Today’s prompt at the Writer’s Digest poetry blog is to write an odd poem. I was feeling uninspired, so I decided to just started typing and let myself mostly free-associate. It ended up not really being as odd as I thought it might be, and it kind of hangs together surprisingly well. I think I sort of made up a story. . .
the last thing she said before she left was something about how memory evades interpretation how the ends don’t always justify the meanings how the sparkle in your eyes seemed to have dimmed over time because of the way the Old Ones never wanted to reveal themselves
the first thing she said when she returned was that she had never known anyone who reminded her so much of her long-lost lover as you on the day when you stood in the dark garden and swore allegiance to the moon
the way she looked at you the way she her eyes drifted off to the side of the frame when you took that portrait someone hung in the gallery on the corner of Seventh and Lime
the way you could never seem to say her name without the briefest pause beforehand as though you were forgetting or reluctant to commit the act of resurrecting her memory
Gratitude List: 1. We saw one of the white squirrels in Palmyra today! It was in a yard with two crows. It looked like they were having a meeting 2. Chocolate cake. I am working so hard to keep my sugar under control, but I am also not living a life of complete self-deprivation, and that was good cake 3. I think I am mostly over the achiness of the Covid/flu vaccine double whammy 4. Just hanging out here with the kid and the cats 5. Pumpkin soup and sauteed cauliflower May we walk in Beauty!
“It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.” —Leonard Cohen
Denise Levertov: Don’t say, don’t say there is no water to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen The fountain springing out of the rock wall and you drinking there. And I too before your eyes found footholds and climbed to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes, frowned as she watched–but not because she grudged the water, only because she was waiting to see we drank our fill and were refreshed.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water. The fountain is there among its scalloped grey and green stones, it is still there and always there with its quiet song and strange power to spring in us, up and out through the rock.
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen
“Remember that day in the woods when everything was so dark, so dreary and you were so terrifyingly alone?
How can it be that these are the same woods and you the same soul and everything shines so, and everything is filled with life?” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Acquiring problems is a fundamental human need. It’s as crucial to your well-being as getting food, air, water, sleep, and love. You define yourself–indeed, you make yourself–through the riddles you attract and solve. The most creative people on the planet are those who frame the biggest, hardest questions and then gather the resources necessary to find the answers.” —Rob Brezsny
“We are free-falling into the future on a bed of broken symbols.” —attributed to Joseph Campbell
“We aren’t disturbing the peace. We’re disturbing the war.” —protest sign
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, but the most important part is not to be afraid.”
Today’s prompt is to write a character poem. I just started writing what came to mind, and suddenly I was writing about my cat Winky. She was a fae character.
When you think of me, she said, think of how the sun seemed to want to run its rays through my fur like fingers.
She was a winsome creature, more mermaid than cat, sitting on her rock in the middle of the creek, tail bobbing in the bubbling current, tempting the minnows.
More fairy even than mermaid she was, denizen of the worlds between, liminal cat, walker-between-worlds, always her own being, ephemeral.
Her magic was the airy kind, twinkling and sparkling in the wind, a bird which materializes out of a breeze, a raven changing form to become a butterfly, a piece of milkweed fluff making little chiming bells as it wafts past.
Sometimes I see her in the dreamrealm, a band of chortling fairy children dancing on the green grass in her wake, her body whole again, her wise eyes blinking in greeting, her fur ruffled by fingers of sun.
Gratitude List:
1. Gabe and Solly. I’m dog-sitting tonight for the sweetest pair of beagly boys.
2. Textures and textiles
3. Stories
4. Chocolate
5. Rilke
May we walk in Beauty!
“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.” ―James Baldwin ***** “Poets are kind of like—it’s a bad metaphor, but—canaries in a coal mine. They have a sense for things that are in the air. Partly because that’s what they do—they think about things that are going on—but partly because they take their own personal experience and see how that fits in with what they see in the world. A lot of people might think that poetry is very abstract, or that it has to do with having your head in the clouds, but poets, actually, walk on the earth. They’re grounded, feet-first, pointing forward. They’re moving around and paying attention at every moment.” —Don Share ***** “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” —Toni Morrison ***** “…Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.” —from “How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)” by Wendell Berry ***** Morning Prayer by Phillip Newell In the silence of the morning your Spirit hovers over the brink of the day and a new light pieces the darkness of the night. In the silence of the morning life begins to stir around me and I listen for the day’s utterances. In earth, sea and sky and in the landscape of my own soul I listen for utterances of your love, O God. I listen for utterances of your love.
Today’s prompt at The Writer’s Digest poetry blog is to write a directions poem. I love working with the cardinal directions and their correspondences with the four sacred elements. Still, when I read this prompt, I decided it was for directions for the sacred grove.
Take the road up the hill through the golden wood and make a dogleg turn at the crest of the the ridge to wander down again on the other side.
There will be thirteen horses in the field behind you and three placid steers to your left. Down a sudden steepness, another solitary horse will look up from his ruminations before you pass the lily pond, whose queen is a koi fish the tangerine shade of sun as it sets over the ridge.
Make a left after the gingerbread treehouse, after the white house set into the hillside. Leave your car and walk up the hill behind the red barn through the high grass. There will be pear trees on your left, and a white-throated sparrow will sing in the sycamore behind you.
A pathway will lead you up the hillside where you will turn to your right up a grassy lane between pear trees, and you will smell the musk of the fox who protects the grove which you seek.
Pause a moment before you enter the circle and listen to the distant call of the phoebe, wait until the shadow of the vulture crosses the sun, then step into the shelter of the grove and let the silence surround you.
Gratitude List: 1. The trusting nature of cats 2. Looking forward to breakfast tomorrow with colleagues 3. The red tree behind the school takes my breath away 4. All of us hanging out in the living room together–somebody is snoring behind the couch 5. Watching students catch fire with the love of reading. I have a student who has been very honest about the fact that she doesn’t like to read, that she has never read a non-graphic-novel on her own. She has been so obsessed with our class reader, The Maze Runner, that today after we finished it, she asked if she could start the second book in the series instead of writing. She read with focus and energy for half an hour straight. I’m so proud of her. May we walk in Beauty!
“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” —Carl Sagan
“But this moment, you’re alive. So you can just dial up the magic of that at any time.” —Joanna Macy
“I tell you the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” —Vincent van Gogh
“The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.” —Emma Goldman
“Love imperfectly. Be a love idiot. Let yourself forget any love ideal.” —Sark
“Everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything exists, only because I love.” —Leo Tolstoy
“Love is a great beautifier.” —Louisa May Alcott
“Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.” —Erica Jong
“Fall in love over and over again every day. Love your family, your neighbors, your enemies, and yourself. And don’t stop with humans. Love animals, plants, stones, even galaxies.” —Frederic and Mary Ann Brussa
“I will start from here. That is an interesting spiritual statement when you stop to think about it. It means that whatever happened before, and whatever may happen in time to come, the past and the future are not the sacred space I actually inhabit. That space is right here, right now, in whatever condition I find myself. This is what I have to work with. This is where change and hope begin for me. Recognizing my location on the map of the holy is one more way that I claim my place of blessing and announce to the universe: I will start from here.” —Steven Charleston
” ‘They kept going, because they were holding onto something.’ ‘What are we holding onto, Sam?’ ‘There’s still good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.’ “ —Frodo and Sam
“Somewhere deep in the forest of grief there is a waterfall where all your tears may flow over mossy rocks, under watchful pines.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” —E. B. White
“There are certain things, often very little things, like the little peanut, the little piece of clay, the little flower that cause you to look WITHIN – and then it is that you see the soul of things.” —George Washington Carver
Write a sentence poem, he says, and I am an English teacher, and so I took the only way out of this poetic escape room that I knew how:
Out on the high wire, an introductory prepositional phrase steps carefully over a verb and its gentle adverb into a prepositional phrase with a compound object and a further series of prepositional phrases, its feet poised for the absolute phrases, its absolute phrases bunching together, and
LEAPS
into a surprising compound predicate. (The crowd goes wild!)
Gratitude List: 1. Meeting people I’ve met online IRL. Today’s connection was beautiful and sweet, and her children brought me sprigs of mountain mint 2. Mountain mint–such a gently invigorating aroma 3. This happy lamp–staving off the time change blues 4. Uji (millet porridge)–I think I am finally getting the hang of the fermenting process–it tastes like childhood memories 5. The way the autumn sun hits the tips of the oak trees in the morning and evening just as it makes its entry into and exit from the hollow May we walk in Beauty!
“Tyrants fear the poet.” —Amanda Gorman
“Don’t be ashamed to weep; ’tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.” ―Brian Jacques
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” ―Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
“Love is the bridge between you and everything.” ―Rumi
“Come senators, congressmen Please heed the call Don’t stand in the doorway Don’t block up the hall For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There’s a battle outside And it is ragin’ It’ll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin’.” ―Bob Dylan
“To open our eyes, to see with our inner fire and light, is what saves us. Even if it makes us vulnerable. Opening the eyes is the job of storytellers, witnesses, and the keepers of accounts. The stories we know and tell are reservoirs of light and fire that brighten and illuminate the darkness of human night, the unseen. They throw down a certain slant of light across the floor each morning, and they throw down also its shadow.” —Linda Hogan
What do you do when the gods of the dreamings offer you maps for the journey?
How will you answer when the night-folk cry out: “Give us the hope of our meanings!” ―Beth Weaver-Kreider
Today’s prompt is to write either a big or a little poem. We’ve spent the evening (after voting) at the cross country banquet, and I am tired, so a small poem will have to suffice. I have been going back and forth about whether that last line should read “leaving” or “going.” I decided on the more pathos-filled version.
autumn dark descends a plane drones beneath the stars someone’s leaving home
Gratitude List: 1. These coaches and all the time they give to our children 2. When I brought home a half peck of apples yesterday, someone in the family did a happy apple dance 3. Got home and sat on the couch to write my poem, and immediately had a cat pressed against each hip 4. I love when my books weave together. I am just about to finish My Antonia with a class, and I’m listening to The Personal Librarian. Although they’re in slightly different time periods, Willa Cather lived at the time when Belle da Costa Greene was JP Morgan’s private librarian. 5. People who work for justice May we walk in Beauty!
“The stories I’m trying to write, and which I want to promote, are stories that contribute to the stability of my own culture, stories that elevate, that keep things from flying apart.” —Barry Lopez
“What the world wants, and people need, are people who believe in Something—Something that will lead them to the good, the beautiful, the true, and the universal.” —Richard Rohr
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” —James Baldwin
“I am not talking about giving our hearts over to despair. I wonder if we can train our hearts, intentionally, like athletes who train for a marathon, to bear the load without crumpling under the weight. I think that’s what the children need from us, for us to bear them, bear the stories, hold them as though they were our own, to be prepared to act at any moment for any one of them within our reach. I think the times call for hearts strong enough to be tender, to bleed without weakening, to rage and protect and pray and hope without numbing out.
“I don’t think it has to be a choice. We don’t have to choose between the closed heart and the broken heart. We can be awake and yet not despair. It’s worth a try.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“If we are going to see real development in the world, then our best investment is in women.” —Desmond Tutu
“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.” —Alice Walker
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” —Marcus Aurelius
Found on a T-shirt: “I am totally happy and not dangerous mostly.”
“Part of the tragedy of our present culture is that all our attention is on the outer, the physical world. And yes, outer nature needs our attention; we need to act before it is too late, before we ravage and pollute the whole ecosystem. We need to save the seeds of life’s diversity. But there is an inner mystery to a human being, and this too needs to be rescued from our present wasteland; we need to keep alive the stories that nourish our souls. If we lose these seeds we will have lost a connection to life’s deeper meaning—then we will be left with an inner desolation as real as the outer.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Adrienne Rich: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility of more truth around her.”
“I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
Time change. It’s just time, just sun, just nightfall, just change. I tell myself this, again and again. Time for the happy lamp.
Today’s Prompt over at Writer’s Digest is to write a poem title “Better _______.”
better left unsaid better said
best be gone I say begone best step up now and do your work best lurk in corners till the courage comes upon you best fill your leaky pockets with compliments and rice
better red or midnight blue better screw the lightbulb in the disco ball better haul the garbage to the garbage dump better pump the handle on the ancient water pump
best to do the thing you must and leave the rest to gather rust best say the necessary prayers and acquaint yourself with silence.
better learn the difference between what’s better said and better left unsaid
Gratitude List: 1. How the sun trickles into the room on afternoons in autumn. 2. The poetry of Layli Long Soldier–We loved exploring her poem Obligations 2 in class today. It expands the way we think about the line in writing. 3. People who swim deeply, deeply, who explore the furthest reaches of Self. 4. Starting over. Resetting. Trying again. Revising. 5. Apples! May we walk in Beauty!
“People who love the divine go around with holes in their hearts, and inside the hole is the universe.” —Peter Kingsley from the Dark Places of Wisdom
“The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.” —bell hooks
“When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.” ―Sally Kempton
“Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.” —Mae Jemison (Astronaut/Medical Doctor)
Adrienne Rich: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility of more truth around her.”
“Part of the tragedy of our present culture is that all our attention is on the outer, the physical world. And yes, outer nature needs our attention; we need to act before it is too late, before we ravage and pollute the whole ecosystem. We need to save the seeds of life’s diversity. But there is an inner mystery to a human being, and this too needs to be rescued from our present wasteland; we need to keep alive the stories that nourish our souls. If we lose these seeds we will have lost a connection to life’s deeper meaning—then we will be left with an inner desolation as real as the outer.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
“Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains – a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.” —Henri Frederic Amiel
There is a legend that has its roots buried deep inside the prehistoric culture of these lands. It is a myth that was seeded before the stories were anchored onto the page, before rigid systems of belief tied gods and spirits into names and form, even before the people were persuaded from paths of individual responsibility into hierarchies of power. This story has been fluid and flowing, changing shape and growing over many thousands of years. It is a story of ancestors and a deep relationship with the ancient land. It is a story of memories that permeate stone and wood to rest within the body of the earth. This legend is too old to be defined by history and therefore we are not limited in our own remembering of it; creative recollection lies at the heart of our very best tales.
Memory may arrive at odd moments and in unexpected forms. Recognition may unravel along strange paths. Wherever the wild reaches through the land, we may touch the edges of this story. We start to tease out a thread, then pick and pull until first a fragment of colour, then a whole strand of story, is revealed. Now we peel away the layers, glimpse the traces of a design, watch a pattern grow until an entire story emerges, then a cycle of stories, and now we are unwinding the fabric of our ancestors’ lives.” —Carolyn Hillyer
We stumble on the journey, O God. We lose heart along the way. We forget your promises and blame one another. Refresh us with the springs of your spirit in our souls and open our senses to your guiding presence that we may be part of the world’s healing this day, that we may be part of the world’s healing. —John Philip Newell
Robert Brewer’s prompt for today, at the Writers Digest poetry blog, is to write a book-inspired poem. I’m not quite sure where this poem comes from, but the poem itself is a book, divided into chapters:
Chapter 1 You found her in the garden flirting with the goldenrod. The next day she vanished before your very eyes in the sparkling autumn sun.
Chapter 2 You searched for her through each successive November. You ran down time’s vast corridors calling her name into doorways.
Chapter 3 It was in the church ruins where you finally found her singing an ancient hymn of Inanna to the ravens nesting on the altar.
Chapter 4 She did not run or try to hide but she spoke your name and the golden flowers burst suddenly from the cracks in the floor.
Gratitude List: 1. Someone told me today that I bring with me the sense that it’s okay to be weird, and that might be one of the best compliments I have ever received. 2. Transformations 3. The vulture with wings open on the old snag on 30 4. Oak leaves falling like rain 5. So many circles of beautiful people! May we walk in Beauty!
“Safety is not the absence of threat. It is the presence of connection.” —Gabor Maté
“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan
Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison
“You need not wade through the mists and bogs to reach the moon. You need not climb a ladder of cobweb. You need not ride the stallions that wicker in the sea’s pounding surf.
Draw back the curtain and open the window. Breathe the bracing air and listen: The whinny of an owl, the click of the bat, The grunt of a buck and the distant roar of the train.
The full moon will spill a milky road before you. That is all the pathway you will need.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“The word is the making of the world.” —Wallace Stevens
“Through the empty branches the sky remains. It is what you have.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“The leaves of the tree become as pages of the Sacred Book to one who is awake.” —Hazrat Inayat Khan
“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” —Albert Einstein
“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” —Coretta Scott King
“When you feel the suffering of every living thing in your own heart, that is consciousness.” —Bhagavad Gita
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.” ―Naomi Shihab Nye
Today’s prompt is to write a Catching Poem. This is a little rough, but I like how it starts to say what I mean, so I’ll put it here as a place-holder today, with hopes to revise it when I get a chance.
How can I know if I’m remembering things as they happened to me or how they were told to me? I come from of family of memory-keepers and storytellers, and the branches of my own memory are caught in the branches of others, the narrative threads tangled in the repetitions, the colors and textures shifting from telling to telling, so that certain memories are like layers of film, each slightly different from the one below, the edges blurring and the colors deepening as the layers blend, the final picture an inaccurate representation and a perfect idealization of the actual event, clearer and more distinct than the moment of happening, gaining a tenderness in the telling and retelling that holds a truth more true than one person’s memory can catch.
Gratitude List: 1. Anticipating sleep. I have insomnia occasionally, but it’s always middle of the night insomnia. I almost always fall asleep immediately when my head hits the pillow. I love that feeling of letting sleep take me like a wave. 2. Winter sweaters. I got the rest of my winter sweaters out of the attic today. I love my sweaters. 3. Uji. I’ve been fermenting millet to make Tanzanian uji for breakfast. I love the sour taste. 4. Fall colors. Are the colors more beautiful, deeper, more rich, than usual? I think they are especially beautiful this year. 5. Art and drumming. I went with my friend Christine to PAVAA art gallery for a drumming and art show tonight. The drummer put paint on her drumsticks and drummed a painting onto a canvas she draped over her drums. Another woman, on a set of congas, did a spontaneous spoken word riff on the colors the drummer was laying down. May we walk in Beauty!
Saturday’s Falling and Getting Up Again: “Both when we fall and when we get up again, we are kept in the same precious love.” ―Julian of Norwich
“What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved–what then?” ―Carl Jung
“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” ―Eleanor Roosevelt
“If I had influence with the good fairy, I would ask that her gift to each child be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.” ―Rachel Carson
“Your problem is you’re too busy holding onto your unworthiness.” ―Ram Dass
“In giving of yourself, you will discover a whole new life full of meaning and love.” ―Cesar Chavez
“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ―Eugene V. Debs
“I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too. Ma Joad: I don’t understand it, Tom. Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.” ―Tom Joad, from the movie Grapes of Wrath
“And don’t we all, with fierce hunger, crave a cave of solitude, a space of deep listening—full of quiet darkness and stars, until we hear a syllable of God echoing in the core of our hearts?” —Macrina Wiederkehr
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” —Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
“The way that I understand it, dreaming is nature naturing through us. Just as a tree bears fruit or a plant expresses itself in flowers, dreams are fruiting from us. The production of symbols and story is a biological necessity. Without dreams, we could not survive. And though it is possible to get by without remembering our dreams, a life guided and shaped by dreaming is a life that follows the innate knowing of the earth itself. As we learn to follow the instincts of our inner wilderness, respecting its agreements and disagreements, we are also developing our capacity for subtlety. This sensitivity is what makes us more porous and multilingual, bringing us into conversation with the many languages of the world around us.” — Toko-pa Turner
Today’s prompt at Brewer’s blog is to write a Problem Poem. I was reading Idra Novey’s poem “That’s How Far I’d Drive for It” in the November Poetry journal today during library time, in which she does this short series of three lines near the end of this three-page poem in which she creates a beautiful negation full of relief after bad things didn’t happen. Crises occurred, but the worst-case scenarios didn’t happen. So in my poem today, I am taking the problems and subjecting them to Novey’s negation. (The pond, of course, is metaphor for a different kind of near-drowning.)
Negation
But I didn’t stay at the bottom of that pond. They didn’t cross the threshold at the Gates of Death. The sky didn’t open up and swallow us. The world was not drowned in the great silence. We didn’t get consigned to hell.
Someone started singing,
the vultures came, and were fed, the work got done, the children tended, the bills got paid, the truth got said, the dream became the dreamer, the morning star continued shining yet more brightly in the dawn.
Gratitude List: 1. Poetry journal. About a year ago, one of the guest editors suggested reading the journal with a pencil or pen, and marking it up, underlining and responding to the poets. I do that regularly now, and I think I have become an even more careful reader, and I’ve also found such intense inspiration for my own writing as I pause and consider my responses to the poems. I think it helps me learn better how to unpack literature with my students, too. 2. Friday morning breakfast with colleagues. 3. That painting of the ivory-billed woodpecker that my dad made for me. 4. Dreams coming true. 5. I stopped to put some of my culled books in a little free library today, and picked up a copy of Natasha Trethaway’s Monument! What a treasure! May we walk in Beauty!
“Awake, my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of light and let it breathe.” —Hafiz
“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan
“The heavens are sweeping us along in a cyclone of stars.” —Teilhard de Chardin
“Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.
Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.
Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.
It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” —Linda Hogan
Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison
Joseph Campbell: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”
Kirumi Bridge, across the Mara River: Ming’aro Pictures Empire
Brewer’s prompt today is to write a Childhood Object poem. A couple days ago, I was scrolling around Tanzania on Google Earth, and saw a bridge over the Mara River where we used to cross by ferry when I was a child. I think the last time I was there in 1988, there was already a bridge, but I was suddenly flooded with memories of waiting for the ferry at the Mara River. There’s even a little video of drone footage of the bridge on Youtube.
I have never seen it, but there’s a bridge there now across the Mara, steel and concrete on the Sirari Road. You used to need to catch the ferry to cross, waiting on the eastern shore of the river, bulrushes and papyrus lining the banks. What crocodile would have been bold enough to lurk among them, with the rattle and rev of lorries and garis lined up for the next crossing? Even fifty years later, and half a world away, I pass a truck idling diesel fumes, and I am back again on that riverbank, the sun sparkling on the water, the hum of Swahili in the drowsing afternoon, the distant ferry approaching from from the Mwanza side.
Gratitude List: 1. The threads which connect dreams to waking life 2. My colleagues–daily I am grateful for this thoughtful and caring group of people 3. Ethiopian food–Jon shared his leftovers 4. Origami–I love the meditative nature of paper folding–I have been making zhen xian bao (Google it) 5. Weaving the pieces together. May we walk in Beauty!
“No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member— No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds— November!” —Thomas Hood, No!
“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” —Mary Oliver
“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.” —Muriel Rukeyser
“We discover the Earth in the depths of our being through participation, not through isolation or exploitation. We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens… We belong here. Our home is here. The excitement and fulfillment of our lives is here… Just as we are fulfilled in our communion with the larger community to which we belong, so too the universe itself and every being in the universe is fulfilled in us.” —Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe
Words of Howard Zinn: “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win,’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.
“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
“If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.” ―Jelaluddin Rumi
“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” –Roald Dahl, The Witches
“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its’ knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” –Anais Nin
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“On such a day each road is planned To lead to some enchanted land; Each turning meets expectancy. The signs I read on every hand. I know by autumn’s wizardry On such a day the world can be Only a great glad dream for me– Only a great glad dream for me!” –Eleanor Myers Jewett, “An Autumn Day”
“Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.” –Alvin Toffler
“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightening flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” –Layne Redmond
Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all. –Thomas Merton
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” –Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein
“Learn to tell the story of the red leaves against water. Read the alphabet of walnut branches newly bared for winter. Become literate in the language of cricket and of wren, of the footsteps of skunk and the changeability of weather.
Interpret the text of the wind in the hollow. Scan the documents of cloud and constellation. Enter the tale of rose hip and nettle and sassafras. Study Wisdom and she will find you.” –Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” –Khalil Gibran
“Awake, my dear! Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of Light and let it breathe.” ―Hafez (Ladinsky)
“We who hobnob with hobbits and tell tales about little green men are used to being dismissed as mere entertainers, or sternly disapproved of as escapists. But I think perhaps the categories are changing, like the times. Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.” —Ursula K. Le Guin
Mockingbird Chronicles 