40 Days of Macrobiotics: Day 7

The trick is making memory a blessing,
To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire,
Of wanting nothing more than what has been,
To know the past forever lost, yet seeing
Behind the wall a garden still in blossom.
~ Dana Gioia

Maybe it is the amount of brown rice I have been eating the past seven days. Or perhaps it is the act of writing about eating brown rice for the past seven days. Whichever it is, my writerly Muse is on a roll.  Today I followed some tips from my virtual mentors over at Write to Done and re-worked a poem I wrote a few weeks ago. 

My first exercise was to highlight all the nouns and verbs in any poem and replace them with synonyms.  I chose Dana Gioia's The Lost Garden because it is a favorite of mine.  It was a strange but interesting exercise.  It made me more aware of word choice and how important an extensive vocabulary is to a writer.  Then Sullivan suggested I change something in each line that shifted the focus of the poem.  By the time I was finished, I had a very cool poem about loss and decay [what can I say, I am a melancholic at heart] and also had several original lines and word couplings that I saved for future creative use.

So, thank you, faithful readers for embracing my Muse.  And thank you, brown rice, for waking her up!

Oremus pro invicem,
~ Mikaela

P.S. Dinner was...dun du da...brown rice with catfish, kale, garlic, green onions and purple cabbage. Mmm!