I am emptying myself, a little at a time, settling in to the laze and the loaf, stretching my spine like an elastic band and letting it ease back into a loose curl.
Oh, I have Lots of Things to Do. But here I am, and that goldfinch out there is shining like a liquid drop of pure sunlight, and a cat needs a human hand in just that spot between his ears and I am happy to oblige.
I’ll practice breathing. How does it go? In. And out. In. And out. In. And out.
Grateful: For the summer stretch before school begins, in whatever form it will begin. For that golden finch, and the fierce pink of the wild peas on the hillside behind him. For making things. Right now my obsession is the sewing machine. For my bike, which I have sorely neglected for years, but which I ride 2-3 times/week now. For anticipation of time with beloveds, masked and distanced, of course.
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!
“Choose to be in touch with what is wonderful, refreshing, and healing within yourself and around you.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.” ―Meister Eckhart
“Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“No matter what the fight, don’t be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.” ―Mary Harris Jones
Gratitudes: * Birdsounds: Thursday, bob white, whom I haven’t heard call in years, called out three times as I was starting my evening walk. This morning, I have been hearing the peewee sliding the blue notes up and down his little scale. * Yesterday, I took my walk in the morning in a gentle sprinkle of rain, instead of in the evening. All the blue-eyed chicory were open and sparkling, and the stars of St. John’s Wort were shining out between the chicory and the lacy asters. And a flock of shining golden finches kept twittering and bouncing through the chicory ahead of me.
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty.
“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.” —Frida Kahlo
Rob Brezsny ft. Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “Devote yourself to your heart’s desire with unflagging shrewdness. Make it your top priority. Let no lesser wishes distract you. But consider this, too. You may sabotage even your worthiest yearning if you’re maniacal in your pursuit of it.
Bear in mind the attitude described by Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her book “Women Who Run with the Wolves”: “All that you are seeking is also seeking you. If you sit still, it will find you. It has been waiting for you a long time.”
Speculate on what exactly that would look like in your own life. Describe how your heart’s desire has been waiting for you, seeking you.”
“Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually.” ―Robert Hass, Field Guide
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” ―Albert Einstein
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ―Terry Pratchett
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large—I contain multitudes.” ―Walt Whitman
“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” ―Friedrich Nietzsche
Gratitudes: 1. Grateful for wonderful neighbors, who invited me to sit (at a safe distance) and chat as I was returning from yesterday’s walk. Lovely folks, with fascinating life experiences. 2. The black snake who slithered across the trail in front of my bike yesterday. 3. The doe and fawn who bounded off the path in front of my bike yesterday. 4. Every day, I feel more healthy, limber, and strong. It is requiring a certain level of obsession with my fitness and good health, but I hope that it will become habit and regular rhythm. 5. Always more to learn. This can be painful because I sometimes just want to BE woke, to BE knowledgeable, to BE enlightened. Getting to a new stage of awareness always feels so good, but it’s dangerous to stop and call it done. And really, it’s always good to learn a new thing, to evolve, to transform. (Which brings me around to the first point again, because this is part of the conversation I had with my amazing neighbors yesterday.)
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!
“Without understanding yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world?” —Ramana Maharshi
“There is peaceful. There is wild. I am both of them.” —Nayyirah Waheed
“This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.” —Marion Woodman
“It was important, Dumbledore said, to fight, and to fight again, and keep fighting, for only then could evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated….” —JK Rowling
“Help one another. It is the only way to survive.” —Elie Wiesel
“Therefore, dark past, I’m about to do it. I’m about to forgive you
for everything.” —Mary Oliver
“I believe that without some inner experience of powerlessness, and the wisdom that potentially comes with it, most individuals will misunderstand and abuse power.” —Richard Rohr
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” —Anais Nin
“Let us not become the evil that we deplore.” —Rep. Barbara Lee, 9/14/01
From Terry Tempest Williams: “We are creatures of paradox, women and bears, two animals that are enormously unpredictable, hence our mystery. Perhaps the fear of bears and the fear of women lies in our refusal to be tamed, the impulses we arouse and the forces we represent….As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.”
This is the season when chicory and day lilies bloom together, and the lace of Queen Anne, and the stars of St. John, and the tall hag’s tapers of the mullein, and the profusion of dogbane, and the tidy self-contained heads of red and sweet clover, and the yellow sparkles of sweet melilot, and the nodding pink balls of milkweed that catch you with their wisps of scent when you’ve already walked on five paces. Our roadside is rife with the buzzing and humming of pollinators.
Yesterday, I worked in the herb room at Radiance, the little shop where I work one day a week in the summertime. It’s one of my favorite places. In the evening, Jon and I walked down the road. As we walked, I began to see the same beings I had been smelling and measuring during the day: St. John’s wort, plantain, mullein, red clover, chicory, raspberry leaves, thistle. Wendell Berry’s words flash into my heart: “What we need is here.” And a fragment of Mary Oliver: “The world offers itself. . .” ***** I often dream that I am wandering down the hallways of a large and rambly and labyrinthine hotel. Sometimes it’s a school, sometimes city streets, but mostly a hotel. I go down hallways and through doors that sometimes lock behind me, into dark passages, up stairways, back into well-lit hallways with a thousand doors. Sometimes I am completely alone, and sometimes there’s a bustle of people.
The anxiety dreams are usually set here, and I have a deadline, somewhere I have to be, and I can’t find my way. Usually, for me, I’m trying to find a class I am supposed to have been teaching, and I’m probably late, and I may have actually missed teaching the class for a couple of days, and my students are completely unsupervised, and I should have had the schedule and directions with me, but I don’t, and I can’t seem to pull it up on my phone. Sometimes, like last night, I ask a helpful receptionist. Last night, I was told brightly to please take a seat and I would be helped in fifteen minutes or so. But I was already five minutes late for a forty minute class. So I set off again to try to find my way on my own.
At one point last night, I did manage to meet up with friends and colleagues for lunch in an incredibly busy dining hall (no Covid in this dream), which was nice, except I was terribly afraid they would discover that I had not taught a single class yet that day and that I had even forgotten how to get from class to class. I was so ashamed. But Ellis was in the dining hall, too, even though he was with his friends, and it was nice to see him there, and happy, and the cooks had made a huge pot of ugali, so he and I kept going back for more of that.
I had kicked off my pointy red high-heeled shoes in my own classroom, but I was supposed to go to a different classroom for every class, and I was supposed to be teaching Math and Foods as well as English, and I suddenly realized as I was rushing down the hall that I was barefoot (thank heavens I wasn’t naked this time), and I was further ashamed that people would see me barefoot because it’s against dress code not to wear shoes.
So it was a long and tiring night, and I kept waking up, and every time I went back to sleep I was back in the dream. At one point, I did manage to find a schedule, but I was already so far behind in the day that it was sort of pointless, and I couldn’t find my way anyway, so I went back and got my painful shoes and sat in on someone else’s French class.
Glad to be awake now.
Gratitudes: For plant medicine all around, for wise women, for catfolk, for time to make and create, for the mirror of dreams, for giving up shame–anxious bit by anxious bit, for the ones who are committed to transforming themselves and society.
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!
“To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.” ―Martin Heidegger
“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“You have to learn to get up from the table when LOVE is no longer being served.” —Nina Simone
“I like sitting at the piano. I like the idea that there are things coming in through the window and through you and then down to the piano and out the window on the other side. If you want to catch songs you gotta start thinking like one, and making yourself an interesting place for them to land like birds or insects. Once you get two or three tunes together, wherever three or more are gathered, then others come.” —Tom Waits
“The poem, I’ve always felt, is an opportunity for me to create an integrated whole from so many broken shards.” —Rafael Campo
“Which came first, the fear or the gun? The broken heart or the bleeding one? The impulse toward death or the desperate reach for love?” —Mark Morford
“A journey can become a sacred thing: Make sure, before you go, To take the time To bless your going forth, To free your heart of ballast So that the compass of your soul Might direct you toward The territories of spirit Where you will discover More of your hidden life, And the urgencies That deserve to claim you.” —John O’Donohue
“There is no such thing as being non-political. Everything we say or do either affirms or critiques the status quo. To say nothing is to say something: The status quo—even if it is massively unjust and deceitful—is apparently okay. The silence of many Christians is used to legitimize the United States’ obsession with weapons, its war against the poor, Israel’s clear abuse of Palestine, politicians who are “pro-life” on the issue of abortion but almost nothing else, the de facto slavery of mass incarceration, and on and on.” —Richard Rohr
I didn’t have time to write this morning before I left for work. Gratitudes: 1. Last night, we saw a bat flying between the barn and the sycamore tree. Bats are some of my favorite people. 2. Tonight on our walk, we saw a frog on the road. When I reached to try to move it from the road, it suddenly zig-zagged between my legs and off toward the creek. 3. Working in the Herb Room today. I might be an airy-fairy sanguine personality and a fiery Leo birth sign, and have a special affinity for Mama Ocean, but when it comes to herbs, the things that gets me most excited is the roots. Earth seems to be my medicine: roots and stones. 4. Kittens! Have I mentioned the kittens? I love little kittens. And their mama. 5. Cucumbers. They’re refreshing.
May we walk in Beauty!
“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
“You say you care about the poor? Then tell me, what are their names?” —Gustavo Gutierrez
Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” —Roald Dahl
History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again. —Maya Angelou
“Doors closing, doors opening. Doors closing, doors I’m opening. I am safe. It’s only change. I am safe. It’s only change.” —chant (I don’t know the author)
Vine and branch we’re connected in this world of sound and echo, figure and shadow, the leaves contingent, roots pushing against earth. An apple belongs to itself, to stem and tree, to air that claims it, then ground. Connections balance, each motion changes another. Precarious, hanging together, we don’t know what our lives support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing. Each holy thing is borrowed. Everything depends. —Jeanne Lohmann, ‘Shaking the Tree’
Parker Palmer: “The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am all of the above.” If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are—embrace it with transformative love—we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and flee from the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.”
“It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.” —Mae Jemison
“Strength,”a two-part redacted poem. I’ve really been enjoying working with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. In fact, if I publish these, I think I might have to use that as the name of the collection. I wonder if that would be a problem.
Today’s Gratitude: 1. Getting back to a project I was dreading. I think two or three more days of work might get me finished with the scraping of the paint. Then we have to decide on the new color. 2. Kittens! We’re pretty dogmatic about not letting cats reproduce for the good of the whole cat-tribe, so the children have never had the experience of raising kittens. Since a local stray had kittens in the barn, we have had the pleasure of gently taming her, and now watching kittens grow. 3. All the local places to hike and bike.
Walk in Beauty!
“…Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?” —William Butler Yeats, 1926
“The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” —Dorothy Day
“Silence is the beginning of God purifying the soul.” —St. Basil the Great
“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.” —Cesar Chavez
“What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity—the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.” —Parker Palmer
“I am afraid to drive the demons from my life lest the angels also flee.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“What’s the greatest lesson a woman can learn? That since day one, she’s already had everything she needs within herself. It’s the world that’s convinced her she did not.” —Rupi Kaur
“Choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people, including yourself. One minute you’ll pray that the transformation stops, and the next minute you’ll pray that it never ends. You’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time.” ―Brene Brown
“Sacred activism is the fusion of the mystic’s passion for God with the activist’s passion for justice―creating a third fire, which is the burning sacred heart that longs to help, preserve, and nurture every living thing. ” ―Andrew Harvey
“What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.” ―Frederick Buechner
“Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.” ―The Talmud
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” ―Joseph Campbell
“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” ―Elie Wiesel
“The seduction in the wake of betrayal is to take up a thicker armour, to practice at expecting less of others, or to punish one’s own naïveté. But these are the same refusals from which our world is dying. Never should a judgement be made against one’s willingness to open the heart.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“I’m so lucky we lived through who we were to become who we are.” ―Neil Hillborn
By the time I got to the end of the second sentence, and saw the words “friend” and “Nazi” in successive lines, it suddenly became impossible for me to search out any other phrase than “Nazi friend” to end the poem, but the order was transposed. Sometimes people use arrows to make such a puzzle work. I decided to get out my little knife.
I woke up this morning with this phrase in my head: “Hymns to The Unknown Civilization.” I might have to create some sort of poetry/art project with that title.
You know that feeling when you wake up, and the cobweb of a dream is still clinging to your consciousness? I always try to maintain that dreamlike consciousness while I stumble downstairs so it stays fresh enough to write down. The dream flotsam offers myriad gifts. Sometimes it’s a stark image floating in my mind’s eye, asking me to look and consider and contemplate. I especially love when it’s word or a song. Sometimes the phrase is so surreal that I can’t weave it into the meaning of daytime reality and I just enjoy its oddness, its quirky presence in my day. Other times, I feel like there are distinct and specific messages in the words and images and stories that appear at the ends of dreamtime.
Gratitude: The sounds of my walk yesterday: Greetings with friendly neighbors, the horses making that blustery horsey sigh, Barb’s goats calling greetings from up the hillside, bird twitterings in the trees, the deep glugging of the bullfrogs in the pond. Earlier, as I was riding my bike on the rail trail, I heard the wood thrushes calling across the path to each other.
May we walk in Beauty!
“If only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“A woman must be willing to burn hot, burn with passion, burn with words, with ideas, with desire for whatever it is that she truly loves.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.” —Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
“I can’t offer justice so I offer just trees.” —Kilian Schoenberger (who photographs trees and woods)
Dalai Lama: “There are only two days of the year in which nothing can be done. One is called yesterday and the other is called tomorrow. That means today is the ideal day to love, to believe, to create and to live.”
“We cannot assume the sacredness nor spiritual livingness of the earth or accept it as a new ideology or as a sentimentally pleasing idea. We must experience that life and sacredness, if it is there, in relationship to our own and to that ultimate mystery we call God. We must experience it in our lives, in our practice, in the flesh of our cultural creativity. We must allow it to shape us, as great spiritual ideas have always shaped those who entertain them, and not expect that we can simply use the image of Gaia to meet emotional, religious, political, or even commercial needs without allowing it to transform us in unexpected and radical ways. The spirituality of the earth is more than a slogan. It is an invitation to initiation, to the death of what we have been and the birth of something new.” —David Spangler
Rob Brezsny reflects on Fuller and Socrates: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” wrote Buckminster Fuller. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Socrates said something similar: “The secret of change is to focus your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
Are they right? Or should we instead focus on unleashing our apocalyptic rage at the corruption and decay of the dying order?
Gratitude: It turns out that the feral tortoiseshell bobtail cat in the neighborhood is a female. Yesterday, we watched her in the front drive and yard. When we opened the door and called to her, she startled and moved off toward the barn, but then stopped and looked back. I suppose I am reading too much into it, but it sure did seem that she was asking us to follow. Josiah did, and discovered the box in the barn where she’d gone to nurse her three ginger bobtail babies.
This kid is loving the idea of taming a cat and kittens this summer. We’ll be looking for homes, of course. Oddly, a friend of mine has been asking me to help her find a kitten or kittens, and here they suddenly are. We’re hoping to be able to catch Mathilda (Joss has named her) by the time the kittens are old enough for families of their own, so she can at least be fixed.
May we walk in Tenderness and Beauty!
“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” ―Pema Chödrön
“Morning is the best of all times in the garden. The sun is not yet hot. Sweet vapors rise from the earth. Night dew clings to the soil and makes plants glisten. Birds call to one another. Bees are already at work.” —William Longgood
“Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn—and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb. So, let us drink a cup of tea.” —Muriel Barbery, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”
“There is ecstasy in paying attention.” —Anne Lamott
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Here is an Interdependence Day piece I wrote a few years ago. For years, I felt uncomfortable on July 4th because I believed we had broken our ideals and our pact of humanity and equality, but now I realize that we never truly lived up to them. Some days, I still hope that we can become the Good Force that we have sort of thought we were. I recognize that this is a painful conversation for some of my beloveds, that to question the root truth of the nation that you have given your lives and your families to feels like a terrible betrayal. I only ask that you consider that the whole idea of the nation has been a terrible betrayal for those we enslaved since before we even became a nation, and for those who lived here in the Before, who were decimated and tortured, whose land we stole in order to make a nation at all. *** I recognize that today is the United States independence day. It’s always crunchy for me.
I don’t celebrate war and war “victories.” I don’t celebrate a freedom that was borne on the backs of slaves. I don’t celebrate the genocide that wiped out, marginalized and impoverished the people of the first nations. I don’t celebrate a freedom that ignores our slave-owning and genocidal history to proclaim us all-good and all-powerful, evidence to the contrary. I don’t celebrate the increasing calls to close us off, to keep out those who seek sanctuary in our borders. I don’t celebrate throwing candy to the rich while grabbing bread from the poor. I don’t celebrate the rush to destroy this beautiful part of the Earth, to call her gifts “resources” that must be maximized and used until she is played out. I don’t celebrate the fear-mongering that I see, the use of fear to keep people in their places, afraid of each other, afraid of their own freedom. I don’t celebrate “America First.” I struggle to celebrate when the country itself is in crisis, when those who were chosen to administer our ship of state have instead chosen to rule like the king we thought we had freed ourselves from those centuries ago.
I can celebrate human community. I can celebrate the spirit that longs to break the bonds of tyranny for all peoples. I can celebrate the spirit of that statue that stands in our harbor, her lamp held high in welcome for all who seek refuge. I can celebrate the strong spirit of resistance to tyranny that continues to pull people to demand rights for ALL of us. I can celebrate the beautiful diversity of us, and the way we find connecting points, the way we so willingly wear each others’ stories. I can celebrate the music, the foodways, the arts, the dialects, the histories, of us in all our many colors and shades and tones and temperaments. I can celebrate inTERdependence. I can celebrate the hope that we will stand up to the greed-mongers and the fear-mongers and the hate-mongers, that we will work to create a nation where all can be free, where all can expect justice.
Gratitude, today, for the awakeners, for the story-sharers, for the truth-speakers, for the one who walk into the fire, for the ones willing to change and to make change.
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!
“If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.” ―Lao Tzu
“The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others. This is where bravery lives, where we’ll find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power.” —Terry Tempest Williams
“You are something that the Whole Universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the Whole Ocean is doing…” ―Alan Watts
“You are beautiful, and I have loved you dearly, more dearly than the spoken word can tell.” —Roger Whittaker
“It’s a matter of discipline. When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend to your planet.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupery in “The Little Prince”
“To cope with losing our world requires us to descend through the anger into mourning and sadness, not speedily bypass them to jump onto the optimism bandwagon or escape into indifference. And with this deepening, an extended caring and gratitude may open us to what is still here, and finally, to acting accordingly.” —Per Espen Stoknes
. . .if truth is to be taught, then teaching and learning must take the shape of truth itself–a community of faithful relationships. Education in truth must bring teacher and student into troth with each other, into the very image of the truth it hopes to convey.” —Parker J. Palmer
“No matter what they ever do to us, we must always act for the love of our people and the earth. We must not react out of hatred against those who have no sense.” ― John Trudell
“I celebrate independence anywhere it happens. The question here is how. When a diversity of peoples is destroyed or diminished in a holocaust of outrageous proportions for independence, does this truly result in liberty, justice and freedom for all? In a few generations indigenous peoples of America have been reduced to one-half of one percent. Imagine Africa with one-half of one percent Africans. We have been essentially disappeared in the story of America. Our massive libraries of knowledge, rich cultural and intellectual gifts have been disparaged, destroyed and broken by interloper religions and a hierarchical system of thought in which indigenous people exist only as savages. What then does this say about liberty and justice in this country?
“For healing the wound needs to be opened, purged and cleansed. Our stories need to be allowed. Our traditional ways and languages need to be honored. This country needs to apologize and reparations must be made. We all need to come together, every one of us to make a true plan for liberty and justice for all. As long as indigenous peoples are disappeared and disparaged, or surface only in Hollywood movies like The Lone Ranger, this country will remain as a child without parents, who has no sense of earth, history or spirituality.” —Joy Harjo
For the past few years, I’ve been working in this book I found a few years ago. My found poems were pretty limp and predictable. I think novels offer better variety for found poems.
Here’s a poem from 2017:
We Bleed by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Indeed, Mr. President, we bleed. There is blood coming out of our ears, blood coming out of our noses, blood coming out of our eyes, blood coming out of our wherevers. There is blood coming out of our faces, our faces lifted long in anger, our faces we have raised in rage.
We bleed, you see. We bleed. We bleed, and yet we do not die. Blood pours from our angry eyes. Blood flows from our vaginas (there’s the real word for it, if you would care to know. We’ll take it back, if you please– and even if you don’t).
Women’s blood is our revolution. We’re bleeding rivers of blood, the blood of life and death– menstrual blood, flowing from our red tents, flowing down the river valleys of this nation to where you sulk and natter in your great white house.
Your mother, too, gave her blood to these rivers, when she gave you birth. And your wives gave their blood to bring children to life.
Our blood flows down the wide and gentle Susquehanna, down Columbia, Patuxent, down Delaware and Myakka, down the Dan, the Mississippi, the Arkansas, and Conestoga, down the Flat, the Tar, the Eno, down the gentle Shenandoah, down the Snake, the Hoh, the Wabash, and the blue Atchafalaya.
Our menstrual blood is running in the deep, deep waters of the Deep, down the Wissahickon, down the Schuylkill, Neuse, and Monoshone, down the Cape Fear, down the Waccamaw, and down the Olentangy, down Santa Ynez, French Broad, the Roanoke, Missouri, down the Guadalupe, Anacostia, Blackwater, and the Pee Dee, down Yadkin, Catawba, Nantahala, and Clatskanie.
Our blood courses down our grand unwalled Rio Grande, down the Pullayup, Colorado, down Kanawha and Snohomish down the fiery Cuyahoga, down the Brazos, and Skokomish, down the Nooksack, the Nisqually, the Pecos, the Sammamish, down Sciota, down Ohio, the Snoqualmie, and Duwamish. We bleed down the chemical-drenched waters of the New, and the Red, red as our blood, down the Elkhart and Potomac.
Even from Elsewhere, our rivers are everywhere: the Moselle, the Mara, the Danube, the Afton, the Nile. Our blood flows down rivers to the White House where you tweet and twitter on your golden bed, to the halls of power where dried up old white men, withered husks with no blood of their own, think that they decide our futures.
We write with our blood on the Earth. We write, “Revolution!” We write, “Resist!” We write, “Now you have struck the women, you have struck a rock. Now you have entered a river.”
With our own blood, we write, “We will not be trivialized. nor delegitimized by insults of an overgrown illbred bully-child.
Yes, we bleed, Mr. President, and our bleeding will overwhelm your smug and violent ramblings. We bleed from our faces, our vaginas, our wherevers, and you will be washed in the rivers of our blood. And justice will roll like the rivers we bleed.
Gratitude List: 1. The companionship of cats 2. Gentle morning birdsong 3. Finding poetry 4. Laughing with the family 5. This little air conditioner
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!
“The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example. If they see their mothers and other women in their lives going forward despite fear, they’ll know it is possible.” —Gloria Steinem
“It is time for women to stop being politely angry.” —Leymah Gbowee
“The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others. This is where bravery lives, where we’ll find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power.” —Terry Tempest Williams
“The heart that breaks open can hold the whole universe. Your heart is that large. Trust it. Keep breathing.” —Joanna Macy
“Peace is not something you must hope for in the future. It is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present, you will never find it.” —Thomas Merton
“To stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.” —Pema Chödrön
From Joy Harjo— “Note to self today: Do not feed the monsters. Monsters are those thought threads that denigrate and disrespect self and others. Some are wandering thought forms, looking for a place to land and live. Some are sent to you deliberately or inadvertently. They can come from arrows or gossip, jealousy or envy. Or from just. . .thoughtlessness. Instead, have a party. Invite your helpers to the table. Give them something to do. They want to be helpful. And just celebrate. Feed the birds.
Second note: A positive mind makes a light slippery surface and anything not of it, slides off.”
“Sometimes we must surrender our own will for the greater good to come through. We are called to make ourselves vulnerable for a time, without answers, sacrificing our priorities to perceive more mythic goals. The word sacrifice is not, as we’ve been taught, synonymous with suffering, but comes from the root ‘to make sacred.’ We take a step outside of time, renouncing our urgency, giving up our plans and allow ourselves to be danced, to be sung, to be told like a story in its most vulnerable arc.” —Dreamwork with Toko-pa
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” —John Lewis
Mockingbird Chronicles 