Live in the Sunshine

Emerson

Not exactly a poem, perhaps, but I will write it like one:

Just for today,
let all the stories be happy ones,
full of surprise and laughter,
the gifts of the unexpected.

Tomorrow,
we’ll get back to the business
of saving the world,
of figuring out how
to love away the meanness,
how to create a shining space
in the dim and dingy rooms.

But today,
let all the stories be happy ones.

Gratitude List:
1. I really didn’t want to give up a day off for an IU13 conference, but I am incredibly glad I went, inspired to engage students in the written word, full of helpful ideas for sparking interest in the text, and eager to keep learning myself.
2. Back to school.  Back to rhythm.  I admit, it’s hard to get back to the work after a wonderful break, but I do miss it when I am away.  I love having a job I love.
3. Small graces.  A little extra time to do something.  A moment of sunshine on a gray day.  A smile from someone in a distracted moment.
4. Tiger eye–such a shiny stone.
5. The great wisdom of my friends.  I am fortunate to have many wise and compassionate and hopeful people in my life.

May we walk in Beauty.

What Gives Rise

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Redacted Poem: I pulled the words and phrases from one page in an old copy of National Geographic.  My favorite phrase is “some visionaries face revision.”

What Gives Rise

ancestors             explore a better place
close the circle             completing the journey

yet it hardly ended

we go to Mars             backtrack and regroup
some visionaries face revision
trying to figure out
what gives rise to this “madness”

we’re doing what they did
an urge to explore rises in us

you find people
passionate enough
intrigued enough
curious enough

Gratitude List:
1. One small boy who is seven years old today.  He has a hilarious sense of humor, a well-developed sense of himself, and open-hearted compassion for the people around him.  He is an observer, watching and noticing little details, from the kind of car everyone drives to whether or not someone seems to be having a good or a bad day.  I am so glad that he came to be in this family.
2. The ways in which the body is designed to protect itself and heal itself.  Those minute guard dogs, the white blood cells, are meant to attack scary intruders.  Today I am praying for someone’s white blood cells to be healthfully and speedily replenished.  The body is designed to do that, too.  May it be so.
3. More reconnecting.  Strengthening the web.  Building the form and reconnecting the strands.
4. Making dolls/creatures.  I haven’t made anything with a personality for a while. (I’ve been making hearts and scarves and things.)  I had sort of forgotten the satisfying way that I begin to fall in love with something as soon as it has eyes and it begins to take the shape that it is meant to take.
5. Warm days.  I managed to get through winter without too much whining about the cold (I guess it wasn’t particularly cold for very long).

May we walk in Beauty!

Wind-Tossed

 

EPSON MFP image

Fox

Wind-buffeted,
the crows remain aloft,
daring the sky to toss them higher,
calling each other through the gusts,
daring the air to throw them through branches.
Shall we be crows, too?
Instead of expecting the breezes to gentle us tenderly,
shall we surf the gales with that fierce joy?

Gratitude List:
1. The foxes of Skunk Hollow, and getting a chance to see that flash of orange, that bottle-brush tail, streaking across Cabin Creek and up into the bosque.
2. Professional development opportunities are available everywhere.  Yesterday, because I had a day off, I got to be the parent helper in first grade at Wrightsville.  I helped them write short paragraphs.  It was incredibly informative to see how writing and language arts are being taught in first grade, how some kids get it right away and others struggle to organize their thoughts.  I am really delighted with the competence and compassion of my son’s teacher.
3. Kale for lunch.  I can take a little more time with my lunches on days off.
4. That little willow tree.  I love watching it become its own person.
5. Watching the mesmerizing movement of the trees by the pond during yesterday’s big wind.  It looked like there were layers of wind going opposite directions, and the trees were moving with such intensity, I thought they had to break off, but they had enough flexibility.

May we walk in beauty!

Bananas

banaba
(This is me at the age of six, in someone’s banana plantation.)

Cold rain has fallen.
Clouds part, sun floods the hollow.
And where have you gone?

Gratitude List:
1.  All the reminders yesterday to keep open to surprises.
2. Nieces and nephews.  Cousins to my children.
3. All the green.  Somehow green means more this spring than usual.
4. Making things.  Creating.  Seeing something inside my head, and then putting it into the physical world. Isn’t that an amazing process?
5. Rain and sun.

May we walk in Beauty!

Fractured Light and Hope of a New Heart

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Last year, I posted this picture I took at the Lancaster Science Factory.  This past weekend I was reading about the colors of light.  Somehow I can’t quite figure out the primaries here–they look the same as physical pigments  to me, or like the secondaries of light: turquoise, magenta, and yellow.  My tech kids at school would be able to explain it to me, I bet.  I am taking a personal day next month to accompany my first-grader’s class on a field trip to the same place.  I will make sure my group hangs out in the light room for a while.

I wrote the following poem/piece last year when we were learning that my friend Kyla’s heart and lung issues were due to Emery Dreifuss Muscular Dystrophy.  Just last week, she was approved by the Duke University Hospital Transplant Team to go on their heart transplant list. Now a new kind of waiting commences.

“There is much I would write this morning, so much I need to learn about myself today,
if only I could write it out.  There is a prayer of sorts, waiting to find its way into the world,
to cast its golden threads through the air.

There is a poem waiting too, about a mother and a daughter,
about the house of the heart, about how I want to join
with a village of women to encircle that house, to sing,
to gather river water, to cook beans and rice, to comb their hair, to sit in silence,
to hold their feet in our hands, to anoint them with precious oils.
Perhaps this is that poem.”

Gratitude List:
1. Health: One boy is up and bright-eyed.  Both of them stayed home yesterday, but there is no way that this is going to let himself miss March Math Madness.  Last year he helped bring his Kindergarten class the trophy for their age group, and he is determined to do the same for first grade this year.  I, too, was not doing well yesterday.  I was sure I was getting an ear infection yesterday, but the shooting pains and the hot ear are back to normal today.
2. Flexibility.  Schedules.  Spines.  Attitudes.
3. Whoever that is singing out in the neighbor’s walnut tree.  Sun must be rising.
4. Easter Break is coming, and I have a couple built-in snow days to enjoy, but now in spring-time weather.
5. Last night’s dream.  I think it was a game.  There were bins and racks of fabrics and old clothes and costume jewelry and things, and we were told to make something interesting.  I was having so much fun tearing an old linen sheet into strips to crochet into a scarf when my alarm woke me.  I had my eye on some blue-green yarn, and now I am afraid someone else got it.  Sigh.

May we walk in Beauty!

What is Attention, but Love?

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I wrote this after reading Mary Oliver’s poem, “Of Love.”

It’s a process repeated everywhere you look:
the way the beech tree catches and holds the wind in her hair,
the way the meadow grasses gather around the tentative feet of the fox,
the way the hands of the clay hold and guide the flow of waters.

What is attention, but a kind of loving?
Living in awareness is a constant tumble into loves.
The way your eyes twinkle when you tell a story.
The way your listening hands reach outward.
The way a new thought is born in your eyes.
The hearty abandon of your laughter,
the caress of your voice,
the shine that surrounds you.

Gratitude List:
1. The way a tenor line can turn a song from sweet to sublime.
2. The lessons we are here to learn, even when they are tough.  I am finding that I need to step back from trying to protect my children from the pains and problems of life, so they are more free to learn from the things that approach them.  This is hard, hard work, and it is a lesson of my own.
3. The buffy fluff of that mockingbird hunched out there in the brambles.
4. The sense of smell.  Most subtle of senses, I think.  I sometimes realize that I have been reacting to a scent even before I am consciously aware of it.  Like a dream, where you don’t always grasp what is happening until just after it has happened.
5. Persephone rises.  She always does.  Her purple footprints are singing aves in the flowerbeds.

May we walk in Beauty!

Learning to Fly

2012 October 053

Never fight a cloud.
Never grasp the wind
in your fists.  Wind is
meant to be ridden
like a rough colt.
Give yourself to it
as you give yourself
to the salt waves.
Let it buffet you,
twist and batter you.
Rise.  Breathe deeply.
Learn the pathways
of currents and drafts.

(First line found on an online “poetry generator.”  This is a very drafty draft, but I do want to write something about riding the wind, so I will let it be a place-holder.)

Gratitude List:
1. Watching a high school crew create a dramatic performance.  The students at my school and their directors did an amazing job putting together “The Sound of Music” last night.
2. Sleep.  This is a placeholder.  I am running on very little sleep at the moment, and will likely run a little low for the next couple of nights.  But I am grateful for sleep, for the little I can get now, and for the good rest I will get in a few days.
3. That lovely, lovely snow.  Simple frosting.
4. The sense of taste.  Isn’t flavor a marvelous thing?
5. Weaving the threads together.  People.  Meanings.  Ideas.

May we walk in Beauty!

If I Say Green

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This is from a few summers ago, a male, looking a little worn and tired.  Here’s a wish for safe journeys northward this season, and much milkweed.

If I say green to you
when the winds of winter
still carry a chill
over the fields
at the top of the hill,
when indigo pockets of shadows
still harbor small mounds of snow,

will you know what I mean,
how even in these days
of limbo, of in-between,
something rises,
barely seen, a little frill,
a thrill of green
beneath the brown of winter?

Gratitude List:
1. Bowling with my guys yesterday.  I have been an occasional bowler for much of my life, and I am abysmal, but I love it, and I love how Ellis loves it.
2. The way the future approaches, as if out of a mist.
3. The population of monarch butterflies in Mexico this past season covered 10 miles of forest (compared to less than 3 the previous year, and less than 2 the year before that).
4. The slow and gentle process of awakening.  Every day, a nudge into a new space.
5.  All the compassionate hearts.  I do get terribly weighed down by the brutality and crassness of the language in the public sphere, especially now.  I need to keep bringing myself back to ground, remembering You and You and You and your healing acts of love in the world. How you don’t let the challenges keep you from moving forward and holding the world in your heart.  Oh, how you inspire me, You and You and You and You. . .

May we walk in Love.

Persephone is Rising

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The crocus spring up.
Persephone is rising.
My heart awakens.

Gratitude List:
1. That green Cholula hot sauce–poblano and jalapeno–that Jon bought yesterday.  At the risk of sounding like a food snob: It was revelatory.
2. Poetry
3. The little elves in the house who got up at 6:15 to start making birthday preparations for their dad.
4. Jon Weaver-Kreider–I don’t mention him here very often because I don’t want to intrude on his privacy by throwing him into my public spheres, but he could be on every gratitude list I make.
5. Loreena McKennitt–I  haven’t listened to her in a long time, but a photograph this week sparked a memory of her music, and I am rediscovering her.

May we walk in Beauty!

Are You Dancing?

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“Are you dancing?” –greeting from my friend, Saheeb

Are you dancing?
Has your soul found its wings,
caught the rhythms that surround you,
felt the throb of waking earth beneath your feet?

Gratitude List:
1. aconite
2. crocus
3. that wren out there, hailing the morning
4. children playing in the sandbox for hours
5. voices of sanity among the clang and clatter

May we walk in Beauty!