Upside Down Kris

Creatures They were orangey with a tinge of yellow, if I remember well.  Who or what are the they , you may be asking. Well, you'll just have to read to the end! Now, back to the description: they had tentacles and a stick body. They could have been a large insect, but weren't. They could have been prehistoric arthropods suddenly resurfacing on the shore of today. They might have been massive mites, but the shield protection was missing.  But they weren't mites or any sort of insect. They were simply orange algae with white pods, albeit fascinating ones. They were very different from the plant stuff that was here when I first arrived on the island–that brownish seaweedy stuff that could have be served in a salad or a soup. No, this had crawlers like a brilliant red crab. However chameleon it was in its animal likeness it definitely tended toward plant form. Where did this seaweed come from and why? Do seaweeds have seasons? Or have the tides changed and the weeds blown in...

Navigating Language I've got  Spanish on my mind.   Words slush and slosh around if I were a pirate slipping on the unsure decks of my wooden boat in a choppy sea of language. It is a tiny boat for the moment, big enough to contain me and some vocab. The structure of my Spanish boat is flimsy at best, although I keep adding boards every day to reinforce it.  Someday soon I will graduate to a sail boat which will navigate the word world with much more ease. Eventually, I will join my mates on a common ship and be able to understand all their "ayes" and "ts". Oh, how I wish that day were already here! But mateys, let's admit something: although at times it can be frustrating to come up with a blank instead of a sentence, it's exciting. I am constructing a new vessel to navigate in, to be able to dangle my toes off of or even launch off of. The sky's the limit as I swim under its falling stars of knowledge. I get to approach the world as a 3-year-old ag...

  Holograming I find myself doubling back more and more recently at the juxtaposition of who I wanted to be as it flashes back and forth like a hologram over who I might actually be. My image of myself is changing (again). Maybe I've always hologramed–that is, to be at the meeting point of two half loaded images between the sense of striving and reality. The truth is always somewhere in the middle, anyway. Aren't we always changing, becoming something else, hopefully better? Thank the gods that we can become something different and that I have improved in some ways. But this feeling is more than the flimsy flipping back, the flicker of self. I know I have swung back and forth many times, sometimes holding firmly onto the vision I crave and other times reverting back to the old when experiences remind me of the past. The growing is in the middle of dealing with these new/old faces, and determines which of the holograms I see. What if my best hologram self isn't me, though? W...

    Karaoke  Goal! One of my companions scooped me up and I suddenly sat on his shoulder. The chord from the microphone pulled taut as I grabbed onto it tightly. We had triumphed.  The bystanders cheered as if we had won a rugby game and I had scored the deciding goal. Most of the celebrating people were quite burly and had yelled out a match before I had gotten there. The screen in the background showed re-runs of runs on the field.  It seemed the fans were quite used to rowdy wins. One advocate for the evening's entertainment even picked up a chair and pounded it on the floor to show his appreciation. So, what was our triumph? What had we won? The interest of a bar full of sailors and tourists. We were the last act of the evening: Start Spreading the News . While all of us had had something to drink, my limit was half a glass of wine, so I was the only one out ot the three of us who was singing the words. My two companions slurred along and made up for it in p...

  Rocking the Boat It is the light that makes me turn my head to grasp its meaning. It draws me to the boats rocking in all their blueness and redness, swaying their wood from side to side in homage of the sea or perhaps the sky above. I am in awe of the light streaming down, highlighting where my eyes should look, taking me away from my self-absorbedness. It is a unique moment of  the sky communicating to the sea. I am lucky to catch it because ten minutes later the shaft is gone, never to repeat that exact illumination and position of the boats again. I have an urge to call him–the one I left at home. The weight of what was not said weighs down my arms as much as the heavy bags from the supermarket. But I can't call him because in my rush to be by myself I had left my phone behind. I stay here for a moment with the bags hanging but feeling lighter with awe and understanding. It is like I am rocking on one of the boats having an out of body experience.  But I am very muc...

She Sea The sea sometimes reminds me of a moody animal. She was so bubbly and frothy this morning, but in a matter of a few hours, she had switched her temperament.    She had grown irritable with the hot sun and the people thrashing about her. Or maybe it was the wind that had brought on her chunky mood. I feel the sea must be feminine in her flow and life giving possibilities. But her fury is feminine, too, although I can't explain why. In the afternoon, her waters rushed–a confusion of confluent lines running in different directions. I feel dizzy watching her pulling while pushing forward. She laps at the shore at the same time as giving me lip for landing my feet in her, soaking me up to my calves. She could have crashed her waves over me and thrashed me under, but instead decided my wet shorts were enough warning. The currents curved and reached and raged, curling and foaming at the mouth while slamming down the brown algae hidden below her green. I had the sensation she ...

  The Sea Giant The seaweed salad stood ready for the giant the other day. A mountainous mount had been piled up behind the boats. That's how the giant would get to the island: on his colossal craft of a boat. He would alight with his fork the size of Triton's trident ready and gobble of up the salad in a few forkfuls. Luckily, the island's residents have discovered the giant's penchant for seaweed salad. They had been deathly afraid that he would demand human or animal sacrifices like in the tales everyone knows so well. (Take Jack the Beanstalk, for instance.) However, the good giant explained that he was actually a vegetarian. You see, he was quite a polite fellow and apologetic about his duty to demand as a giant. No one doubted this fact because it was well known from the Dealing with Giants handbook written about the same time as King Arthur and his Noble Knights . The thing is, in modern times knights have gone out of business, so the poor people knew they had t...