Is That Where It Started?

(Note** This is a poem about a lie spread sixty years ago, that Beatle Paul was dead. This is not, in fact, what happened. Paul McCartney is very much alive today, as of this writing in 2025.)

Paul is dead.
A most beloved Beatle.

I was in junior high school, bussed across town like so many of us then. Against our will. It was a confusing enough time for anybody—never mind a former Mormon girl who knew the church was no longer right for her, but had no idea what might replace it. My parents’ violent drama was coming to a head—if not an end just yet. Of course I had no idea what would take its place. Church, family, blast, boom, bam. Gone.

All my dreams had culminated in this void.

Then The White Album. Second-to-last track: Revolution 9.
Play it backward.
You would hear an otherworldly voice moaning, Turn me on, dead man.

In 1969, this was enough to convince Beatles fans: Paul was dead.

I failed Critical Thinking 101 then. You could hardly blame me, given my upbringing. I was just lost. Instead of considering possibilities—as I might have ten years later—I could only feel despair. The particular existential despair of teenagers.

I remembered The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, singing No Reply.

I tried to telephone, they said you were not home,
that’s a lie, ’cause I know where you’ve been,
I saw you walk in your door.

I nearly died! I nearly died!

Insert at this point, my dad singing, I wish you had! I wish you had!

How he hated his teenage daughter’s adoration of those mop tops. He had been supplanted—though I could not have known it then. A life saver for me, I now realize.

Paul? Dead?

John Hiatt’s lyric lines creep in years later, all jumbled up.

Gone, like the shape I’m in,
gone, like a fifth of gin,
gone, like a Nixon file,
gone, gone away.

Years later, after it was determined to be a hoax, I—and many Beatles lovers like me—still wondered.

And then, sixty years later, I see the similarities.

Feed them lies.
Repeat them often.
Seed them—again and again.

And the masses are left to wonder:
what is real?
What, fiction?

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Deferring to the Now

Daily writing prompt

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

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Mindfulness is brilliant in its essence—
always here, always now.
But I would be lying
if I said I lived there
all the time.

My mind keeps me alert, attentive
to details I would otherwise miss
in the complexity of daily life.
Yet it can mislead,
moving too quickly
when important choices are required.

So when decisions arise,
I return to mindfulness
to discover clarity and space.
Still, the mind wanders—
drifting forward and back,
like fingers on a guitar’s neck:
often melodic,
sometimes dissonant.

That dissonance most often appears
when I look backward.
Memory is an unreliable witness.
My siblings’ recollections of childhood
differ from my own,
just as my children’s memories of me
will differ from mine.

To remember how we felt at five
is like stuffing a king-sized quilt
into a mailbox.
We have grown too much
to make it fit.
And so I step away
from the past
with relative ease.

The future is the opposite.
Anything is possible.
With optimism, imagination
creates worlds.
When I travel forward,
it is to envision peace—
equality among all beings,
a world like the Hawai‘i I call home,
where Aloha is practiced
and the common good
is shared.

Between past and future,
one feels expansive;
the other, fragmented,
often unsettling.
Measuring inner progress
from then to now
keeps me from slipping backward
into confusion and fog.

In the end,
I return to the Now—
the only place
where choice is possible,
and growth occurs.

Stormy horizon ~ bj 2026

Loosening The Knot

Daily writing prompt

What makes you feel nostalgic?

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I am not one who looks back, longing
for what was, or what might have been—
that way of seeing sets me up
for self-criticism,
which dims my spirit
rather than lifting it.

Nor am I inclined
to prop myself up with false images,
finding them equally damaging
to the essence of who I am,
and what I have to express
in this short span of a life.

Still, it feels natural
from time to time
to cast back in memory,
to long for a simpler era—
which, for me, would be
the mid-twentieth century.

Then I shake myself awake.
How could the 1950s or ’60s
have been simple?

I won’t insult your intelligence
by rehearsing the broader strokes
of that time.
It’s enough to say this:

In retrospect, it’s easy
to long for what we label innocence—
a time before life felt weighted
with adult responsibility,
before decades of accumulated knowing,
before facts and figures
revealed the depth of our impact
on the Earth,
on one another,
on other species.

And I find myself wondering:
was there ever a moment
when ignorance
was truly bliss?

Hibiscus – bj 2018

Portal

11:11 again.
I almost missed it—rapid scrolling,
morning ritual, catching up or taking a pulse
of the Collective on this blustery Tuesday morn,
filling yet another hour with what passes
for connection. But the numbers draw me,
hold me, as I scroll internally now
through memory.

Our first 11:11 celebration on Moloka‘i
nearly thirty years ago—people arriving
at our door in that tiny town, from places
we could hardly believe, even Kaua‘i,
as Hurricane Iniki had swept away so much
of their lives there. I must have placed
a small notice on a bulletin board
somewhere, and they followed that thread.
But they came; we came together, cooked,
laughed, hacked coconuts in the backyard—
people in tents, people we would never have met
otherwise—and have lost touch with all
but a few. That was the last celebration,
but not the last time we marked
that date and hour, that threshhold.

For a breath, the noise drops away—
and I remember: this portal has always been
in the now, this time of year especially,
when veils are thinnest,
stone doorways aligned to solstice,
eyes widening at the sound of beating wings,
the hush before entering the unknown.

Time folds, the veil quivers;
the invitation the same as it ever was:
look up, step through,
Be here.
Now is all there is.

Fire dance portal ~ bj 2018

Nuclear

Daily writing prompt

What major historical events do you remember?

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We were children of the fifties,
taught to duck and cover—
curl small beneath the desks
as if our little spines and folded hands
behind heads could shield us
from the power of the sun.

I remember the drills, the fear
tucked neatly between math
and spelling, the siren’s shriek,
a teacher’s calm command:
hands behind your neck,
curl into a ball.

Later came the blisters—
angry welts rising big and long
on my skin; wet rags soaked
in Burroughs solution,
Cortisone in the arm.
My mother whispering it will pass.

Years later, I learned the military
was testing nuclear missiles
over the mountain behind our house.
That was the click,
the sound of truth locking in.

All that ducking, all that covering—
none of it could save us
from what we’d already inhaled.

Even now, I can’t stand showers,
the way water beads up on my skin—
it looks too much like fallout,
refusing to soak in.

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