Portrait of a Cowboy

So, ya’ll should know I run a photo blog of cowboys and rodeo at www.meganoteri.wordpress.com.  If you didn’t know, now you know. If you did know, thanks for knowing.  That means you follow both my cowboy and Wyoming musings and my personal blog here.

I have submitted an entry to Talenthouse.com to assist Brett Ratner on a Treats! photo shoot.  The theme of the creataive invite is “portrait.”  So I entered, “Portrait of a Cowboy.”  Please click on the link and vote for me starting August 3.  Talenthouse will remind you to vote.  I think you just have to make a comment or something.  It’s all social media (a lot of it is over my 80′s Atari/Pacman era head).

Thank you for passing this photo on.  And for visiting both my blogs.

Anyway, thanks for your help and please help spread the word.   This would be a great opportunity for me to get my foot in the door in the freelance writing and photography world.

memomuse

Super Powers

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

This is a slide show of my fourteen month old son in his Superman shirt and cape. 

What super power would you want?  I think I would want anti-writer’s block venom.  I know I have several books buried deep in me.  I just don’t feel like mining right now.  I have not written in awhile.  I have journaled, but I have not really written.  I have my hands in so many other creative projects right now that I am just not feeling it.  So, if I could wave my super power wand, I would wave away writer’s block.

The essays and ideas I want to write about just keep getting thrown in the “sock” basket and soon enough, there are no socks to wear and too many socks to sort.  So I have been running around barefoot this hot month of July. 

Soon enough I will need those socks and I will have to sort through them find some salvaged sock pairs.  Or just grab any ole’ two and make it a mismatched muse.

So, please leave a comment on what would be your super power or what super hero or heroine would you want to be.

Super Heroine Memomuse

Country Music and Me

There is a sadness to country music I am a sucker for.  Probably because I am a poet.

And country music is like a reata, wraps itself like a cord, and tugs tight on the heart.  Its big ole’ box of magic, capturing the sentimentality of the human condition in a simple stanza.  Country music drips into ya real slow, seeping into tiny pockets ya didn’t even know could quake.  Like little earthquakes, it rumbles, kicks up dust in the heart you didn’t know was unsettled until ya see the storm rising on the open prairie.

The human condition has always amazed me.  Like now, as I write this I wonder what you may be going through.  What dust is kickin’ up in your heart?

I can’t help myself most of the time when I listen to country music; I usually end up crying, quivering like a kid, with honeydew melon size tears, bursting through my skin song. It’s no secret I’m a heavy thinker.  I grew up with a lot of quiet and a lot of noise.  I guess those dust storms settled pretty thick on my heart.  Moreover, Wyoming’s buffalo hide and open sky, tawny brown blue, never escaped me.  Always with me, like a country song you can’t get outta your mind.  Into my heart, Wyoming crept.

I wasn’t always a Wyoming girl.  I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago until I was fifteen.  And then my parents moved to Cheyenne and I couldn’t wait to get outta that god forsaken land.  I was flabbergasted when I had to pee in a ditch, as we hoped off the bus for bathroom breaks on long wide open bus rides for conference games that crisscrossed us high school athletes to the North, as far as Gillette and South as far as the Utah border to Evanston.

My parents always talked about a snow storm so thick it was like cotton sleeves of God.  The snow plows of the Wyoming Department of Transportation guided our big, thick school bus to the state championships in Casper, the middle of the state, three hours from Cheyenne.  It took us six to get there safe and sound.

Wyoming is magic to me and I hear her voice in country music.

I see it in the twinkle of a country star as he strums his guitar he most likely named.

“Trigger” © Megan Oteri * All Rights Reserved
Willie Nelson’s Guitar, which he named Trigger

Like “Trigger” named after Roy Rodger’s horse.  Willie Nelson understands this muse, as do the fans and musicians in the country music scene.  I’m not saying it’s all perfect and poised, but something real special exists in a country song.

Something a pop song can’t puncture, something pristine and pure.  Something only a heart can feel, like an earthquake under your feet, like a tornado up over head, seen off in the distance.

Time pauses for me when I hear country music, my heart encapsulated in its beauty and truth.  A story told through ballads.  That reata rotating in the tilt of the cowboy’s curved arm.  It lassoes around me, loosens up the dirt and pretty soon I’m covered in sobs, falling for honky tonk tunes about somebody’s woman who left em’ or a rodeo grabbin’ a hold of a cowboy’s heart, pulling him far away toward something he can’t explain, but gives him fire to fuel his eight second muse.

I love it.  Country music and me, we gonna be together for a long while, it just feels right in my Wyoming heart.