Gratitude List:
1. Jon Weaver-Kreider, who tends the milkweed
2. Monarch in the milkweed. I’m sure it must have been a female, there to lay as many eggs as monarchly possible. Please, I want to live in a world where this is cause for gentle seasonal joy rather than a wild, fretful hope.
3. Refining the systems
4. Laughter
5. Day lilies–Ah! This is the season of orange: monarchs and lilies.
May we walk in Beauty!
I
We handed you our trust, that egg,
so gently cradled in our palms,
our fingers making a cage to hold it
until we could be certain it was safe
in your own careful hands,
in the nest of your own heart.
II
I am thinking about freedom,
how you are free to do whatever you choose,
and how you are never truly free of consequence.
You may think you act alone,
but everything reverberates,
everything resonates.
It all ripples outward.
The tremors of one selfish choice
can grow into a quake that shakes a village.
So too must the good ones grow,
like instruments in an orchestra
building the sound together,
until a great and mighty
river of sound transports us.
III
You chose shame for shame.
So that will not be the name
I choose for this poem.
You chose the clothes you would wear for this one,
and soon enough the world will see your costume.
I will witness, but I can offer you nothing
but small pity, perhaps, for what broke you first.
IV
These angry squirrels gnaw and chase,
racing through my brain,
but I will not let them make me choose to hate.
I will not let them make me choose to hate.
Gratitude List:
1. The hope that good acts will grow and reverberate as surely as acts of cruelty and selfishness
2. Harvest, beautiful and lush and nourishing
3. How quickly the body can mend
4. Worms, down there under the soil, doing their work
5. Waking up to the clucking of the cuckoo in the bosque
May we all walk in Beauty
Wear today loosely,
like your grandmother’s shawl
or a hat that keeps blowing away in the breezes.
Wear it gently,
and hold it like you hold a kite
the moment before you release it to wind.
Walk through these hours
the way you waded through the creek
or up and down the beach that day,
picking up smooth and shiny pebbles,
pocketing them for later.
Tiny stones of moments
to sift through your fingers,
testing their weight
and feeling their coolness,
to place in a tray on the table.
This one, you’ll say.
This. And this.
Gratitude List:
1. Naps
2. A Fabulous farm crew
3. Memories of winter
4. Echoes of laughter
5. Remembering and looking forward
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. That holy, sacred thing that happened yesterday morning: courageous and honest words, then words of encouragement, words of blessing. And the music!
2. The word Hunh! Or Huh! Maybe Hngh! It’s brassy. It’s final. It’s defiant. And it makes good percussion.
3. Spontaneous drumming circle
4. The talent show–organized and run entirely by the children
5. Change and permanence.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. Belly laughs and chocolate
2. Reminiscence
3. Singing Together. Finding the notes.
4. Africa House (the art, the fans, the cool floor, the growly mockingbird, the rainmaker, the gathering places, the fireplace, the games, the way laughter echoes down the hallways, oh–even the skunk)
5. Telling Our Stories: All these wonderful and terrible stories, these wise and hopeful and despairing stories. How they fill the bowl. How we make a net together, to receive them, to sift them, to examine them. To hold them maybe, or to let them go.
May you make your path by walking.
May you find someone who will hold your stories with you.
May you walk on holy ground.
May you walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. This web that is sometimes a net. Even when it gets shaken, it holds.
2. Resiliency. I know that you may not always feel resilient and strong, but I believe in you. I know that you will make it through.
3. This poem fragment, by Antonio Machado:
XXIX
Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.
Traveller, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveller, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.”
4. A nice hot shower
5. The next 25 years
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. Dancing Spiral Dance with Yasmin and the girls at camp.
2. Sense of Wonder Camp for Girls.
3. The life and work of Rachel Carson
4. Step by step, step by step, things work out. Or they don’t, but then often that is also a working out of sorts, eh?
5. The ACA–As a self-employed farmer, I am one of those people for whom “Obamacare” has been a blessing. My health care has improved.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. Letting go, and letting go, and letting go. . .
2. Rituals and rites of passage
3. Summer bass of great horned owl, bullfrog and mourning dove
4. Getting the next thing done, and the next thing
5. Learning to say yes. Learning to say no.
May we walk in Beauty!
Life is full and busy these days with the start of the farming season. I have been wanting to just dash off some quick morning tankas to keep my heart in the game. And I will. But there’s a poem boiling inside me at the moment and I keep trying to get it going these mornings, but it doesn’t seem to want to find its full form, or it feels too maudlin, or too angry, or too easily misunderstood. Poems are like people, I guess. Some just want to hang by the door for a while before they come in. This is a percolating time for poems.
Lately I have been listening to Kate Tempest every chance I get. I’ve always been enamored of the word play and rhythms of hip hop and rap. The noise of the music that sometimes drowns the words, the sometimes misogynistic or violent lyrics, have kept me from exploring the art form with too much intention. I know that there are some really bright and revolutionary hip hop artists but I haven’t made an effort to seek them out. And here comes poet Kate Tempest, who started as a hip hop artist and has taken the stage as a leader in Spoken Word poetry. I am utterly mesmerized by her words and her style. I feel like a little kid hearing something for the first time.
Look her up. Then look up Sarah Kay. Then Hollie McNish. Then Andrea Gibson. Then look up Shane Koyczan, especially his poem “To This Day.”
Gratitude List:
1. Blooming Milkweed! Blessings on the Monarchs. Blessings on the bees.
2. The sounds of early morning birdsong, even though it wakes me up and leaves me drowsy for the day.
3. Kids and adults working together.
4. Finishing a puzzle. I love doing puzzles, the way they make my mind work. I often feel as though I am solving internal puzzles while I am working on a jigsaw
5. Spoken Word Poets
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. CSA season 2014 has begun!
2. Those invisible threads that connect us all to each other. The web. The net. I think I am talking about prayer.
3. Cool, breezy days.
4. Day lilies
5. Wildly inspiring friendships
May we walk in Beauty!
