Roadkill Zen (n.): Involving the search for and usage of the seeming discards and decay of everyday life balanced with cultural overabundance and the ignored beauty of natural circumstances, resulting in spiritual and physical creativity. This involves both opening the mind’s eye and closing at least one of the body’s eyes, searching out the center of sight. Hereafter referred to acronymically as “RKz”.
Roadkill Zen (n.): An online occasional literary journal highlighting contemporary poetry, flash fiction, and creative non-fiction.
Nutrition Facts Serv, Size: 1 or more visits, Amount per serving; Cal 0, Total fat 0g (0% DV), Sodium 0mg, Total Carb 0g, Protein 0g. A significant source of creative alternative thought provocation. Percent Daily Values based on a 200 page per day diet.
Ingredients: About, Roadkill Zen Journals (RKzJ), Mountain Mysteries, Coal Dust, Overburden, Poetry, Photography, Linkage, Blogsmak, Angstiness, Kudzu Extract, Rust Nails, Steaming Asphalt, unhealthy amounts of Caffeine and free thinking.
Go to: www.facebook.com/thackalachia
People speculate as to humanity’s natural tendency for self-destruction, for killing, hurting. There was a time in my life when I agreed. Not any longer. I feel – I know – our mutual constant is the undying desire to create, one of only two natural tendencies we have as human beings. The other is to love. The acts of loving and creating are the only two “real” things we do. Everything else – hate, hurting, and other emotional and physical discomforts – requires negative work and poisonous effort, causing a vacuum of realness. Creativity, in all its forms, and love, just another form of creativity, though requiring much work at times, are the only real expressions of who we are. Encouraging people to express this natural talent of creativeness is my lifelong dream. It is a dream I’ve floated in long before I knew it was a dream. Now that I’m finding my ”voice” in all the projects relating to writing, assemblage art and painting, photography, and the occasional wandering into the performing arts, some social justice issues, I am finding myself in each new project, each additional layer of creative expression. But these individual pieces of work – a poem here, a painting there - are not the art. The art is, in fact, the dynamic expression of my whole life experience over the course of time. The ”work” is linear, a long, thin line of being, dabbled with created milestones springing from my own mind’s alchemy with the ingredients life throws at me. I’ve had to let go of many expressive restraints in order to land where I am. One of those is fear. The more you try to ignore fear the stronger it becomes. It scurries over to somewhere else, disguises itself and lingers. And don’t fool yourself; fear knows you better than you know it. But it’s not real. It is the future ghost into which only you can breath life, through choice. I eventually took a step back and looked at what I was “saying” in all this explosion of expression. What I found was someone desperately searching out symbolic form and sense from real and imagined chaos. This then, is ”Roadkill Zen” if you must know, the searching out of beauty and clarity within the discards of life. I find explaining it in much more detail than that about as easily as I can clearly explain the physics of gravity; I know it exists and has control over all I do and see, yet the apple falling from the tree at my feet is about as technical as I can get. LDT
"Early Disturbance"