All images created by Rebekah Marshall’s prompts using AI on Gencraft.com website.
To lead with grace requires steel humility when praised and iron confidence when cursed, for either extreme wields the awful temptation to unsettle the serene pond of self. To yield to right and bow only to integrity fills her people with love overflowing, willing to sacrifice all in service to her rule.
Good Friday comes before Content Saturday, who always waits politely for the arrival of Lazy Sunday. Sad Monday would rather not but does until Weird Tuesday shows up with bells on. Nonchalant Wednesday saunters past. Hopeful Thursday sets the stage for Good Friday.
Light spreads beneath my vision Behind my tomorrow sifting Into cactus green tea cups Yellow tentacles undulate Magical tendencies flirt nonchalance Shadows too tired to pretend to flicker…
I’m having a creative moment. The level of bliss I am experiencing is every creator’s dream. It is that moment when everything feels possible, and all synapses are firing and one idea sparks another. There are so many tabs open in my brain that I need to pause and write about it for a minute just to process the joy.
Let me begin by describing the tabs open on my computer…just for funsies. I have one open that is a bank of usernames I need for different creative tools I’m using that I access through my writing company’s browser. Yes, my best friend and I started a technical writing company. We have meetings and everything. They are on our calendar. We feel very grown up. I’m working on an ebook for our company’s portfolio that is about Data Privacy. It is too wordy, and Erica (my business partner) basically told me I must go back to the drawing board and turn all my wordiness into bullet points and sound bites and images and stuff because people don’t actually like to read all that. Sigh…
In other news, I have a tab open to my current obsession, Suno, where I create music from my lyrics or AI’s lyrics, or some combination of our poetic collaboration. I just wrote a prompt to create a French swamp blues song called “Vie triste”, which translates to “Sad Life.” AI made up this chorus and I love it so much.
And with every kiss We say to ourselves (Ouch) But without kisses It’s worse (Ouch again)
Before that, I generated a sort-of-Salsa song called “Qué rico me lo bailas.” I laughed out loud at Google Translate’s suggestion for the English title as “How delicious you dance it for me.” No, I don’t think that is quite the right interpretation of the meaning. ChatGPT explained that it implied a playful and flirtatious tone, with a focus on admiring someone’s dance moves and rhythm. That sounds more like the idea I was going for. Anyway, I hope it doesn’t say anything awkward in Spanish. Someone will have to let me know if it does.
On another tab, I have an art AI program open called Artistly, where I’m trying to generate an image of a dancer to be the album cover for the Salsa song. It is a new program for me, so I am watching videos to learn how to change the color of his shirt, make him stop pointing at the sky, fix his strangely formed hand, erase the stick he’s now holding for some reason, then add a background. The technology is super impressive. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m figuring it out and having fun as I learn. And then I noticed that Suno already generated the perfect album cover. It is a picture of a bird shaking its tailfeathers. I see you AI. Very funny.
Suno AI generated based on my lyrics.
While my latest song is playing, which happens to be a Korean Bluegrass piece about an old married couple, I am working on art on my Gencraft website. One of my projects with my art is to train AI to be more diverse with body size, skin tone, hair texture, gender, disabilities, and age. I am currently trying to teach one model how to make a little black fairy have an afro instead of loose curls. It is basically arguing with me and struggling to understand.
I am going to wrap up this blog post I am currently working on, then I plan to work a bit on a memoir I am ghostwriting for someone. Next, I will turn my focus to my own novel I am writing. If there is any time left, I will attempt to learn more about template creation for selling digital products on Etsy using a new template website I am learning how to navigate called Templett. I have started a store and am trying to fill it with unique, creative digital art and templates for people to download. There is so much I want to do and not enough hours in the day! When can I read any of my hundreds of books waiting for my attention? When can I get back to any one of my novels I’ve started to write, but not finished? When can I work on my coding classes online to make myself more marketable in tech? And I do have a real job where I work 8 hours in front of a computer with AI every day.
The reality of all this is that most of it was not possible until right now. AI was not advanced enough to be at the stage where engineers needed my help to train them with language. My job was not possible a few years ago. I am not an artist and do not enjoy attempting to create art with my hands, but for the first time in the history of ever, my words can be transformed into beautiful images by AI through collaboration. I love music and can read music, but do not have the time or musical skills on multiple instruments to create the music I am imagining to accompany my lyrics. This new technology did not exist until now. This is a new opportunity for word-creatives like me to express ourselves in a whole new way. And I am here for it.
One of the things I noticed first about my future husband was his unaffected demeanor and his willingness to be openly fascinated by a new thought. There was no pretense, no attempt to impress, and certainly no vanity. I am still pleased by these qualities he embodies. He is who he is and that is that.
The people I want to surround myself with must share these characteristics or at least strive to work toward some semblance of authenticity. A friend of mine is writing a beautiful short story about a fictionalized Nefertiti whose companion silver fox’s tail bristles at the slightest hint of insincerity. When I read her rough draft, I was struck by the realization that something within me resonates with that fox—a bristling, like sand in my shoe, an unfamiliar noise in the dark, a mis-buttoned shirt, or one little dead gnat in my soup. Sure, I can fish the gnat out and consider eating the soup because I love the soup and don’t want to waste the soup, and the dead gnat is not that big of a deal. However, it is a hurdle my brain must get past to push through and move on and act as though nothing of consequence has happened. I know. I can’t unknow.
We are all flawed and have moments that we regret in our interactions with others or our representation of ourselves to the world, but my biggest regrets all stem from times in my life that I was not being authentic with myself. The lowest lows where I had bona fide breakdowns with lifechanging consequences were when I was lying to myself about who I was, what I believed, or what I was willing to tolerate. Living a fractured life, accepting unbearable circumstances for the sake of a belief system or other people’s judgment will result in disaster.
It is scary to say out loud that our personal ideologies no longer line up with our current realities. It is terrifying to admit to people who we love that we must set boundaries with them for our own sanity, but we owe it to ourselves to speak the truth in love and accept that there will be consequences for speaking that truth. And I have come to know in my half a century of living that, though some of the fallout is painful and chaotic, when the dust settles, I am better for it.
When living in authenticity, I can find a gentle, kind, sincere soul to partner with on a dating website full of toads. I can leave my career that I invested over 30 years of education and work into. I can leap into a new, scary field and become the writer I’ve always said I wanted to be. I can develop a spiritual life that nourishes me and others around me. And I can be ok in the midst of the turmoil that is spiraling around us all due to geopolitical craziness that sucks us easily into the madness. I don’t know the right answer to everything, anything sometimes, but I know that when my silver fox tail bristles at the inauthenticity of the moment, I will stop and listen and possibly change course.
2024 was a difficult year, made all the more difficult by losing my grandmother, who was one of the people I would commiserate with about all the challenges.
It started off with a bang at 3am on New Year’s Day with taking my husband to the emergency room for a kidney stone.
I spent more time this year in doctor offices, hospitals, or watching my grandchildren so my daughter could be by a hospital bedside than I care to even try to tabulate.
This will not be a list of my woes, nor a lesson in counting my blessings. I do not have the energy for either right now because I am recovering from some sort of upper respiratory infection that has caused me to end my year in a rather puny state.
This is simply an acknowledgement that 2024 was hard—painful—and I am eager to begin anew with fresh perspective and a sober heart to love, create, empathize, meditate, pray, read, sleep, live, learn, and grow.
Photos taken New Year’s Eve 2024 by Rebekah Marshall.
It is winter in Texas, though our photos make us look like we are on some tropical island where the weather is always a balmy 75 degrees and we can wear shorts and short sleeves year round.
The fire is to pretend it is wintertime, so we can participate in the festivities of making smores, roasting hot dogs, and sitting around a fire pit for New Year’s.
We are good at pretend. It is actually one of our preferred states around here because pretend is usually much more interesting and fun.
Charlotte had a dramatic argument with the fire pit lady for shooting sparks out at her. It was quite believable.
Julian scared himself watching a giant marshmallow transform into a huge, flaming beast with fire bursting out from inside a hollowed out cave, turning from dinosaur, to alligator, to terrifying skull; its ability to both expand and melt was nearly too much for his imagination to handle.
Maybe later this week we can pretend some snow into being and make a snowman to start off the new year right.
@Home Studio – 365th poem of the year
Runner ups for the Fire Pit photos to accompany my poem:
We’re going through Mema’s old cookbooks to see which to keep and which to let go, and the slices of 20th Century home life represented through food are an interesting study. If I had more time, I would categorize them and photograph them all by decade before selecting several recipes from each and do themed nights from the 50s, 60s, 70s and so on. But, alas, I do not have that kind of young people energy anymore, so thinking such thoughts and then writing about them is about as far as I can get, and that is ok.
Take for instance, a Home Economics textbook from 1944 called Everyday Foods that teaches girls to wear an “inexpensive house dress, or smock, or apron” and it “should be washable, attractive, and of course spick-and-span.” Also, don’t forget your “handkerchief…placed safely in a pocket.” Wouldn’t want to forget that—super important. Girls are also encouraged to be very careful what they eat. They are given a list of “What Carelessly Chosen Food May Do To You: It may give you a ruined waistline and a poor figure, a pallid complexion, bowlegs, premature old age, and deficiency diseases.” They were seriously warned against “pellagra, beriberi, rickets, anemia, and scurvy.” I hope the boys were warned somehow, as well.
Other favorites are the 70s style cookbooks that favored varying degrees of red, yellow, and brown thematic layouts featuring many Jello desserts and shrimp cocktails. I notice a lot of celery and things shaped into balls—ham balls, coconut ice cream balls, Swedish sausage balls, cocktail meatballs, chilled melon balls; I could go on. And what is baked Alaska? I am so confused, even though I was alive during that decade. And bisques, who was eating so much bisque? Do people still eat bisque?
The 70s also saw the invention of the crock pot. People weren’t exactly sure what to call this new cooking art form, but my favorite is the Crockery Cooking, though “crockery” as a term never really caught on. It sounds fancy. There is an introduction that explains how to use a crock pot and why it’s a good idea. I love it.
The 80s was the decade of microwave cooking and Mema had several books that not only teach what a microwave is, how to use it, how not to use it, and how to cook every imaginable food in one—bake a cake, bread, pie, check; oysters casino, escargot, clams-in-the-shell, coquilles, check; whole casserole, check; coffee, check; steak, small turkey, whole roast, check; the microwave is a miracle invention capable of revolutionizing the American kitchen, but rule #1: “Do not attempt to operate this oven with the door open.” I guess people had to be told you can’t sit and watch it cook with the door cracked a bit the way you would with your stove or the lid of a pot. The Amana Touchmatic II Radarange Microwave Oven Cookbook does due diligence with teaching the importance of not using metal implements (it even explains arcing), and assures the reader that every recipe has been tested in a real microwave by a “trained home economist.”
We also found a binder of recipes from Grandad’s mother, Frances Capitola Bearden, including such delicacies as giblet sandwich spread, chicken a la king, potato candy, mince meat (for which you need an average size hog head), loquat jelly, prickly pear jelly, spudnuts, potato donuts, salt dough for kids to play with, homemade soap, and the best carp bait for fishing with (which include Wheaties, cottonseed mill, and black strap molasses, among other interesting spices.)
I did not inherit even one ounce of interest in cooking, but my daughter is very excited about trying some of these recipes, and it is going to be an adventure to taste some long lost delicacies of the last 80 years. Mema was like me, a functional cook, capable of feeding whatever size crowd needed a full belly with satisfying results. Nothing fancy, nothing gourmet, but tasty and filling. The fact that she saved so many recipes with the good intentions of trying them out someday makes me chuckle because she, like me, didn’t even like to cook. She just enjoyed reading the recipes, looking at the pictures, and imagining the fun conversation at the dinner parties when everyone would be gathered around the table having a good time. It wasn’t even about the food. It was about the entertaining, the laughter, the storytelling, the getting together. It was about all of us that she loved and wanted to nurture with food.
@Home Studio – 364th poem of the year
Runner ups for the Cook Books photos to accompany my poem:
rebekahjmarshall 