Memoir Moments revealed
Memoir moments revealed
A Japanese promenade garden is designed with hidden elements you can only experience as you walk through the landscape. Your perception changes as you turn a corner, ascend a hill, move from gravel to sand.
Life is like a promenade garden. It changes every moment. What we see, feel and hear alters in unexpected in-between places. Immersing yourself in those quiet spaces merges your creative impulse with your experience. Your position and, thus, your reality shift as you move through moments. If you intently watch and listen and breathe, a single moment can fuse with your whole-life experience and produce, dare I say, magic.
Each “Memoir Moment" captures one of those times, culled from memories or the present moment. Each essay or poem comes from a time when, without warning, something I observed — a time and place in everyday life —collides with a lightning bolt of deep meaning or questions.
The Isuien Garden is a traditional walking garden in Nara, Japan.
The garden cannot be taken in all at once; its reality is tied to a single viewer’s specific position, but, as the viewer walks, this reality shifts, is proven to be necessarily fluid, changeable by space, time, motion.
— Chloe Cooper Jones, “Easy Beauty”
Walk with me through my memoir moments. Expect the unexpected. You may find yourself nodding your head when you recognize a similar experience, or you may take a cerebral hopscotch to your own version of a memoir moment. Allow yourself to not know what is ahead. You may peek into the crevasses as they emerge. Maybe you will find a bit of the pleasure and glee you felt as a child — plopped only in the now, unworried by place and time.
Perhaps you will be moved to create in life’s in-between spaces. Have you had a memoir moment today?