Being my friend has many perks, like you get to hang out with a crazy person who will help you bury the body without asking awkward questions, but it has a definite downside, and that downside is that you will someday find yourself in a blog post, or an essay, or, if you’ve done something to annoy me, killed off in a novel.
Now that my friend Lynne Baur has convinced me that I need no actual talent in order to draw, my friends may also find themselves rendered in cartoon illustration.
For example, this is my friend Debz, who is, among other things, a yogini:
Debz is much more enlightened than I am (although frankly it is not that hard to be more enlightened than I am), and her first reaction to any setback is to see how she can learn from it, whereas my first reaction is to punch it in the nose, but as my daughter likes to say, we are all different and that’s okay.
A while back, Debz took me and some other people on a guided meditation in which our higher self or somesuch was to help us solve a problem (I don’t believe in any of this, I’m all “I have a fertile imagination” and Debz just smiles). Anyway, my higher self turned out to be a small green frog.
I was hoping for, you know, an amazing dragon or like that but no, I got a small green frog.
So I have been thinking about the frog, and how my brother and I used to watch these tiny tree frogs at my grandparent’s lake cottage when we were very small. The frogs eventually realized we wouldn’t hurt them, and they would hop right onto the palm of my hand. We never caught them or anything, just hung out with them, and that was our idea of an excellent way to spend a summer afternoon.
You couldn’t find the tiny tree frogs unless you sat quite still by their tree and waited. After a while they would peep out at you, like little magical creatures no one else could see. Mostly this was because other people didn’t bother looking, or couldn’t understand the attraction, or they made too much noise, or had other things to do.
I am thinking in some ways a small green frog is quite a bit better than a dragon, no matter how spectacular it may be.
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Dojo Wisdom for Writers, second edition, now available on Amazon in print and ebook! (Nook and other ebook versions here)
Catch a Falling Star (by Jessica Starre) and The Matchmaker Meets Her Match (by Jenny Jacobs), two of my favorite novels.
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See, see! I was right! 🙂