This is the fifth day of riffing on phrases from Rilke. I love the choices my friend Tim made, choosing phrases with odd beginnings. I am a little compulsive about following my own rules, and I decided right away for some reason that I would begin every poem with the Rilke line, no matter how awkward. I can already feel it affecting my sentence structure, my sense of the sentence. This one begins with Nor. How do you begin with Nor and create something that makes real sense? It’s forcing my brain to explore different pathways. I’m liking this new view.
Gratitude List:
1. Cats: they’re such good company
2. Daffodils
3. This phrase from a student today: “If this last stanza of the poem were sentient, I would hug it!” (Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “I Am Offering this Poem”)
4. National Poetry Month
5. Praying/Meditating with my body
May we walk in Beauty!
“When I interviewed Maya Angelou, she told me to write this sentence on my notepad and to never forget it:
EVERY STORM RUNS OUT OF RAIN.
I still think of that to this day. ” —Alex Banyan
“Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.” —Hafiz
“The problem is that you think you are separate from others.” —Richard Rohr
“You have to want a thing enough to reach out for it.” —Lailah Gifty Akita
“To wait within the moment for the coming dawn,
To breathe the single breath of all that lives,
To walk the web on which we all belong,
To face the newborn day with love instead of fear.
To listen for the whisper of the Spirit’s wind,
To feel Creator’s heartbeat in the world around,
To hear the grace of the Beloved in my neighbor’s voice,
To embrace the sacred space between the past and change.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Hope is a dimension of the soul. . .an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . .It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” —Vaclav Havel
“When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream.” —William E. Marks
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Healing is not pouring your energy into another, but activating the widening field of possibility around yourself, so the other may glimpse their own majesty forming on the horizon.” —Toko-pa Turner
“An ant crosses your carpet. A spider weaves a pattern older than mammals beneath your stairs. Just nod, breathe, and think, “Good. It’s all still here. The forest, the mountains, the desert. At home in my home.” The sterile white box is the stranger. Not the ant. Not the spider.” —Jarod Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist
Mockingbird Chronicles 