Insidious Karma

OK, was it yesterday's weensy bit of snark that caused this morning's electronic glitch, or what? I don't really think things work that way, but I do think karma can be insidious, an ambush from within, in a perfectly reasonable way beyond superstition. I also think we can interpret our dreams the way we might interpret poems, looking for what's there and asking why, and how the evidence links up toward meaning, or paradox. Our dreams are in our own heads! We can figure them out by looking closely.

What's all this adding up to? Well, this morning I posted the new poetry feature at Escape Into Life--Matthew Murrey--and emailed the poet to check it out and let me know if there were any problems. When I got back from a business meeting, he'd answered that only 3 lines of the first poem appeared in the post. How awful, and how embarrassing (for me...I hope he was OK!)

Anyhoo, I don't know what happened, nor why comments are turned off on that post, but I did figure out how to restore the missing text, images, bio, and link by returning to a previously saved version and re-saving and publishing that. Whew!

Was it a wack attack on our site? Was it some glitch caused by the "limited connectivity" message I keep getting today on my home computer? Is the Internet overloaded by online holiday shopping? OR did my grinchy spirit in yesterday's post and my self-righteous-sounding complaints against snark in the Sound of Music posts leading up to that collide to screw up my online karma? I'll never know, unless I can figure out how to fold up my origami brain into a cootie catcher in order to re-ask those questions.

Speaking of "insidious karma," that is a phrase in my poem "Learning Simple Things #5" up this month in the wonderful Redheaded Stepchild, "a home for rejected poems." The poem is based on a wonderful whimsical but ultimately scary pastel drawing of a fanciful forest by John Cassidy. His whole show was about learning simple things, and I keep learning them over and over. I don't have his images, but I can show you these wonderful Samuel Jan images from Escape Into Life.

And speaking of interpreting dreams, I had a sad one this morning about losing my shiny bicycle, which was, at first, in parts, then reassembled and whole, then stolen. I wept in the dream, already interpreting, and woke still doing both. Then the Internet ate my post, and now I am peeking out at a rhino from under an umbrella. It's snowing a little, it's the hump of the week, and, oh, look, the sky has turned blue!