The Muse and The Time Traveler

I pulled out all the tiles from my Magnetic Poetry® Wood Words box. From the moment I began to assemble my poem from among them, I knew exactly who and what inspired it. When I placed a specific word, I also knew what photo from my archives I hoped to find to share with the finished poem.


From September 2009, based on a challenge from television’s “Project Runway” for my website’s “Runway Monday” series, I found her. She’s in fashion I designed for her of silk, satin, polyester, tulle, and crepe. A sheer coincidence only a handful of people will understand: I’d named this doll Maggie and said she was dressed as a Time Traveler. I’m grateful to my Muse and this Mattel Model Muse doll. I hope she likes the role she plays. There’s no role I’d rather have in my world than writer.

Here’s her poem, destined to be named “Time Traveler.”

©Becky Cochrane, 2025

Today is the anniversary of the date Riley died in 2008. The L.A. fires and their consequences have kept me emotional for the last week already, so this year, Riley’s loss feels a little sharper. The other night, Tom and I watched The Last Waltz, which I haven’t seen probably since the late seventies, when it was released. I still remembered the songs, the performers (band members and musical guests), and some of the conversations with members of The Band as they talked about how the concert (the focus of the film, as directed by Martin Scorsese) was bringing to an end their sixteen years of performing on the road.

Though most of the members worked together again, they never again performed live as a group with Robertson. Now all are gone, except for keyboardist Garth Hudson, who’s 87 and has been reported as a resident in an assisted living facility since 2022, when his wife Maud died. ETA: Garth Hudson died on January 21, five days after this post.

  • Richard Manuel: Died in 1986 at the age of 42 
  • Rick Danko: Died in 1999 at the age of 55 
  • Levon Helm: Died in 2012 at the age of 71 
  • Robbie Robertson: Died in 2023 at the age of 80

I think the footage of The Band singing with Bob Dylan got to me the most, maybe because Riley loved him so much and considered him a songwriting muse. I had a lump in my throat listening to “Forever Young” and “I Shall Be Released.” So many memories. In an alternate life, Riley and I might have ended up in L.A., friends sharing a house in a neighborhood like Altadena, while I pursued all the things that would have informed my fiction and he played everywhere anyone wanted to hear a guitarist, pianist, and songwriter. I’m not sure either of us ever wanted fame and fortune as much as the chance to create and be true to ourselves. Riley did play all over the Southeast (I’m not sure about his time in Nevada), and he wrote a lot of songs. I never lived further west than Texas, but I’ve had fiction published, and what I’m working on now includes real settings (many of them decimated by the fires) and celebrates my fictional artists (none of them native-born Angelenos) of Los Angeles.

I’m so grateful for the years of friendship Riley and I shared. Though we aren’t the Muse and Time Traveler of the poem, Riley’s part of why they exist.

Hearts and angels

I only made two little ornaments this past Christmas. One for my own tree that I shared here in December. The other, also on a 2-inch by 2-inch canvas, I sent to the person with whom I will always connect hearts. She seems to have her own key for finding them in nature, and I wanted to celebrate that.


When I was reorganizing my paint and canvas shelf, I found these little wooden ornaments. The next time I’m in the mood to paint, maybe I’ll make more ornaments to send out next Christmas, even though most people seem to have theme trees or fancier trees than I put up. Like that one kid who sits in the back of the class, my crafty little ornaments may not fit in.

I personally like receiving gifts someone’s taken the time to craft or create. I was surprised and delighted recently to get another angel to join the one a friend sent me in December.

The new one came from Mark, and she’s stunning. I’ve only been waiting for a red-themed week to share her. From Catherine Stock’s A Christmas Angel Collection, she’s derivative of “Eccelesia,” a gospel miniature from Salzburg or Passau, late 12th century.

I wanted to give an idea of how shimmery she is. (I like shiny things!)

Thank you so much, Mark, not only for the angel, but for the time and energy you put into coloring her. Thank you also for this coloring book with pages based on historical people and art from the Tudor period. I’ll really enjoy its coloring pages.

Tiny Tuesday!


Those shoes are mine, betch. Lyric from “Kelly” and the song “Shoes.”

In 2008, when I was in New Orleans with Lynne during a chilly February, I made a visit to Greg’s apartment to see him and his and Paul’s cat Nicky, perhaps better known as Skittle. Greg gave me that parade throw from the Krewe of Muses. It lives with my other Mardi Gras memorabilia in the living room display cabinets. I gave hundreds of Mardi Gras beads and throws to my grand-nieces and -nephews when they were little kids, but some treasures will always remain with me.

Carnival began in New Orleans on January 6 and will end March 4 on Mardi Gras Day. The 2025 Krewe of Muses parade will be on Thursday, February 27.


These CDs will take me days to get through, because I find them so effective that I tend to let them repeat multiple times. They were produced by New World Music, and if you follow that link, you can find the links for getting them in your country. They’re also available for resale on ebay and many other online retail sources, and there are undoubtedly different offerings in this series from the ones I have.

I used these CDs for myself and much of my practice in the late ’90s, early 2000s, and they remain my go-to choices for resting, relaxing, or centering myself. I probably bought the “Reiki” CD first, from Body Mind & Soul in Houston at their previous location (close to The Compound), and I kept going back to get the others. In the store’s current location (closer to Houndstooth Hall!), it remains one of the best places in Houston for gifts and for all your metaphysical needs.

Mindful Monday


I love the color of this box. I like the design carved into the top with its feather motif.

I even love the bottom of the box, which emphasizes its strong red pattern in the wood stain.

What lives inside the box: heart-shaped cutouts. Most of them have what I call “Angel Affirmations.” I think the feather design is the reason this is the box I chose to store them.

The instructions tucked inside describe how I used these Angel Affirmations, and the first line explains why I chose to share this on Mindful Monday.

Think of only today…
Light a cone of sandalwood incense…
Center yourself with deep breathing…
Surround yourself with white light…
Take any heart and apply it to today’s situation…
Trust yourself…

Here are the words from the one I pulled. Maybe it will mean something to you today.

To match the mood, here’s some of the metaphysical music I was listening to while I wrote at the end of last week:

Tommy Greer’s ‘Angel’s Kiss’ 1995; Steven Halpern’s ‘Gifts of the Angels’ 1994
Steven Halpern’s ‘Chakra Suite’ 2001; Dean Evenson’s ‘Forest Rain’ 1993; Nature Quest’s ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber: Naturally’ 1995; Erik Berglund’s ‘Harp Of The Healing Light’ 1999

Sunday Sundries & Question No. 8

Things that are red.

Clockwise from lower left: Red Beatles car. Push-puppet elephant mascot in a red jersey with an ‘A’ for the Alabama Crimson Tide. Red Stratocaster guitar at 1:6 scale. A red “Woody” wagon with a surfboard atop. A red pickup truck with a surfboard atop. A dirty red truck in honor of one I borrowed and drove for a while in the mid 1980s. An English Breakfast London bus tea tin. A red bud vase I made during our pottery section in high school art class. Two little red ceramic chickens I painted for Jeff which were later returned to me. Piccadilly’s ‘3000 Questions About Me’ book.

I’m intending to share a few things featuring the color red in the coming days. From the 3000 Questions About Me book, 2167. If you could afford a personal driver to drive you everywhere, would you get one?

I’ve always said if I were wealthy, the one lifestyle change I’d definitely make is to have a full-time chauffeur. So that’s a resounding YES answer to the question. They could drive me in a red truck, a red Woody, a red Beatles car, or a red London bus for all I care. I only ask that speed not be excessive and they don’t tailgate, taunt, or incite other drivers, a terrible idea in Texas.

Do intentions matter?

Over the past few days, I’ve seen too many photos and read too many stories from the city of my ❤️, Los Angeles. My heart aches for all those homes lost. People lost. Businesses and jobs lost. The daunting prospects of recovery and rebuilding. Not everyone there is wealthy, nor are all those neighborhoods filled with the residences of celebrities.

I’ve seen videos of terrified wildlife fleeing from fires, including a cougar with her two cubs running behind her—so beautiful, so scared. I’ve seen horses being rescued and taken to shelter in safe sites, and offerings from other communities of the number of horses they can take in. Many pets have been placed in shelters until their families can figure out where they’ll be staying or going next.

So many have lost their homes, all their homes’ contents, and sometimes even their vehicles. Meaning to be reassuring, people offer, They’re just things. They can be replaced.

Not all things can be replaced.

I thought of my decades of photos, my own and my mother’s. My father’s art. My lifetime of journals. My father’s military records. My mother’s genealogical records.

I thought of all the mementos and items Tom’s parents have saved his entire life and given to him on special occasions. His rocking horse. His family Christmas ornaments, including some from his grandmother. His parents’ art.

My teddy bear. My dolls, and I don’t mean that massive collection of Barbies so much as my baby dolls and the dolls my father brought back from Korea and Japan. Some of the Barbies do have deep sentimental value, too.

I thought about Tim’s violin, built by his grandfather. The portrait of Rex done by a local artist and gifted to him by Laura. The plant he brought back from his grandmother’s funeral that he’s kept thriving for several years. Lynne, too, has two plants, one that came through various relatives from her grandmother to her; another that was her mother’s, who died in 1978. I thought of the carousel horses that were gifts from her late husband.

Debby lost some very precious keepsakes related to her children during our flood in 2017, and a couple of things I valued from my teenage years went missing, maybe inadvertently thrown out with larger items. We’ve lost a lot over the years, but we’ve never lost everything, as is happening to so many right now because of the L.A. fires.

Some things can never be replaced because most of their value exists only in our hearts and memories. Sometimes, when our hearts are broken, those things give us something tangible to cling to, just as our companion animals give us the will to be strong, to keep going.

Yesterday, I watched a video of a stranger, maybe someone’s neighbor or a passerby, as she realized she saw movement on a property, and used her hands to pull two surviving fish and two turtles, all struggling, but alive, out of someone’s koi pond in their yard next to their burned down house. She put them in a cooler that she filled with their water to transport them. (There were others, fish at least, that hadn’t made it.) Imagine losing everything but what you could take with you, and then being reunited with those four little survivors, and what they might mean to those people. The kindness of that woman is immeasurable, and she’s just one of so many who are trying to do something, anything, for their fellow Angelenos.

There’s so much heartbreak in these losses, but there’s also heartbreak in the vitriol from the usual choir of cruelty. I can’t understand, don’t even want to understand, how people can be so small, so hard, instead of just kind. Even in thoughts. In words. Just kindness. It costs nothing to be kind.

Do intentions matter? Yes. I absolutely believe they do.

Over these days, I’ve turned to music from the CDs that live in the sanctuary closet with a lot of the things I once used in my practice. They’re meant to comfort. To help someone relax. To be a channel to healing. I have more, but these were ones I pulled out so far.

Enya, The Celts, 1987 and re-released in 1992; Watermark, 1988; Shepherd Moons, 1991; The Memory of Trees, 1995; A Day Without Rain, 2000. Loreena McKennitt, The Book of Secrets, 1997.
Loreena McKennitt: Parallel Dreams, 1989; The Mask and Mirror, 1984.

I’m grateful for artists and their music, as I am for all those who provide the movies and television shows we watch, the books we read, the art that intrigues us. So much of the creative output that entertains and enriches us comes from that concentrated part of the west coast.

There are two realities I hold on to. First, our strength and resilience are the reason we persevere and rebuild. It’s how San Francisco has come back from earthquakes. How New Orleans came back from Katrina. How New York came back from terrorist attacks. I’m picking big cities because right now it’s Los Angeles, but across the Midwest, the Northeast, the South, the West and Northwest, this same spirit has driven us, as it will North Carolina and other areas impacted by disasters, whatever their causes.

And second, the abundant kindness we show to those who experience catastrophe reflects the best in us. Whether we give our time or material support or let our thoughts, words, actions, and prayers come from kindness, infused with the energy of good intentions, we get to choose to be a part of one another’s healing instead of their suffering.

Photo Friday, No. 942

Current Photo Friday theme: Puddle.


A little backyard fun after a few days of rain. This made me think of the movie Convoy, in which Kris Kristofferson played the truck-driving Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald, Rubber Duck being the handle (name) he used on his CB radio. I had a CB radio in my car, my own handle, and a lot of fun and helpful conversations with truck drivers on the road at night.

Kris Kristofferson as “Rubber Duck.”

That movie soundtrack brings back memories, too.
“Convoy” by C. W. McCall
“Lucille” by Kenny Rogers
“Cowboys Don’t Get Lucky All the Time” by Gene Watson
“Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” by Crystal Gayle
“I Cheated on a Good Woman’s Love” by Billy “Crash” Craddock
“Okie From Muskogee” by Merle Haggard
“Southern Nights” by Glen Campbell
“Blanket on the Ground” by Billie Jo Spears
“Keep on the Sunny Side” by Doc Watson
“Walk Right Back” by Anne Murray

“Climb the stairs to the moon.”

This black and white page is from Jenny Lawson’s You Are Here book and titled “Climb the stairs to the moon”:

With a touch of color added. (I share the text that’s around the tree roots below the photo.)

If I cannot see the sun
I’ll follow the stars.
If I cannot see the stars
I’ll follow the moon.
If I cannot see the moon
I’ll make my own.
–Jenny Lawson

Tiny Tuesday!


Tom gave me this candle for Christmas, and it burned next to me sometimes over the multiple days this post has taken me to write.

Now that some of our house and holiday chaos has tapered off, I’ve resumed working on the Neverending Saga. It feels really good. I mentioned that I’d gotten encouraging messages from Lynne when she read the most recent chapters. I’m very fortunate that both Tom and Lynne stay engaged by these novels and offer me not just positive feedback, but also constructive suggestions, and they sometimes ask questions that cause me to look ahead or to better flesh out things already written.

In a few months, it’ll mark six years I’ve been working on this series. It’s been challenging and sometimes discouraging. As I start the new year, I’m doing a kind of inventory of the journey so far.

First: One of the first people, who is not a writer, with whom I discussed my plan for rewriting/developing the novels, told me that I couldn’t write books that include the diverse set of people and some of the social matters I wanted to make part of the stories. Because I’m white (and so is this person), I was warned that any characters of color–whether Latinx/Latine, Black, or indigenous American–would be rejected by the “woke” readers (not my term) I might hope would be among my audience. Within a couple of years of that conversation, expressing my opinions and values, not just in the books, became enough of a problem that this person chose to end the friendship.

I was surprised but have no animosity or resentment about it. I see it happen every day among friends and families, consequences of the time we live in. It does, however, make me uneasy when other people go silent now. Instead of thinking, everyone’s busy, lives are complicated and full of competing demands, I tend to castigate myself for anything I might have said or done that drove them away. This despite the fact that I have friendships stretching back through all the decades since the sixties, and we don’t all think alike or agree on everything. If each of us has a specific fear or anxiety, mine is abandonment, and it’s based on experience. Who knew one day the term for that would be “ghosting.” I’m not a fan. I do appreciate that in the experience described above, at least I wasn’t ghosted.

Second: Getting back to what and how I want to write, I understand the concept of “own voices.” We need more books from diverse writers; people of all cultures, genders, socio-economic groups, minorities, sexual orientations. It’s not my place or right to co-opt the stories of those voices. However, I’ve lived in, and I grew up in, places with a wide variety of people. I’ve worked with, lived with, gone to schools with, attended churches with, been taught by, and been friends with all kinds of people from all kinds of cultures. Even before I ever wrote a word (I started my first novel when I was eleven), I observed everybody. I listened to everybody. I heard people’s stories. I read endlessly in all kinds of genres, set in places all over the world. I’ve taken no one else’s stories, but many of their stories undoubtedly speak to or inspire the stories I write. I’m not writing biographies. I’m writing fiction.

Third: I kicked off the first decade of this century with published novels I wrote with three gay men. Every one of us wrote every character: male, female, straight, gay, transgendered, Black, white, Latinx/Latine, elderly, adolescent, wealthy, struggling. We weren’t writing autobiographies. We were writing fiction. People often assumed I wrote the straight female characters in those novels. I did introduce a new one occasionally, but their stories were filtered just as often through the other writers as through me. Once characters are properly established, they take on their own lives, whether I’m the only writer or a co-writer. That statement right there–I’ll go back and put it in bold–is my joy in writing fiction. Characters will surprise me, defy me, break my heart, and make me love them, even their flaws.

Fourth: One friend offered to read the books as they were being written, as a kind of beta reader. I’ve never had beta readers (other than my writing partners). I gave fair warning that these were works in progress based on old, very old, versions I wrote in the far-away past. They were subject to change during new versions because I’m older now and a more seasoned writer. This person had read and enjoyed my published novels (the TJB novels, the Lambert-Cochrane novels, the Coventry novels). To me, that implied I could be trusted to tell the stories of flawed characters organically. Not only were my narrative choices subject to change, the characters would change. Grow. Make mistakes. Course correct. Learn. I think that’s called being HUMAN. I don’t write androids. Robots. Aliens. (I don’t even write vampires who sparkle, but I sure read them.) I’m not interested in writing perfect or static characters. If you trust me because you’ve read me before, then I deserve the opportunity to develop the story and allow my characters their flawed humanity. This person began to take issue with my characters’ choices. In addition, I’d get comments like, “This character is obviously a serial killer.” I’ve never written, would never write, a serial killer. Anyone who’s read me knows that. The feedback became insulting, annoying, and an impediment to my process. The friendship survived; the beta reading relationship ended.

Fifth: Other people agreed to or offered to read the works in progress. Here have been the results of that. One never started the first book after agreeing to be a reader. One read the early lives of the first three of four characters who have points of view in the first novel, but then got tired of reading anything and wanted to switch to watching television for a while. The manuscript was never picked up again. One read the first novel and asked for the second, where the reading stalled. As far as I know, it remains unfinished. A fourth wanted to read them, has the first two novels, and again, as far as I know, never began.

These things definitely impact my self-esteem as a writer. Now, when someone asks, “May I read them?” The answer is, “Not until they’re all finished.” The beta/early reader concept hasn’t worked for me, and I realized it can even be harmful. I’ll continue writing and hopefully finish these novels because I want to. Because I need to know how it all turns out.

Below, using the week’s theme of black and white, is some motivation. Maybe you need it, too, as encouragement to forge ahead and protect yourself from what inhibits or harms your creativity.