I’ve tried to write this post in plain language a few times, but the words aren’t coming.  So instead, let me tell you a story:

Long ago in a place far away there was a young prince with a hard heart.  His pride was like poison and he became ruthless.  He cruelly punished villagers who poached deer from his expansive forest.  He brought the law down without mercy on the heads of the weak and powerless.  One day he was visited in the night by an old and bent woman with hair in tangles and torn robes.

“My prince, my prince,” the hag said, “I beg you a night to sleep in the kitchens by the fire, for it is cold and I am weak and far from home.”

“I wouldn’t let you sleep with the pigs,” the prince retorted, “who are you to beg anything of me?  Leave this place!”

The woman looked on the prince with sorrow and said, “would that you had shown me the kindness a boy would show a dog,” with tears continuing, “for a curse you have brought down on yourself with your hard heart.  The winds will change and this land will fall fallow, you will be left with nothing but your walls and possessions, without a single person to be your companion through the long winter.”

Time passed and the lands fell fallow.  One by one the prince was forced to release his servants as there was no longer food to keep them.  Quietly in the night the serfs who worked the fields crept away, until nothing was left of his kingdom but the castle and surrounding forest.  The road through his kingdom fell into disrepair, into the hands of thieves and slave traders.

The winter was, indeed, long.  It was cold in the castle without servants to tend the fire.  The Prince grew thin and weak without anyone to cook for him.  His appearance changed from the softness of youth into something far more haggard and grim.

Then, one night, he heard a voice call out.  It was a woman’s voice, high and desperate.  It was curiousity and boredom that first motivated him to don his riding garb and to go out in search of the voice.  Curiousity and boredom, that was, until he saw her.  Brown hair fell over pale cheeks and hands red and broken from the cold held her frail form upright against a tree.  Tears were pouring down her face and she was trembling.  “Is there anyone?”  She called, again and again, “anyone to hear me?  Anyone to keep me from dying alone?”

The Prince’s hard heart felt the first fingers of spring grasping for purchase.  He rushed to her side and held her up.  “Who are you,” she whispered.  “Are you real?”

The Prince made no reply.  He simply carried her into the castle and put her in his bed.  He scrounged through the pantries to find bread to feed her, he killed the last of his chickens to make broth for her to drink.  He went out into the forest and felled dead trees to cut wood to keep the fires burning.  All that he would not do to ease his own discomfort he did for the sake of the strange girl.  And over the weeks as the snow outside began to thaw, the girl’s condition improved.  By the time the flowers were peeking out from under the last fall’s leaves, she was walking again.  And in time she started to talk, and told the Prince the story of her father’s death and her own loss of home and security, how she had fled an abusive suitor to fall into the hands of slave runners, and how at last she had escaped their clutches just to lose herself in the forest.

“And now I am here.” She said, “but why are you?”

“Why am I here?” The Prince replied.

“Yes,” the girl said.

And so the Prince told her the story of his lost kingdom and the curse that had left him alone through the long winter.  “If only I could have learned of compassion, if only I could have governed like my father, in fairness and love for my people.  But I brought my curse down on my head, and now I live alone.”

“Is that what you wish for?”  The girl asked.

“My father was a good man,” the prince replied.  “He was loved by all, and he returned their love.  He gave to those who were weak, he studied the words of the elders.  There is a story of a time that he came to the defense of a man who was to be hanged for poaching in the forest.  He said, ‘I kill the deer here every month, shall I be hanged as well?’ and he killed a deer for the man’s family to eat.”

“And you are not like him?”

“He died when I was very young,” the Prince replied, “I forgot who he was until I was left alone.”

“But you took me in,” the girl said, “you fed me from your table, you gave me your bed, you built a fire to keep me warm.”

“There was no one else to save you,” the Prince said.

“All that you wish for you already are,” the girl replied, “you just haven’t realized it yet.”

* * *

And somewhere in that story was what I really wanted to say about reconciling our potential for change with the truth of who we are.

Somewhere.

I hope.

As some of you know, one of my other hobbies is writing fiction, mostly fantasy and sci-fi. Sometimes I write short treatments hoping to birth a larger work and they just end up filed away somewhere on my hard drive gathering dust. So now in an effort to force myself to take my own work more seriously, I’ll subject you guys to the other, odder, side of my creative bent. (note: This is MY work. Anyone steals it, expect my wrath. Borrowing with my permission can be negotiated. )

Mermaids.

Novella idea: Reverse of the common theme- a man falls madly in love with a mermaid and trades his legs in for fins.

Odd thought: How would mermaids reproduce? Would it be like seahorses? Or would they lay eggs like fish? Or would they be more like underwater mammals? In other words- just how human ARE they?

* * *

The first time he saw her was in the late evening. He was walking along the lava beds taking photographs when a flash in the sun caught his eye. There she was, head and shoulders out of the water, one pale hand brushing black-as-tar hair away from reddened cheeks. When she saw him she looked startled and immediately dropped out of sight.

This is a game, he thought, she’ll resurface in a little while, laughing, closer to me.

But she didn’t. He counted silently in his head, wondering how long she could hold her breath, and panic started to set in. Perhaps she’d been caught in the undertow. But how could he possibly swim out to her in time? More time was wasted counting his options.

Then she reappeared, farther out. Strangely large eyes peered at him, unblinking. Pink mouth pursed, pensive. Pale hand lifted out of the water and slowly every finger unclasped and clasped in turn. A slow wave.

Isaiah lifted his own hand and returned the gesture. He could see the confusion and fear in her eyes and it troubled him. “Hello?” He called out.

She winced, visibly, but returned his call with a timid “Aloha.” Her voice was far more musical than any other he had heard, deeper in tone and resonance. She blushed furiously and then was gone. This time she did not resurface, and oddly enough this time he did not panic. He saw a ship a little farther out, and some part of him assumed that was where she was going.

Another, deeper, part of him had registered the feathery gills on the side of her neck as she’d pulled back her hair, and the fact that her unblinking eyes had in fact blinked, with a third eyelid like a cat’s. This part of him accepted the fact that she simply disappeared with no haven in sight simply because it was used to accepting all of the irrational things that the rest of him didn’t want to deal with. This inner part of him was harmoniously tuned in to the inexplicable world living just beneath the skin of the one the Western world so empirically stated as the whole of existence. This inner Isaiah was about to permanently become the outer one, but he didn’t know it yet.

*And so ends the odd love story of Isaiah and Anala, as far as I’ve written. Part of me really likes it. A bigger part of me doesn’t want to engage in the necessary research to make Anala’s world more believable than Disney’s Ariel. Time will tell which part of me wins.

There are times I feel like I’ve written all I can on the subject of Christianity and Homosexuality. And then there are times, like today, when I feel like I haven’t. I’m not sure how my mind wandered to this particular topic, but I was laying awake with my son and all the sudden I thought, “I really don’t get this whole thing.” I understand why gays want to get married- I don’t understand why Christians don’t want to allow it. Well, I do understand the reasoning (don’t cheapen something sacred) I just don’t understand how that equates to gay marriage being wrong.

Allow me to explain myself. Right now, anyone can get married as long as they are heterosexual, not cousins, and not married to someone else. That means that it’s not just Christians who understand the “sacredness” of what they are engaging in who are getting married. Not all people get married in God’s house, either. I myself was married in a courthouse, by a judge, about ten minutes after receiving the marriage certificate. The service, the attire and the atmosphere were all far less than sacred and holy, right down to the stuffed crab in my back pocket and the fact I had a horrible case of the giggles and could barely say my vows. What makes my marriage holy is not the laws or the way in which it was made- it is the two people in it, their heart and their attitude. My marriage is not made less holy by the high divorce rate or the people who enter into it for the wrong reasons. The only marriage that effects the holiness of my marriage is MY marriage.

Gay marriage is not about whether or not heterosexual marriage is holy- it is about protection. It is about the protections afforded by a piece of paper that says “these two people are legally united.” It is about the way in which a couple is percieved who can provide that paper when legality is necessary. It is about little rules like hospital visiting hours in which two people with their names on that paper are afforded different rights than those who do not have it. It is about tax breaks, ownership, joint checking accounts, discounts and retirement communities. It’s about equality. It’s about the fact that any time two people decide to share a life, they are terrified. They don’t know what the future holds. They never can fully understand what signing their names beside each other really means. It’s about that sense trust and devotion that comes with the decision to share all things, including toothbrush holders and a carton of milk. It’s about the fact that I am not more privileged, more protected, in making this journey than anyone else should be.

If I have a piece of paper that says that I can sleep at my husbands side every night, even if he’s in the hospital and breathing his last, everyone else who wants that piece of paper should be able to get it. That doesn’t mean that pastors and priests will now be FORCED to wed gays, any more than they now are forced to wed every snot-nosed heterosexual kid who says he’s ready. Every individual always has and hopefully always will have the right to use their own judgment and say no. But just as I had the right to have my own marriage papers undersigned by my county judge, gay people should at the very least be afforded the right to that paper. That’s all I have to say for now.

In Politics: If “Change” is the theme of the primaries, why does it all sound like politics as usual?

In Religion:  Prayer can be like sex in a marriage.  First you can’t possibly get enough and you do it four times a day and never really think about the quality.  Then you start to want to have it better, even if it’s less.  Then, one day, you notice it’s been months and you wonder, “how is this possible?” and the next time you try it, you feel like you’ve forgotten what it’s all about.  Pray-a-Thons on TV are like Christian pornography, which explains why so many non-Christians find it offensive.  They are seeing something that was meant to be done behind closed doors.

In Family:  I’ve noticed that almost all five year olds seem to go through a stage where they have short term memory loss every time they do something wrong, which is why my children will be going straight from age four to age six.

In Health:  I find it amusing that there are so many sex articles coming out post Valentine’s Day.  Or is it pre-Spring?  In any case, this time of year seems to make sex leak in to everything.  Unlike bacon, sex does NOT make everything better.  It must be used appropriately and in reasonable amounts, or like bacon you will regret having so much later.  There’s the thought for the day:  Sex is like bacon, sex is not like bacon.  Also:  Sex and bacon should only be combined in carefully controlled environments.

In Literature:  Stephen King’s Duma Key is definitely worth reading, but make sure you’ve got 30 hours of free time and enough food in the house.  You won’t want to have to do ANYTHING but finish the book once you’re four chapters in.  (Trust me on this- I stayed up until one reading it, despite the fact that I’d only gotten four hours of sleep the night before and my son was teething and I KNEW I’d be exhausted.  Every time I turned off the lights I thought about the moon over the water and I freaked out and turned the lights back on so I could finish reading it and know that everything ended well, and then when the book ended I felt sick to my stomach and wanted to cry, but I LOVED it.  Stephen King is an evil genius.)

In Movies:  I’m really looking forward to the Spiderwick Chronicles, even though I’m already bracing myself for a letdown.  It seems like I’m always bracing myself for a letdown these days.  PRODUCERS:  MAKE BETTER  MOVIES.  For the love of me, PLEASE!  I have two small kids- if I bother to put on something not covered in ambiguously colored stains to go to the theater, I don’t want to be thinking, “and I could be napping in my car right now” the entire time.  (ambiguous stain = is it poo or chocolate or blood?  Do you WANT to know?)

In food:  Pepsi and mint Milanos are SO close to being the perfect breakfast. All I want is a sausage link and a bowl of cherries.  Mmm…  Then I would have the four food groups:  caffeine, chocolate, pork and fruit!

Writer’s block is a bad word for what I have today, as if there is something simply obstructing the path that needs to be moved.  No.  This is not writer’s block.  This is writer’s pain, writer’s agony, writer’s knife in the gut, writer’s riptide, writer’s living grave.

The cursor blinks.  It looks like an erratic blink.  Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, never predictable.  I do believe it is teasing me.

The words don’t seem to want to come.  It’s not that I am not passionate.  Quite the contrary.  I am enraged, embittered, so full of piss and vinegar that I ought to be sleeping in a pickling barrel at night.  The passions have drained me and thinned my skin, clarifying me, leaving me wet and slippery with salty partiality.  I’m too impassioned to think clearly, I think.  I want to speak about politics and conspiracies and language and belief and religion, I want to speak of all of these things so badly that I cannot settle on one theme.  I write out one sentence, two, three, and erase them in irrational hatred of my own thought.  Nothing is good enough.  Nothing dances silkily on the page.  Everything lies there in a zombie sulk, griping and moaning it’s way across the screen, trying to communicate but saying only “urgh, argh, b~r~a~i~n~s…”

I want desperately to be able to say what I desire.  I hate myself for sitting on the computer for three hours straight and have nothing to show for it but a better knowledge of Don Siegelman’s plight, and yet no words to properly express my horror and confusion at the state of our Union.  Why, oh why, can I not seem to whip my mind to serve me? Why do I have to go day after day feeling like I could but yet I am not?

I want to make the words sing.  I want to enrapture and inspire.  I want to do what I love to do and be loved for doing it.

I want to.  I may.  Some people say I am.

I feel like I’m failing.

And they call this “writer’s block.”

Assholes.