save it from a feared dire fate. Through every escapade, Ivy is Martha’s best friend and creative confidante—until she isn’t. 

Sometimes, she simply vanishes from Martha’s life as the Carson family abruptly skips town (whether for unpaid bills or trouble with the law), only to turn up again randomly years later ready to pick up their friendship. Still, a gossamer horizon always lies between them. Perhaps the best description Snyder gives of Ivy is Martha’s observation, “There was a kind of blur about her, as if she had moved to a distance that had nothing to do with space” (115). 

What I especially love about this novel is how naturally the story approaches the first bittersweet realizations that come in childhood. For example, Ivy’s fateful encounter with the world of professional ballet. Though she was born a free-spirited dancer, Ivy instantly becomes frustrated with her inability to master the same moves that she witnessed in a ballet performance. While she knows that her family can’t afford lessons, she vows one day to learn how to dance and “do such perfect—perfect—things, so easily, and—” (121). Her anguish and determination mirror the nascent heart of lofty dreams that stretch with us all into adulthood.   

Change and tumult are inevitable parts of growing up, as are a teenager’s “very mixed-up feelings about almost everything” that hold both the lowest and highest moments of happiness (136). When Martha enters seventh grade, Snyder notes, “Everything stayed disgustingly the same—and at the same time changed so rapidly that she sometimes felt there was nothing she could count on as being fully true” (136).  

Faced with cliques and confusing relationships with her school peers, Martha becomes overwhelmed by a sense that everything is “phony and unreal” (138). Even herself sometimes! Snyder states, “it would suddenly seem just too much of an effort and she would turn quiet and strange and escape to her room and her books, and sometimes to Bent Oaks Grove” (138). 

Resisting the growing clamor, Martha’s withdrawal from accessibility becomes an instinctive act of self-protection. Perhaps in some ways also a lost and vulnerable art of introspection in today’s world. However, sometimes the storms of life will simply not let one be. 

When Ivy’s mesmerizing dance tryout earns her the coveted spot as lead dancer in a school production over their more popular classmate Kelly, Martha senses the approach of doom. Kelly starts a rumor campaign to portray Ivy as having unjustly stolen the position as only a trashy Carson would do. But when Kelly promises to be Martha’s friend if she’ll just “drop” Ivy, for the first time in her life, Martha finds her own voice. She firmly calls out Kelly’s unkind and disingenuous behavior, not yet understanding the painful price that comes with speaking up.  

Enraged, Kelly later accuses the two girls of causing property damage at the school. The cleverness of this ploy relies on the fact that no one will possibly believe in a Carson’s innocence over the “angel-faced version of Kelly” (187). When a tearful Martha tries to console Ivy and remind her that she’s a truly a changeling, not a Carson, Ivy explodes—

“Shut up! I’m no changeling. There’s no such thing as a changeling. I was lying to you” (190). 

Although the true culprit is later revealed, irrevocable damage is done—Ivy’s family abruptly leaves town and the two friends never cross paths again after their last argument. But their intertwined story isn’t over even as seasons pass, and Martha grows more confident in her own identity and busily involved in school drama performances. Martha never quite forgets Ivy and is startled to encounter the spitting, younger image of her friend in Bent Oaks Grove one day. Only this time it is not Ivy, but her little sister Josie with a letter meant just for her. 

Readers are rewarded with an unexpectedly happy twist to this coming-of-age tale as Ivy now lives in New York thanks to an inheritance earmarked exclusively for dance school fees. Ivy has grand plans to study hard and become a ballet dancer! And one very crucial retraction to make—she didn’t mean what she said about changelings, of course. 

“But lots of people are changelings, really,” Ivy insists. “You might be one yourself, Martha Abbott. I wouldn’t be surprised” (219). 

The story ends with Martha raising her face into the wind and relishing “the wild push and pull of the darkness that flowed around her” (220). Oh, and the realization that she, too, might truly be a changeling at heart. Perhaps Snyder is suggesting that to be a changeling isn’t just a state of being? Maybe it’s more a becoming. For whenever we give ourselves permission to wonder again, our imagination and curiosity may flow as freely as Ivy’s dance.  

Work Cited:

Snyder, Zilpha Keatley. The Changeling. Backinprint.com. 2004. 

 ~*~ 

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The Luniferous Gazette #16: The Odd-day Motto

 Today is not a day to make beds

  

 *Photo of our (late) first adopted elder cat, Baby.

 

 The Odd-day 
Motto

Today
is not a day
to make beds

(I knew it the minute
I woke up).

Today
is not a day
for the order of things,
erudition or ponderous
philosophies—

Today
I shall live
a mess on purpose.

I wrote this poem many years ago, and the older I get, the more sense it makes to me. Perhaps that is also why my grammie, Nancy Anne, pinned this silly little poem onto her fridge until it was nothing but a faded paper scrap. She understood that some days are odd days out. 

Sometimes life gets to be overwhelming, and smiling in person and curating sparklestars online feels painfully performative while cinders pile up in the mind and heart. This poem is a reminder to myself that it is all right to have days where you just don’t try.

You rest.

You let the bed stay unmade. Wrinkles and chaos are inescapable, after all! And while it might mean life is imperfect and messy sometimes, rest is a raft, and that is worthy of our effort, too. 

 ~*~ 

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The Luniferous Gazette #15: The Ancient Sparkle of the Herkimer Diamond

Everyone has a birthstone. But in my family, there is a stone that comes even before that in importance—a Herkimer Diamond. Technically, it is a type of quartz from upstate New York, regaled as the clearest and most lovely, a 7.5 on the Mohs scale of hardness instead of 7.0 like regular quartz as a local explained to me. This crystal is “doubly terminated,” which means it is faceted on both ends, and is strong enough to cut even glass. Fancy.

 

 *A Herkimer Diamond cut into a “Kiss Drop” faceted shape.

When my mother and father married, they tied their fates together with a Herkimer diamond necklace. My father grew up on the East Coast going on mining trips to dig up stones (including geodes and Herkimer diamonds) and had a lifelong passion for all types of minerals. My mother wore the solitaire crystal that he gave her on their wedding day and kept it in a little jewelry box even after its post broke. Years later, the little stone eventually went missing, which really saddened my mother. She was not a huge jewelry wearer, but that one pendant was special to her.

I stopped at Gems Along the Mohawk on a family road trip to New York earlier this month. In a way, it felt like a mini pilgrimage to the beginning of my parents’ story—one that would eventually grow to include my siblings and I, too. This large shopping and visitor center sits beside the Mohawk River. Now, if we had arrived earlier in the day, perhaps we could have booked a river boat trip. But we were there for a sole purpose, anyway: to bask in the concentrated, collective glory of Herkimer Diamonds.

My breath was quite taken away by this (I believe it was 5k?) Herkimer Diamond bonsai tree. If I were ever to become inordinately wealthy, I would be tempted to place one such bedazzling beauty in every window!

Now, one may go on mining excursions in Herkimer to dig up your very own prize crystal, but I’m over forty and was not in the mood for such a muddy expedition. I wanted the already curated sparkle experience—and the excellent pair of shop owners there certainly provided that for their customers and visitors. From them, I learned that Herkimer diamonds can only be found in this one single location on Earth.

When you hold a Herkimer diamond, you’re grasping something that is 500 million-years-old from “the shallow Cambrian sea that once lapped against the southern shores of the ancestral Adirondack mountains” (*Wisdom gleaned from the historical printout kindly provided at the shop).

When I hold a Herkimer Diamond in my hand, I feel like I’m marveling at that last little mote of light from Fantasia that the Child-like Empress cradles in her palm like a precious dream. 

The most flawless Herkimer diamonds are usually no larger than half an inch, a jam-packed glitter-fest that catches and holds the least slant of light in its facets! I guess that is what I like best about them: they’re tiny packets of gleam that refuse to be stamped out by time. 

I didn’t purchase the 5k Herkimer Diamond tree, but this thirty dollar version of crystal perfection will lend a most becoming spark to any windowsill: 

 ~*~ 

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The Luniferous Gazette #14: Here Are Only Stars

~*~ 

Here are only stars

There are no dandelions

The trees were saying.

As someone who is wont to meander into purple prose, I don’t write haiku often as I find them challenging to truly ink what I wish in a format of such compact elegance. However, this little poem from Tangible Creatures is one of my favorite attempts at capturing a single idea in a 5-7-5 syllabic structure. 

 

I wrote it in answer to a call for haiku submissions years ago, and while the poem was rejected, sometimes I find myself repeating it softly like a mantra of sorts—

Here are only stars . . .  

 

For like the shadow dapple of light on leaf, our perception can suddenly shift. A seemingly dull reality startles our eyes with hidden gleam—

There are no dandelions
The trees were saying . . . 

And so a humble weed may reveal an innate star, moon, and sun bound together in one, wondrous lifeform. A singular timespan in “The Teeth of the Lion!”

Dandelions have been alternately used, prized, discarded and despised by the human species for thousands of years. Yet they persist despite our various opinions of their worth, radiant in their own vivid purpose. 

As a dear friend recently reminded me, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” The wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt blooms boldly in the dandelion. 

I would live with such stubborn rays of courage spilling from my being and escaping my fear-bound silhouette. What a thing to be free as a filament! Even a quavering wish seed dares to dream sometimes, too. 

*Fantastic wallpaper from our favorite brunch place that has me rethinking my dislike of such adornment.

 ~*~ 

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The Luniferous Gazette #13: Message to a Poet I'll Never Meet

 Thank you, Carmen

My very first published poem was in Inscape Journal. I remember I was terribly disappointed that the journal switched from print to an online format only with my issue as this meant I would have no physical copy to treasure and share with others. 

However, I’m grateful that an online archive has been maintained, because that is how I am able to discuss this marvelous 2011 poem by Carmen Sophia Cutler, “A Wider Universe than Yesterday.”

  

The poem opens with a cosmic bang with the sudden personal revelation, “There are, now, worlds coming into being” in the same amount of time it would take one to consume “a peach.”

According to the Almighty Google, the Earth is “181,944 times larger than the diameter of an average peach.” Yet this poem explores how even the mundane act of eating this small golden orb can spangle the human imagination to the edge of creation. 

The playful juxtaposition between a humble fruit and the birth of planets spurs Cutler to declare, “What immeasurable options knitting the stars.” The sensory overload of this sidereal realization elicits a more jubilant cry from deeper within—

“alleluia, alleluia
in voices too sweet for sound.” 

Then, the poet adds a single italicized line that reminds us of Mary’s timid, but hopeful inquiry in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved work, The Secret Garden: 

"may I have a bit of earth?"

The reader is drawn back to the garden, to stellar nurseries, to beginnings, as Cutler reframes her mortal journey in a fragile dance of human limbs:

“because I have been practicing—
balancing books on my perfect princess head.”

Aren’t we all practicing, too? And dropping books right and left! Yet still, we pick up the pieces of the day, the shards of ourselves, and try again. 

Maybe I’m overthinking this poem. Maybe I’ll never catch every facet no matter how many times I roll all the lines over in my head. I’m just glad I stumbled upon such a jewel in the ink! And I hope more people will read and love it now, as well. 

I would be grateful to one day send the author a note of thanks for the lasting impression their poem has left on me after all these years, but so far, I have been unsuccessful in that regard. 

It’s a curious thing in this digital age to wonder just how many humans cast their most precious words out into the online ocean, never knowing who will find their fragile bottle of soul glass. Or who will unravel the coiled scraps tucked inside and read each glimmering syllable in quiet wonder. 

It’s also strange and unsettling to think about just how easy it is for all these cyber ribbons of brilliance to vanish when an online publication shuts down. I’ve lost more than one published poem to sudden virtual death . . . . 

Life is still shockingly ephemeral despite the powerful digital glow that lulls us under its trance with promises of eternal recordance/remembrance. Nothing is forever in the entire universe. The last luscious bite of a peach, the wide orbit of a world, the implosion of a star—the whole of every experience is bound by linear time. 

And the random gift of words from one complete stranger to another who will likely never, ever meet on this Earth? Pretty amazing. I hope I never take for granted that we live in such an Age of Astonishments! So thank you, Carmen, for the gift of your stelliferous poem. 

Work Cited

Cutler, Carmen Sophia (2011). “A Wider Universe Than Yesterday.” Inscape Journal.
<https://inscape.byu.edu/2011/11/16/a-wider-universe-than-yesterday/>

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The Luniferous Gazette #12: Lessons from a Faceless Cameo

 When the Stone Bent the River

“One Thought, Fills Immensity.” –William Blake

I live by a river that isn’t quite ten thousand years old yet. Periodically, it floods its banks and leaves behind debris in the cracked earth. One year, the water receded and left behind a curious marvel locked in the mud like a homely gem: 

A single stone had carved a rippling wake of dirt behind it, refusing to relinquish its spot to the raging currents. This drab lump of rock would hardly be noticed nestled in the soft and tender grass blades. Nor was it the least bit dazzling by human standards of mineral glamor! 

But lodged squarely in the muck, this stubborn stone took on a metaphorical glimmer that my mind could not ignore, reminding me:

Hold your spot. 

Sometimes when the news smacks me with waves of inescapable doom and dire forecasts of future gloom, I feel like it won’t be long now before I crumble into a pile of cowardly pebbles. Pftt! AGAIN? I disintegrate into melancholic particles with the dust of the day. 

The same day that my mother unexpectedly died about seventeen years ago, I was feeling grumpy and out of sorts. She hugged me, and said, “You’ve got to have a firm mind.” Those were her very last words to me before she left for dialysis and passed away from a sudden blood clot. 

Mom, I’m trying, but some days—

No human can escape this feeling in life, because it’s simply the pain of a mind taking up space, form, and breath. But this muddy little stone? Such a dull gray jewel—ungleaming, and yet unyielding. It held its own spot against the impossible eddies, anyway. 

And maybe, our own spot feels very small and buried under smothering layers and fierce currents sometimes. Hold out anyway, Little One-off! There will never be another clump of carbon shaped exactly like so. Like you, star dustling. 

And while one may never feel shiny or steadfast enough to face each day, even the quietest presence does not go unmarked in the world. Our track is wider than we will ever fully know under this mortal spell—wider than wings.  

 

Faceless cameo,
You never needed a name.
You hold your true worth.

 
~*~

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