Month: October 2013

“Pouring Glory of the World Roaring By”

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 Earth from space
Photo by Karen Nyberg, from ISS

Yesterday as I was out delivering boxes of fall vegetables, I heard this on the radio:

Chris Hadfield, former commander of the Space Station, describing space-walking for Terry Gross:  “. . .you’re holding on for dear life to the shuttle or the station with one hand, and you are inexplicably in between what is just a pouring glory of the world roaring by, silently next to you — just the kaleidoscope of it, it takes up your whole mind. It’s like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen just screaming at you on the right side, and when you look left, it’s the whole bottomless black of the universe and it goes in all directions.”

And I, who live inside Earth time, with a carful of Earth’s bounty, with the trees of Earth exploding into choruses of scarlet and crimson and gold all around me–I am still trailing those words like spiderwebs caught in my hair:  “. . .a pouring glory of the world roaring by. . .”  I think I can feel it from here.  Can’t you?

Gratitude List:
1.  The pouring glory of the world roaring by.  Knowing it is doing that out there, but even here, inside Earth time and the ball of atmosphere.
2.  Community child-centered rituals.  Tonight I will take a couple costumed children down to the town to meet their town neighbors in the annual ritual when people open their doors to strangers and offer them sweets.
3.  The ancestors.  This is also the first of three days when many religious and cultural traditions remember those who have gone before us: the ancestors, the saints.
4.  Maple and sweet gum
5.  Quartzite that seeds the hills here and sparkles in the sun.

May we walk in Beauty.

Oak

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2013 October 108

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Oak
2.  Oak
3.  Oak
4.  Sycamore
5.  Oak

May we walk in Beauty.

Revisions

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2013 October 103

Gratitude List:
1.  Cardboard boxes and tape.  Easiest and most fun Halloween costume prep ever.  I hope they never grow out of their love of transforming boxes into costumes, play sets, posters, spy centers. . .
2.  Fleece pajamas and fleece slippers
3.  Friendship
4.  Revising poetry (Mockingbird says it’s okay to move on to this step)
5.  Working together

May we walk in Beauty.

Finding Poetry

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Found Poem
Source: Joss Weaver-Kreider

I just saw a tree
that had no leaf left

and

at first I thought
it was a giant feather.

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This is an old photo, from December,
but it shows some naked feathery trees.

Gratitude List
1.  Ten Years of Goldfinch Farm.  It has gone by in a flash.  It has been forever.  Happy Birthday, Bright Spot!
2.  Prayer.  Or singing.  Or writing poems.  Or drawing.  Or listening.  Or looking.  Or magic.  Whatever you call it, the energy that is the connective tissue of the Universe, the Multiverse.
3.  Four-part harmony
4.  Standing in the borderlands, looking around, and realizing that I’m ready for the journey.
5.  This contemplative morning time all to myself.

May we walk in Beauty, in Love

Whisper to the Angel

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Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it
and whispers, “Grow! Grow!”
–The Talmud

Me, I will whisper to the angel,
I will read poetry to  the angel,
I will shout and dance and sing for the angel
who guards that little blade of grass.

And you.  You guard your precious and oh-so-tender heart,
you take that one breath, then this one, then the next.
One step, one step, one step.

No matter what the future holds,
we will know–
you, me, the angel–
that light entered this holy space,
that we knew what rested there.

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Gratitude List:
1.  How a little change revitalizes a room.  How that’s true of other things, too.  Tweak, tweak.
2.   Okay: brandy, ginger, honey, garlic, elderberry, menthol.
3.  Dreams and poems.  Poems which are dreams.  Dreams which are poems.
4.  Breathing deeply into those tree roots, those deltas, those nebulae inside the lungs.
5.  We have inner capacities to meet trouble as it comes.  How you show me this.  And you.  Even when you don’t feel like you are being brave or strong or patient or wise.   I am grateful for the tender ways you share your journey.  I am honored and strengthened to witness.

With Beauty all around me, may I walk

Just a Minute

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

After yesterday’s lai, my friend Mara sent me a link to an interview with the poet Cathy Smith Bowers, who worked with another short form, the minute.

A minute is three stanzas in length, each of twenty syllables (60 total, like a minute).  The rhyme scheme is aabb, ccdd, eeff.  And the kicker is that the meter is iambic: ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum.  Sort of like Shakespeare, but with fewer feet.

This one’s tricky.  Even when the meter and rhyme seem to come easily, it’s a real challenge to get it to dance rather than stumble.  But Mockingbird says that you learn to dance by taking those first stumbling steps.

Out in the dawn, a misty sea
in walnut tree
a silent crow
will dream of snow

will ruffle feathers in the chill
will wait until
the first bright ray
begins the day

then with a final shake will rise
from branch to skies
and this will be
a memory

Ha!  Well, that was fun.  Mockingbird says I am not supposed to make fun of it or try to explain its inadequacy, so I’ll let it stand for today’s poem.

2013 October 081

Gratitude List:
1.  Getting a card in the mail!  Just for hello-and-I-love-you.  What a delight.  And there was a tiny picture of an artist’s palette on the back that inspired Ellis to draw and draw and draw.  Thank you, Auntie Mary!  I love you, too!
2.  New soft. warm rug underfoot
3.  Faery-light.  I don’t know another word for it–the way the vegetables glow and shine from within, even when there is no obvious light source nearby.  Yesterday, the tomatoes seemed to glow from within.  Radishes, potatoes, carrots, when they’re wet, take on a light and color that seem to be beyond the capacity of the available light to create.
4.  New perspectives.  Rearranging the furniture, literally and figuratively.
5.  The way frost outlines every leaf, every blade of grass, every bud and vein.  My children say Jack Frost is just a made-up thing, but I’ve seen some of his best work.

Beauty all around us.

Back to Form

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2013 October 058

Winter is coming on, and I am feeling the pull to go inward, to explore new poetic forms.  This one I discovered on Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog.  It is a French form called a lai.  It’s good for me to get back to the anxious thrill of writing something for the fun and playfulness of it, and not simply because there are words knocking at the back door of my head asking to be let out.

It’s 9 lines.  The 5-syllable lines (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8) are rhyme A, and the others are 2 syllables and are rhyme B.  Here goes:

Either moon or frost
has whitely embossed
the field.
I wake, having crossed
the sea of sleep, tossed,
concealed
within my own lost
ark.  Now, waking’s cost.
I yield.

Hmmm.  Perhaps I ought to have been a little more intentional about choosing rhymes instead of diving in head first and letting the rhymes find me.  Nah.  That was fun.  Sort of like a tanka, but with the added imperative of rhyme.  And that happy little skip in the last lines of the triads could be used comically or very seriously, I think.  I started with the first thing that jumped into my head, so I was stuck with -ost as my major rhyme.  Initially I typed “grass” instead of “field,” but was limited by that rhyme.  Now that’s an exercise to wake me up.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The artistic power of limits
2.  Colored pencils
3.  Warm rug for winter
4.  Cleaning the attic
5.  Civility

Beauty All Around Us.

The Bowl

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2013 October 088

Gratitude List:
1.  Clouds
2.  River
3.  Crows
4.  Books
5.  Insight

Beauty All Around.

Quick

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Gratitude List:
1.  Egg-fried Rice for breakfast
2.  Inner Guide
3.  Both/And
4.  The Farm season shift approaches
5.  Scarves

May we walk in Beauty.

Looking Within

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2013 October 015
Cat in the compost. . .

Gratitude List:
1.  A wonderful and rich morning with Alyson Earl, looking deeply within.  Thank you so much!
2.  All my helpers, healers, mentors, guides, faery godmothers, friends.  I get by with a little help. . .
3.  That clickety little bird who sings in the chestnut tree these days.  I don’t know who it is, but its call says, “Stop and pay attention.”
4.  The way the vegetables and fruits that are ripe in any season are designed to give the body exactly what it needs in that season.
5.  Balance

May we walk in Beauty.