Gratitude List:
1. Oak
2. Oak
3. Oak
4. Sycamore
5. Oak
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitudes
Revisions
Gratitude List:
1. Cardboard boxes and tape. Easiest and most fun Halloween costume prep ever. I hope they never grow out of their love of transforming boxes into costumes, play sets, posters, spy centers. . .
2. Fleece pajamas and fleece slippers
3. Friendship
4. Revising poetry (Mockingbird says it’s okay to move on to this step)
5. Working together
May we walk in Beauty.
Finding Poetry
Found Poem
Source: Joss Weaver-Kreider
I just saw a tree
that had no leaf left
and
at first I thought
it was a giant feather.
This is an old photo, from December,
but it shows some naked feathery trees.
Gratitude List
1. Ten Years of Goldfinch Farm. It has gone by in a flash. It has been forever. Happy Birthday, Bright Spot!
2. Prayer. Or singing. Or writing poems. Or drawing. Or listening. Or looking. Or magic. Whatever you call it, the energy that is the connective tissue of the Universe, the Multiverse.
3. Four-part harmony
4. Standing in the borderlands, looking around, and realizing that I’m ready for the journey.
5. This contemplative morning time all to myself.
May we walk in Beauty, in Love
Just a Minute
After yesterday’s lai, my friend Mara sent me a link to an interview with the poet Cathy Smith Bowers, who worked with another short form, the minute.
A minute is three stanzas in length, each of twenty syllables (60 total, like a minute). The rhyme scheme is aabb, ccdd, eeff. And the kicker is that the meter is iambic: ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum. Sort of like Shakespeare, but with fewer feet.
This one’s tricky. Even when the meter and rhyme seem to come easily, it’s a real challenge to get it to dance rather than stumble. But Mockingbird says that you learn to dance by taking those first stumbling steps.
Out in the dawn, a misty sea
in walnut tree
a silent crow
will dream of snow
will ruffle feathers in the chill
will wait until
the first bright ray
begins the day
then with a final shake will rise
from branch to skies
and this will be
a memory
Ha! Well, that was fun. Mockingbird says I am not supposed to make fun of it or try to explain its inadequacy, so I’ll let it stand for today’s poem.
Gratitude List:
1. Getting a card in the mail! Just for hello-and-I-love-you. What a delight. And there was a tiny picture of an artist’s palette on the back that inspired Ellis to draw and draw and draw. Thank you, Auntie Mary! I love you, too!
2. New soft. warm rug underfoot
3. Faery-light. I don’t know another word for it–the way the vegetables glow and shine from within, even when there is no obvious light source nearby. Yesterday, the tomatoes seemed to glow from within. Radishes, potatoes, carrots, when they’re wet, take on a light and color that seem to be beyond the capacity of the available light to create.
4. New perspectives. Rearranging the furniture, literally and figuratively.
5. The way frost outlines every leaf, every blade of grass, every bud and vein. My children say Jack Frost is just a made-up thing, but I’ve seen some of his best work.
Beauty all around us.
Back to Form
Winter is coming on, and I am feeling the pull to go inward, to explore new poetic forms. This one I discovered on Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog. It is a French form called a lai. It’s good for me to get back to the anxious thrill of writing something for the fun and playfulness of it, and not simply because there are words knocking at the back door of my head asking to be let out.
It’s 9 lines. The 5-syllable lines (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8) are rhyme A, and the others are 2 syllables and are rhyme B. Here goes:
Either moon or frost
has whitely embossed
the field.
I wake, having crossed
the sea of sleep, tossed,
concealed
within my own lost
ark. Now, waking’s cost.
I yield.
Hmmm. Perhaps I ought to have been a little more intentional about choosing rhymes instead of diving in head first and letting the rhymes find me. Nah. That was fun. Sort of like a tanka, but with the added imperative of rhyme. And that happy little skip in the last lines of the triads could be used comically or very seriously, I think. I started with the first thing that jumped into my head, so I was stuck with -ost as my major rhyme. Initially I typed “grass” instead of “field,” but was limited by that rhyme. Now that’s an exercise to wake me up.
Gratitude List:
1. The artistic power of limits
2. Colored pencils
3. Warm rug for winter
4. Cleaning the attic
5. Civility
Beauty All Around Us.
The Bowl
Gratitude List:
1. Clouds
2. River
3. Crows
4. Books
5. Insight
Beauty All Around.
Quick
Gratitude List:
1. Egg-fried Rice for breakfast
2. Inner Guide
3. Both/And
4. The Farm season shift approaches
5. Scarves
May we walk in Beauty.
Looking Within
Cat in the compost. . .
Gratitude List:
1. A wonderful and rich morning with Alyson Earl, looking deeply within. Thank you so much!
2. All my helpers, healers, mentors, guides, faery godmothers, friends. I get by with a little help. . .
3. That clickety little bird who sings in the chestnut tree these days. I don’t know who it is, but its call says, “Stop and pay attention.”
4. The way the vegetables and fruits that are ripe in any season are designed to give the body exactly what it needs in that season.
5. Balance
May we walk in Beauty.
Listening
See the feather?
I don’t want to write a Gratitude List today. I have a cold. Not a bad cold, but the second one in two weeks, and it makes me grumpy, and it fills my head with cotton fluff. But these are the days when the list is tested. I could make this all about the cold: I’m thankful for cough drops and warm blankets and that I felt good for two weeks in between colds and for elderberry tincture and brandy. But somehow that comes off sounding more like a complaint, and part of the point of this practice is to get me working a little more deeply. To get this Sanguine Leo Seven to look at something beyond herownself.
(Sanguine refers to one of the Elemental Types based on the medieval humors–are you Melancholic Earth, Sanguine Air, Phlegmatic Water or Choleric Fire? Leo is my Sun Sign, a little bit self-absorbed. And Seven–again self-absorbed and focused on personal gratification–is one of the nine numbers on the Enneagram.)
Gratitude List:
1. Listening
2. Yesterday’s feather. Almost every day I find a feather, like a message. I noticed it sometime late in August, and for a period of about three or four weeks, I did find a feather every single day. Small grey feathers, charcoal with white tips, brown feathers, little white downy feathers. I think tufted titmouse, nuthatch, perhaps some mockingbird. Yesterday’s feather is a translucent and elegant ecru, touched at the base with charcoal. It seems a little larger than most of the songbird feathers around here. Perhaps a mockingbird. There’s a divinatory practice whereby someone holds an object and determines from its energy signature who held it last. I want to do that with this feather, to hold it in my hands and open my heart and my inner sight and then see the bird who wore it. I want to say it’s a cedar waxwing, but we’ve never seen them here in the hollow. Of course, it is the season of migration, so who knows who was passing through.
3. Yesterday’s fun at Flinchbaugh’s Fall Fest. Good, simple, outdoor fun for kids. Lots of support for a local family farm.
4. Carrots. The smell of carrots in the washing bin. Lover’s carrots twined around each other. The taste of the sweetness under the earth.
5. Finding faces in the branches of the trees. This morning, there’s a smiling cat outside the window.
May we walk in Beauty.
Snowlight
Gratitude List:
1. The snowlight of that moon blanketing everything.
2. Getting back to sleep
3. Illusion, reflection, layers of vision
4. How, in my dreams, there are always more rooms in the houses than I could ever imagine. Hidden capacities, potentials.
5. You. The way your heart, your hope, your determination to make it through the next challenge, and the next–the way that inspires me, inspires all of us around you, to grow and become, too.
May we walk in Beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 