May there be dancing in your days. May there be smiles. May there be feasting.
May there be softness in the eyes of those who surround you. May there be warmth. May there be wisdom.
May you recall that the armor you’ve been wearing is not your true self, but only a shell of protection. May you have safety. May you be brave.
And may you breathe Belonging through the whole of your being until every cell of you celebrates your name: Beloved.
Gratitude List: 1. We did manage to carve some time and safe space with some of our beloved college friends. What a joy! Missing those who weren’t there, but feeling them present even in distance. 2. Learning from friends about the Friends (Quakers) makes me open myself to listening more attentively to the messages meant for me. 3. In the stillness is the dancing. Finding my way back to meditation and mindful breathing. 4. Learning and relearning, every year, every day, that it just takes one step. And then another. One by one. . . 5. Egg on English muffin for breakfast. May we walk in Wisdom!
“Brew me a cup for a winter’s night. For the wind howls loud and the furies fight; Spice it with love and stir it with care, And I’ll toast our bright eyes, my sweetheart fair.” —Minna Thomas Antrim
“How do we go on living, when every day our hearts break anew? Whether your beloved are red-legged frogs, coho salmon, black terns, Sumatran tigers, or fat Guam partulas, or entire forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, or oceans, or the entire planet, the story is the same, the story of the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved, the murder of one’s beloved.” —Derrick Jensen
“The Work. I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment. And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” —Peter Drucker
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly.” —Margaret Fuller
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” —T.S. Eliot
“So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.” ― Naomi Klein
Here are two versions of the same photo, taken as the sky was beginning to show grey on this first morning of a new year. In the first, I played with filters and textures and color saturation in order to create a pensive mood. Looking at it here in this space, it feels anxious and wary and stark, especially next to the second version, which I ran through an AI Dream filter. This second one is still pensive, but cheerier, more hopeful.
While both are significantly changed from the original, both of them hold emotional truth that is deeper than the just-the-facts original. I AM going pensively into this new year. I am both rattled and happy, scratched and hopeful. The shadows are there, but they don’t scare me (not so much, anyway), and I am ready to explore them a little more deeply.
Usually I wait until Epiphany to declare my words to myself, but I am feeling settled now, ready to choose, ready to embark.
So, my word for this year is Embodiment. I have written about this idea before, the way I have always felt a deep sense of wrongness whenever religious and spiritual and self-help practices begin to talk about mind over matter, or about transcending the body, or about liberating the soul from its body trap. I understand at a base level the philosophical concept that this physical reality isn’t the Real Reality, but I don’t really accept it as a core principle. Or, as I understand it, I think I need to understand it through the physical body I live in.
I think it’s helpful to consider body, mind, and spirit, to see to all our various categories of health and wellbeing, but I always feel like the greatest health happens when I am working to integrate all the various aspects of myself rather than separating them out, dividing in order to conquer, particularly in the way the culture I live in seems to see the punishment of the body as a virtue, unless it fits some strange “idealized” vision of what a body should be.
I am soul embodied into matter. I think perhaps, yes, the soul part of me exists in a way that may transcend this physical plane. I get glimpses of that. But this collection of atoms that make up the physical part of me are no less ME than the sentient, thinking, yearning, indwelling part. And if my soul exists here in this present plane, then I believe it’s here for a purpose, to know what it feels like to touch and taste and see and hear and smell, to experience physical pain and pleasure, to be em-bodied.
Body imbued with soul, with spirit, with sentience. Soul enmattered. Mind ensouled. These different pieces of what we come to know of as Self are in this current configuration because they teach and inform each other. I think we hinder our evolution by trying to escape and transcend the magic of this intertwinement. Or, to take the positive twist, we further human evolution and our own personal destiny and purpose by becoming integrated selves, all the pieces braided together.
Two streams that I have been working with this year that relate to Embodiment are Creativity and Magick, so those are also words for my coming year. If I am categorizing the various parts of me, perhaps Creativity fits in the more mental realm, the ways in which the mind solves problems and develops new ideas. And Magick is the more spiritual, the prayerful, the awareness of deeper levels of reality, the level of the soul. So my quest for the year is how to braid my creative and spiritual selves more artfully into my physical reality.
Some implications: * I will continue this journey to consciously stop beating up on my body for the way she looks or feels. I will offer her what she needs and tend to her aches and changes. * I will live through this period of peri-menopause with as much consciousness and intention as possible. * I will feed the creative and spiritual parts of mySelf as intentionally as I feed my physical Self. With care and with joy. For health and for satisfaction.
Last week, I posted a quote by bell hooks on Facebook, about how self-improvement when done as a simply inward-looking thing can become narcissistic, that we only become better in the context of community. A friend expanded this, pointing out the paradox that we cannot improve our communities unless we do our inner work. Both/And.
Perhaps that’s part of why I have this urge to keep this blog-journal public, to lay at least some of it bare so that I can place my own journey into the community context. It’s why, even while I recognize that aspects of my social media life have become addictive and need reigning in, the overall open and vulnerable quality of the community I have discovered on social media keeps me learning and growing from the inner journeys of so many circles of beloveds. We become better together.
Gratitude List: 1. Being a multi-faceted being: soul and mind and body and spirit and streams of energy braided into one Self. 2. Evolving, growing, changing, Becoming 3. Cats 4. Reflections: windows, mirrors, shadows. . . 5. Layers: in artwork, leaves, selves, reflections, clothing. . . May we walk in Wisdom!
Honoring Kwanzaa with those who celebrate it: The word for this last day of Kwanzaa is Imani, or Faith. Believe that your dreams have the power to create change in the world. May it be so for you and for me and for all who long for and work for justice in the coming year.
May the long time sun shine upon you All love surround you And the pure light within you Guide your way on. —Traditional Irish Blessing
“A writer without readers is just a person alone in a room.” —Barbara Kingsolver
Someone Should Start Laughing by Hafiz (Ladinsky)
I have a thousand brilliant lies For the question: How are you? I have a thousand brilliant lies For the question: What is God? If you think that the Truth can be known From words, If you think that the Sun and the Ocean Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth, O someone should start laughing! Someone should start wildly Laughing –Now!
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Courage, Dear Heart.” —the Albatross (Aslan) to Lucy, C. S. Lewis
“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering ‘it will be happier.’” —Alfred Tennyson
“Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.” ―Joan Chittister
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” —T. S. Eliot
“And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” —William Blake
“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.” ―Mary Oliver
This thing I do every year, during the high holy days between Solstice/Christmas and Epiphany, of listening for words and watching for repeated images and ideas in waking life and in dreamtime, helps me to focus on a theme for the year. In recent years, I’ve gotten pretty free with throwing everything into the mix. This exuberance has meant that I end up with such a collage of ideas and words that are somehow loosely tied together that I can’t seem to keep my focus as much throughout the year, and end up forgetting or dropping my theme by midyear.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It serves me for a while, and then I move on to another idea. This year, in June, while I was on my silent retreat, I found three words that I have been gnawing on for the past six months: Embodiment, Creativity, Magick. As I sort through my dreams and images from the past few days, I keep returning to these words. And yesterday, one of my new Facebook friends wrote a powerful piece about how focusing on embodiment helps her through times of anxiety. That’s the sort of message I look for. This word has been flittering about inside my skull, and then someone brings it up, or I hear it across a room, or it comes in a dream. Those are the patterens I search for.
As for the dreams, I’m finding a lot of anxiety there, and weariness. Last night, I was trying to care for two children, a boy and a girl. We were assigned a room on the fifth floor of a run-down building. It was so cold we slept in cardboard boxes. I was terrified I was going to lose the children. Typical anxiety dream.
In a later dream, I was at a farming conference with a group of people. A couple of us went up near the front to try to get seats for the group. I really wanted to hear the speakers. But nothing ever really happened. People milled about, and speakers seemed to go up and get ready to speak, but then something else would happen, the speakers would switch out, and eventually a bunch of us fell asleep on a mattress at the back. When we woke up, most people had already left. The weirdest thing about that dream was that at one point I was talking to a couple of farmers we’d once worked with (in the dream, they were just generic men–not any specific people I know in waking life), and I was struck by how crusty and rough-talking these earnest and thoughtful men had become. They were both smoking cigars, but they looked like stage cigars, with a glowing bulb in the end and little bits of orange and red tulle fabric to look like glowing ash. But smoke was coming from the ends, and they were getting shorter.
I feel like my dreams reflect the anxiety of the times. How can I take care of the Beloveds in my circles, and still have enough energy left for my own inner and artistic life? How can I maintain my true self when social and community rules and conventions seem to keep shifting? How can we build and grow the new thing when rest itself has become work?
What dreams and messages are you receiving these days?
Gratitude List: 1. I’m still feeling the resonance in my chest of playing music with Val and Henry several days ago: violin, clarinet, and tenor recorder. I’ve always liked clarinet, but now I am in love with it. What a rich sound, and what a blend of instruments. I don’t know if it’s just with recorder, or whether other instrumentalists hear it, but when recorders play together, there’s often an overtone, a separate voice, that layers itself in the mix. Often it’s a clue that the instruments aren’t quite in tune with each other. But sometimes, it blends and supports the other instruments, like an angel humming along. This happened during that session. At first, I thought my father was humming a harmony along with us. 2. A misty morning. 3. Time out of time. This is healing and rejuvenating time for me. 4. This sturdy little oak up on the bluff. It’s probably thirty or more feet tall by now, but still young and skinny. I remember when it was a sapling, just my own height. Thank you, friend squirrel, for planting this beautiful guardian of the hilltop. 5. Bright red cardinal on a branch out in the mist and the grey. May we walk in Beauty!
Honoring Kwanzaa with those who celebrate it: Today’s word is Nia, Purpose.
“The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day’s work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: ‘What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.’ People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.” —Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935)
“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, ‘It will be happier. ‘” —Alfred Lord Tennyson
From An African Prayer Book by Archbishop Desmond Tutu Wonderful one, you live among the sheltering rocks. You give rain to us people. We pray to you, hear us, O Strong One! When we beg you, show your mercy. You are in the highest places with the spirits of the great ones. You raise the grass-covered hills above the earth, and you make the rivers. Gracious one! —Rozwi, South Africa
“We arise today in the Eternal Flow of Mercy who was here when the land began to breathe, when the first tribes began to roam, and when the colonists came to settle. We arise today in the Eternal Flow of Wisdom who is dimly perceived in the stones, the stories and the studies of all our peoples. We arise today in the Eternal Flow of Life who seeps through land and limb and love. Amen.” —Ray Simpson
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. #goodtrouble” —John Lewis tweet
“Being curious is the most important part of being a journalist. It might be the most important part of being anything.” —Lemony Snicket
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” —Virginia Woolf
“And when I had asked the name of the river from the brakeman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.” —Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879
The New Song by W. S. Merwin For some time I thought there was time and that there would always be time for what I had a mind to do and what I could imagine going back to and finding it as I had found it the first time but by this time I do not know what I thought when I thought back then there is no time yet it grows less there is the sound of rain at night arriving unknown in the leaves once without before or after then I hear the thrush waking at daybreak singing the new song
“Know that the same spark of life that is within you, is within all of our animal friends; the desire to live is the same within all of us…” ―Rai Aren
Someone asked me what is your religion? I said, “All the paths that lead to the light.” —Anonymous
(on the day of the massacre of the people of the Conestoga 250 years ago)
Come with me now, Bright Souls and we’ll sit in a circle together. Silently a while. Then we talk.
Light six candles for the people of the longhouse who died that wintry dawning.
The air is filled already with too many words. The day carries so many mutterings on the wind, on the wings of the vulture, drifting above the broken fields.
If we are to keep awake, to live in the place where the heart stays open, then perhaps we must look into the teeth of the story. Together we gaze at those shadows. Together we speak their names. Together we listen for the sparrow’s call.
At the place of the great stone I did not speak their names. I left my shell there at that place in the glittering sun.
Some days I cannot bear the darkness, but I will close my eyes and sing while you keep vigil near me. And when you falter, too, I will have found the strength renewed to witness the tale while you sing to me.
Perhaps you will not believe me when I tell you: As I drove that road toward the River, six deer ran across blue shadows cast by afternoon sun on snow, over the fields to the road. They paused a moment to watch the golden fish of my car approach, then slipped across Indian Marker Road and were gone, past the still pond and into a fringe of wood.
This afternoon, as Jon washing out some old bins beside the barn, and I was transplanting hosta by the shop, we were caught by the sight of a pair of brown thrashers dancing underneath the walnut tree. We figured it was a mating ritual. After one flew away, the other continued to dance-flit in a sort of circle around a branch, flashing its wings in rhythmic motions. When that one, too, had flown, I went to inspect the stick, which seemed odd to me. I thought maybe instead of a mating ritual, the birds were agitated about another dead bird or small animal.
It was not a stick, and it was not dead. It was a four-foot long black snake, squiggled in upon herself. (Note on Snake Pronouns: “It” seems disrespectful, somehow, like I am refusing to acknowledge her beingness. And somehow singular “they” doesn’t quite feel right here either, so I am going to use she/her.)
The whole family spent some time watching her, and she didn’t move more than to flick her tongue and shift her head to watch us. She was either frightened or torpid or waiting to figure out her next move. Snakes are patient that way.
Twenty minutes later I was carrying the black flags my parents had given me to the hole by the shop where I was planning to plant them.
The snake was sliding along the edge of the grass at the driveway toward the little stream of water running from Jon’s bin-washing. She stopped, dipped her head to the stream, and drank. Have you ever watched a snake drink? It was already feeling like a pretty sacred moment of wonder by this point watching a snake drink. I felt like the Goddess in Denise Levertov’s poem “The Fountain.”
I stood where I was, bag of plants in one hand and shovel in the other, and the snake began slithering toward me.
I’m not afraid of snakes. Not exactly. I love them. And yet, perhaps I actually am just the tiniest bit afraid of them.
This one slithered right toward me. I made a conscious decision not to move, to stay where I was, and to see what she would do when she came near to me. She kept on, right toward me, and I had a momentary sense that she was going to slither right between my feet.
And then she DID! Right between my feet!
I don’t think I would still be believing myself that it had happened had Jon not been there watching, too. Off she went to the hosta I had just disturbed beside the sycamore tree, and curled herself in a hollow beneath their broad leaves and in a hollow between sycamore roots.
You can tell me there’s a scientific reason that she came my way–snakes perhaps can’t see particularly well, perhaps they move toward tall things, and she slithered my way thinking I was a bush, perhaps it was simply the most direct route from small stream to sycamore.
Still. Still. Still, it was a magical moment I needed right now. A messenger. A visitation.
Yesterday, my father helped me to articulate what it feels like to live with the after-effects of Covid for weeks after I have supposedly recovered. It feels like languishing. It’s like that word was made for people like me, who can’t quite get out from under the rug of this thing.
There’s that meme of Count Rugen from The Princess Bride, where he has just tortured Westley on his Machine, and he says, “I’ve just sucked one year of your life away. Tell me, how do you feel?” Covid has been my Count Rugen. I always assumed that the year of life was taken away from the far end, that when people say, “It took a year off my life!” they mean that year 99 is now gone. After Covid, I feel like I’ve lost a year or three from my life, but they’ve been taken from right here, like I’ve gone from 53 to 55 or 57 in six weeks.
Here’s the part where I sit with the folks in the Nursing Home and enumerate my aches and pains, so feel free to skip down to gratitude and inspiring quotes here. Since this blog is also my personal archive and chronicle, I feel like I need to set it all down here. * I am definitely regaining my energy, but I still crash. I can’t push myself or overdo it, and expect to rest for an hour or two and bounce back. If I push myself too hard, I crash hard, and end up on the recliner for the rest of the day, my body exhausted and my brain foggy. This is definitely improving as time goes by–fewer crashes. * I have always been forgetful. I prefer to think of it as engagingly flaky. It just feels like I’m more forgetful now, like my brain enters fogs and mists more regularly. I need to really slow down and breathe in order to focus. This is also less intense six weeks out. * Before Covid, my body had been sort of toying with the idea of menopause for several years. I’d have periods of time when I would have a hot flash very morning at 3 am, or months of unbearable insomnia. I’d skip a period once in a while, or be late or early, or have really intense and heavy periods for a while and then really light ones. But my body would always re-regulate. In the time since I have had Covid, I’ve skipped two periods in a row. * About two weeks ago, I developed pain in my shoulder and upper arm. I figured I had just slept on it wrong, but it persisted and worsened, and I realized it wasn’t actually all muscle pain, but mostly nerve pain in my brachial nerves. The pain became excruciating at night, and has been manageable during the day. I did some research, and discovered that brachial neuritis occurs after injury, virus, or vaccine. The primary treatment is painkillers, yoga, and breathing exercises until it subsides. Several nights in the past week and a half, I have gotten very little sleep because of the pain, but the last three night are getting much better, and last night, I only woke up twice, and was able to get back to sleep almost immediately after doing some yoga stretches on the arm. * The other day when I was eating, I noticed that a piece of enamel had chipped off the back of one of my front teeth. Later in the day, as I was exploring the spot with my tongue, the top edge of the tooth just crumbled away. My brother is a dentist, and he didn’t think I should be too alarmed, that it’s not uncommon as people age. I have also heard that one side effect people are noticing after Covid is that their teeth crack or fall out. I’m getting it fixed this week.
Gratitude List: 1. The fiercely creative students at my school. This is school play weekend, and I am the head usher for plays, so I go to every show (which means I need to especially guard my energy this weekend), and this play offers them the perfect chance to collaborate in ensemble acting, and to sing and dance and do comedy and drama. 2. The little beans of Tanzanian Peaberry are such cute little peas, and it’s just the perfect coffee. 3. Every little noticeable bit of ground regained in my recovery. I slept most of last night, with very little nerve pain in my arm. This is huge. 4. Hugging people again. Carefully and with full consent, but hugging. 5. These cat-folx and their varied personalities. Interspecies communication.
May we walk in Beauty!
“The only time incorrectly is not spelled incorrectly is when it is spelled incorrectly.”
“There is no such thing as one-sided generosity. Like one ecosystem, we are each at different times receiving or purging, growing or pruning. In those moments when you believe you aren’t receiving enough, consider what you most want to receive might be the thing you need to give away.” —Toko-pa Turner
“Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.” —Henry David Thoreau
“Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Yet we so easily take this gift for granted. That is why so many spiritual traditions begin with thanksgiving, to remind us that for all our woes and worries, our existence itself is an unearned benefaction, which we could never of ourselves create.” —Joanna Macy
“What if the Creator is like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s God: “like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence”? What if the Source of All Life inhabits both the dark and the light, heals with strange splendor as much as with sweet insight, is hermaphroditic and omnisexual? What if the Source loves to give you riddles that push you past the boundaries of your understanding, forcing you to change the ways you think about everything? What if, as Rusty Morrison speculates in “Poetry Flash,” “the sublime can only be glimpsed by pressing through fear’s boundary, beyond one’s previous conceptions of the beautiful”? Close your eyes and imagine you can sense the presence of this tender, marvelous, difficult, entertaining intelligence.” —Rob Brezsny
Student poetry on my white board. Both poems are apt messages for standing in the doorway to May.
Today is the last day of Poetry Prompts for April. I might take a break from the blog for a few days when this is done.
Today, as we stand in the doorway to May, write a poem about doorways and doors. Doors can be portals from one world to another, the symbol of the step of faith we take from one stage to the next. Doors can also be symbolic of the space between ourselves and others. What doors keep us apart or invite us in? Or write about the doors of your town.
Doorways are about liminal spaces. Write about thresholds, about standing poised between one thing and the next. What holds you in the past? What pushes you into the future? What are the spiritual lessons you learn from standing in the in-between? Or write about the doorway to another world.
Who or what is on the other side of that door?
Today is May Day Eve, one of those special moments in the solar calendar, situated between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. We’ve watched the riot of spring creeping over the gardens and fields, delighted in the shining colors of flowers and the tender greening of leaves, paid attention to what is hatching within us.
May Day, or Beltane, is about celebrating the freedom from that egg, about jumping into the green of the season, feet first, taking risks, whooping with joy. Dust off your wild barbaric yawp. Wanton is the word of this season. We’re stripping off the constricting cloaks and coats and scarves of winter, and running through the fields, barefoot and maybe naked (some of us keep that purely in the realm of metaphor).
What do you need to release and let go of in this season? What are the names of the items of clothing you drop in your wake as you run to the fields? What is the name of the green field before you, the thing you give yourself to with every ounce of your passion?
As we enter the season of Beltane, consider all that has kept you from living fully and joyfully and passionately into your purpose. Name the habits and boxes and dogmas that keep you from living in the world with you Whole Heart. Drop them. And run for the fields.
Gratitude List: 1. That phoebe, calling his name into the dawn. 2. The oriole who called from the sycamore trees yesterday as we left school. 3. Although I was disappointed that opening night of the school play was cancelled because of the rain, our whole family needed the rest of being cozy together in our house last evening. 4. Living by the seasons means that every year has its reminders and rituals of letting go, paying attention, living fully, resting, growing. On the threshold of May, I commit to ditching the constricting habits that keep me from living joyfully. 5. The dawn keeps coming earlier and the twilight comes later, even when the day is cloudy and grey.
May we walk in Beauty!
“Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are world of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into t anew way of thinking.” —Richard Rohr
“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” —Georgia O’Keeffe
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit
“The child’s hand Folding these wings Wins no wars and ends them all. “ ―Thomas Merton
Write a poem about a tree, or a grove of trees, or a quiet wood, or a wild forest.
Gratitude List: 1. Morning Thor snuggles 2. Oriole is back! 3. How the green of early sycamore leaves filters the light into the holler 4. Sleep 5. Mint chocolate chip ice cream
May we walk in Beauty!
“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.” —Barry H. Gillespie
“There is room for you at our table, if you choose to join us.” —Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing
“For beautiful to happen, the beautiful has got to be seen.” —from the musical “Ordinary Days”
“You will be found.” —from the musical “Dear Evan Hansen”
“How do you become the person you’ve forgotten you ever were?” —from the musical “Anastasia”
“The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.” ―Joseph Gordon-Levitt
To all the children by Thomas Berry
To the children who swim beneath The waves of the sea, to those who live in The soils of the Earth, to the children of the flowers In the meadows and the trees of the forest, To all those children who roam over the land And the winged ones who fly with the winds, To the human children too, that all the children May go together into the future in the full Diversity of their regional communities.
Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
“Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi (Barks)
“You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.” ―Isabel Allende
“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy – the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ―Bréne Brown, Wholehearted
Today is National Great Poetry Reading Day! No, I’m serious! It’s a thing. Go get you some Angelou, Dickinson or Whitman, some Baraka, some Stein, some Oliver, and read it out loud. Read to yourself, to your lover, to your students, to your sister, to your cat. Read to the wind, to the apple tree, to the dishwasher, to the dust bunnies.
Dive into those great poems and make yourself a cento, which means “patchwork garment” in Latin, which makes this poem form seem extra special. Really, it’s a glorified found poem. You pull lines from a bunch of different poems and you make a poem from them, sticking them together in ways that seem to connect and complete each other’s thoughts and ideas. Homer did it. So did Virgil. So you can, too. Put an asterisk at the bottom of your page and list the poets you borrowed from.
Gratitude List: 1. May apples 2. Maples 3. Moooon 4. Massage 5. Meditation
May we walk in Beauty!
“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” —Diane Ackerman
“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.” ―Wendell Berry
“A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with.” —Jean Shinoda Bolen
“Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.” —Thomas Carlyle
“At the end of the day, I’d rather be excluded for who I include than included for who I exclude.” —Eston Williams
“Free me. . .from words, that I may discover the signified, the word unspoken in the darkness.” —Byzantine Prayer
“Father, Mother, God, Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days. For then we have you to lean upon. For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak. For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness. For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing. Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most—Peace.” —Maya Angelou
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” —Leonard Bernstein
Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.” —Mary Oliver
“If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” —Harper Lee
Write a poem that relaxes, a poem that settles, that brings rest. Maybe it’s a lullaby. Maybe it’s a poem for meditation or yoga practice. And another thing to do today: Memorize a poem you’ve written–get a poem out into the air. Poetry began as an oral art, and it longs to be set free into the air again.
Gratitude List: 1. Gulf Shrimp with risotto for supper. That was delicious. 2. Full Moon 3. Fluttering blossoms 4. Patterns 5. Lights at ends of tunnels.
May we walk in Beauty!
“As truly as God is our father, so truly is God our mother.” —Julian of Norwich
“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” ―Anaïs Nin
“Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.” ―William Wordsworth
Forever Oneness, who sings to us in silence, who teaches us through each other. Guide my steps with strength and wisdom. May I see the lessons as I walk, honor the Purpose of all things. Help me touch with respect, always speak from behind my eyes. Let me observe, not judge. May I cause no harm, and leave music and beauty after my visit. When I return to forever may the circle be closed and the spiral be broader. ―Bee Lake (Aboriginal poet)
“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.” ―Joseph Campbell
“I can’t tell you why your story is important, only that it is.” ―Mara Eve Robbins
Mockingbird Chronicles 