Renaissance Woman

Now more than ever, I know so many people who perform a whole host of activities and pull them all off exceptionally well. These are not Jacks of all trades, masters of none. These are people who are tapped into the very essence of creativity, people who shimmer and glow with a seemingly unstoppable surge of inspiration and ideas. They are the ones who follow through on those ideas, acting as beacons, exemplifying what is possible for us all under the right conditions and with a lot of passion and hard work.

I do believe that we all have this potential, and I believe that one of the ways we can learn to activate it is by talking with and listening to those who are already successfully tapped in.

This upcoming Sunday night, I have the honor of interviewing Lois P. Jones, award winning poet, radio show host, published photographer, international editor, reading series producer, documentarist, and expert on Argentina's wine industry. I'm sure I forgot something. Probably more than one something. Nevertheless, I will be mining Jones's unique and generous mind for understanding as to what makes her the creative force she is.

I'm attaching a poem by Jones and a photograph she took in San Miguel de Allende in January of 2009, as well as some videos of her reading her poems. If you have any questions you'd like me to consider asking her, please feel free to leave them in the comments below. You can listen to the show live at Tiferet Talk on blogtalk radio at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time this Sunday, July 24th. Afterwards, you can listen to the archive indefinitely at the blogtalk site or access a podcast of the interview at itunes. 

Milonga for a Blind Man


Time is both loss and memory.
—Jorge Luis Borges

In the middle of the night
a man takes a key
from his pocket.

In the middle of the night
he climbs to the top of the stairs.
From his balcony he remembers daylight,

the crumbled cement and the cracks
on the tavern below. The way the sky spoke
to him, the last one with anything to say.

And the opening of the flowers
when they would open for him.
Pink or coral, her lips staining
his with a memory – a breath

and a daydream of pampas and hibiscus.
His shirt buttoned down to the waist
and the white skin of a butterfly.

In the middle of the night
he remembers a snow heart
and the red walls of morning

where he walked the streets
in search of distance. Someone
has counted his days

before he was born. And this blindness
that followed plucked out his eyes
to sleep. It always comes to this –

edges fading from the familiar,
a city vague and celestial. He has lost
count of all his endings.

Published in Rose & Thorn, Winter 2008