Brigid’s Day is dawning, the indigo shifting to blue and grey over the southeastern hills. A strip of tangerine edges the horizon like a waking eye. From the porch, I heard a rooster from the Tome farm on the western rim of our little bowl of a hollow, and from the east, up in the brush and the treeline, I heard what must have been coyotes mumbling–not the loud yaps or howls, but friendly “look-what-I-founds” and “keep-together-now-kids.” The sound was closer to me than the dog kennel on the other sound of the ridge and it didn’t have the “help-I’ve-been-abandoned” sound of those residents.
This morning, groundhog will see her shadow or not, but spring is on its way. I do hope she slept late this morning, until the coyote family passed through.
Feel Earth stirring. Notice the kicking of the life that is growing this morning, the sap rising, the fresh breath of breeze. What new gestating thing is calling you into your wildness today? What is growing within you? How can you nourish and tend it within you until it grows to be ready for birth?
Blessed be your seeds, your fertile dreams, your deep awareness of that which will awaken, will bud, will sprout, will rise. Dream well. Plan big.
Gratitude List: 1. On Thursday evening, we saw sundogs on the way home from school–they were trying to become a halo, and they managed to be rainbow arcs on either side of the sun. I keep meaning to write them in a list. 2. Brigid’s morning. If you look deeply into the grey, you can see rich and watery blues. 3. Coconut shrimp for supper last night, with stir-fried zucchini, and butter pecan ice cream for dessert. 4. Creating the life I want. 5. All that is waiting to be born within me.
Sweet Shining and Shadowy Beloveds: This morning, it’s hard to keep believing in justice, hard to keep the long view in mind, hard to hold a vision of a world in which people of courage make decisions for the good of all, with wisdom, humility, and honor.
Part of me longs to enumerate all the horrors and destructions of the past week, to see the hurts laid out like a cadaver, to identify each killing blow, each bruise, each scar.
But that would only serve to feed the rising panic that’s been gathering in my gut this week, and perhaps in yours, too. Those pieces will come later, in poems. But now it’s time to tend to ourselves, to shore up and take stock and plan our way forward.
Let’s fight this collective panic attack. If we’re left lost and quivering, we only feed their power. Oh yes, I’m lost this morning, and quivering, too, re-traumatized. Let’s acknowledge it, notice where it lodges in our bodies.
My muscles actually ache from all the tightness I’ve been holding in. My head is pounding and my brain is foggy.
Now, it’s time to push back the panic: Breathe in. Straighten your spine. Lower your shoulders. Breathe out. Roll your neck and shoulders. Stretch and wriggle your spine until you feel yourself to be a line drawn between heaven and earth, a conduit of energy that flows through you. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Notice every place your body is touching a surface. Notice the sensations in your body. My backside and thighs on the chair.One foot on the floor, one on a chair rail.This cozy jacket keeps me just warm enough.My tongue’s a little scalded from that first sip of coffee.
What do you hear? The water in the cat’s drinking fountain, a small boy clicking his tongue, the creaking of an old house on a chilly morning.
What do you taste? (Grab a bite of something, or remember a favorite taste sensation.) The bite of pepper and the creamy counterpart in the pepperjack cheese.
What do you smell? Coffee, vanilla, springtime
Look around you. Find a color, a texture, a beautiful thing. The shining scarlet drop of red on the head of that downy woodpecker.The sweet, soft salmon leaves of the Japanese maple,still clinging to the branches and twigs.So many winter goldfinches on the thistle bag!
Now, here we are in the doorway of a new season. Today and tomorrow mark the beginning of Imbolc, the Season of Stirrings. New life is coming, cold snap or not. Sap will rise. Seeds will sprout. The Earth spins and whirls on in her dance through the cosmos.
One of the old names for today is Candlemas, when we acknowledge how the light has been within us all along, how much light we have to offer. Take stock of your candles. What is the small flame that you can offer the world in this moment? What is the fuel that you share?
Perhaps you are already doing it–tending daily to children or calling your senators, teaching teenagers to ask discerning questions or planting seeds for the crops that will feed your neighbors, healing bodies, gathering friends, listening. Today, this week, this month, do that work like a prayer, like a magic spell. Do it with intention, knowing that your work is changing the world, that what you do is fighting the forces of wanton destruction and power-mongering.
And maybe take up another thing this week. Make cranes for the Tsuru for Solidarity March, when Japanese Americans for social justice will be marching on Washington in early June to demand the closure of internment camps in the United States. Become an advocate for immigration reform. Send money or food to groups who are taking food to asylum-seekers forced to wait in inhumane conditions in Mexico. Express your support for Muslim people, and people from African and Asian countries which have been added to the US travel bans. Help people register to vote.
To combat the lies and obfuscations: Speak truth. Magically. Prayerfully. To combat the normalized cruelty: Speak compassion and tenderness. Prayerfully. Magically. To combat the power-mongering: Share your privilege. Offer the microphone, the stage, the moment. Do it prayerfully. Do it magically. To combat the greed-mongering: Be generous. Give. Share. Do it magically and prayerfully.
Another ancient name for this day, this season, is Brigid, after the ancient goddess of the Celtic peoples, who offered her muse to poets, to metalworkers, and to healers. She later became syncretized with the beloved St. Brighid, and so this aspect of human understanding of the Divine was not lost. Water and flame and word are her tools, her symbols. Today, make a poem, or make art, or make a nourishing broth to honor the gifts the Holy One has given you to make and change and heal. Do it prayerfully, as an act of defiant hope in the face of lies and cruelty and greed.
And also, this is the Groundhog’s moment. Tomorrow is the day when we check on the burrowers and the underworld dwellers. What light do they see? What shadows? In Advent, we walked into our own shadows. On Epiphany, we celebrated our light. And now, as we feel the heavy weight of the week’s shadows like a physical burden upon our shoulders, we must acknowledge and greet our own shadows. How do they give us power? How do they sap our power? Can we work with them instead of against them? Can we find their deepest meanings?
We can’t know what the coming days will bring. Too many signs point toward historical repetitions that turn me to salt, to stone. I freeze. I feel small and insignificant. But I must remember, constantly: Nothing we do now–to fight the tides of hatred and cruelty, to stand between the powerful and the vulnerable, to create holiness and beauty and health–will be wasted, no matter what happens. Now, perhaps more than ever, every act of hope and healing and love matters.
And:
We are not alone. You are not alone. Reach out. Take hands. Build the webs. Ask for help, and be the helper.
Let’s situate ourselves so that we are always ready–strong enough, centered enough, grounded enough–to step up and do the work of love and compassion and justice, to stand up, to stand between, to risk, to raise our voices, to be the fierce and defiant hope for the future we want to create.
Gratitude List: 1. Gulls navigating north over the River 2. Yesterday’s pink morning 3. The purposeful morning flight of crows 4. Friday is here. Everyone is in the carpool on both trips on Fridays, so we can listen to our story TWICE! And tonight is family movie night. Lots of story today. 5. Morning stretches. I had gotten out of the habit of morning yoga. Truth be told, one of the more complicated stretches had become a little difficult for me, so instead of working harder to get there, I jumped ship. I’m back now, and I did manage, with a little work to catch my left foot with my left hand, though I am wobblier than I was and made sure I was right beside the counter so I wouldn’t fall. My goal is to get back to comfortable balance sometime this spring.
On a walk by the pond yesterday with my small boy, the phone slipped as I was taking a photo, and gave me a swirly image, so I replicated the slip, and found this.
Gratitude List: 1. Motivation. Wherever it comes from. I read a silly thing the other day that suggested that if you have trouble getting the motivation to exercise or remembering to take your vitamins, imagine that the health boost is magically transferred to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Somehow, at least for now, it’s been helping. 2. Learning to rest. When I had the backlog stacks of grading hanging over me, I didn’t always manage to get to chipping away at it every evening, but everything I did was colored by that low-grade panic: I SHOULD be doing that. Now that I am caught up and keeping up, I still find that panic rising, and now I can remind myself that everything is okay. I am caught up, and I am going to keep up with it this time. I have a better plan. 3. Little synchronicities 4. Little daily rituals 5. Nourishment, of all sorts
May we walk in Beauty!
“We love because it’s the only true adventure.” —Nikki Giovanni
“Everything we do is music.” —John Cage
Abba Poemon said, “Teach your mouth to say what is in your heart.”
“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” ―Audre Lorde
“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” ―Audre Lorde
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” ―Audre Lorde
“We’re still dumb kids, just gray and tame. If we had it to do again, we’d get it right.” ―from Jack Ridl’s “The Reunion”
“For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.” ―Evelyn Underhill
“… a ditch somewhere – or a creek, meadow, woodlot, or marsh…. These are places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin.… Everybody has a ditch, or ought to. For only the ditches and the field, the woods, the ravines – can teach us to care enough for all the land.” —Robert Michael Pyle, Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland
In the dream, I am back in a little town where I have often found myself in dreams. It’s a fully realized little town, with neighborhoods and trees and people and traffic. It’s miles away from any other town or city, out in a scrubby desert. On the outskirts of town are several truckyards–I suppose this is the source of the town’s thriving economy. But this is something I know from previous dreams about the place. ** In this particular dream, we are living in a house (that I think belongs to us or a friend). People come and go through the property, and the path leads over a steep, muddy embankment in the corner of the yard. When I skid down over the hill, I realize at the bottom that the mud and grass cover an enormous quartz crystal “colony.” Some beautiful points are visible beneath the mud. Bits have broken off, and points and broken pillars of crystal scatter the lower yard. They’re so clear and shiny, even amidst the mud that they look almost more like Herkimer Diamonds than Quartz. I collect LOTS of random pieces, and someone has left baskets of stones and little carvings and treasures on the sidewalk near our house. I know that they are for us, if we want them, so I decide to come back and get them later, along with several of the more beautiful quartz bits. ** A little later, we’re going to eat lunch at the cafe in the community center (which might also be our house, or next to our house). We’ve gone to taste the Bhaktar (not a waking-life word or recipe), which is a cracker-like bread crumbled into a bowl with a creamy soup poured over top. On the way in, we pass a student of mine who is taking people’s orders. She looks at me and says, “Have you ever seen James Kinder’s wife? She reminds me so much of you!” I google them, and it turns out that she is the creative director of the plays and events at the community center.
After lunch, we watch some of the dancers preparing a performance at the community center. I don’t think James Kinder’s wife looks or acts anything like me. She reminds me a bit of Amanda Palmer, someone with a lot of creative energy and vision, which I really admire, but super vampy/campy in her own aspect, which makes me feel uncomfortable and awkward. I wonder if people perceive me as vampy and insincere. Not that she is insincere, really. I just can’t get past the vampy-style mask to make a human connection. I wonder if people think of me as wearing too much of a mask to really get to know me.
The dance performance they’re preparing is amazing. Back stage (or maybe on stage), I make friends with the Kinders’ sweet black cat. ** A little later, my whole family is gathered at our house. Everyone seems to have something they really want to do right there at the house, but I want to explore the town. Finally, I get up the nerve to tell everyone that I would like to go window shopping. They sort of chuckle, but they don’t make fun of me for wanting to shop. I say it’s because I want to get the steps on my step-counter. ** Just as I am waking up, I find myself fascinated with how my legs and arms move as I am walking up the hill, and I realize that I am actually in someone else’s body. I’m not sure if anyone else notices. I enjoy the odd experience of being in a different body. Her limbs are long and thin and very dark brown. I’ve tripped and scratched her knee, but I don’t feel the hurt. ** A small ginger cat in the waking world is licking my cheek, and someone is meowing in the hall to say that no one filled the cat food bowl before we went to bed, so the dream ended and the day began.
Gratitude List: 1. Sincerity and honesty. People who can interact without too much of the mask. 2. While I am tired of the recent days of constant waking in the night, the waking brings the memories of dreams, and dreams are fascinating, and they offer me clues to my deeper self. 3. New strategies for handling the workload. There’s always hope that another way to organize will help me keep up with things better this time. 4. Reading books to a small person. I’m going to string this out as long as he can take it. He still demands that we read every night. 5. The interplay between language and ideas. In AP Comp, we watched a TED talk by Lera Boroditsky on how language shapes thought, and I am finding that the video itself is giving me new language for thinking about how vocabulary actually directs the shape of abstract ideas.
“Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.” —Zora Neale
“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
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.” ―T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of [people]. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.” ―Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
“silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.” ―Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
“Meow” means “woof” in cat.” ―George Carlin
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” ―George Orwell, 1984
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” ―Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” ―Ludwig Wittgenstein
“I like you; your eyes are full of language.” [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]” ―Anne Sexton
Gratitudes: 1. Baked oatmeal 2. I did get back to sleep. There was that moment in the night when I ache and wakefulness make me almost leap from the bed. But the recliner soothed me back to sleep 3. Lunch duty. I would have said that the last job I wanted was to be the Watcher in the Gathering Area at lunch. I maybe be an ambivert, but the introverted part of me is made extremely anxious by noise and crowds. It helps to have a task and a plan, and then students have a way of approaching me to make conversation, or standing nearby in circles talking larger than life and glancing my way to see if I am noticing their delightful performances. I get to note who is lonely, who is going out of her way to greet someone who is on the fringe, who is gathering others together. 4. This cat pacing behind me like a sentry. (Oops! It’s because the food bowl is empty–I’ll have to remedy that.) 5. Stories.
I have been fuzzy in my civic understanding of the differences and similarities between a democracy and a republic, and to what degree my own nation is one or both of those. This morning, alarmingly, I have seen two articles posted online, one warning that our democracy is dying, the other that our republic is in its death throes. I suppose it’s time I develop a clearer understanding of the terms so that I can better understand what it is we are in danger of losing.
I think we are an oligarchy. I think we are in end-stage capitalism. I think that greed and self-interest have become the MO of our most powerful public servants. Serving the will of the people, and doing the right thing, have taken second place to staying in office, and garnering personal political power and wealth. The ideals of democracy and republic have failed to serve us as a nation.
There have been some bright spots in this impeachment process, some fine speechmaking and oratory, some grand ideals expressed, some hope for a society that governs itself according to core principles of freedom and justice for all. Still, the defensiveness and bullying, the sense of threat hanging over the whole proceeding, begins to make the story feel ominous and tragic.
A society that cares more about protecting the assets of its wealthiest members rather than providing for the basic needs of its most vulnerable members is headed for implosion.
Gratitude List: 2. This is my tabula rasa morning. I’ve been living in semester two for two weeks, but finishing up the grading for semester one. I will hit the Grades Ready for Registrar button in half an hour, and then the last rocks blocking this tunnel will crumble and disintegrate, and I will walk into the full light of the new story. 3. Wise people. Wise women. Helpful, thoughtful, perceptive friends. I don’t know how I would get by without those serendipitous and intentional moments of wisdom and care that you share. 1. Not everything is dire and tragic. So much is beautiful and wise and thoughtful and hopeful. You are here, and so am I, and we hold the ideals of a civilization that protects the environment and cares for the vulnerable. 5. Stretching, releasing breath, grounding, centering. 4. The breathing spaces in the day to come.
“Like water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world.” ―Brenda Peterson
“Tyrants fear the poet.” —Amanda Gorman, U.S. Youth Poet Laureate
In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.” —Jonas Mekas
“Are you enhancing your power to discern the difference between rash risks motivated by fear and smart gambles driven by authentic intuition?” —Rob Brezsny
“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. . . . Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. . . . The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.” ―Ursula Le Guin
“I wonder how the world would be different if we grew down?” —Someone in my House, a few years ago
Gratitude List: 4. Planning and processing 3. The shades of gold, saffron, yellow, ochre 2. Grilled cheese and sauerkraut sandwiches with all the condiments 1. The way the eyes make sense of what they see. The way the create meaning: Tree branches that curve into the shape of a fish. Clouds that are dragons. A rough patch in the ceiling that is an old woman smiling. 5. Light at the end of the tunnel. I tend to visualize the light at the end of the tunnel as a gleam at the end of a long straight railroad tunnel. Sometimes it turns out that you’ve got lots of rock and debris to move from the pathway, or that it’s just a little opening, and you’ve got to dig yourself out. No matter what shape the tunnel is in, the light is there to inspire and guide.
Welcome, rain. Welcome, dawn on this chilly morning. Welcome, work of the day, of the weekend. Welcome, time yet to come when the work is done. Welcome, clean new pages to write my next chapter.
Gratitude List: 1. Yesterday’s dawn. It began as we pulled out of the driveway, with pink streaks on the horizon over Spicher’s field. On the way to pick up our car pool, we passed the small paddock where two mountainously fluffy sheep graze, and the sky was beginning to glow gently magenta against the woolly clouds, the grass a green almost glowing. The River, as we crossed, flowed pink beneath the old bridge to the south, and the lamps were still twinkling along its span. By the time we reached school, the sky colors had shifted out of indigos and violets and pinks, to tangerine, and rays of coming sun shot upward through the low-flung clouds. 2. Rain and reflections on a Saturday morning 3. People who stand up for peace 4. People who stand up to bullying behavior 5. Poetry
Grades are due Monday. I’m focusing on the day ahead, the weekend ahead, on getting it done. Fueled by coffee, hope, and the wild burst of procrastinator’s eleventh-hour mania. I am good at getting things done on time, but not in a timely fashion, if that makes any sense. Always hoping to rectify that, and sometimes, like now, finding myself deeper in the hole than ever.
Gratitude List: 1. Good colleagues. I love working with these earnest and compassionate people. And they’re funny, too. 2. There are some clear-thinking, justice-aware folks in that room in Washington. I don’t think I am really hopeful at all that the rule of law will prevail, that justice will be done, that the democracy will be saved. Still, some people are standing up for truth and democracy and justice. 3. Reading through student journals yesterday about people they admire. Some of their answers were my colleagues (see point number one), and others were family members. One student write a gripping couple paragraphs about being inspired by Bernstein and Woodward. Another write a page and a half about Tolstoy as an inspirational model for living. I love these young people. 4. Animal companions 5. Flannel sheets
Mockingbird Chronicles 