Gratitude List:
1. I didn’t hit that button to send my final proof off to the printing process before I noticed a major omission. Whew. (“Where’d they put the page numbers? Oh right. They is me. Forgot ’em.”)
2. The tides may be turning in favor of small and local and real and authentic.
3. Kindness.
4. New ideas.
5. Dreaming.
May we walk in beauty.
This week I have been thinking about the layers of stories that I experience. There’s this story of mine that I am creating with every thought or idea that I latch onto or release, every image I carry with me, each action, each refusal to act. I create the tone and subtext for my story, and even develop the plot with a certain amount of control. A fair bit of the plot is beyond my control, and then my role in the story becomes how I respond and shape myself in relationship to the plot.
My story is interwoven with the stories of my husband, my children, my parents and the rest of my family, my friends and community, the folks who work on and who visit the farm, my internet network. And they shape my story as I shape theirs. We hone and whittle, we tweak and trigger and tickle each others’ stories. When your story gets rocky and challenging, it shakes my story, too. I sort of think that’s the work we’re here to do, to help each other hone and perfect our stories.
There’s the living of story and the telling of story. Someone told me part of his story this week, and said, “It helps to tell it. There’s no point in keeping it inside.” Something in the experience of being present for the telling, being tuned in to the mixture of pain and relief and terror and hope, something in that changed me in a way that I can’t quite understand. I am glad that telling the story helped him. How is it that it healed and completed something within me as well?
I think, too, about the religious and spiritual stories that inform our lives, the way they overlap and challenge us, the ways that firm adherence to a story can close and calcify hearts. The ways that tender adherence to a story can open a heart to acceptance and compassion.
And fiction and myth. Why is it that we need to talk with other people about Downton Abbey and Mad Men and Six Feet Under? About The Fifth Sacred Thing and The Hunger Games and Harry Potter? Why do we get obsessed with Star Trek and Doctor Who? There’s something in the public, corporate sharing of story that develops and hones community experiences, that helps us explore more deeply what is means to be human, what it means to be community.
We’ve been pretty careful to shelter our children from the frenetic pacing of much of contemporary movies and television shows. And I will continue to do so, but I am realizing that I also want to be careful not to stunt their opportunities for community-making through story-sharing with their peers. Of course, I want them to create story with their friends as much as possible, which is what imaginative play is, but I also want them to have storylines to discuss and ponder with their friends. Shared story is so important to community-making.
I feel a little like Andy Rooney on a ramble, without his skill at wrapping up the free association. So I’ll leave you with a few pieces of my story from today, in the form of my current gratitude list.
Gratitude List:
1. That the elder patriarchs in my life are not The Patriarchy. Such wonderful hearts, such rich meaning-making and humility and acceptance and tolerance.
2. That the matriarchs continue to hone their voices, to lead the way into the story. The ways they lead the charge to defend justice, to admit anger, to fiercely and joyfully protect and nurture. Their solid practicality.
3. Spirit, the fifth sacred thing, the wind that makes all winds that blow, the flame, the Center, the Mystery.
4. The LCCN came for my book. Conservative estimate is that it will be ready to purchase within a week. I stated that with much more calm than I feel. I am extremely excited.
5. Being in a community where people pass babies around. Watching the way people’s eyes change, the way their energies shift into such a tender place when they hold a baby.
6. Bonus: The way Jon can make me laugh by throwing out some little Jon-ism. Still. After more than half our lives. I still love the way he makes me laugh.
May we walk in beauty.
I have been thinking about how I make meaning as I speak. As I am talking, I come to know what I mean. I might have ideas and thoughts in my head, but the nuance and subtleties of language shift and tweak the essence of a thought. It grows or shrinks as I speak it. Sometimes in conversation I find myself saying a thing, only to realize that it’s not exactly what I meant, so I need to re-phrase and re-re-phrase it. I love conversations where people work at that process together. Sometimes I am left confused when I assume that someone will be joining me in that conversational work, and then they don’t really get it.
I think that’s why I like poetry. Using words so intentionally, packing so much meaning into each word, means that the landscape of meaning shifts and twists with each reading, sometimes becoming clearer and more defined, and other times deconstructing and separating out into many threads.
Gratitude List:
1. The wonderful owl kites that Suzy Hamme gave the kids. Ellis ran around the farm for hours today with an owl flapping behind him. What magic you gave us, my friend!
2. Picnic at Sam Lewis State Park, flying kites, rolling down the hill, climbing the rocks, playing on the playground, pretending to be astronauts and aliens.
3. Planting a garden with the kids (which was mostly me planting and them sort of diddling, but still, it was a fun project.
4. The way the sun rays sparkled through the cloud just before sunset.
5. Dreams that bring comfort.
May we walk in Beauty.
Here’s a poem I posted here back in January. It’s in the chapbook that I sent to Finishing Line Press for their Emerging Women’s Voices contest.
I spent some time today thinking about not knocking people over the head with hope, especially when they’re walking in the wasteland and the hope-talkers can even appear threatening. I have so much to learn about being a compassionate presence, about acknowledging pain without trying to shift it, to fix it.
Still, I don’t think that a poem about hope by a random blogger can go amiss.
Sing You Gently Joy
Here in the house of exhaustion
Here in the place of retreat
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here when your way is weary
Here where your heart is uneasy
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here when the day closes over you
Here when your sighs bring tears
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here where the way seems hopeless
Here where the rage overflows
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here where the No overcomes you
Here where despair abounds
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here in the birthplace of fear
Here in the abode of loneliness
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Each morning a new sun rises
and the stories are always renewed
As we sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope.
Todd and I were about the ages of my children today.
Gratitude List:
1. Peregrine flying over the farm today. What a gift. The Wanderer winging across the ridge.
2. The healing power of story. Unexpected story of intense pain and tender joy and hope. From the man who fixed the tractor. What a gift. What grace.
3. The tractor is fixed. A little less stress for the farmer I love. What a gift.
4. Wild chamomile. What a gift.
5. Learning what my work is. What grace.
May we walk tenderly, in Beauty.
Yesterday a group of us got to chatting. I said I thought we needed–now, today–to follow Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation and set up this congress of women to work toward a better future for the world’s children. Rochelle seconded the motion and suggested the group to begin it. Mara responded immediately, said she’d love to see the Proclamation itself re-written for today, but she didn’t think she had time. Within an hour, however, she had created the powerful document which follows, carrying the urgency and intensity of Ward Howe’s original, and weaving her own voice into the heart of it.
A NEW MOTHER’S DAY PROCLAMATION FOR 2013
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your home be city or country, forest or field!
Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our children shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of kindness, benevolence, compassion and patienceWe women of one country will be too tender toward those of another to allow injustice and destruction to continue.”
From the throat of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Make safe, make safe!”
The work of war is not the balance of justice. Blood will not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As we have forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let us meet first, as women, to lament and commemorate the dead. Let us take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing into our own time the sacred impress of love.
Say firmly: “We will not stifle our voices when the voices of so many go unheard. We will speak for the speechless, cultivate comfort for the desolate, foster hope for the fearful and give them room to trust.”
From the throat of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Seek healing, seek healing!”
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, we earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objectives, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.
Say firmly: “We will no longer turn away from violence in any form. We will challenge the dominant paradigm, offer exchange to dissonance, exemplify compassion and cultivate communication.”
From the throat of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Speak your truth! Tell your stories!”
We will not rest our heads on the pillow of oppression. We will not eat the food of tainted fields. We will not drink the elixir of fear. We will not stand by and watch each other’s children go hungry. We will not allow conflict within our homes, our countries or our world to go unnoticed, but instead will work together to find solutions that benefit all living creatures of this planet.
Say firmly: “We are the mothers of nature, the mothers of mountains. We are the mothers of the well and the mothers of the river. We are the mothers of the hearth and the mothers of the heart. We are the mothers of the wind and the mothers of the work.”
From the throat of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Celebrate the solutions! Create change!”
As women, we commit to mothering the world. We will nurture each part, offering comfort, healing and reconciliation. We will turn our attention towards the pieces that we can address and we will offer each other strength in the face of cynicism and humility in the face of arrogance. We will work together, finding our common ground and points of connection and celebrating our differences rather than allowing them to separate us. We will care for ourselves so that we may better care for others. We will make small changes day to day and build upon the larger ones with the outreach of our inspiration, honoring beauty, creativity and radical thinking.
Gratitude List:
1. New Proclamations
2. Seeing Lady Oriole several times in the last couple of days. Her conversation and manner of dress are less ostentatious than those of her consort. She appears like rays of sunlight in the dappled leaves of the sycamore, and her speech is whispery and even a little petulant compared to his piccolo.
3. The way Jon’s music infects us all. He’ll walk humming through a room, and suddenly I’ll notice that I or one of the boys is singing his song. Today it was Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” Joss picked it up and started humming it.
4. Julian of Norwich: All will be well, and all will be well. All manner of thing shall be well. And it may not always feel like it, but there’s that glimmer, like a yellow-green bird high in the new-green leaves of spring. You almost can’t see it, but it’s there. All will be well.
5. That viral video of the couple doing karaoke at the gas pump. I smile every time I think of them. I want to know those bright and delightful spirits. Such utter, spontaneous joy and playfulness.
May we walk in Beauty.
First, some mulling drawn from today’s Facebook conversations. Then a poem. Then a Gratitude List.
Sometimes I don’t know if I can bear the weight of the problems of the world. I get so furious, not just at the military-industrial complex, but at the way corporations have become the ruling classes, the way Monsanto has taken over the USDA, the way our consumer culture is balanced on the backs of slaves and oppressed people elsewhere in the world. I don’t know if we can turn things back. But I know that there are lots of like-minded people out there who want to turn things back. I’m not sure how we do that, but I want to start by putting as much love out there as possible in the meantime.
I don’t mean for that to sound childish or like I am ignoring the problem. I bring it back to the metaphor of the bowl for the heart. I used to think that I could only have one thing in there at a time, either the joyful things full of wonder, or the angry and despairing things. But recently I have pledged to just sit with the bowl open and let it all fall in together. And the whole crazy mix belongs there. The love I have for butterflies and songbirds is precisely why I hate Monsanto so. The delight I take in my children is precisely why the military-industrial complex terrifies me.
How can I maintain the balance in my head when I get so furious and despairing and tired and sad about so much that is happening in the world? Sometimes it feels so schizophrenic to speak of beauty and wonder and delight when something in my heart is cringing in fear of what the future holds for my children. I know that remembering what I love, remembering what holds my heart, reminding myself why I fight, all this helps me to keep doing my work.
If we who care deeply enough to walk the cliffs of despair, if we let ourselves get frozen or lost or broken on those cliffs, then whatever it is that we’re fighting against has begun to win. Maybe that’s it. Instead of just using my rage and despair to fight this thing, I want to find ways to use my love and wonder to overcome it.
Perhaps my work of late has been too passive, too much in the realm of prayer and contemplation. What is the next step, I wonder?
These Are the Words
These are the things that I tell myself, over and over again.
These are the words I use to remember.
Don’t forget to do your soul-work.
Don’t stop because it seems like no one is watching,
because it seems like no one else is doing their work.
They are working.
Ask around. Tell your own story.
Suddenly they pop up like mushrooms,
all over the yard,
like fairy rings that fairly sparkle in the moonlight.
I always say, Be the web. Throw the lines from one to one to one.
Today I say, Be mycelium.
All those underground signals racing through the soil,
through the roots, through the fine hairs so tiny,
so tiny they are more energy than matter.
But that’s what matters.
That’s the heart of the matter.
We’re all doing our work, sending messages to each other,
invisible like energy,
like the sermons of the fungi
traveling those invisible underground highways.
Something is going to pop up.
I say, Something is going to pop up!
One morning you will wake up
and they’ll be there,
not just hiding underneath the leaves
with the shy toads and salamanders,
but spiced throughout the lawn
throughout the lawns
all over the world,
saying
We are here!
We are doing our work!
In the meantime, keep hoping,
keep praying,
keep making magic spells,
like the one my son made today
from dandelions and Virginia Creeper
to bring peace among the chickens,
and from them to their eggs and to us
and then to the whole world.
In the meantime,
keeping speaking the names of the captives.
Your words will set them free.
Keep singing and dancing,
praying and hoping.
Be the Underground Laureate of The Poetry of Waiting.
Be the One who Sings to the Dark Moon.
Be the Dancer in the Sullen Crowd.
Be the Painter of Speckled Eggs.
Oh, I have to say it, though the activists have said it a thousand times,
like Gandhi said it:
Be the change you wish to see.
Until the twining vines of the sacred squash
grow from your heaving heart,
until the song of the whale echoes through your deserts,
until the world is born afresh.
Until the world is born afresh.
This is the song. This is the poem.
This is the story that will heal the world.
Now.
Let’s get down to business.
Gratitude List:
1. A pair of indigo buntings feeding in the dandelions before the rain. (Perhaps some day I will write a gratitude list without the wing-folk. Or perhaps not.)
2. Ferns. The ones I transplanted today from the barn wall to the house and walkway were taller than my children. I think I may just keep adding and adding until the lawn is gone and the children can walk beneath their waving fronds like hobbits.
3. The feeling of something being released in my spirit as the air pressure changes before rain.
4. The way people care for your spirit when you ask for help. That’s what I mean by asking around. All that good work is being done, all that hopeful energy, all that intentionality, all that tremendous love waiting to spring into action, springing into action even before it is called upon. Oh, I believe in angels, and some of them take human form.
5. Conversations about the grandmothers that bring them into the present moment.
May we walk in beauty. May we walk in love.
This is pure play, loosely based on a game we made up during supper tonight. I think I might want to come back to it at some point and re-work the idea. It reminds me a little of Ted Hughes’ “Amulet.”
Where is the moon?
I think it is in the pond.
Where is the pond?
I think it is under the mountain.
Where is the mountain?
Inside the eye of the dragon.
Where is the dragon?
In the dreams of the fox.
Where is the fox?
In the egg of the hummingbird.
And the hummingbird?
In the shimmering colors of the sunset.
And the sunset?
In the spider’s web.
And the spider?
Oh, the spider is on the moon.
This is a photo of my grandmother Lura Slabaugh. I wonder how old she was in this picture?
Gratitude List:
1. All the birdie love in the air today. A bluebird feeding his sweetheart. Grackles mating–he did such an elaborate dance with his wings in fans while he sang her a sweet song, and watched her so intently with his bright white eyes.
2. The way the sun suddenly shone through the clouds when my boy and I were out checking the chickens this morning.
3. The way the big carpenter bee at the barn swims through the air to check me out–eye to eye–whenever I pass, and then zzzzez away.
4. Words, resplendent words, audacious, precious, unique, absurd, fetching, delightful, breathtaking words.
5. The way the Earth feeds us, even beyond what we can plant. There’s food out there, in the dandelions, the poke, the soon-to-ripen Juneberries, the dock and thistle and plantain. I use most of these mostly for tea at this point in my learning. Still, they nourish me.
May we walk in beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. Carla Christopher, the poet laureate priestess of Culture and Main. I am a little star-struck, spending time with all those good vibes today. Good, thoughtful interviews. Singer/songwriter Soji. Riverkeeper and Councilman and singer/songwriter Michael Helfrich. Poet and model Jess Angel. And Miles Coltrane, the cutest puppy ever. I’m still kind of high on this energy. Get the farmer off the farm. . .
2. The beautiful interchange between Maya Angelou and Diane Rehm after Angelou finished telling her personal story of horror. Such open hearts.
3. Those stacked-up clouds over the fields tonight while oriole sang in the hollow. The way the kale has bloomed bright yellow like wildfire spreading across the northern hillside. And Crimson Clover. And Purple Passion Asparagus. And those petulant pink Dogwoods.
4. This boy, who is seven years and not yet twelve hours old. I am so grateful for these children, for all they are learning, how and whom they are becoming.
5. Playing Wildcraft with my kids this evening, a cooperative plant-learning game that friends gave us for Ellis’s birthday today.
May we walk in beauty.
Ellis and his Great-Grandma Marian Weaver.
This morning, I spent some time writing about how my rages and my fears and my sadness are the things that help me to discover my Work in the world, my Soul Purpose. I’ve been thinking about how to better integrate those uncomfortable emotions rather than to sweep them under the rug, where the tend to either burn things or start to mildew and rot.
I was raging and tearful after reading about the recent slaughter of the last 15 surviving white rhinos of Mozambique. I was going into the red tunnel of fury. And then it hit me that this was a message. This is one of the clues to my Work. And I don’t just mean my vocation, I mean the work I do in the world. It may be activism, it may be writing letters or poems, it may be prayers and magic spells. But the things which I love so deeply that to lose them drives me into that red tunnel, those are the things which are my Soul Purpose.
“What are my tasks?” I wrote. “What is my Work? I think the place to start is in contemplation and meditation, connecting myself to the Deep Well of Love that makes me want to protect, to heal. Prayer, magic spells, weaving and shifting energies. Behind the scenes work. I don’t think I can stop there. I think prayer and contemplation need voices, need fingers.”
Later in the morning, a friend shared this Wendell Berry quote that says it more eloquently than I think I can: “What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how baldly and embarrassingly that word now lies on the page—for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love (adolescent, romantic, or “religious”), which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands, acts, showing its successes and failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity. I think that this sort of love defines the effective range of human intelligence, the range within its works can be dependably beneficent. Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous. Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows.” ~Wendell Berry
Gratitude List:
1. Much as I loved having babies, and proud as I am of that part of my journey, I am grateful that I am here contemplating and writing tonight instead of walking the labyrinth of labor that I was experiencing this night seven years ago (I was nearing my 24th hour of labor at this point).
2. I am grateful for that baby, for the boy he has become, for the ways in which he becomes himself more and more every day.
3. Frogs and creeks and glorious cousins.
4. 8 1/2 hours of healing sleep last night. I can hardly believe that my children and my cat and my own head let me manage that one.
5. The Columbia Re-Uzit Shop. I bought a new dress and summer shoes and some colorful plates.
May we walk in Beauty. All the days of our lives.
This is an older poem, one that I have pulled out again to put into my book.
Great Mother
I am the scent of dawn that rises from the owl’s feather
to awaken the floating moon.
I am the fingers of frost that vanish from the budded
branch, transformed by wren’s song.
I am the child of thunder, sinking into a purple
couch of sky.
I am the seed of the mountain that waits in the
memory of the hummingbird.
I am the tufted ears of the vixen, yearning to the footfall
of the field mouse.
I am the snakes of flame which slither through the dark
doorway of the ring of stones.
I am the lustful sermon of the bees,
earnest and ardent.
I am the wild eye of the star, silently observing
the wayward dance of the planets.
Have you seen me slip between the stones of the grotto?
Have you seen me winking in the coals of your sacred fire?
Have you seen me flash through the electric air of your dreams?
Oh search for me among the brambles and sharp stones on the hillside,
within the bubbling heart of the spring.
Listen for my name in the bluebird’s chortle,
in the whisper of wind through the milkweed.
I will be found.
I will be found.
Open your hands and search
within the wrinkled webs you carry there.
Grasp the shattered ray of light
which passes through the crystal’s heart.
Drink the shadows which surround you
as the day scampers away over the fields.
I am here.
I am here.
I am always here.
Gratitude List:
1. Honey Lemon Ginger Tea
2. The gloaming. The way the trees come alive in the dusk.
3. People who care deeply about the Earth and Her creatures.
4. Freshly vacuumed rugs and freshly mowed lawns.
5. The fresh faces of dandelions.
May we walk in beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 