Here are a few of my favorite scribblings for your edification and enjoyment. I would love to hear your responses and comments to these!
Leslie

The Muse Has Departed

Arroyos

Jacques Bunol & Walter Ciszek

White Noise

Remember Me

Sore Spot

Above Santo Domingo

By the River

(haiku)

In the Telephone Line

Iridescent Ice

Sunday Afternoon Musing

Marina

Desert Monsoon

Scruffy polkadot
desert where Juniper casts
five o’clock shadow.

c1998/2005 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

A couple months after I began my first job out of college, I was sitting at my desk one afternoon, working on a computer program, when suddenly everything was quiet. I stopped working to listen. Hadn't it been quiet a minute ago? Now the quiet was even more quiet. A minute later I heard the blowers of the heating and cooler system kick back in, drowning the quiet in a continuous shhhhhhh of air. A coworker explained that this was "white noise" used to muffle the sound of conversation in the other cubicles so that everyone could concentrate on their work. I returned my attention to the computer program and forgot about the "white noise."

The other weekend I had a similar experience. A friend and I had gone camping up near the border of Colorado. I awoke early and went for a stroll by the lake. Suddenly I noticed the absolute silence. Wow! Not a breeze, not a bird, not a bug, was stirring. It was intense. I paused, curious: It's quiet at night by my house in the city, I mused, yet I've never noticed the silence. Then it occurred to me that the silence in the city is not absolute. What I call quiet is actually the continuous shhhhhh of the city. It's not traffic or people or machinery, but a kind of indefinable blend indistinguishable as any particular noise. One has to stop and focus the attention in order to hear this white noise; otherwise, it becomes so familiar that it cannot be heard.

There are other things in my life that have become white noise. I think, for instance, of the job I recently left. The group dynamics of the department where I worked were less than congenial. People didn't interact very much and didn't seem to like each other very much. There was no group identity. In addition, the manager was inexperienced and had poor communication skills, leaving most of us feeling vaguely uncomfortable all the time. One had the sense of having to be very careful what one said or having to pay the consequences. The result was a conspiracy of silence: it was hard to get people to talk about what was going on with them. A veil of fear hung over the place: watch your step or else! I didn't realize how this white noise dampened my spirit until I one day spoke my mind despite some misgivings. I suddenly felt free! As if the weight of imposed restraint had been lifted. From that day on, I began to consider moving on. Who wants that kind of white noise filling the spaces in one's soul? I didn't.

It's hard to hear the white noise in my soul or to realize the effect it has on me. I carry around the sounds of my fears and of unresolved issues. It takes effort to stop and focus long enough to perceive the noise which has become so familiar. It's even harder to find the way to turn it off. It means becoming aware, cultivating that awareness, and finding ways to confront my fears. I think the effort is worthwhile, though. I love the sound of silence and it is in those silent moments that I begin to hear the voice of God.

c2000 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

The Muse has departed and I am dry.
Dry as a leaf in winter
    still hanging onto the tree,
clinging . . . beyond hope, beyond waiting . . . clinging,
    like one who has forgotten how to let go;
clinging, a dead man’s hand holding a pen.
The Muse has departed.

Oh, the dreams of my youth!
in the years when hormones surged
propelling my thoughts as they spilled upon the paper,
verbal pictures inarticulately drawn.

I awaited a fuller, future day
    when the distillations of forty years
would render from chaos a fruitful creativity.

But the Muse has departed
no more to encourage this heart with jubilation or sweet sorrow.

The Muse is elusive;
she cannot be grasped.
she comes on a sunbeam
    a hummingbird at a feeder whose feet never touch the ground.
she goes on the wind to wherever hummingbird food is found.

I shall put out sweet nectar and wait for her.

c2005 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

Since coming to Albuquerque, I have found new meaning in Psalm 126:4: Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb. One of the first things people told me about when I came to Albuquerque was the arroyos. "Arroyo" is Spanish for stream; in New Mexico it refers specifically to a seasonal stream, one that is dry except after a rainstorm.

The Holy Land is also an arid climate, and arroyos, called "watercourses" in this Psalm, also lie dry for a good part of the year. But when it rains, the water comes rushing out of nowhere, providing needed moisture for plant, animal, and human alike.

My first week in Albuquerque I stayed with a family on the eastern edge of town, right under the Sandia mountains. In the mornings I would climb up above the subdivision to the open land at the base of the mountains, where a series of paths had been established by hikers and their dogs. My walks took me across several ditches paved with concrete, which I learned were the arroyos. "Never walk down the middle of an arroyo," my friends warned. "You never know when they will fill up with water. It may be dry and sunny down here, but if it is raining higher up, the water will come rushing down. Every year several people get caught in an arroyo and killed. Even cars have been swept away by the force of the water."

Later on, when I moved further into the city I discovered the continuing network of arroyos, which are strategically engineered to steer the great mass of water around and behind neighborhoods. As one goes lower toward the Rio Grande river valley-a real river carrying water year-round-the size of the arroyos increases to where in places they are 30 feet deep and 30 feet across the top.

Here the rain is seldom a gentle shower or a dull, steady mist; rain comes in sudden thunder showers, crashing down from magnificent clouds and accompanied by spectacular double and triple rainbows. The earth is so dry that the speeding water has no time to sink in, but runs immediately toward the river.

I have never visited the arroyos when they are full of water; usually this happens in the middle of a downpour and I am scrambling for cover; but I can imagine the force of the water because even the city streets become little arroyos, conveying several inches of water rushing singlemindedly down, down, down toward the river.

I picture the goodness of God coming to me, unexpectedly and without warning; God's living water is coming into my barren life in sudden abundance, such that I, who have sown "in tears" may "reap with shouts of joy."

c2000 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

High in the Andes mountains
by a river called Yanuncay,
Eucalyptus-tree women dance in the wind.
They pick up their skirts and run, laughing,
for they have no cares.

Far below, Indian women slap the rocks,
spread laundry over bushes and grass.
They do not sing; the river sings to them,
reaching back into the memories of rock, hill, river,
to tribal peoples never conquered,
who lived and worked and played
in a land wholly their own.

The tree-women know not of this.
They only sing and play,
drinking with their toes the infectious song of the indomitable river.

As they whirl, rejoicing in sun and water,
Indian boys play naked on the rocks
as yet able to drink with their toes
the joy of youth, sun, water,
to know without naming it
the beauty of the eternal, flowing spring,
the song of Cuenca, song of the Andes.

Sun reclines,
shadows lengthen.
Dry scraps of clothing are bundled up.
The women leave,
Their sons go with them.
The river, likewise, flows on . . .

Yanuncay, the ever flowing, the ever present,
Eternal and eternally new,
I call you Keeper of Secrets, Queen of the Valley.
You have sung your song for ten thousand years
And shall for thousands more,
High, high, high in the Andes mountains.

c1998 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

It's a sore
spot. It's become a sore spot, a point
of contention.
for them. from them to me.

"Here, have our sore spot. Make it better, can you?"
"Kiss it and all will be well."
"We'll rub you with it and soon you'll be sore, too."

Maybe it will rub right off of us.
and onto you.

You can
be
the sore spot,
and we'll all resent you.

c1998/2005 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

The bus careens along mountain roads
Taking us up, above the steaming valley.
Hills, their kinky green hair curling in all directions,
Exhale humidly.
We climb to the heavens
To where the mountains snuggle beneath their cloudy blanket;
And passing through, we leave behind the fertile foothills
As if they were a dream.

c1998/2000 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

Nazi-occupied France
and a man who won't be quiet
who won't stop what he is doing
just because they say so.

Did you have any idea when you joined up
what you were in for?
No one ever does.
How did you manage to do it?

Why me? you might have asked.
You probably did, human
being like the rest of us.

yet you chose the priesthood
you signed up to be a servant
to go wherever the Master sends you.

Why me? I ask.
I am no priest, I think.
Voices inside protest
while all around is silence.

Didn't you also sign up? Didn't you say you wanted to be like
Him?
Does it have to be so hard?
Yes. Yes,
it does. It has to be so hard,
it is so hard
to get free of yourself.

Give until it hurts.
Give until it's gone. all gone. nothing left.
Give away the last bit
roll up like a dry blade of grass
and let the wind take you far away . . .
Stretch out your hands.
someone will gladly take you
where you do not want to go.

It's not because of me; it's because
of them.
It's not about me; it's about
Him.
Have I received enough love to be able
to give it away? Is what I am giving
away
love?

Love is most present where it most hurts.
God is in the depths, waiting
for me to discover him there
even there.
Especially there
and when I have been loved enough
and know it
when God's love is brimful in me
then He will begin to spill over
then He will begin to be
seen.

c2000 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

Father Zossima died, and I cried, standing in the everlasting line to make a phone call. Father Zossima died and my crying caught the attention of the Russian man in front of me.

"Why are you crying?" he asked. Then, seeing my book, "What are you reading?" He turned to look at the cover. Even in English, the word 'Karamazov' was discernible to him. "Ah!" he said, "The Brothers Karamazov."

"Zossima," I stammered, trying to remember the word for 'death.' "Father Zossima will died," I said.

"Ah!" he said again, no doubt satisfied at the power of Dostoevsky to reach the human heart.

How could I begin to explain? My sadness at Zossima’s death had as much to do with the peculiar mixture of excitement, anxiety, and loneliness that I felt while travelling alone, alone in a country where I barely spoke the language. How could I explain it to him, when I did not yet understand it myself? When Father Zossima died, the feelings whelled up in vicarious sorrow for him, for humanity's loss of such a great man, for my own pain. The stranger's unexpected kindness did nothing to assuage the quiet flow of tears because it, too, touched me.

Father Zossima died, and a kind, Russian man took notice of my crying.

c2001 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

Remember me
on fine June evenings
when the sun turns everything golden,
    trumpet lilies bloom in roadside profusion,
    and young corn reaches for the clouds.
Remember me,
for I will long to be there, too,
    walking the Ohio fields
    inhaling the freshness all around
    and talking with you.
Remember us
here
the faraway Southwest desert
    land of Spanish pilgrims
    and 50s neon road signs.
Here, the evening sun shines pink on the mountains
    And six o’clock brings relief from the heat.
Here, the city grows daily
    new arrivals pour in
    and the old-timers believe tomorrow
        is soon enough.
Here, I live
far from my childhood home, and yours
far from a place I shall not return to
    to which you have gone once again.
Remember me
as you walk those limitless fields
    we both love
as you greet the congregation in our native tongue
as you sit out the evenings in your grandfather’s house.
Remember.

c2005 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

It’s not so hot in Albuquerque
once the rains begin. The summer rains, those 15-minute monsoons, that crash against our city
in the afternoons between 5 and 6.
At 7 once again the sun is shining. Rain?
What is that?

c2004 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

October leaves half sunk in sand
golden like a careless band of sunbathers
mark the limit of water’s low-tide reach.
Warm wind that hints at frost
tosses up a sand storm
strews across the idle wavelets
tiny turbid trinkles of summer past.

Liquid lake shines frosty blue
reflecting on the pale-hued autumn sky—
even the wet sand flashes cold color—
caught from a sinking sun
golden, bright
against the coming frigid night.
Iridescent ice you shiver in the evening breeze
along with me.

c1990 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

I see you again, today, at the stoplight;
Or someone very like you
in everything but your face.
I see a scarf on your head, though you are not old;
and a cigarette, half consumed, dangles
between your fingers.
From the car
I examine you head to toe.
You give no sign of recognition or any awareness of my stare.
Can it really be a Russian? Could it be you?
Nothing gives you away:
the sneakers, the jeans, the shirt, even the satchel were all
“made in America.”
It is only the face, so like your face
(not yours?)
so empty, hopeless, directionless . . .
My light turns green; I must go.
What happened? Had they thrown you out?
Or are you really but one of many who wander?

c1995 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!

Some day
(maybe on a Monday)
I'd like to fall into a prior century.
It should be so long ago
that none of the known languages would yet have been born
(and the days of the week would as yet have no name).
I would walk through the primeval forest contemplating
nameless plants,
tall growing things,
and indescribable light.
When the inhabitants of that far-off era saw me
they would not express their surprise
as the words for it would not yet exist.
(That would be the finest un-Monday, off-record
in the history of the planet
not like the one I must face tomorrow.

c2004 Leslie R. Kryder.
Please do not copy, forward, or distribute without my written permission. Thank-you!