But, first things first: My book is born!

Ten years ago, I ventured into the world of self-publishing. I created my own little imprint called Skunk Holler Poetryworks (we live in a dip between the arms of Pisgah Ridge casually known as Skunk Hollow). Then I published a book of Poetry called The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird. It’s a mouthful of a name, which is often the burden of first children. A year later, Skunk Holler Poetryworks published a second volume: Holding the Bowl of the Heart. Then I dithered. The company I use to publish the books can print a single copy or dozens, as demand requires. That means no up-front capital for me unless I buy a batch of author copies. The downside of this marvelous situation is that the company is an Amazon company, and I feel like I am working within the belly of the beast. So for years, I just didn’t publish anything. I haven’t been able to find another company with the incredibly user-friendly design system, the marketing potential, and the one-off printing. So I didn’t publish for almost a decade.

But then last year happened. I became The Heretic. I wrote some of my best poems. And The Heretic’s Book of Prayer was born. I wanted to publish it, but I am essentially an unknown poet, and I like having total control of everything from font to layout to organization to cover design, so I jumped back into the belly of the beast.

This is definitely my best book so far. The poems are stronger and more confident. The organization tells a story that I want to tell. The focus is crisper. And in the sorting and editing of poems, I actually found that I have enough poems for a second book, possibly titled Seasons of the Witch.

You can buy The Heretic’s Book of Prayer on Amazon. My dream is to eventually set up a page on The Mockingbird Chronicles website where you can order all of my books directly from me, but I am not that smart yet. I’ll need some tutoring to manage it, and my IT Guy is leaving for college in two weeks.

Shameless ad: Buy my book, please!

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And. It’s my birthday! I’m turning 56. I’ve done my yearly research, and there doesn’t appear to be anything mathematically interesting about the number 56. There’s something about it being the sum of the first six triangular numbers, making it a tetrahedral number, so there’s that.

The angel number and numerology people all seem to agree that 56 is a number of transformation and change. I’ll take that! As I have been praying along with the current Way of the Rose Novena, I have been asking for focus and determination, and somehow that seems to have translated to the focus I needed to get this book done. Also, I recently asked my doctor how I can deal with the exhaustion and aches. She suggested, I start eating a careful Mediterranean diet, and exercising more. Exercise has always been my bugaboo, but then I thought about the fact that I am already spending 30-40 minutes a day saying my rosary–What if I would walk during that time? So I’ve added a brisk walk every day. In a week and a half, I am feeling a change. So maybe the transformative aspect of 56 can help me continue to develop greater health in the coming year.

I asked if I could write the blurb about the saint for today on The Way of the Rose novena page. I chose St. Harriet Tubman. You should be able to read it by clicking here.

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Gratitude List:
1. How people circle ’round to protect the vulnerable.
2. Examples of people who offered their lives for justice for others.
3. Goldfinches along the roads these days, how they fly up twittering so joyfully.
4. The little fairy birds that flitted ahead of me on my walk today. I think they must be field sparrows, but in the dusk they looked tiny and fairy-like.
5. Aging. Yes, really. Despite the aches and the hormone shifts and the new and edgy anxieties. I love how we change and ripen, how our faces begin to show the art of our living. Birthdays remind me that I am always on the turning wheel, and what a glorious ride it can be!

May we walk ever in Beauty!

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“Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.”
― Tom Robbins

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Even
after
all this time
the sun never says to the earth,

“You owe me.”

Look
what happens
with a love like that —

It lights the whole
world.
—Hafiz

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“The Seven of Pentacles”
by Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

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“Life…is a wonder. It is a sky laden with clouds of contradictions.” —Naguib Mahfouz

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“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” —Coco Chanel

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“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin

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“Soul of my soul … be water in this now-river.” —Rumi

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“You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe, and your name is Love.” —Rumi

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“There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.” —Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life Of The Bee, 1924

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“If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” —Rumi

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“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.

“While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.

“If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words.

“Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner