Taking Time for Silence

"Moon shadow" by James Jordan

“In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.”
          ― Robert Lynd


It's time to be silent for a while.
 
Reacquaint myself with stillness and the wonder of the moon.

"Moon child" by Michal Koralewski

CHILD MOON
     by Carl Sandburg, 1916

The child's wonder
At the old moon
Comes back nightly.
She points her finger
To the far silent yellow thing
Shining through the branches
Filtering on the leaves a golden sand,
Crying with her little tongue, “See the moon!”
And in her bed fading to sleep
With babblings of the moon on her little mouth.

Reacquaint myself with my own pen and paper babblings.

Back in February, I introduced my One Little Word for 2016:

Enkrateia = to be "in power over oneself."

Without getting into that discussion all over again (you can read it here), my goal was to find where I can cut back on some things in order to make room for others. I've taken enkrateia to heart (even if I still can't spell it *by* heart), and to that end, here are three ways Today's Little Ditty will be changing over the coming months:

1. Spotlight interviews and the Ditty of the Month Club will be published eight months out of the year: February through May and August through November.
The "off" months will be spent focusing on other projects. I still hope to blog occasionally, even if it's just my illustrated quotation series (Two Line Tuesday), but it probably won't be with any kind of regularity. I hope that doesn't cause the Ditty of the Month Club to lose momentum, but some things are worth the risk.

I'm reminded of these words from Adam Clay's "Meditation for the Silence of Morning": 

I wake myself imagining the shape
of the day and where I will find

myself within it.

. . .

We destroy the paths of rivers to make room for the sea.

We have some wonderful Spotlight interviews scheduled for the rest of 2016, so trust me, there's much to look forward to!

2. I'm delighted to be adding a new regular contributor to the TLD line-up.
Diane Mayr has agreed to bring her expertise as a librarian to explore various resources, tools, and opportunities to expand our horizons as writers, readers, and poetry-appreciators. Thank you, Diane– I'm looking forward to your posts!

3. Would you like to share a blog post with the TLD community?
I'm opening Today's Little Ditty's doors to guest bloggers. Not to be confused with TLD's regular contributors, these one-off posts might fall into an existing TLD series—Book Love (reviews) Haiku Garden (focusing on haiku), Limerick Alley (focusing on limericks), or Poetry in Action (focusing on poetry combined with other mediums, music, video, art, etc.)—you decide who or what you would like to feature and write the post, I will publish it. Or maybe you have something related to children's poetry, picture books, or verse novels that you would like to share outside of these series. While I don't have a whole lot of slots available for this kind of thing, I do have a few. Contact me– I'd love to hear your ideas.

There may be other changes to the blog as well, though I haven't spent enough time exploring feasibility to know if they're actually going to work! I do promise plenty of good stuff come August and hope you'll be here to join me for that.


And speaking of good stuff...
How about that persona poem celebration last week?! There were a couple of late arrivals, so you might want to go take another look.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed a persona poem in response to Laura Shovan's challenge. In an email exchange with Laura, she said, "There were some great characters and voices created in response. Who knows – maybe one among them will go on to star in a book someday." I couldn't agree more!

Random.org has determined that the winner of a personalized copy of Laura Shovan's THE LAST FIFTH GRADE OF EMERSON ELEMENTARY (Wendy Lamb Books/Random House) goes to . . .

DIANE MAYR – congratulations, Diane!

"Cape Cod fantasy" by Elliot Margolies

Wishing all of you a wonderful summer!

See you August 5th for our next Spotlight interview and DMC challenge. 

Jone MacCulloch is hosting this week's Poetry Friday roundup at Check It Out.