Gratitude List:
1. Rain
2. Drizzle
3. Mist and fog
4. Creek and River
5. Growth
May we walk in Beauty!
Waiting for Rain
Smell it in the air,
feeling of impendingness,
a sense of silence,
broken moments of birdsong.
Everything is listening.
Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s music
2. Smell of rain in the air
3. A clean house
4. Solutions
5. Words, gestures, language
May we walk in Beauty!
The Revision
This is the poem/fish I wrote about yesterday, the one that just jumped out of the water and into my net, but then needed some serious wrangling to get it to shore. Perhaps it still needs some tweaking, but I need to let it cook a bit now.
When the story has been revised
the ending will read:
We won.
We were the liberators,
it will read above the (overstrike) conquerors.
We
(the revision will read)
were noble.
In the revision:
(notice now my use of the future perfect tense, negative):
There will have been no starving children.
There will have been no raped women.
There will have been no collateral damage with a name
that sounds like your sister’s.
Mission
(you will say)
Accomplished.
(Notice, there, the use of the simple past.)
Done.
Full stop.
Your president
(shifting now to a simple future)
will appear in warrior’s garb declaring victory.
Your president will make it clear that all the strikes were surgical.
Your president will announce that the man killed by that last drone bomb
was The Terrorist in Question,
and not somebody’s gentle Uncle Abdul,
the one with the laughing eyes.
When the revision is complete,
there will no longer be desperate refugee children
seeking safety at your borders.
Instead, you will be protecting your boundaries from ravaging illegals.
When the revision is complete,
your enemies will have committed brutal murders,
while your own side will have taken just revenge.
The words invasion and genocide will have left your lexicon,
replaced by freedom fighters and patriots.
When the revision is complete,
you will sit alone on your little island
and sing your victory songs
to a moon who has turned her face away,
to stars that no longer understand your language.
Gratitude List:
1. Mullein tapers and dogbane on the roadsides.
2. The idea of rain. The hint of it in the air. The weather report for tomorrow (80% chance),
3. Summertime dinners always have fresh vegetables.
4. Visiting with old friends.
5. Envisioning.
May we walk in Beauty!
Fishing
I don’t fish in the actual sense, but I have been thinking about poetry and fishing for the last few days, and this morning I read something about how poetry is both art and craft, both inspiration and work. Sometimes, it’s like the fish are just jumping out of the water, waiting for me to hold out my net and catch them. I love it when that happens. Sometimes I have to have two nets available to be catching them all as they rain past. It’s important not to get too attached to every fish I catch in this manner. Some are real stinkers, but occasionally I can catch a nice rainbow trout this way.
But more often than not, I just have to show up at the river, day after day, with my fishing rod, and sit there in the hot sun or under a shady tree, and wait and wait and wait. Lots of times, I’ll hook an old boot or funny piece of wood. Most of these things I’ll toss back, but some of them I can use. It’s particularly rewarding to catch a beautiful fish this way–the wait and the work of it makes it especially satisfying.
When I first started writing poetry as a teenager, I didn’t have time for revising or perfecting. I ended up throwing away most of that stuff when I reached my twenties. Then I got into a phase where I didn’t believe anything was truly good until it had been worked over and wrangled repeatedly. I sucked the life out of many a good poem that way.
I think sometimes really good poems do just drop out of the sky with little need for change. Most of the poems I write need a little more tweaking, though. During those times when they’re just jumping out of the lake, I need to just write it down like dictation without thinking about whether this is the perfect word, or whether the sounds work together or the rhythm is compelling. Then, when the rush and whoosh is done, I can go back and see what I have, and organize it into a more complete form.
The other night, half a poem jumped out at me that way. Had I not been on my way to an appointment, perhaps it would be complete, but now that I’ve lost the moment, I need to go back and sit by the river with this one, wait for inspiration to strike on the next line.
Gratitude List:
1. Milkweed everywhere
2. Quiet mornings
3. Super moon, though it does cause some sleeping difficulty
4. How inspiration strikes
5. Crafting
May we walk in Beauty!
Power
After nearly two full days without electricity, I want to make all five point on my Gratitude List something about the wonders of electricity and how grateful I am for running water and lights at the flip of a switch. Part of me, however, is a little embarrassed, a little chagrined with myself, for my dependence on this wonder of the modern world. Why is it so hard to manage? Of course, there’s always the anxiety over spoiled food–because we’re so dependent on electricity, we end up with quite a lot of time and money invested in the contents of our refrigerators. I have a friend who has made the transition away from the use of a refrigerator. I’m not entirely sure how exactly she manages it, but it does seem like a good choice. Refrigerators and freezers are real energy hogs.
But aside from the fridge, why does loss of power throw me for such a loop? I go to bed at dark, instead of staying up later than my body thinks I should. That’s not a bad thing. We carried buckets of water from the kiddie pool up to the bathroom so we could flush the toilet. We had filled the kiddie pool the day before the power died–how lucky was that? The buckets were heavy. And it took a lot of trips over the two days we were without power. So who am I to grumble about carrying water upstairs to my bathroom when women in many places of the world are walking often a mile or more, perhaps twice a day, likely with a baby on their backs or children at their ankles, to get the small amount of water that their family will use for the day.
So now the power is back on. I am back to wasting electricity and water. One of the privileges of living in a wealthy nation is that we take our waste for granted and forget that we are wasting. Perhaps I can use this experience to give me practice, to help me live more mindfully, with more awareness, so that I can be more conservative of Earth’s precious resources, so that next time the power goes out it will be a minor inconvenience rather than a serious frustration.
Gratitude List:
1. Those clouds in the evenings after the storms, bunches hanging low into the magenta of the sunset.
2. The way the shining, fresh-washed blue sky shone out between those clouds, like Mary’s robe.
3. The Ganesha cloud I saw yesterday morning, looking for all the world like the jolly elephant god riding the winds across the sky.
4. A day of really moving in to my classroom, beginning to feel myself in the space.
5. All the power available to me, in so many ways. May I not take it for granted.
May we walk in Beauty!
Big Hearts
Gratitude List:
1. Collegiality. Sharing ideas.
2. Snail Mail
3. Is that a rain cloud?
4. A cool morning for harvest
5. Your good heart. You know, we may be in completely different worlds when it comes to politics or to religion. We might find very little to agree on when it comes to the issues that are thrown to us to fight about. But when it comes down to it, I believe in your good heart. I trust your essential connection to love and goodness. I want to be worthy of your trust as well.
May we walk in Beauty.
After Prayer
More a reflection than a poem, this somehow still wanted appear in poetic form:
Prayer is the raw material,
the stuff
the starting point.
Where shall I take it then?
When the quiet,
the intention,
have built
into a swirling ball of light.
When the web hums
with prayer,
like orb-weaver’s web
when she shakes it
in the morning sun.
The time comes
when prayer must be shaped,
molded into form and action.
Gratitude List:
1. Watching my children sleep, curled like seeds or sprawled on their backs, one leg cocked like they are about to leap off in the dance or a fencing match. Or half curled, like they’re mid-stride in a marathon. One is still in the exact same position I left him in last night. The other has been moving about in his sleep.
2. The current roadside triumvirate of day lily, Queen Anne’s lace, and chicory peeking like a blue eye among them.
3. Those who care for the children. People who foster children in need of loving homes, who take that belief that they are all our children into loving action.
4. Gathering, harvesting, filing, preparing–all these ideas for the coming work of the fall.
5. “Song of Peace,” the words set to the tune of Finlandia.
May we walk in Beauty!
Make it all a Prayer
(tanka)
make it all a prayer
each motion, each thought, each step
feel the connection
that silver strand that pulls you
to the heart of another
Gratitude List:
1. Those planets snuggled up to the moon at dusk yesterday. Any of my star-folk friends know who they were?
2. Making art with my RVRGRL and my Animalboy. In the time of the beginning, there was a cave. . .
3. Yesterday someone I love anointed my head with oil. We were thinking more of protecting the crown chakra than of the 23rd Psalm, but I think it was kind of the same thing. I was tenderly shepherded.
4. Reading about reading. To say that preparing for teaching in the fall is a stimulating experience is an understatement of vast proportions. I love to feel The Teacher re-waking within me.
5. How have I not yet had a gratitude dedicated to tomatoes? Summertime tomatoes! Red ones! Pink ones! Stripey ones! Golden sunshiny yellow ones! Deep purple and indigo ones! Wintry grocery store tomatoes taste like styrofoam and sawdust and the people who pick them are not given fair wages or healthy living conditions–don’t eat them; please, don’t eat them. Summertime tomatoes are luscious and wonderful, and they’re usually harvested by your local adorable farmer.
May we walk in Beauty!
Summer Morning Tanka
the first is the crow
then mourning dove on a wire
sparrow tremolo
a dog barks up the hollow
and the day is beginning
Gratitude List:
1. Morning yoga practice. It’s very short, but a few balance poses in the morning make me feel balanced all day.
2. Putting a plan into action
3. Making new friends
4. Feedback
5. Research
May we walk in Beauty!
Waking to the Rain
Sometimes the things that fill me with gratitude are great and weighty: The deep sharing of each others’ lives that friends do. The way the Universe sometimes seems to be conspiring to make things work out. The way things work out after they haven’t worked out. Change and Permanence.
Sometimes they’re simpler: Rain. Crows jabbering in the bosque. The taste of the year’s first fresh tomato. A small feather and a white stone. Snuggly children.
I try not to separate them out from each other, not to suggest that getting a job is more important, more gratitude-filled, than a turtle sliding over the grass. I want them to be jumbled up in there, the feelings and the noticings, the ideas and the bright colors. That’s how it is in the world–they’re all jumbled up together. You have to have both the steady warp and the colorful weft to weave the rug.
When I read a poem that grabs me or see a piece of art that really catches me, often it’s the way apparently unrelated things are juxtaposed together that really transports me. Collaging together the sparkle of dew on a spiderweb with the support of a family through difficult times offers new meaning to both, perhaps.
As a spiritual and mental health practice, it keeps me noticing the inward and the outward, paying attention to the ways that the inner and outer worlds intersect and inform each other, how some little thing that I might notice in the outer world is really an image for the inner realm. On days when I get into a broody funk, when I am having inner conversations with my rage or despair or sadness, knowing that I have to find my gratitudes makes me focus on things outside myself and my inner tangles, draws me out of the darkest parts of the labyrinth. It helps me to keep perspective.
And it also becomes like a prayer. When I listen to that defiant cawing of the crows and note how deeply it satisfies me on some level, it doesn’t cover up and distract me entirely from the anger at the frackers. But part of me sends that crow energy, like a prayer, to the people who are fighting the destruction of our natural resources for corporate gain. When I feel the thrill of watching the impossible flight of a tiny hummingbird, it doesn’t cover up the sadness I feel for a friend in great pain. But the hummingbird becomes part of my prayer for the lightening of burden and ease of my friend, for eventual joy to break through.
Today, I am grateful for what this practice has brought me, how it helps me to live in the moment, to keep perspective, to hold it lightly, to carry sadness and joy together in the same basket. May your day be filled with sparkling raindrops and the coolness of rain-filled breezes. May a bright color grab your soul by the sleeve and say, “Notice me!” May you feel today the love of someone wrapped around you like an afghan made by a grandmother.
Having said all that, my list today, id filled with outward noticing. Or is it?
Gratitude List:
1. Waking (after sleeping in) to the sound of rain and of birds singing their rain songs in the hollow
2. Bats! They’re back at work
3, Giggling children playing hide and seek in their grandparents’ house
4. Helena’s magical mulberry pie
5. Teeny tiny toads. Teeny, teeny tiny toads!
May we walk in Beauty!
