Gratitude List:
1. Letting go, and letting go, and letting go. . .
2. Rituals and rites of passage
3. Summer bass of great horned owl, bullfrog and mourning dove
4. Getting the next thing done, and the next thing
5. Learning to say yes. Learning to say no.
May we walk in Beauty!
Life is full and busy these days with the start of the farming season. I have been wanting to just dash off some quick morning tankas to keep my heart in the game. And I will. But there’s a poem boiling inside me at the moment and I keep trying to get it going these mornings, but it doesn’t seem to want to find its full form, or it feels too maudlin, or too angry, or too easily misunderstood. Poems are like people, I guess. Some just want to hang by the door for a while before they come in. This is a percolating time for poems.
Lately I have been listening to Kate Tempest every chance I get. I’ve always been enamored of the word play and rhythms of hip hop and rap. The noise of the music that sometimes drowns the words, the sometimes misogynistic or violent lyrics, have kept me from exploring the art form with too much intention. I know that there are some really bright and revolutionary hip hop artists but I haven’t made an effort to seek them out. And here comes poet Kate Tempest, who started as a hip hop artist and has taken the stage as a leader in Spoken Word poetry. I am utterly mesmerized by her words and her style. I feel like a little kid hearing something for the first time.
Look her up. Then look up Sarah Kay. Then Hollie McNish. Then Andrea Gibson. Then look up Shane Koyczan, especially his poem “To This Day.”
Gratitude List:
1. Blooming Milkweed! Blessings on the Monarchs. Blessings on the bees.
2. The sounds of early morning birdsong, even though it wakes me up and leaves me drowsy for the day.
3. Kids and adults working together.
4. Finishing a puzzle. I love doing puzzles, the way they make my mind work. I often feel as though I am solving internal puzzles while I am working on a jigsaw
5. Spoken Word Poets
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. CSA season 2014 has begun!
2. Those invisible threads that connect us all to each other. The web. The net. I think I am talking about prayer.
3. Cool, breezy days.
4. Day lilies
5. Wildly inspiring friendships
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. High school friends. Conversations that can move seamlessly from tears to laughter in the same breath. Remembering. Growing up. How we are still the same people we were 30 years ago, and how we are oh so different. All those loves and losses. All that heart wisdom.
2. Sometimes at the very moment that you really desperately need someone, the right person appears. In yesterday’s case, it was an electrician.
3. Language, languages.
4. There are so many possibilities for happy endings.
5. Drying strawberries–the whole house smells delicious.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. The way decisions grow and bloom. You put that seed in the soil there and you say, “Hmmm. Maybe?” And then you come back to it a few days later, and–Lo and Behold!–something is growing! And sometimes the bean you planted comes up, and sometimes something else is there. Then you decide whether to uproot that or to tend it. The year we began farming here, we planted watermelons in plastic planting trays. As we were transplanting them out into the field, I came upon a little square where a tiny nettle was growing instead of a watermelon. Nine years later, after that watermelon field has been tilled under and re-used for beans, for tomatoes, for squash, for peas, the nettle patch down by the parking lot is growing strong and lush. Ah, decisions. . .
2. The way, when you touch the wounded place and say
“This makes me feel vulnerable. This makes me feel weak,”
the way that makes you real,
the way it makes me less afraid.
When you say,
“This is despair. This is burnout,”
then all the rest of us can sigh,
then all the rest of us can say,
“So that is what it is.”
Then all the rest of us
can feel so much less alone.
3. Orchard oriole in the back trees.
Baltimore in the the front.
4. The bins are washed,
the market room is clean.
Today we harvest.
Today a new season begins!
5. Possibilities.
May we walk in Beauty!
Sometimes you start to write a poem, and an interesting structure emerges, and so so go on and formalize it and make your own structure. What emerged here was a 2/8/8/3 syllable-count poem. These really busy summer days when the farm is ramping up, but the feeling of the world is slow and lazy and dreamy, something about the structure of this appealed to my sense of being caught behind a veil, stuck in a conflict where something in me wants to live in a quiet instinctual place while the world is bustling about me.
The song
of the house finch is green, and the
way the sunlight dapples the wall
in shadow.
Green is
the soul of the field mouse, and the
way that the brook meanders through
the meadow.
The heart
of this morning is green, and the
morning breezes that eddy in
the hollow.
I realize that Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are crunchy for many people, for many reasons. If this is the case for you, I wish you comfort and solace, a chance to look quietly at the attendant pain, and good strong breath to carry you through. Much love.
Gratitude List:
1. For my father, for the way he so gracefully blends reason and wisdom and compassion.
2. For Jon Weaver-Kreider, and his gentle spirit.
3. For books and stories, myths and fables
4. For work, preparations, and planning (opening day on the farm is this week!)
5. For that green sun peaking over the hill.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. The subtle watery taste of mulberry
2. Sharp tang of strawberry
3. Homemade berry popsicles
4. Sun and moon
5. Bees
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. Strawberry sorbet (I keep wanting to sing a Prince song with that: “She ate her Straaaaawberry sorbet!” Hey Weird Al! I’ve got an idea for you!)
2. That Alan Lomax Collection Sampler CD I got at the yard sale. No liner notes–glad I’ve got Google.
3. Early morning thunderstorm
4. Starting the day with energy
5. Balance
May we walk in Beauty!
“If you wish for light, be ready to receive light.” ~ Rumi
Gratitude List:
1. Unfolding
2. Uncertainty, and the way it draws me to trust, faith. The way it tilts me out of my comfort zone and throws me into a new space. (Six weeks ago, I would not have imagined being grateful for uncertainty. That shift, itself, is something I am grateful for.)
3. Bridging
4. Continuing the line, keeping the patterns going, but adding my own lines, my own colors.
5. That thing that happens when you talk to someone and you realize that you’ve both grabbed the same word or idea in the past week or day, that you’re in very similar places of creative shift or idea birthing, that you’re waking up to the same things at the same time. Synchronicity squared. A take-off-your-shoes-this-is-holy-ground sort of meeting. That.
May we walk in Beauty!
This isn’t really a poem. Not in any polished sense. More like a ramble that wanted to look like a poem. Consider it a scribble in the writer’s notebook, a placeholder for me to return to and flesh out at some later date.
The little ones wanted to know
at what moment on the bridge
we were in Columbia
instead of Wrightsville.
At what point have we gone
from there to here?
But the bridge is its own thing,
a place between places,
spanning the distance
between town and town,
and time to time.
Everywhere and everywhen
begins here, ends here.
Gratitude List:
1. So much to anticipate
2. Bridges.
3. The birds of Goldfinch Hollow. These weeks, it’s like the Keystone Kops out there. Cardinal chasing cardinal past the window. Then back again. And a third time. Next flyby is oriole chasing mockingbird. Then sparrow after chickadee. Never a dull moment.
4. Whatever brings relief. Ice packs. Cold nettle and mint tea. Antihistamines. Sleep. (This one is sort of a whiny gratitude, I realize. These days when the allergies are really bad, I tend to get wrapped up in my own misery. Whatever can give me a few moments of rest and calm, whatever can help me feel closer to baseline again–that I am truly grateful for. REALLY grateful.)
5. Community. Powerful personal healing stories. The dancing flames quilt banner. Pot luck.
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 