Written in 10 minutes: “cutting a piece of the past”

The goal of our 10-minute Saturday Salon prompts is not to create a finished piece (in 10 minutes! how silly is that?) but to generate powerful, vivid raw material. Everyone present spends two minutes generating a list of random words, and we then share one word each to create a community list, which we all use for extra inspiration.

Katerina Tana wrote this piece months ago, and captured the contradictions of individual experience at a frightening, dislocating moment in time. Our prompt that day was an image by Galina Zhiganova, of a woman cutting her kimono so as not to disturb a sleeping cat.

The last century just reared its ugly head, and driving past the crowd bearing blue and yellow banners, blonde tall people carrying flags and signs of support while tourists looked on in wonder as they stood at the crosswalk with cotton candy and balloons in hand from their pier adventure, from the madness of the past two years, only to surface like hibernating bears into a world warped into a past psychosis of flagrant violation and violence boldly stomping on the nascent world at its edge.

I honk and put my fist through the sunroof, the soft sizzle of silk sliced with the ocean breeze, the transience of peace and liberty, and springtime can be that very ugly ring time when the thaw of brute power unleashes the warnings written on the wall, for months or really years. This floating dream against the Pacific Ocean, dancing with sunlight upon it, rejecting tradition and gentle divisions, and asking ourselves what is the rule of the universe?

What is this madness, but to show where a piece of me understands the power and danger of cutting a piece of the past.

On a different Saturday, Katerina wrote this perfect haiku:

Insects in amber
End of life as we know it
Eden on fire

This image, by Paul Pascarella, was the prompt:

See more of Paul’s work at paulpascarella.com.