Featured Film Short: Her Un-Armed Beauty

May I present to you,
Her Un-Armed Beauty,
a Tribute to a girl I once knew.



Dena was this really bitchin’,
free spirited, totally cool, hippie chick, girlfriend I had senior year of high school.

Although our friendship did not last past our early 20's,
the memories we made together have lasted.

She died in September of 2004
and today is her birthday.
(at least it was when I wrote this before many time and technical difficulties)
She was born exactly one month before me in 1972.

I took these pictures of her.
One from one side
and one from the other.
She literally turned and we set up,
I moved, she fluffed her hair, and I took the pic!
What a difference.

I see a little girl, sweet, but unsure in one
and I clearly see a woman in the other.
I Always loved these pictures of her.
Now, I’m at a point in my life when I have the ability to create something really unique and special that reflects something of Her and of the times we shared.

She deserves to have art made about Her.

She always seemed to be trying to get her life together.
One time, she moved to CA from The East Coast.
It ended with her returning home,
on the plane,
crying.
She said she cried on the plane next to some guy.
She felt bad for him.
I felt bad for her.
I wished I’d been able to be there for her.

But once I was.
And I’ll always hold a special place in my heart for the time she cried in my lap.
Does that sound sick or mean?
I don’t mean it to be.
I feel more like Sally Fields in Steel Magnolias saying, “It was a most precious moment of my life.” (Or does she say the most precious?)

But now I’m the one crying
and saying,
THERE IS VALUE HERE IN THIS LOVELY EXPERIENCE PEPPERED WITH PAIN.
If you can find the value in the pain.
You Are Totally GOLDEN.

Your job is to find that in your own sadnesses,
in your own losses.

Don’t stop at SAD.

Dig deeper and go for the sob

So, Dena, thank you for helping me to experience part of The Great Tragedy in Life.
If I didn’t know The Great Tragedy in Life, I could not know Life.
And knowing Life,
fully and completely,
IS the purpose of Life,
I think.

What I speak of is only a single gift of her Great Life.
Just one single gift
of
an
endless
supply
of
gifts
of
Her.

She helped me be more free.
Because she had a freedom about her.
We rode on that rope swing together.
We jumped in leaves together.
We took pictures together.
We rolled down that hill together.

She was an adventure for me.
No other girlfriend I’ve had since did those sorts of things
nor encouraged me to.

Dena, you were a trip.
You made me french toast.
You shared your school lunches with me that you probably paid for out of your own money from working at Acme.
I thank you for all that and for everything else I am leaving out.

Free Spirited people are great!
Until they leave.

I missed her when she was still alive
because she just kept going away.

a pile of pictures hides inside.
I still don't have a picture of us together.

I don’t know why or how she died.
By something I heard combined with something inside me,
I believe there was tragedy there.
?
I just don’t know.
But I know I saw her body
and the body was cold
and had no Dena spark left in it.

She was dead in the sense that people mean
if they mean gone from here.
Because dead does not equal end.
She was much too precious to end,
the shimmer of her remains.
Why else would I be talking about her right now?
Part of Her Shimmer lives on in me, through me,
because I remember her.
And I remember taking these pictures with her.
And I remember her sobbing into my lap
and me rubbing her back
and just trying to be there for her while her heart shattered
into a hundred
million
pieces because a guy she thought loved her, didn't,
he loved her ex-best friend.
Having someone sob with utter sadness from the soles of their feet into your lap leaves a wound on you.
That's why I tear up whenever I think about it.

I remember partying with her
and dancing with her
and cleaning her room with her
and brushing our teeth together
and picking leaves out of our hair together for hours after jumping in those leaves
and talking about how we STILL hadn’t started on our typing class project yet
and how much we hated our typing teacher, Mrs. Saroka (that woman was so mean to Dena - teachers shouldn’t be allowed to be mean to their students!)
and joining in on her plans to get our lives together
and working out with her
and laying out getting a tan with her (when I used to bother trying to get my freckley skin to tan)
and how she told me on the phone that the night before she came home from work and ate cottage cheese for several minutes without looking in the container first and when she finally did,
she saw that it was very green......ew
and talking about guys (lots of this)
and laughing,
and I remember laughing with her.

If we were not friends until the moment she died,
can I still morn her loss?
Am I allowed?
Or will there be judgement with this?
Whatever.

The last time I saw her,
I didn’t speak to her.
I was very sick
and wasn’t interested in rekindling our friendship.
She didn’t make any moves to.
My mother and her spoke,
I acknowledged her,
but I just didn’t want to be friends with someone again whom I knew had already bailed on our friendship twice before.

For me, she’d already died.
I’d already lost her in my life,
TWICE.
I’d already felt the heartbreak of it.

But all that is gone,
in the past,
and now she is the light that flickers through the trees through my window and onto my leg.

And whenever I hear “Love Song” by Tesla
or “When October Goes” by Barry Manilow,
the she that lives inside my heart,
lights up and shines anew.
   

I dedicate this all to you, Dena,
wherever you are....
Wait, I know where you are!!!
You’re Late!  What a surprise there.
Please don’t shake your chocolate milk again,
you already opened it and last time you sprayed us all.
:)~

~Love and Magick~
Meliss

ps:  here's the magick spell

How far down the rabbit hole did you say you want to go? 3

“The Force is what gives the Jedi his power.  It’s an energy field created by all living things.  It surrounds us and penetrates us.  It binds the galaxy together.”  Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars: A New Hope

“When we began to analyze galaxies, like our own, we realized that they were spinning too fast.  By rights they should fly apart.  In other words, something was binding the galaxy together that was invisible.  And it’s the greatest mystery in all of physics: Dark Matter.  Dark Energy.  In other words, The Force.

“As astrophysics crunch the numbers, an illusive material began appearing in the equations.”

“We now know that only 4% of the universe is made out of atoms.  96% of the universe is made out of, well, The Force, Dark Energy and Dark Matter.”

“Dark Matter is difficult to detect because it does not emit or reflect light.  We can only infer the presence of Dark Matter by observing its effects on the visible universe.  Such as gravitational lensing, the distortion of space time around massive objects like black holes.”

“It’s in the room right now.  And we physicists are clueless as to what it really is.  There is a shelf full of Nobel Prizes waiting for the young person who could explain what is it that surrounds the galaxy, holds it together, permeates our bodies, and makes up 96% of the universe.”

In Star Wars, they channel The Force.  Is this similar to the power some say we contain to create and affect our world?  What part does Dark Matter play in it?

And why the heck did they name is something so evil sounding??

~magick~
Meliss

ps:  it's here right now......and it's looking at me.....i'm a little scared.

ps:  quotes above from:    Prophets of Science Fiction: Episode 8:  George Lucas

I am artistically haunted

and lovin' it.
~magick~
Meliss

Featured Film Short: We've got a ghostly kind of love

The following account has been pieced together like Frankenstein using this fragment of information and that
gathered over the time I have lived in Fern Hill Cottage:

In the attic,
in the back corner,
in the chest,
rests,

a scrap of fabric from the hem of a skirt,
a scrap of paper, a year written,
and they,
married with a straight pin,
began it all.

Then, photographs of a ghostly woman
standing outside this very house
widen the eyes.

Followed by a page,
torn from a book.
The words “The Dead Woman’s Photograph”
create a chill up the spine that lasts for several weeks
that is aggravated nightly by trips alone
and in the dark
to the bathroom.

Then thankfully, time passes,
life happens.
The chest and its contents are forgotten.
The mind is occupied during nightly trips to the potty with to-do lists.
Everything is blissfully normal.

But one day,
that changes.

A ghostly doe appears in the woods.
It is captured on tape.
And when replayed,
a ghostly voice accompanies it.
Oh, yeah, that’s gonna do wonders for the ability to go to the potty alone in the dark at night.
It’s not scary enough to have pictures of ghosts or ghostly animals outside the house.
No, let’s ramp it up to a whole new level of scary and have a voice come from ‘no-where’ inside the house.
That’s great.

But through the fear,
you listen
and listen
and listen to the words,
trying to decipher each and every one,
to decode the message sent from ‘the other side.’

And when you finally do,
a story begins to form.

“Sometimes secrets kill relationships.  Sometimes they kill you.”

Once there was an okay looking girl who would turn into a beautiful albino doe as soon as she entered the woods.
Oooo, aaahhhh, you say?
Yeah, it’s actually not that cool,
She Died.
Husband shot her in the heart with an arrow.

You see, she made several critical mistakes:
One was never saying to her husband, “Hey, I turn into a white deer when I go into the woods, so if you see one, don’t shoot it.”

And two was going out looking for her husband during deer hunting season. 
Big mistake.
Huge.

If you can’t tell by her expression,
I can tell you,
she was just a little pissed about the fact that he killed her,
that he shot her in the heart.
Just a little bit pissed.
Okay,
she was REAL pissed.

But she loved him still,
the idiot,
moron.

And him?
Oh, he felt real bad when he realized it was her he shot and not some prized albino doe.
But that might have been because he REALLY wanted that albino deer’s head above his fireplace.
Being the dastardly fellow he was, for a moment he considered what her head would look like there,
but decided it would be in poor taste
and instead he buried her at their favorite place to watch the sunset,
figuring they could still do that together,
as long as he remembered to show up
or wasn’t too busy hunting
or playing cards
or drinking with his friends,
now that he was single again. ;)

But before you think he’s a complete jerk,
you should know that inside the chest he kept that scrap of the hem of her dress
and on his cheek rests the key.

That’s gotta mean something.....

~magick~
Meliss

Ps:  What I find to be the scariest part is this question:   Why do we share ourselves with people we can’t trust enough to know our deepest darkest secrets?

How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? 2

 

“The universe is mostly empty.” 

“We like to think of space as empty and matter as solid.  But in fact, there is essentially nothing to matter whatsoever.  It’s completely insubstantial.  Take a look at an atom.  We think of it as a kind of hard ball.  Then we say, “Oh, well, not really.  It’s this little tiny point of really dense matter right at the center, surrounded by a kind of fluffy probability cloud of electrons popping in and out of existence.”  But then it turns out that that’s not even right.  Even the nucleus, which we think of as so dense pops in and out of existence just as readily as the electrons do.  The most solid thing you can say about all this insubstantial matter is that it’s more like a thought - it’s like a concentrated bit of information.”

“Within all the atoms and molecules, all the space within them, the particles take up an insignificant amount of the volume of an atom or molecule. The rest of it is vacuum.”

**quotes all from the movie What the Bleep do We Know**

So, all of the stuff we see around us that appears solidly created of atoms and molecules, which contain smaller parts inside of them, do, in actuality, contain mostly empty space.
In other words, nothing.
They contain mostly nothing.
?
So, I’m sitting on a bunch of empty space strung together that somehow looks like a couch and holds me up off the floor, comfortably, because I think it does?
because I believe it does?
What they’re telling me is that what makes up this couch is something less comparable to what we would call ‘A Thing’
and MORE comparable to what we know as ‘Thought.’
Wow.
Furthermore, given this information, my mind has said,
“Well, then, there are no ‘Things’,
there is only forms of ‘Thought’ and ‘Consciousness.’”
Is that right, I ask myself?

They said, “a vacuum”.......what I know in association with the word vacuum is that it sucks everything around it, to it.
I wonder, is that why it’s so easy to get ‘sucked into’ materialism??
And away from consciousness?
The solidness of the couch is easier to believe and ‘buy into’ (so to speak) than the other.
I wonder if it’s because,
IF the other was true,
that would mean.........

~magick~
Meliss

Of Dark Nights of the Soul and One-Eyed, Polka-Dot Bellied Cats

"Many people think that the point in life is to solve their problems and be happy.  But happiness is usually a fleeting sensation, and you never get rid of problems.  Your purpose in life may be to become more who you are and more engaged with the people and the life around you, to really live your life.  That may sound obvious, yet many people spend their time avoiding life.  They are afraid to let it flow through them, and so their vitality gets channeled into ambitions, addictions, and preoccupations that don’t give them anything worth having.  A dark night may appear, paradoxically, as a way to return to living.  It pares life down to its essentials and helps you get a new start.”

a quote from Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life’s Ordeals by Thomas Moore.

I really like how he calls them life's ordeals.  Ordeals, yeah that's a good word for them.

swimming champion, Diana Nyad taught me today:


"It wasn't so much what did I want to do, it was who I want to be."

"Am I living the life that I can admire?"

"and never giving up, and finding a way through your obstacles, and finding your grit and your will."


~magick~
Meliss

Featured Film Short: My Lipstick on Your Lips

Hope you find inspiration jumps out of the screen and into your life and fills you with that creative urge!  And if you already had some, you'd better stop fooling around on the internet looking at other people's work and do your own.  ;)

~magick~
Meliss

Ghosts and Glitter

I'll spend my time,
In the place where ghostly girls
with eerie eyes
form slowly in the midst of music driving them into their own birth.

Time spent there,
gloriously so,
is medicine for my soul.
OH,
I exclaim,
I am so glad that I found myself
wandering around in my atmosphere.

I would croak if I saw a real ghost in the middle of the night in the mirror.
I have seen WAY too many ghost stories to be 100% confident in saying:

If I look in the mirror, at butt crack in the middle of the night, when I’m going to the bathroom, with only the light of my cell phone lighting my way.......
I’ll be alone
and nothing will pop up behind me
or in front of me
or in the background.......
WAY too many pictures of that in my head.
Darn me and my love of being scared!
:)

But ghosts in my art......
I quoth Tangina from Poltergeist
“Welcome.  All welcome.”

Maybe I really got influenced by Jennifer Slept Here.

Doesn't matter.
Alls I know is
I love it.

~magick~
Meliss

PS: I am so glad that our FDA is no longer inspecting food.  AND more importantly, I’m glad our news announced that information to the world, including people who might want to poison our food supply.  Congratulations Government and News!  You both do a bang up job making our lives better.  BTW, I’m sure we have small pox somewhere.  We all should know where it is not being guarded......just so we can see how unsafe all this bickering and revenge is for those of us who are at the mercy of it.