I’m exhausted with this grief and fury and disillusionment and shattered hope. I want to curl up into a ball and sleep for a week. Yet there are also small joys and wonders in the midst of the agony. Here is a cloud that looks like a bird that brought me joy today.
And a rose that a colleague gave me this morning.
Bringing Each Other Back by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Give me a word that means something akin to the feeling of finding yourself safe in a cave at the moment the heavens explode with lightning and thunder and rain.
Tell me a story so shining with wonder that foot-weary travelers and lost souls gather in the shadows around us to be warmed at the fire of your telling.
Spin me a strand long enough for my weaving, rich with color and hints of bright sunlight so that I may make a cloak to protect us and keep us from harm in the shadows.
When you look into the eyes of strangers let softness come into your gaze sweep tenderness through the glaze of anxiety, fury, and grieving.
Gratitude List: 1. A gift of a rose when my spirits are tattered 2. A cloud in the shape of a bird 3. Chocolate as medicine 4. How people circle around and care for each other in times of crisis 5. How music soothes the soul May we walk in Beauty!
“The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.” —bell hooks
“People who love the divine go around with holes in their hearts, and inside the hole is the universe.” —Peter Kingsley from the Dark Places of Wisdom
“When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.” ―Sally Kempton
“Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.” —Mae Jemison (Astronaut/Medical Doctor)
Adrienne Rich: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility of more truth around her.”
“Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains – a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.” —Henri Frederic Amiel
There is a legend that has its roots buried deep inside the prehistoric culture of these lands. It is a myth that was seeded before the stories were anchored onto the page, before rigid systems of belief tied gods and spirits into names and form, even before the people were persuaded from paths of individual responsibility into hierarchies of power. This story has been fluid and flowing, changing shape and growing over many thousands of years. It is a story of ancestors and a deep relationship with the ancient land. It is a story of memories that permeate stone and wood to rest within the body of the earth. This legend is too old to be defined by history and therefore we are not limited in our own remembering of it; creative recollection lies at the heart of our very best tales.
Memory may arrive at odd moments and in unexpected forms. Recognition may unravel along strange paths. Wherever the wild reaches through the land, we may touch the edges of this story. We start to tease out a thread, then pick and pull until first a fragment of colour, then a whole strand of story, is revealed. Now we peel away the layers, glimpse the traces of a design, watch a pattern grow until an entire story emerges, then a cycle of stories, and now we are unwinding the fabric of our ancestors’ lives.” —Carolyn Hillyer
Liberty and Justice: Invocation on Election Day by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Liberty, I too will lift my lamp, the hope of my vote, to make good on the words they spoke and wrote, before they even meant them to belong to all of us.
And Justice, carrying the weight of all our stories on your golden scales, you too were meant for all of us. For, all men, they said, which word they claim includes the women, too, both rich and poor, and those with roots here in this native soil, and Africa and Europe, Asia and the islands. although perhaps they never really meant it.
We do now.
We base our hopes upon those words, like sacred text. We hold the truths, self-evident, of course, that humans here have hope of that equality. I cast my vote for that lamp, that book, that scales which weighs us all equal in the eyes of Lady Liberty and Justice For All.
Starhawk has begun calling her LAJFA, Liberty And Justice For All, a goddess of this place–a deliberate syncretism of Lady Liberty and Lady Justice, a manifestation of the intent spoken and written by the founders, whether they truly believed it or not. Her robes are rainbows, and her emblems are the lamp and the sword and the book and the scales. Her face is perhaps indigenous, perhaps an amalgam of all the races that now call home this place which she protects. All. Not just wealthy white male Christian landowners. And this vote, this thing we do today? It’s our sacred pledge to LAJFA, to Democracy, to make it so.
Gratitude List: 1. These brilliant and playful and thoughtful young people 2. A glorious fall day 3. Voting. Getting to choose. Having a say. 4. Breathing and centering and grounding–how the Earth holds my roots 5. Chocolate-covered coffee beans May we walk in Beauty!
“Safety is not the absence of threat. It is the presence of connection.” —Gabor Maté
“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan
Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison
“You need not wade through the mists and bogs to reach the moon. You need not climb a ladder of cobweb. You need not ride the stallions that wicker in the sea’s pounding surf.
Draw back the curtain and open the window. Breathe the bracing air and listen: The whinny of an owl, the click of the bat, The grunt of a buck and the distant roar of the train.
The full moon will spill a milky road before you. That is all the pathway you will need.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“The word is the making of the world.” —Wallace Stevens
“Through the empty branches the sky remains. It is what you have.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“The leaves of the tree become as pages of the Sacred Book to one who is awake.” —Hazrat Inayat Khan
“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” —Albert Einstein
“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” —Coretta Scott King
“When you feel the suffering of every living thing in your own heart, that is consciousness.” —Bhagavad Gita
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.” ―Naomi Shihab Nye
It was a ripple a glimmer a golden ray shimmering just a moment shining on the twilit waves percolating like a cooling stream of water trickling down my soul just a whisper in the wilderness a fragment of a fragment of a fragment of an almost-remembered dream, and nearly as ethereal, yet almost tangible too a brewing of hope on the horizon
Gratitude List: 1. A moment of Hope 2. Remembering beauty and goodness 3. Chocolate-covered Holiday Star cookies 4. Music to calm the anxious spirit 5. Good stories May we walk in Beauty!
Saturday’s Falling and Getting Up Again: “Both when we fall and when we get up again, we are kept in the same precious love.” ―Julian of Norwich
“What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved–what then?” ―Carl Jung
“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” ―Eleanor Roosevelt
“If I had influence with the good fairy, I would ask that her gift to each child be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.” ―Rachel Carson
“Your problem is you’re too busy holding onto your unworthiness.” ―Ram Dass
“In giving of yourself, you will discover a whole new life full of meaning and love.” ―Cesar Chavez
“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ―Eugene V. Debs
“I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too. Ma Joad: I don’t understand it, Tom. Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.” ―Tom Joad, from the movie Grapes of Wrath
“And don’t we all, with fierce hunger, crave a cave of solitude, a space of deep listening—full of quiet darkness and stars, until we hear a syllable of God echoing in the core of our hearts?” —Macrina Wiederkehr
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” —Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
“The way that I understand it, dreaming is nature naturing through us. Just as a tree bears fruit or a plant expresses itself in flowers, dreams are fruiting from us. The production of symbols and story is a biological necessity. Without dreams, we could not survive. And though it is possible to get by without remembering our dreams, a life guided and shaped by dreaming is a life that follows the innate knowing of the earth itself. As we learn to follow the instincts of our inner wilderness, respecting its agreements and disagreements, we are also developing our capacity for subtlety. This sensitivity is what makes us more porous and multilingual, bringing us into conversation with the many languages of the world around us.” — Toko-pa Turner
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 ***** “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.”
Here is a conjuring for Day Two of November Poem-a-Day
First Conjuring by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Deer Mother! Falcon Mother! Be the watching in my sunrise, the quiet waiting at the gates between breath and breath, heartbeat and heartbeat, between day and day again.
Fox Mother! Bear Mother! Walk me deep into forest dreaming, where wind will whistle through my fur, where earth will rise into my padded paws and my eyes will turn to embers.
Rabbit Mother! Trout Mother! I will go to a rabbit, to a silvery trout. Give me quick-running feet, grant me quick-swimming fins, give me breath for my flashing from shadow to shadow.
Vulture Mother! Crow Mother! Enfold me in the robes of your black wings. Draw my very substance down into earth and up into sky that I may see, and seeing, take flight.
Gratitude List: 1. That brown sugar bourbon ice cream 2. I got hours of work done on a project today–still hours to go, but fewer than when I began 3. No matter what happens people will still keep doing good and advocating for justice 4. Good writing–C S E Cooney can’t come up with her sequel to St. Death’s Daughter fast enough for me–her use of words is exhilarating 5. Standing in the early morning chill with a bunch of other cross country parents to watch as the police and fire department escort came down with the bus on the way to States May we walk in Beauty!
“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
“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.”
“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” –Roald Dahl, The Witches
“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its’ knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” –Anais Nin
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“On such a day each road is planned To lead to some enchanted land; Each turning meets expectancy. The signs I read on every hand. I know by autumn’s wizardry On such a day the world can be Only a great glad dream for me– Only a great glad dream for me!” –Eleanor Myers Jewett, “An Autumn Day”
“Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.” –Alvin Toffler
“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightening flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” –Layne Redmond
Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all. –Thomas Merton
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” –Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein
“Learn to tell the story of the red leaves against water. Read the alphabet of walnut branches newly bared for winter. Become literate in the language of cricket and of wren, of the footsteps of skunk and the changeability of weather.
Interpret the text of the wind in the hollow. Scan the documents of cloud and constellation. Enter the tale of rose hip and nettle and sassafras. Study Wisdom and she will find you.” –Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” –Khalil Gibran
“Awake, my dear! Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of Light and let it breathe.” ―Hafez (Ladinsky)
“We who hobnob with hobbits and tell tales about little green men are used to being dismissed as mere entertainers, or sternly disapproved of as escapists. But I think perhaps the categories are changing, like the times. Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.” —Ursula K. Le Guin
I’ve had quite a few ideas about how I wanted to organize this year’s November Poem-a-Day. Try on a different persona every day? Do a month’s worth of epigraph poems? Do two days on each of the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary? Write a daily ekphrastic poem based on drawing a tarot card? Do a month’s worth of found poems? Make each a magic spell?
Today I hadn’t yet settled on an organizing motif, and I’d sketched out the beginnings of several ideas for today’s poem, when I picked up The Best American Poetry 2000 (edited by Rita Dove) to read during Library Period while my students were independently reading.
One of the poets described how his poem in the anthology had taken him three years to write. Three years!?! How does a poet sustain the energy and attention for a single poem over three years? My own process has become very tied to my poem-a-day cycles in April and November, a discipline that tends to place practice over craft, a way to ensure that even when I go through dry times, I’ll always come back to a writing practice twice a year.
Even as I wrote that last sentence, I began to quibble with myself, because the practice, messy as it is, has definitely honed and sharpened my craft, and I always come back, select the best of the month’s harvest, and subject them to more careful crafting. I’m not just a word-vomit poet. I take crafting seriously.
But this poet who took three years to craft a poem! Perhaps it’s my own squirrelly attention span, or the mediocrity of my poetic sensibility, but I have never been able to imagine the process when poets talk about lengthy poem-crafting, the aching strain of shaping an idea over such a span of time. What was the poem doing in those years? Was it like a painting waiting for the artist to dab a few dabs of paint a day? Or half-abandoned like one of my knitting projects that gets stuck in the bottom of a basket for months before I remember to work on it again? Was it working on the poet’s psyche every day?
Perhaps the poem that rushed from me as I considered this poet and his process, and my own slap dash throw-it-on-the-page method of writing, made me a little defensive. I don’t really intend the tone to be snarky–toward him or myself. I was invigorated by the rush of ideas, the whoosh and whisper as the words winged in.
Perhaps this is one I will return to more deliberately, to craft into a gem. It will not take me three years, and yet, despite that essential lie, I feel like I’ve found some gold inside today’s idea.
Three Years by Beth Weaver-Kreider
This poem has taken me three years to write. First, it was a simple spot of blood, blooming crimson on the white petal of the page, glowing slightly, touched with were-light. It hovered in that state for months, in stasis while I hammered out the form, the quiet exhalations of its line breaks, the humming tension of occasional enjambment heightening the tautness of the structure, driving the metrical processional to the first stanza’s end. That was the first year.
In the second year, I crawled about, blindly, in the dusty rooms of the poem, gathering shadows like cobwebs stuck to my knees, my hair, my teeth. Here and there I tugged transitions into place, opened blinds to let light in, took myself in hand and faced the demon labyrinth of the second stanza with every scrap of strength my soul could muster. Perhaps you can sense, Sensitive Reader, the longing that fed me forward to the exhausting conclusion of the second year?
The third year was filled with howling and wrangling, attempting to tame the wild creature of the poem without breaking its will, feeding it symbols and reasons, assonance, consonance, rhythms and patterns to live for, then recanting the dominion within me that sought to subject it, to coax and corral it under my will. I gave it some rein for its wildness, then set it free. And just today I heard it nickering on the hill behind the orchard, its gentle form slipping through the mists to return to me complete.
Gratitude List: 1. Writing Practice 2. Writing Craft 3. How golden sunlight fills the bowl of woods, of hollow. 4. Weekend 5. No matter what happens, people will continue to work for good. 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
“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
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.
“Surrender is not passively resigning yourself to something. . .it is a conscious embracing of what is.” —Cynthia Bourgeault
I drew this sketch of a dream ten years ago, 25 November 2014.
Last night’s dream, 2 October 2024: I’m on a farm, in a yard near the farmhouse, when a woman in a car comes racing down the lane, around a sharp curve between stone walls, spewing gravel in the wake of her tires. She spins the car around and backs it up beside a big barn and the rear end of the car gets caught on the low stone wall. She leaves the car running, tires spinning, gets out of the car, and starts to walk across the yard toward the farmhouse. Her sunglasses are askew, and she looks confused. I walk toward her. To comfort her? To help her regulate? To tell her to turn off her car, or scold her? The alarm goes off and it is morning.
Who is this woman? Is she a version of me? Is she the women of America? Is she the goddess herself? She didn’t seem particularly angry or anxious. Just impatient and confused. I think I need to find this out during the coming season.
In this season of ripening into darkness, as worries whirl around me like angry wasps, I asked the Mother, By what name shall I call you? And I saw a the parade of Deerpeople who wandered through the farm on balmy summer mornings, the shaman ancestor with her drum, the dream I had of a woman who was a deer who was a tree who was a shelter to small animals and birds in her branches and among her roots.
Oh Antlered One: who calls me home to live within the garden of myself: Help me to find the still point in this maelstrom of my anxious fears, to follow where the sacred tug of griefs and rages will guide me to the wisdom I will write upon the pages of these my croning years.
I’ve written about this one before, but it really is a fascinating way to break out of a rut. It’s a common problem for me, at least, looking back through poems I have written and noticing that I use the same words, the same phrasing rhythms, the same ideas, over and over again. Part of this is Voice, and I want to keep honing and focusing my Voice in my poetry, but part of it is the worn place on the carpet where everyone walks, the dip in the marble step where centuries of feet have worn the stone away. Again, there is a certain character to the worn places, but there’s value, too, in forging the new path, finding the new word, creating a new bounce to the rhythm.
Take a poem you’ve written, or write one for the occasion.
Here’s mine, which I am going to write as soon as I finish this sentence:
First it was five deer two does and three fawns moving through the meadow and then five starlings in formation a W against the sky. And was it a pensive and beautiful moment followed by another? Or was it the Mother whispering, Follow this trail, seek this path and pattern?
Then, copy and paste it, go to Google translate, paste it in the box, and translate it into any of the listed languages. Then switch the boxes so the new poem–in Urdu or Tagalog or Malayalam–is in the Translate box. You can either simply translate it back into English, or choose another language. I like to go through eight or ten languages before I come back to English. Errors happen on the way, and often the errors actually enhance the poem, and usually they give me some insight into the way my mind works to create ideas. Sometimes I keep parts of what happens when I come back to English, and sometimes I mash up bits from the “translation” with bits of the original.
I tried it in ChatGPT, asking for specific languages, but that AI has gotten so good that, after translating it into Malayalam, then Swahili, then Spanish, then Japanese, then Urdu, then back to English, the only difference was that it had translated “pensive” to “contemplative.” That’s a lovely synonym, but I am looking for crunchier bits.
I copied the Urdu from the ChatGPT session into Google Translate to begin. I love the look of the Urdu script: سب سے پہلے پانچ ہرن تھے، دو مادائیں اور تین بچے، جو میدان میں حرکت کر رہے تھے۔ پھر پانچ ستارے تھے، جو آسمان پر ‘W’ کی شکل بنا رہے تھے۔ کیا یہ ایک سوچنے والا اور خوبصورت لمحہ تھا، جس کے بعد دوسرا لمحہ آیا؟ یا یہ ماں تھی جو سرگوشی کر رہی تھی، “اس راستے کی پیروی کرو، اس راستے اور نمونہ کو تلاش کرو؟”
Then Hawaiian, then Icelandic, then Assamese. Look at the Assamese script! আৰম্ভণিতে পাঁচটা হৰিণ, দুজনী মহিলা আৰু তিনিটা ল’ৰা-ছোৱালী, পথাৰত খোজ কাঢ়িছিল। তাৰ পিছত আকাশত “W” আকৃতিৰ পাঁচটা তৰা আছে। চিন্তাশীল নে সুন্দৰ মুহূৰ্ত, তাৰ পিছত আন এটা মুহূৰ্ত? নে এই মাতৃয়ে ফুচফুচাই কৈছে, “এই পথ অনুসৰণ কৰক, এই পথ আৰু এই উদ্দেশ্য বিচাৰি?” Then Samoan, Hmong, Swahili, Kazakh, Telugu. I am swooning at the Telugu script: మొదట్లో పొలంలో ఐదు జింకలు, ఇద్దరు మహిళలు, ముగ్గురు పిల్లలు నడుస్తున్నారు. అప్పుడు ఆకాశంలో ఐదు నక్షత్రాలు “W” ఉన్నాయి. లోతైన లేదా అందమైన అనుభూతి, మొదలైనవి? ఈ తల్లి “ఇటువైపు వెళ్ళు, ఈ ప్రయోజనం కోసం ఈ దారిని వెతుకు” అని గుసగుసలాడుతుందా? Takij, Krio, Ewe, Dogri (another incredible script), Xhosa, and finally back to English. Here is the fascinating result:
The first five deer, two females and three calves were roaming the wild. Then there are five stars “W” in the sky. Deep emotions or beauty etc? This mother is shouting “go over here, find this way to this goal”?
Oh my heart! Some bits are funny, and others really move me. The final three lines, although the question mark survived, are no longer a question, and the Mother–THIS mother–is no longer whispering, but shouting. Hmmm. Maybe shouting is better. I tend to see the moment of visionary and intuitive awareness as a Holy Whisper, but maybe it is actually a Divine Shout? I’m going to try keeping the new sentence structure of the first lines–it takes it into a mythological sort of place rather than simply sounding like my retelling of the moment.
I ran “pensive and beautiful” through several layers of translation and ended with “retired and handsome,” which is no closer to the specific adjectives I want, so I’ll leave that part as is for now. Here’s a mashup.
The first five deer, two does and three fawns, were roaming the wild. Then there were five starlings, a “W” in the sky. A pensive and beautiful moment followed by another? Or the Mother shouting, Follow this trail, go over here, whispering, seek this path and pattern?
I like how the translator eliminated some of my little introductory bits to my sentences and phrases. I can certainly afford to simplify. I think I like having the Mother both shouting and whispering, but I’m not sure. I might tinker with that some more. I think it has taken my moment from the contemplative and pensive to the mystical and mythical, which is what I am seeking to do with my poetry in this season.
Gratitude List: 1. Such bountiful and beautiful communities that hold and support. 2. Hope and Joy. Finally. Hope and Joy! 3. School begins next week! And In-service starts this Friday! I am intensely eager to get back to it! 4. Holy shouts and whispers from The Mother. 5. Thermal delight after weeks of thermal discomfort. May we walk in Beauty all around!
“Be softer with you. You are a breathing thing. A memory to someone. A home to a life.” ―Nayyirah Waheed
“This beautiful word “mother” is so sweet and kind in itself that it cannot be attributed to anyone but God.”—Julian of Norwich, Revelations 60, trans. M. Starr
Late Fragment
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. ―Raymond Carver
Powerful words from Rob Brezsny: “The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words,” said Terence McKenna in “Alien Dreamtime,” “and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
Here’s my version of that hypothesis: What world you end up living in depends at least in part on your use of language.
Do you want to move and breathe amidst infertile chaos where nothing makes sense and no one really loves anyone? Then speak with unconscious carelessness, expressing yourself lazily. Constantly materialize and entertain angry thoughts in the privacy of your own imagination, beaming silent curses out into eternity.
Or would you prefer to live in a realm that’s rich with fluid epiphanies and intriguing coincidences and mysterious harmonies? Then be discerning and inventive in how you speak, primed to name the unexpected codes that are always being born right in front of your eyes. Turn your imagination into an ebullient laboratory where the somethings you create out of nothings are tinctured with the secret light you see in your dreams of invisible fire.
“The power of love is stronger than the power to destroy.” ―Vandana Shiva
“And then– and then your eyes will open as if waking from a dream or waking into a dream and the dew-drenched grasses will sparkle before you like gold in the morning and you will know.
You will know what it is you have come for.” ―Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Writing is one of the most ancient forms of prayer. To write is to believe communication is possible, that other people are good, that you can awaken their generosity and their desire to do better.” ―Fatema Mernissi
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” ―Robin Williams as Mr. John Keating in Dead Poets Society
“Well, I don’t only think that the biosphere is in trouble, I know it is. I just have to look around in the environment, in which I live. In my own part of the part of the world, I keep telling people, let us not cut trees irresponsibly. Let us not destroy especially the forested mountains. Because if you destroy the forests on these mountains, the rivers will stop flowing and the rains will become irregular and the crops will fail and you will die of hunger and starvation. Now the problem is, people don’t make those linkages.” —Wangari Maathai
“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” —Robin Williams
“All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted so long, the good is close at hand.” —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“I saw three ways to look at the Motherhood of God. The first is that she created our human nature. The second is that she took our human nature upon herself, which is where the motherhood of grace begins. And the third is motherhood in action, in which she spreads herself throughout all that is, penetrating everything with grace, extending to the fullest length and breadth, height and depth. All One Love.” —Julian of Norwich, Revelations 60, trans. M. Starr
Here’s a common poetry prompt, taught in workshops and classes. It’s commonly called a copy-change. You simply take a few lines of poetry that move or inspire you, and use the structure of that poem like a template into which you insert your own words, kind of like a Mad Lib. And in this form of poetry, you must always give credit to the original poet. It’s called copy-change because you are copying the style or structure or voice of a poet, and changing it into your own piece.
George Ella Lyon made it a favorite of US English Language teachers after she published her poem “Where I’m From” and realized that teachers were using her format as a template for teaching the writing of poetry as a form of self-exploration. She created a template of her poem with missing words, encouraging students and writers to insert words that described their own lives. Or, if they want, they can just use her poem as inspiration and write whatever they want. Click this link to go to her page.
The Astrologer Rob Brezsny has created a similar exercise using a stanza from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, which encourages his social media followers to explore symbols of their inner life. He suggests using the second stanza of this poem:
Widening Circles by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Joanna Macy)
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?
Here’s my copy-change of stanza 2, formatted as I would format the poem in order to be sure that I am giving credit for the original. I used Rilke’s first stanza verbatim, so I italicized it, to add another signal that this part is not mine:
Deepening Spirals by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider after by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Joanna Macy)
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. (Rilke)
I spiral into the Goddess, toward the center of Earth. I’ve been descending for a thousand lifetimes and I still don’t understand: am I a snake, a labyrinth, or a wild dance?
This exercise has various benefits for the beginning or blooming or stuck poet: It gets you past the freeze that sometimes happens with the blank page. It’s a super low-stakes poem–because it’s “just an exercise,” you don’t have to perform on the page, and so you can break more rules and boundaries, and let go of the control of your brain for a little while. I especially love that it’s a Voice experiment–you get to try on different poets’ voices, see how they fit, feel the way someone else’s words and phrases inform yours. And as a reader, it gets you into the poet’s head and helps you to make sense of their diction and lyricism.
Here is your challenge: Visit Lyon’s page to write a “Where I’m From” poem, or use Brezsny’s Rilke prompt. Or go seeking a short piece of poetry that inspires you and create your own copy-change poem. Don’t forget to credit both yourself and the author. Share it with someone!
Gratitude List: 1. My wise and tender and compassionate friends. I often wonder how I got so lucky. 2. Daily grounding and centering. And other rhythms of grounding–the yearly reunion with my college friends is an incredibly powerful reset and re-centering for me. 3. The nibling-weddings! Because family celebrations! 4. The several delightful years we got to spend with our marvelous vampire cat, Erebus. 5. My school community. May we walk in Beauty!
“Be wary of any influence in your environment which dismisses or judges your enthusiasm. Without it, we would become anaesthetised to life itself. Anyone who demands this smallness of you is in danger themselves and may have contracted this insidious, deadening monotone. Enthusiasm is the vitality of spirit expressing itself through us and its grace in our voice should be welcomed and cherished. The word originates in the early 17th century, from the Greek enthousiasmos meaning ‘possessed by god.’ Now, more than ever, the world needs your enlargement, your weirdness, your fiery crescendos of rebellion from boring.” —Toko-pa Turner
“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” —Ray Bradbury
“How do you think you’ll ever see the fairy underneath the flowers, if you never stop to notice the flowers themselves?” —Marie Winger, storyteller
“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing Light of your Being.” —Hafiz
“We do not become healers. We came as healers. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are. We do not become storytellers. We came as carriers of the stories we and our ancestors actually lived. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
“We do not become artists. We came as artists. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
“We do not become writers, dancers, musicians, helpers, peacemakers. We came as such. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
“We do not learn to love in this sense. We came as Love. We are Love. Some of us are still catching up to who we truly are.” —Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.” —Desmond Tutu
“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” —Dalai Lama
“You were wild once. Don’t let them tame you.” —Isadora Duncan
“If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.” —Meister Eckhart
“We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.” —Barry Lopez
If you don’t follow Heather Cox Richardson on Substack or Facebook, or get her daily email, I urge you to do so. At least read today’s letter about democracy (click link).
Read her letter to the end: Joe Biden didn’t pass the torch to Kamala Harris. He passed it to us. It’s no longer about whether you are a Democrat or a Republican: It’s about whether you are seeking to continue this democratic experiment or whether you want to go back to autocratic rule. Me, I’m with the We-Won’t-Go-Back crowd.
I keep reminding myself that Democracy is an ideal, that we’re always on a trajectory to create an ever-more-perfect democracy. We still don’t have a true democracy that offers equal opportunities for jobs and power and voice for everyone. We’re at a tipping point where we can choose to keep trying, or give up. I’m going to throw my hat in with the Keep-Trying folx.
Gratitude List: 1. Wise and calm voices 2. The ideal of democracy for which we strive 3. A couple more weeks to get my act together before school starts 4. The deer people of Skunk Holler 5. There truly is magic everywhere around us if we know how to look May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 