Art by me and the AI. Robert Lee Brewer’s prompt today was to write a poem that begins, In the. . .
In the hard times, you could still hear the song. In the skeleton days when all you could do was to drop out of bed in the quiet dawn to pray, even then, you could hear it, the gentle melody underneath the jangling and dissonant voices that clamored for attention in your head. Even when your insides were displayed on street corners for all to see, the hopeful notes floated around you, small birds that only you could sense, like angels, leading you through the chanting crowds.
In the house made of sunlight and bone, where your spirit found shelter after the ravening creatures of malice and spite had picked your very soul clean of flesh and sinew, there, in the liquid autumn air, the music expanded, mending the breakage, tending the spaces like cobwebs, repairing the breaches, weaving the song through the aching gaps, declaring you whole.
Gratitude List:
The calm and peace of Friday evenings
That autumn slant of light
Leaves drifting gently down
I get by with a little help from my friends
Music
May we walk in Beauty!
(Today’s quotations come in pairs that interact with each other) “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
Art: “A New Beginning” by Beth and the AI. Prompt: “Write a Misguided poem,” by Robert Lee Brewer of The Writers Digest.
Take the misbegotten moment, the misinterpreted glance, the misguided misapprehension, and the miserable chance. Take the mistakes you’ve made, the misjudgments. Take the mischief and the misaim. Then take out your finest eraser, and start all over again.
Gratitude List: 1. Chances to start over 2. The second half 3. Revision 4. StoryCorps 5. Lemon Drops 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.”
Day two of Poem a Day! Prompt (Sweetness) from Robert Lee Brewer at Writers Digest, and art from my own collaboration with Wombo Dream AI.
Birth of a Poem
A poem is not born until it hits the air, until you’ve tasted its sugar on your tongue, shaped it with your lips, felt the hiss and slither as the words meet the soft, sweet curl of your ears, those precious shells, which yearn for music, which long for golden truth.
Gratitude List for All Souls: 1. Lizzie and Lura and Marian and Mammy 2. Wangari and Rachel 3. Harriet and Sojourner and Dorothy 4. The Witches and Rebels and Heretics 5. Annwyn and Nathan and Merle and Carl . . .and all those bright spirits gathered around our remembering hearts. May we walk in Bright Memory.
“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.”
Bill Maher: “Christians, I know, I’m sorry; I know you hate this and you want to square this circle, but you can’t. I’m not even judging you. I’m just saying, logically, if you ignore every single thing Jesus commanded you to do, you’re not a Christian. You’re just auditing. You’re not Christ’s followers. You’re just fans.”
“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’s November! Time for a Poem a Day! I am following Robert Lee Brewer’s Prompts over at The Writer’s Digest. Today, he suggests a Beginnings/Endings poem (or one or the other). The art is a collaboration between me and the Wombo Dream AI.
Another Month to Feed by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Perhaps it’s always rabbits at the mouth of the month because beginnings come so often timidly, twitching noses in the shadows, marking a small moment in the never-ending spiral of time, one birth in an incandescent infinity of new beginnings, yet another meal for the wolf of the month to come.
Gratitude List: 1. Poetry prompts 2. The two children who held my hands in the woods yesterday. 3. Social/emotional learning and teaching 4. Finding fresh purpose 5. Miracles May we walk, oh so tenderly, in Beauty!
“I am passionate about everything in my life, first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.” —bell hooks
“Bless the light and the darkness, the love and the fear.” —Rabbi Olivier BenHaim
“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
“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 lightning 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
Audre Lorde: “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. . Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. . As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” —Khalil Gibran
I’m not Catholic, but I pray the rosary. I had been intending to learn the prayers and explore the process (very intellectualized, I know), and then my father got very sick. On the weekend that he was receiving a risky treatment simply to try to save his life, I picked up the rosary and my little booklet into which I had scribbled my versions of the rosary prayers, and I learned. In desperation and need of grounding and comfort, I began to say the Aves and the Love Prayer (the Our Father), holding desperately to the beads. When I had no words for the mix of terrible anxiety and holy presence I was feeling, I walked the path of the beads.
Perdita Finn and Clark Strand, in their book The Way of the Rose, speak about holding the beads as holding the hand of The Mother. Comfort and peace and tenderness upwelling in the midst of whatever life is bringing: crisis or joy, or the quotidian rhythms of the day.
Here is my version of the Our Father. It changes every once in a while, as praying it brings me new insights into what I mean when I say the words. I’ve gotten a little wordy on the sign-off, but that’s my own flourish. It feels right to me:
Oh Love, which imbues the cosmos, Holy is thy name. May thy realm come. May thy will be done, here on earth as it is in the heavens, and within the sacred circle. Grant unto us this day what we need to survive, and lead us ever into right relationship with you and with others and with the all. Keep us from walking in paths of destruction, and deliver us from evil. For thine is the Wisdom and the Vision and the Virtue, the Promise and the Presence and the Peace, the Glory and the Story and the Song, both now and forever. Amen.
Lately, when I say the line, “Draw us ever closer into right relationship,” I see in my mind’s eye several of the people who have hurt me. Of course, I mean them when I pray that line–still, they intrude upon my peaceful prayers. Today, when it began to happen, I invited them in. I had also been thinking about how this is the day of the Archangels, the Feast of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. And so, instead of simply holding the idea of being drawn into right relationship with them, I asked the archangels to invite their angels to witness my prayers.
It feels really weird to write that, but it felt so right in the moment, and continues to feel right. My rosary prayers also became more lively, more awake, more focused. I felt safe (who doesn’t feel safe when surrounded by angels and Mother Mary?). It feels like the line in the Psalm: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” I’ll admit, when I got to “Keep us from walking the paths of destruction,” I found myself talking very directly to their angels, and “Deliver us from evil” has a new sort of ring when you say it in presence of the angels of people who have harmed you.
I don’t know whether there will ever be reconciliations and restorations on this plane. I’ve walked away from that door. I won’t wait around for that to happen, and making it happen will take a great deal of work on someone else’s part at this point. But I might continue to invite their angels to the table of my prayers.
Gratitude List: 1. Angels 2. Art 3. The rosary 4. Always something new to learn, some new way to deepen 5. Celebrating thirty-two years with my soul-mate. Such a good, good man. May we be draw ever into right relationships.
“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who you are and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” —Maya Angelou
“Sometimes it seems as though the Wildest One (you might call her God, or the Universe, or Love) is actively meddling in the affairs of mortals, like I am given a thing to learn, and then immediately after am handed the situations necessary for practice and integration.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“You don’t need to attend every argument you are invited to.” —anonymous (possibly Zig Ziglar
“It’s hard to be mad at someone who misses you while you’re asleep.” —Calvin, of Hobbes (Bill Watterson)
i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings;and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any– lifted from the no of all nothing–human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened) ―e. e. cummings, read by Anne Marie at our wedding on this day in 1990
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” ―Joseph Chilton Pearce
“If music be the food of love, play on.” ―William Shakespeare
“At the still point, there the dance is.” ―T.S. Eliot
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.” ―Leonard Bernstein
“To speak about that location from which work emerges, I choose familiar politicized language, old codes, words like ‘struggle, marginality, resistance.’ I choose these words knowing that they are no longer popular or ‘cool’ – hold onto them and the political legacies they evoke and affirm, even as I work to change what they say, to give them renewed and different meaning. I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance – as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, and fulfills desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.” From the essay: ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness;’ From the Book: “Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics” (1989 ) by bell hooks
We require that you speak into your misalignment with our doctrine. Also, do you float when ducked, or drown? Do you truck with Satan? Or run naked in the moonlight? Do you own a speckled hen?
Please tell us which of the following are true: You commune with fairies. You read people’s fortunes in the cards. You talk to trees. You have a one-eyed cat named Old Scratch.
Tell us about that wart on your chin. Do you have a roving eye? Do you claim to sweep the cobwebs from the sky upon your broom? Do you own a cauldron?
Your neighbor says you threatened him, you killed his cow and fouled his well. He says you are a danger to his children.
How combustible are you? For instance, how long will it take, we wonder, for your life to go up in flames?
Will you renounce the path of inner knowledge? Denounce your friends, your unmentionable activities? Will you use our chosen names for God?
Sign this confession, this creed, this code, this doctrine of belief. Explain your heresies and offer us an actionable plan for self-correction.
This is an ambush. The story is rigged. We’ve seen you in our visions when we kneel to pray, flying free and far from here, no longer troubling our status quo.
Again, we ask: When we duck you, will you float or drown?
What I Want to Tell the Bullies by Beth Weaver-Kreider
You’ve made your god too small, clothed him in your own cast-off suits, put him in a little box and now you claim to worship the poor little thing.
But the one whose name you wear had a thing or two to say about your kind of sanctimony: Brood of vipers. White-washed sepulchres, the hypocritical teeth of your Sunday smiles hiding the mouldering flesh of your lies, and the dust and dry bones of a faith that should be lush and living, but which you killed so you could set yourself up as god-kings.
What you worship is simply a reflection of your own self-righteousness and power.
You’ve taken the word of Love and turned it into a purity prison, a death cult, an excuse for your own violence and greed.
Jesus never burned a witch, refused aid to the ailing, or excommunicated someone for loving who they loved.
The Holy One will not be caged. The god-bird you thought you’d caught flies free, inviting all who Love to follow.
You did not cage or break me. I followed the Bird.
Gratitude List:
Cool weather
Tomorrow begins in-service for my new job!
All my beloveds
Hidden patterns
The Holy realm of the senses
May we walk in Beauty!
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” —Salman Rushdie ***** “I used to say, ‘There is a God-shaped hole in me.’ For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.” —Salman Rushdie ***** “Run my dear, From anything That may not strengthen Your precious budding wings.” —Hafez ***** “The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.” —Hildegard of Bingen ***** “Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.” —St. Hildegard of Bingen ***** “The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.” —Howard Zinn ***** “Dominance. Control. These things the unjust seek most of all. And so it is the duty of the just to defy dominance and to challenge control.” —Robert Fanney ***** “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” —Alice Walker ***** “I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.” —Alice Walker ***** “I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way…I can’t apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to… We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful…We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.” —Alice Walker
Today is my birthday. I’ve been here 55 years now (<–link), beginning at a hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. To Shirati, Tanzania, when I was ten days old, where I met my father for the first time. To York PA, back to Shirati, to Philippi WV, to Ephrata PA, and then to the messy all-over-the-placeness of young adulthood, and now back in York County, PA, for 20 years.
Here are some 55 Facts and Notes: The number given to asteroid Pandora is #55. I am Pandora’s progeny–I can never leave a box unopened.
The number 55 is apparently a lucky number for the astrological sign of Leo. Roar!
In Mathematics:
55 is the product of the smallest sexy prime pair (although I do not know what this means, I too am small, and sexy, and in my prime.)
55 is the largest triangular number in the Fibonacci sequence (again, I know not what this means, but I am large, and I like triangles.)
The element Caesium has the number 55 on the periodic table. According to Wikipedia, Caesium is “a soft, silvery-golden alkali metal with a melting point of 28.5 °C (83.3 °F), which makes it one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at or near room temperature.”
In Numerological terms, my soul number is 5 (add the digits in 8.10.1967, and keep adding digits together until you get a single digit), so 55 (five and five) feels like a good strong year for me. In the tarot, the fifth major arcanum card is The Hierophant, which symbolizes the passing on of knowledge and traditions—I like to think of that as the Teacher. So I am going to take that as my personal charge for the coming year and double my efforts to be an effective and compassionate teacher.
The number 5 breaks out of the stable solidity of the 4, offering new opportunities for growth, but also the potential for conflict and instability. I go into this double five year with my life shaken and stirred (boy howdy!), ready to find my new balance, eager to grow and change and Become more me.
Gratitude List: 1. My father’s relative health. July was a difficult month for our family. I am reminded to treasure every moment with the people I love. 2. Walking with a good friend on woodsy trails this morning: Hackberry trees, smell of fox (pervasive in those woods), teasel, wild mugwort, wild hibiscus, the Little Conestoga Creek, and dogbane. Mostly: good, easy conversation and companionship. 3. Monarchs. I know they’re heading onto the Endangered Species List. Grateful to see so many here where we live. 4. Scent of fox is a reminder of the story of Foxwoman, told by Martin Shaw. Reminder to know myself, to know my wildness, to trust my dreamingself. 5. So many delicious birthday blessings! I feel delight and strength and hope, and such a connection with so many people whom I have known, both in person and online. So much love! May we walk in Beauty!
Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that —
It lights the whole world. —Hafiz
“The Seven of Pentacles” by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup she is looking at her work growing away there actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans as things grow in the real world, slowly enough. If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water, if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food, if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars, if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees, then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
“Life…is a wonder. It is a sky laden with clouds of contradictions.” —Naguib Mahfouz
“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” —Coco Chanel
“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin
“Soul of my soul … be water in this now-river.” —Rumi
“You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe, and your name is Love.” —Rumi
“There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.” —Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life Of The Bee, 1924
“It’s not only those who have succumbed to hate who have to change. We need to learn to love bigger, to bring them back.” —Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
“If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” —Rumi
“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.
“While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.
“If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words.
“Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner
If you’re just joining me in these recent posts, I am taking a trip through the Fool’s Journey, the soulpath laid out in the stages of the Major Arcana of the Tarot cards. As I work on creating my own deck with the help of an online AI image generator, I am renaming some of the cards to unthread the gendered nature of the older titles, but holding the images and ideas I have learned in twenty years of studying the tarot carefully in my center while I consider their significance.
I have been struggling to meditate on this one because of my own recent pain. For so many years of my life, I have identified as a teacher, and since early April, I have doubted that path, considered other options as perfectly viable options for my future, and finally, returned to The Teacher as my primary vocational destiny. It came clear to me one morning, just after I celebrated the graduation of the senior class I was unable to finish teaching. Being among them, even after the grief and rage of this loss, reminded me of the thing that brings me most alive. And so, I said Yes to a small school that has offered me a position as a Humanities Teacher. I am feeling satisfied and grateful. I have not yet signed the paperwork, so I won’t give details just yet.
In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, this card is the Hierophant, a figure in the clothes of a bishop or pope, holding up a hand in blessing. The idea that comes with this card is the passing on of tradition. But it looks so patriarchal, I just struggle with it. As I worked with this card with friends, we came to see that this isn’t inherently about passing on the patriarchy, but about passing on knowledge and history, nurturing ideas and critical thinking. This is, to me, The Teacher.
I’ve spent so many years of my teaching life saying that I could probably be happy in any profession, that it’s not necessarily the profession that I love. But I realize that I have been fooling myself. Here’s another thing: One playful thing you can do in working with the tarot is to find your Soul Card. Take your birthday: Add the year to the month to the day. Mine is 1967+08+10=1985. Then add the digits together: 1+9+6+7=23. If it’s more than 22, add those together: 2+3=5. Your number, between 1 and 22, is your Soul Card. This is your soul’s work. It always bothered me that my Soul Card was The Hierophant, and I have sought out other, more helpful interpretations, and now, as I settle on my own extension of the meaning of this card as The Teacher, and realize that the vocation of Teacher is truly part of who I am, I can breathe a little better.
As I worked with the AI on this one, it was very important to me that my input would cause the AI to create the image in a natural setting because I think that the most pressing issue underlying everything we do and teach today must include a sense of the importance of knowing and protecting the Earth.
Gratitude List: 1. Settling into my vocation. When I have signed the paperwork, I will say more, but for now, I am deeply grateful and delighted to have found a teaching position for the fall! 2. Cool mid-June. I struggle with really difficult allergies from mid-May until mid-June, so during what are the most pleasant temperatures of the late spring, I keep indoors with doors and windows closed. When I emerge from the allergy fog, the season has usually turned hot. I am so grateful for these cooler days when I am emerging and able to live out of doors again. 3. Kindness. Tenderness. Gentleness. 4. Poppies. I still don’t have any of my own, but I LOVE walking and driving past other people’s gardens, especially when the poppies are blooming. 5. Truth. Veracity. Impeccability. People who can humbly speak what they know to be true without having to shift the narrative in order to defend or aggrandize themselves. May we walk humbly, justly, and kindly, in Beauty!
“We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.” —Louise Eldrich
“A man who does not know how to be angry does not know how to be good. And a man that does not know how to be shaken to his heart’s core with indignation over things evil is either a fungus or a wicked man.” —Henry Ward Beecher, social reformer and abolitionist (1813-1887)
Here’s the best way to see a thing: catch the edge of light that burns around its opposite, that which it would otherwise obscure. —Mark Bibbins
I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone. I looked you straight in the cold eye, cold. I was not punished, was not turned to stone. How to believe the legends I am told? …
I turned your face around! It is my face. That frozen rage is what I must explore— Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place! That is the gift I thank Medusa for. —May Sarton, “The Muse as Medusa”
“How you get there is where you’ll arrive.” —The Mad Hatter
“When you look at what is happening to our world—and it is hard to look at what’s happening to our water, our air, our trees, our fellow species—it becomes clear that unless you have some roots in a spiritual practice that holds life sacred and encourages joyful communion with all your fellow beings, facing the enormous challenges ahead becomes nearly impossible.” —Joanna Macy
“We are capable of suffering with our world, and that is the true meaning of compassion. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don’t ever apologize for crying for the trees burning in the Amazon or over the waters polluted from mines in the Rockies. Don’t apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal. That is what is happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time.” —Joanna Macy
“And I consider myself a skeptic, but Lord, I’m an optimistic soul.” —Rising Appalachia
Art by Beth Weaver-Kreider and AI. Brightwing Tarot.
I’m trying not to engage in too wide-ranging a re-interpretation of the cards as I find my way through the Fool’s Wanderings in the tarot, so I want to be careful with cards like this one, which I have always found unsettling. The Fool leaves the arms of the nurturing Earth in the Empress/Matrix card, and now meets the Emperor. As I meditate on the meaning of this card and what the Fool needs to learn here, I find the martial and domineering nature of the Emperor to crunch too intensely against my own notions of peace and justice.
The Emperor is the boundary-setter, putting their own Will into the world and establishing the edges. Rather than interpreting this card as the selfish and greedy conquest of a power-hungry patriarch, I look at this boundary-setting as an incredibly important moment in the Fool’s learning process, when they realize they, too, deserve justice and respect. In my own recent crisis, I find that I must make a stop here in the land of The Protector (whom I might end up calling The Boundary-Setter), and relearn how to re-member my own boundaries, how to shore up the walls of my garden, and say, “This far, and no further. Here is my limit.”
And it IS a re-learning and a re-membering. It’s never a once and done thing. This Fool that is me has been here in this place before, learning about boundaries and protection of my insides. I thought I had completely aced this lesson in the past. Yet I find myself here again. Again. The assault on my inner realm this time has been more intense than I could have previously imagined. Time to re-learn this lesson. With the Emperor/Protector/Boundary-Setter, I say, “I will protect myself. I will hold fast to my inner truth and not feel shame.”
And this one pairs so beautifully with the work of The Matrix, in this case a binary pairing that dances together to form a deeper complexity. The life force of The Matrix is free of boundaries and rule-setting, and the soul force of The Protector creates healthy and safe boundaries. Too much of one or the other, and the Fool will lose her balance.
And how can I truly create brave and safe where others can feel belonging if I cannot protect my own inner world? One thing that the traditional Emperor does not seem to know how to do is to ask for help. I’m grateful to add that layer to my version of the card. This Protector knows how to ask for help in times of breached walls.
Here is my Emperor poem from several years ago. I find that it’s one of those moments when my own voice from the past has something to say to the me of the moment:
Setting the Intention by Beth Weaver-Kreider
I will. That should fill the task list of the day. Just say, “I will.”
Then make that happen. Make your will into a thing Let it sing. Give it ground.
Cast your boundaries around you: east and south and west and north. Go forth and do your will.
Gratitude List: 1. Blue grosbeak. I know he makes my gratitude list every day now, but really, the sun twinkling off the deep cerulean of his feathers is such a revelation! I feel like Mother Mary is tapping me on the shoulder every time I see him. Such a Blue! 2. Safe and protected spaces, and the people who rush to help shore up the walls when they’ve been breached. 3. Father Richard Rohr’s words today on symbolic language for the journey of faith. I felt like he’d been watching my own story somehow. Powerful synchronicity. 4. Reclaiming my place. 5. So many Beloveds. You and you and you. Twice this past weekend, I met people in the flesh whom I have only known online, and I was so blessed to know and see their beauty in the real world. I can be really socially awkward, especially right now, but I love this sort of encounter! Balm to my soul. May we walk in Beauty!
“Stars are an excellent medicine for homesick hearts.” —F W Boreham
“Radical simply means grasping things at the root.” ―Angela Davis
“If you put three or four disassociated ideas together, and created awkward relationships with them, the unconscious intelligence that comes from those pairings is really quite startling sometimes, quite provocative.” —David Bowie
“Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith.” —Brené Brown
“Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only [s]he who sees, takes off [her] shoes.” —Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“I do not see a delegation for the Four Footed. I see no seat for the Eagles. We forget and we consider ourselves superior. But we are after all a mere part of Creation. And we must consider to understand where we are. And we stand somewhere between the mountain and the Ant. Somewhere and only there as part and parcel of the Creation.” —Oren Lyons
“The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed—to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is.” —Parker J. Palmer
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” ―Maya Angelou
This is how I would die into the love I have for you: As pieces of cloud dissolve in sunlight. ―Rumi
Werifesteria: To wander longingly through the woods in search of mystery. (No one seems to know if this is an actual Old English word, as the internet says, but I don’t really care. It’s a word now.)
“Keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive” ―Martha Graham
“When Paul said, ‘Help those women who labor with me in the Gospel,’ he certainly meant that they did more than pour out tea.” ―Julia Foote
In Japanese (again, according to the internet), tsundoku means, “the act of buying books and not reading them, leaving them to pile up.”
So, the Fool has embarked upon adventure–unprepared but winsomely present to each moment on the road–has learned the elemental mysteries of the universe from the Medium, and has studied wisdom and lore from the Secret Keeper. The next two characters the Fool meets are usually called The Empress and The Emperor. By renaming the Empress Matrix, I haven’t actually managed to entirely pull this character out of the gender binary, for matrix is the source, the womb from which we are born, the fertile Earth, the rock bed on which crystals are formed. This is the birth-giver, the bringer of life: fecund, nurturing, fruitful, generative. The German word mater, from which we get the word mother, comes from the Latin matrix.
This Matrix, unlike Neo’s computer simulation, is the source of all life, the life force that pushes dandelions through concrete and pulls forth the greening of the spring, draws forth the flower, and brings flower to fruit. Then the Matrix locks up that life force into the hard shell of the seed to begin the cycle all over again.
After acquiring knowledge and power from Medium and Secret Keeper, the Fool must take time to grow, and to carefully observe the cycles of life, to feel the Life Force that feeds the Fool’s own self. The Fool learns to tend and nurture life force in the presence of the Matrix.
Here is a poem I wrote several years ago about The Empress:
Message from the Empress by Beth Weaver-Kreider
In the grove over the ridge, the trees have broken into a flourish of pink, lascivious against the rain-wet green, a thousand mouths seeking a drink.
Let us riot too. Let us fill our thirst.
Let us spread our blooming fingers, opening our mouths and hearts, dancing away ruin with bloom, lingering with simple beauty, with aching fragrance.
Let us waft. Let us be wanton.
The Matrix/Empress has no time for rule-making about bodies. Here is where the Fool learns about Embodiment, about Being a Body. Unlike certain strains of Buddhism and Christianity that stress transcending or mortifying the body in order to reach enlightenment or purity, The Matrix knows that the body is pure and right and holy. “Your body is a temple,” we were told in Sunday School, and were expected to hide and contain and control it. “Your body is a temple,” says The Matrix, “and it is meant to be celebrated and inhabited and experienced.”
How do you experience life in a body? Is it painful? Uncomfortable? Shameful? Joyful? Ecstatic? Primal? What meditations and movements, what breathing and noticing, can you do to more fully experience the deep sense of belonging in a body?
Gratitude List: 1. People who get it, who understand your story even when you need to speak around silent spaces. People who See you even when you feel like parts of you have become invisible. 2. Textile arts, particularly crocheting and knitting–how amazing that we can take one or two little sticks, and a piece of string, and make such amazing things? Knot and twist. There’s a life lesson in that, isn’t there? 3. Wood thrushes calling in the woods at Sam Lewis Park this evening. 4. Disc Golf. I didn’t play because we only have two sets of discs, but it was such a delight walking through the course as the boys played. Child 2 said to Child 1, “You’ll have to hurry up and get your license so we can do this whenever we want!” 5. Blue grosbeak, a constant visual presence at the feeder, and oriole, a constant aural presence in the holler. May we walk in Beauty!
“If you feel thirsty, then drink from your cup. The birds will keep singing until they wake up.” —Franz Wright
“Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” —attributed to Buddha and to Nelson Mandela
“Let fury have the hour. Anger can be power. D’you know that you can use it?” –The Clash
“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.” ― Junot Díaz
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” ― Stephen King
“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences” ― Sylvia Plath
Mockingbird Chronicles 