Moon Haiku
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
the boat of the moon
riding above the ridgeline
shadows on my road
Gratitude List:
- That moon
- Lobster tail for supper
- People who make me laugh
- Dreams
- The Wrightsville Bridge
May we walk in Beauty!
Haiku
Uncategorized
Democracy
Today’s poem.
Spell for Walking Through the Shadows
Your ancestors surround the well
of love unconditional, sending you forth
with the blessing on the unforgotten ones.
Step into the silver light
of the first snow,
tingling with anticipation.
One day is the gentle fall of soft flakes
on dark soil, the next is the wild storm
you must struggle through to survive.
It’s a slog, a long-haul prospect,
a journey through the labyrinth
of caverns, until you reach the light.
There, at the end, you find your tribe,
telling the story by firelight. There will be
laughter, there will be dancing.
Focus your vision on blackthorn
and hagstone, on the faerie bramble
and the wild wild wind.
Energy Wheels
Wheels of energy radiating strands of color, texture, and sound. Summer evening sun sparkling and twinkling and streaming through ribbons of energy.
Yesterday evening, I went to Don Ziegler’s Energy Wheels Exhibit, a magical and contemplative journey through the energy of the elements, with the spirit of his wife Priscilla, my beloved friend, present in all the twinkling of light, the undulating ribbon, the chimes of the Cosmos.
Don told me to interact with them as I felt led, and so I walked into each one, and took selfies within each wheel.
I began at the Spirit Wheel.
The Wind Wheel’s Ribbons were white, and they reflected into the water of the pool:
I found myself at home in the Earth Wheel:
And the Fire Wheel danced around me as I entered:
Don didn’t stop at the traditional Elements. He’s a plant man–of course Chlorophyll would speak to him.
I can’t seem to get my video of the Cosmos Wheel to load up here. I can’t do justice to Cosmos without the sound. Wires and bits of chain, energetically charged pendants and pieces, a tiny round piece of meteorite that my brother found in Tanzania when we were kids, prisms and crystals and chiming pieces of metal.
I’m fascinated by the way each element affects me in the selfies. Iam reminded that I have all these elements within me. One exercise I have done in groups–writing groups, tarot classes, magic classes–is to ask which element you most closely identify with: Air, Fire, Water, Wind? I find it helpful to explore how our personalities may be more airy or grounded, fiery or flowing. Last night’s installation had me asking a different question: How do all the elements present themselves within me? They are all present (Chlorophyll and Cosmos, too, and Spirit) within each of us.
I’m so grateful to Don for following his intuition and creating this incredible art installation. When one person is true to the vision that comes to them, it inspires others to follow their own visions and dreams and intuitions.
Possibility
Heart’s Desire
I’ve had a very productive day doing things other than poetry writing! So my poem today is my heart’s desire prayer for the new novena that begins tomorrow with Way of the Rose.
Gratitude List:
- Bringing the kid home from college for the weekend!
- How things sometimes fall together instead of apart. I lost the cap to my air stem when I went to top off my leaky tire, so I drove to our garage to but a new one, and they offered to just go ahead and fix the leak, too! Now I don’t have to fuss with an appointment.
- Fall leaves
- Peppermint brownies. Haven’t eaten then yet. The mix is there waiting in the cupboard for us to make this evening!
- A good car book to listen to on a long trip. Weyward by Emilia Hart is the current one.
May we walk in beauty!
“Never laugh at live dragons.” —J.R.R. Tolkien
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“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” —Aristotle
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“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” —Mark Twain
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“The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.” ―John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
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“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” —Aristotle
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“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” —Anais Nin
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“Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best thing to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change.” —Michelle Obama
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“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” —Amelia Earhart
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“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” —Lucille Ball
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“Learn how to take criticism seriously but not personally.” —Hillary Clinton
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“Like a great starving beast, my body is quivering, fixed on the scent of light.” —Hafiz
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“Identity is a story carried in the body.” —Sophia Samatar
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“Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine … and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine …”
—W.B. Yeats
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“The heart is your student, for love is the only way we learn.”
—Rumi
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Poet Joy Harjo, from 2012:
“Visited with my cousin George Coser, Jr yesterday at the kitchen table. He’s a gift. Always something profound among the stories. The sacred lies at the root of the mundane. And every word is a power element. Each word or sound, whether thought, written or spoken grows our path, the path of our generation, the children, grandchildren, the Earth. . . . We become the ancestors. A sense of play gives a lightness of being. So get out there and play—and be kind while you’re at it. To yourself, too.”
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Help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways
and break fresh ground with You.
Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You.
—The Prayer of St. Brendan (attributed to Brendan)
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The Wild Geese
by Wendell Berry
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Conjuring Calm
Day three of conjuring daily poems for November.
Conjuring the Self to Center in an Anxious Time
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Dance the thousand anxious angels of your thoughts
onto the head of a silver pin.
Unclench, and listen to the pin drop,
and the rush of a thousand thousand wings
rising around you like snow geese
lifting from the surface of the lake.
A single feather floats into your lap.
Let it settle into the open bowl of your fingers.
Watch it rise and fall with your breath.
On this breath, you are the chill winter over snowy fields.
On this breath, you are the orange eye of the ember.
On this breath, you are the wild cry of the wandering goose.
On this breath, you are the scent of cinnamon.
On this breath, you are smoke rising.
On this breath, you are a small bird singing in the dawn.
On this breath, you are an angel dancing on the head of a pin.
On this breath, you are nothing.
And on this breath,
you are the web of everything that ever was,
everything that is, and everything
that ever will be.
Gratitude List:
- Finding center
- So many beloveds looking out for each other
- Squirrels
- Lighting candles to hold the anxiety
- Cleansing the toxic energies.
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
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“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan
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“The heavens are sweeping us along in a cyclone of stars.” —Teilhard de Chardin
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“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
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Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison
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Joseph Campbell: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”
Found
Gratitude
- Such a lovely warm day
- We have a new car!
- Found poems
- The swing and drape of linen
- Cherry blossoms
May we walk in Beauty!
It’s Time for November Poetry!
Early in my time writing this blog, I joined the poets who follow Robert Brewer of Writers Digest to write a poem every day in November. I’m succeeding years, I think I’ve only missed one November of writing a daily poem.
Today’s prompt is to argue a declaration poem. I toyed with taking the words of the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and rearranging them to say something about shattering the patriarchy and ridding the world of White supremacy. In the end, I came up with this little warm-up for the month:
Why do I hesitate to start
the declaration? I wait,
I stutter, I vacillate. I’d rather
pose it as a question, invite you
into the conversation,
collaborate our way
to a mutual solution.
It’s not that I lack confidence
in my opinions, or lack my own
self-evident truths. It’s just
that I know truth to be
a little slippery, a little loose,
and my own vision will always
be clearer with you as my mirror.
And here is what I came up with in my Preamble to the Declaration Poem:
I Found a Preamble
they Were ensLavers
they held women to be unequal
o thes truths self-eident, that all m are created , that ded by their Creator with certain alienable Rights, that aong se are ife, Libt and the pursuit of Happines.
Gratitude List:
1. Inspiration
2. Anticipation
3. Sleep
4. Meeting goals
5. Wise friends
May we walk 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
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“Bless the light and the darkness, the love and the fear.” —Rabbi Olivier BenHaim
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“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” —Roald Dahl, The Witches
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“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
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“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“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
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“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
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“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” —Khalil Gibran
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Marge Piercy:
Forgive the dead year. Forgive
yourself. What will be wants
to push through your fingers.
The light you seek hides
in your belly. The light you
crave longs to stream from
your eyes. You are the moon
that will wax in new goodness.
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“Surrender is not passively resigning yourself to something. . .it is a conscious embracing of what is.” —Cynthia Bourgeault
In a Good Place
It’s been a rough week. Hard Conversation. Colonoscopy.
It’s been a lovely week. Gentle and tender conversations and remembering together. Good health and wellbeing.
In a bad place? In a good place? In the end, the Hard Conversation yielded a slightly open window in a painful space, and the colonoscopy yielded nothing, a very good nothing.
Tomorrow, I’ll visit a beloved, then later summer beloveds will visit me. Two years ago, even one year ago, visiting was a worrisome proposition.
Yeah. I’m in a good, good place.
Gratitude List:
- My canine colleague. Today, when I was tending to a dysregulated student who was crying in the hallway when my canine colleague and his person came along. Just what she needed. I went into the room and brought her a treat to give him. He sat, shook her hand, and then sat up in begging posture. She went away bright-eyed. I love my school.
- Five minutes into first period this morning, someone announced that the sky on the field side of the building was full of geese. Everyone stopped class, the rooms on the field side of the school opened up, and the rest of us went across the hall to watch and marvel. I love my school.
- Last week, one of my colleagues sent around an invitation to join a live Zoom today from McMurdo Station on Antarctica. We were encouraged to sign up even if we aren’t science classes, so my Creative Writing and Journalism class joined in. The presenter is an artist who photographs microscopic animals like tardigrades, nematodes, and rotifers. There are such wonders in the world. Also, I love my school.
Glory, glory! Beauty all around!
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” —Rumi
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“You got to take care of people smaller and sweeter than you are.” —Hushpuppy’s teacher, Beasts of the Southern Wild
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“Language creates reality. Words have magical power. Speak always to create joy.” —Deepak Chopra
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“I had given up my seat before, but this day, I was especially tired. Tired from my work as a seamstress, and tired from the ache in my heart.” —Rosa Parks
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“I believe there is only one race – the human race.” —Rosa Parks
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“Without vision, people perish, and without courage and inspiration dreams die.” —Rosa Parks
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“Each person must live their life as a model for others.” —Rosa Parks
Mockingbird Chronicles 