Today, I wrote an ekphrastic poem for my prompt: ekphrasis is a Greek term referring to a written description of a piece of visual art.
I used Andrea Kowch’s piece titled “In My Mind” for my inspiration for today’s poem. You’ll have to click the link to her page there. I feel like this is too much of a re-publishing for me to put it here without permissions. Instead, I put up an AI collab of St. Martha taming the dragon, which has some of the similar feeling. But please check out Kowch’s piece that inspired my poem for today, and explore more of her good, good work.
Gratitude List: 1. For the last two days, in the green field in the dogleg of Ducktown, three deer have stood watching us as we passed in the dawn gloaming. 2. My comfortable shoes 3. Poetry 4. A new red shirt 5. The loving care and concern of people who rush to care for someone in need. May we walk justly, in mercy, humbly, in Beauty!
“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” —Terry Pratchett
The Happy Virus by Hafez I caught the happy virus last night When I was out singing beneath the stars. It is remarkably contagious— So kiss me.
“It is our mind, and that alone, that chains us or sets us free.” —Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell
“We must live from the center.” —Bahauddin, father of Rumi
“Some days I am more wolf than woman and I am still learning how to stop apologising for my wild.” —Nikita Gill
“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” —Albert Einstein
“Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.” —Joseph Campbell
“Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.” —Annie Lennox
Some days feel like the lightning rods of days. Today has been one of those. People attacking people and institutions I love. Attacking me. People working together to answer with love, to hold out our arms, to support each other. Good, hard work–Good Good Work. It’s wearying. And still, there’s the daily and the mundane work to get done in the midst of this other.
I am glad I’ve chosen the path of poetry this month to get me back to the inner work of writing and get me out of my own head.
I don’t know how to withstand the onslaught of the culture wars, especially when they begin so directly to affect me and those I love. Offer love. Offer a hand. Offer a word of wisdom or care. Hold steady. Be the conduit for the Holy One.
My own path, while embracing a wide and universal understanding of the spiritual, is grounded in the Anabaptist Christian tradition. I don’t think I have ever asked myself so frequently, “What would Jesus do?” as I have in the past week, the past months. Is this the moment to turn over tables? Is this the moment to offer stories? Is this the moment to bear witness silently? Is this the moment to ignore the ones who rage and spit, and simply do the Work I am called to do?
Today’s poem form is the mondo. I used this form to try to express some of this inner processing:
Gratitude List: 1. Friends who walk with each other and share the burden. 2. So many kinds of daffodils! (Read that Wordsworth poem over and over and over). 3. Finding center. Holding center. 4. The open-armed ones who welcome all to the table. 5. Writing again. This fog that has held me in the past six months lifts faster as I find my way back to words. May we walk Justly, in Mercy, and Humbly–in Beauty!
“We write to taste life twice.” —Anais Nin
“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” —Maya Angelou
“If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.” —Thich Nhat Hanh
“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
“When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and seeds of hope.” —Wangari Maathai
Today’s poetic task is an anagrammatic poem. What fun! What fun! The power of limits indeed. This forced my brain in a tangle which all my intellectualizing could not save me from, and I had to swim through the wordplay.
Gratitude List: 1. Found that light at the end of the tunnel. Whew! 2. The dawn chorus 3. Leafing greenly spirits of trees 4. Companionable silences 5. Mondos–a collaborative poetic form that my Creative Writers were working on today. Such a lovely form. May we walk in Beauty!
“I must have flowers, always and always.” —Claude Monet
“Nobody’s on the road Nobody’s on the beach There’s something in the air The summer’s out of reach…” —Don Henley
‘Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.” —Roger Ebert
In a mist of light falling with the rain I walk this ground of which dead men and women I have loved are part, as they are part of me. In earth, in blood, in mind, the dead and living into each other pass, as the living pass in and out of loves as stepping to a song. The way I go is marriage to this place, grace beyond chance, love’s braided dance covering the world. —Wendell Berry (The Wheel)
”You have to begin to tell the story of your life as you now want it to be, and discontinue the tales of how it has been or of how it is.” —Esther Hicks
Today, I gave my self the task of writing an Eavesdrop poem. Like many found poems, it can become more about the word play and the intellectual game than about the artfulness. Occasionally, I find I’m creating one that really rings. I’m not sure today’s quite meets the artful edge, but I have grading to finish, and I think I’ll call it done here. I’ll post my prompt page and the “harvest page” where I wrote the random eaves drops, and then the poem.
Gratitude List: 1. Leading singing with the Children. As I was leading the first song this morning, I noticed that three or four of the young children were actually waving their arms around along with me, so when I led “I See a New World Coming,” I asked the young song leaders to come up on stage and lead with me, and about ten kids joined me, and it might have been the most fun I have ever had leading singing. 2. Kite-flying with the whole family. Henry asked my dad to pull out the kites after lunch, and it was a blast (though I ended up going inside because I was cold). 3. Lunch and the afternoon with a lot of the family. It’s such a relief to spend time together again. 4. There are lights at ends of tunnels. Though I don’t see mine yet in the work of the rest of the day, I know it too will come. 5. Communities of people committed to the work of loving, of healing, of growing and evolving human compassion and empathy, of listening, of learning together. My friends, my family, my colleagues, my church, my online circles. You, Beloveds, you! May we walk, always, in Beauty!
“Sound or vibration is the most powerful force in the universe. Music is a divine art, to be used not only for pleasure but as a path to Awakening.” —Yogananda
“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” —Hermes Trismegistus
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” —Jane Goodall
“Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.” —Henri Nouwen
“In the end, we’ll all become stories.” —Margaret Atwood
“Privilege is when you think something’s not a problem because it’s not a problem to you personally.” —attributed to many authors
Dea Ex Machina by Beth Weaver-Kreider
What we speak we create. Writing, we make meaning into existence.
These words, cogs and gears, shift meaning to matter:
“Let there be. . .” And there is.
And it is good.
Make space in this house for all of the people you are. Make room for the schemer, the doubter, the cynic, but open some space for the credulous child and the mystic, the dreamer, the wild one, the quiet one.
Open a space within for the glass-half-full to dance with the glass-half-empty, for the monk to sing songs of revolution with the fury.
There in those rooms, the One may enter and speak your many names, saying, Peace be yours. —Beth Weaver-Kreider
Here are today’s pages from my Poem-a-Day for April:
Gratitude List: 1. Faces. Full faces with smiles. I love seeing smiles, smiling back. I’ve missed this. And now I can read lips again, too. I didn’t realize how much I relied on reading lips and expressions to help with understanding before we lost that part of our faces. 2. Feral Flaming Forsythia Hedges–not the tidily trimmed ones, but the ones that look like they’re on fire. 3. Horses. I love horses in fields. 4. The BeeGees. How Deep Is Your Love? 5. Young people. Spending my days with young people. Tonight was the Youth Group Auction at church, and a whole church-full of people investing in our young people while having fun. May we walk in Beauty!
“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.” —Alain de Botton
“We are capable of suffering with our world, and that is the true meaning of compassion. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don’t ever apologize for crying for the trees burning in the Amazon or over the waters polluted from mines in the Rockies. Don’t apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.” —Joanna Macy
“We should have respect for animals because it makes better human beings of us all.” —Jane Goodall
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you love. It will not lead you astray.” —Rumi
“If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.” —Harriet Tubman
“The little grassroots people can change this world.” —Wangari Maathai
“Some form of the prayer of quiet is necessary to touch me at the unconscious level, the level where deep and lasting transformation occurs. From my place of prayer, I am able to understand more clearly what is mine to do and have the courage to do it. Unitive consciousness—the awareness that we are all one in Love—lays a solid foundation for social critique and acts of justice.” —Richard Rohr
“You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to.” —Anonymous
It’s been a long, hard winter. There’s no other way to say it, except for the cliche. Slowly, as the days warm and the sun returns, I am finding my way out of the Winter Blues layer of the brain fog that has been swirling around me. As I try to grab the bright threads that will lead me out of these mists, I am jumping once reaching the golden thread of National Poetry Month to use the discipline of daily writing to reenergize me.
This year, I’ve made a slideshow (with Slidesgo template) with pages for prompts and daily poems. Several of my students have made their own slideshows, and we’re sharing them with each other so we can read each other’s work throughout the month. Click the link above, if you want to read mine. Here’s today’s:
Gratitude List: 1. Daily contemplation of the changes in the trees. 2. Beginning to walk out of the fog a little. 3. My students and my colleagues. This school is a wonderful place. 4. Yogurt and grapes and granola–a healthy, reliable lunch 5. You, Beloveds, how you’re there, so steady, doing your Work, and I can feel the strength of that even when I am wandering about in the fogs of my brain. May we walk in Beauty!
Words for the Day of the Holy Fool: “The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.” —Julian of Norwich
“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” —Carl Jung
“Poems are maps to the place where you already are.” —Jane Hirshfield
“Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is to draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.” —Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson
“When you do not know you need mercy and forgiveness yourself, you invariably become stingy in sharing it with others. So make sure you are always waiting with hands widely cupped under the waterfall of mercy.” —Richard Rohr
“All four gospels insist that when all the other disciples are fleeing, Mary Magdalene does not run. She stands firm. She does not betray or lie about her commitment to Jesus—she witnesses. Hers is clearly a demonstration of either the deepest human love or the highest spiritual understanding of what Jesus was teaching—perhaps both. But why—one wonders–do Holy Week liturgies tell and re-tell the story of Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus, while the steady and unwavering witness of Magdalene is passed over—not even noticed? How would our understanding of the paschal story change if instead of reflecting upon Jesus dying alone and rejected if we were to reinforce the fact that one person stood by him and did not leave? For this story of Mary Magdalene is as firmly stated in scripture as the denial story. How would this change the emotional timbre of the day? How would it affect our feeling of ourselves? How would it reflect upon how we have viewed, and still view, women in the church? About the nature of redemptive love?” —Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal Priest
“When I feel this fog rolling in on me, I light fires of affection in the hearts of others. I tell them in tangible ways how the life they live makes me live mine differently, how precious and important they are to the rest of us. That fire then becomes like a beacon which burns through the grey and which I can sail towards.” –Toko-pa Turner
It’s good to leave each day behind, like flowing water, free of sadness. Yesterday is gone and its tale told. Today new seeds are growing. —Rumi
On the night before Brigid’s Day, they say, hang a cloth out of doors, where The Lady, when she passes by, will touch it. Then in the coming year that cloth may be a comfort wrapped arounda sore throat or aching head.
Oh, I know science, and I listen hard to those who know it better than me, but I also know comfort, and a star-kissed, moon-kissed, chill-kissed scarf left out on the night of The Lady would indeed be a comfort as I sip my lemon tea with honey.
And so a blessed Imbolc night to you.
May your hearth be warm and cozy.
May you and your beloveds be hale and healthy and hearty.
And may your words be wise and well-chosen.
A red scarf to wind about my neck for comfort.
Gratitude List:
A great bunch of students in my classes this semester.
Courses that offer me a creative outlet.
I slept for 8 hours straight last night.
Salmon patties for supper, with spinach and refried beans.
You, and you, and you!
May we walk in Beauty!
“ In the dark times, will there also be singing?Yes, there will be singing.About the dark times.” —Bertolt Brecht
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” —Virginia Woolf
One of the old names for today is Candlemas, when we acknowledge how the light has been within us all along, how much light we have to offer. Take stock of your candles. What is the small flame that you can offer the world in this moment? What is the fuel that you share?Perhaps you are already doing it–tending daily to children or calling your senators, teaching teenagers to ask discerning questions or planting seeds for the crops that will feed your neighbors, healing bodies, gathering friends, listening. Today, this week, this month, do that work like a prayer, like a magic spell. Do it with intention, knowing that your work is changing the world, that what you do is fighting the forces of wanton destruction and power-mongering. —Beth Weaver-Kreider, Mockingbird Chronicles, Feb 2020
We are not alone. You are not alone. Reach out. Take hands. Build the webs. Ask for help, and be the helper.Let’s situate ourselves so that we are always ready–strong enough, centered enough, grounded enough–to step up and do the work of love and compassion and justice, to stand up, to stand between, to risk, to raise our voices, to be the fierce and defiant hope for the future we want to create. —Beth Weaver-Kreider, Mockingbird Chronicles, Feb 2020
Last night, I had a bizarre synaesthesia dream in which I could see the colors and patterns of pain. My heel was throbbing, and with each pulse of pain, a different square square would appear in front of me, almost like a square of fabric, with colors and patterns. As the pain changed, the colors changed, and focusing on the images made the pain less intense.
When I woke up, my heel was actually aching. The pain that I live with is not intense or debilitating. It’s mostly just the aches and pains of aging. I go through cycles when I feel like everything is inflamed, and then long months of low-grade aches. I’m not spending a great deal of time thinking or worrying about the aches lately, so the dream is interesting, perhaps just a manifestation of the momentary sensations. But I’m really grateful for the crossing of senses that the dream offered me.
Gratitude List:
Shiny new semester with a clean slate.
Color
Chicken corn noodle soup for supper with crusty rolls, and Jon who made it
Three day week
Cats
Daughter, the songs of women
are the first words of children
—Abby E. Murray, in Rattle Magazine
*****
“Our vitality is inextricably bound up with creativity. Like a tree whose expression is fruit, giving our gifts is what keeps life pushing through our veins. It’s what keeps us feeling alive. As anyone who has strayed too far from their creativity knows, without it every corner of one’s life can fall prey to a terrible greying spread. As Kahlil Gibran writes about trees in an orchard, ‘They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.” —Dreamwork with Toko-pa
******
“If we want children to flourish, to become truly empowered, then let us allow them to love the earth before we ask them to save it. Perhaps this is what Thoreau had in mind when he said, “the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think the same is true of human beings.”
—David Sobel
*****
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” ―Martin Luther King Jr.
*****
Ursula LeGuin, in the Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness:
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound—a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in . A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.)
*****
“I think being motivated is naturally built-in to one’s vocation. When you walk a path you love, there is something deeper calling you forward on it, like a beautiful question that can never be answered. In the hard times you may turn away from it, but a part of you knows you’ll always turn back because you can’t give up on what you love, even if you try.
In the end, I think the real work is not finding inspiration, but attuning to it. So when I’m not feeling inspired, I know somewhere along the line I’ve been distancing myself from life. This feeling of being separate from ‘something greater’ is usually brought about by numbing habits; so I’ll take myself to the forest and let my senses be reawoken and warmed back to life. I think pleasure is really the gateway to feeling connected and inspired.” —Toko-pa Turner
*****
“Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. . . . The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” —Annie Dillard
I woke up at 5:30 this morning, as I tend to, but then I was able to fall right back to sleep. In the hour and a half that followed I had this dream.
In the dream, I am writing a short story:
Once there was a girl who wanted her writing to be real and alive with emotional impact. So every day before she sat down to write, she would stand at her open window and simply let herself feel. As she let the feelings wash through her, she would weep, great tears falling like rain from her window onto the plants below. Then she would turn from the window, sit down at her table, and write.
One day as she was looking from her window, she noticed that leaves and vines were growing in wild riot below her window. As her feelings began to rise and flow through her, and the tears began to fall, she noticed that where each tear fell, a small plant would begin to grow, whether it fell on brick or wood or other plants. At the point of each tear’s impact, a leaf or sprout would emerge and start to grow.
Her feelings enriched her stories, and they also greened and grew the world around her.
In the dream, I become the girl who is writing. I am trying to help my friends solve a problem, but for each thing I offer to do, they see another problem on the other side. I retreat into myself, and start to wear my hair down over my face like a veil. I stand in corners and alcoves so I can watch people without being seen.
I am burdened with the weight of emotion and pain that has no solution.
It was sort of a relief to wake up and put down the weight of feelings! But although the dream is heavy, and the ending is isolating, I am grateful for the essential message, that feelings have a green and growing reality in the world outside ourselves.
Now I am sitting at my own writing table, looking out to the snowy hill behind the house, and the red-gold glow of the sun is illuminating the trees in the woods, first the tops of the trunks further up the hill, and now the little oak at the edge of the wood is glowing, too. (And then, in a moment, the clouds must have come over the sun, and the wood has gone wintry grey.)
Gratitude List: 1. The way the morning sun sets the woods to glowing. 2. Feelings, even when they are big, especially when they are big. 3. Long sleep and dreams rich with messages. 4. Something got into my kids yesterday. Kid #2 is always re-arranging his room, but yesterday he went big and tried a wildly creative (and mostly successful) configuration. Suddenly Kid #1 was re-arranging his monster computer set-up. I think he may have stayed up most of the night, but this morning, it looks mostly tidy and organized in a way it has never been. Settling into spaces. 5. Yesterday’s crockpot stew–comfort food on a cold wintry day. May we walk in Wisdom!
“Today I am grateful for truth, for narratives that center stories of people who have been cut from the narratives told by the powerful to skew the truth to their own agenda. I am grateful for the weavers and menders and spinners who pick up the torn and tangled threads and get to work to repair the tapestry of our story, holding the lie-mongers to account, and weaving in the threads of truth.” —Mockingbird
“A man is either free, or he is not. There cannot be an apprenticeship for freedom.” —Amiri Baraka
“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” ―bell hooks, killing rage: Ending Racism
“Consider whether great changes have not happened deep inside your being in times when you were sad. The only sadnesses that are unhealthy and dangerous are those we carry around in public in order to drown them out. Like illnesses that are treated superficially, they only recede for a while and then break out more severely. Untreated they gather strength inside us and become the rejected, lost, and unlived life that we may die of. If only we could see a little farther than our knowledge reaches and a little beyond the borders of our intuition, we might perhaps bear our sorrows more trustingly than we do our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters us, something unknown. Our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, they take a step back, a stillness arises, and the new thing, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible, is music.” —Aldous Huxley
“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” —Shel Silverstein
“As If Someone Was Blowing on Feathers,” Beth Weaver-Kreider and AI
I’m experimenting with AI art and poetry these days. I like the surprises. I feel like I can call these things mine to some degree, because I offer the seed and the sense, but then the Ghost in the Machine plays her part and makes magic.
I began this poem with the somewhat bland first line, and then played with the line lengths, and changed a couple words:
The snow fell softly through the night as if someone was blowing on feathers, and the branches touched my face in the coldest breeze I had ever felt. I awoke with a start and realized that it was not snow falling upon me, but tears.
I am filled with wonder at the surprise of that last line. The Ghost in the Machine is delivering the pathos. I then put the first two lines (my own and the first of the Ghost’s) into Wombo Dream AI Art Generator, and received the illustration above.
Gratitude List: 1. A snowy day at home. Breathing Space. 2. The magic and surprise of collaborating with the Ghost in the Machine. 3. We put money down to hold a little green Prius with fewer than 30,000 miles. It’s an old model, but the lowest mileage of any car we’ve ever bought. And the instrument panel and console are almost identical to Pippi Prius, so it’s a seamless learning curve. And the gas mileage is better than Pippi’s. We’ll pick it up early next week, when we’ve got Pippi sold and the dealer fixes the green car’s headlight and hatch latch. I’m excited to drive a reliable car again. Pippi was getting iffy. 4. These cats 5. How the light shines in. May we walk in Wisdom!
“We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller.” —Rebecca Solnit
“There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.” —Zora Neale Hurston
I see her walking on a path through a pathless forest or a maze, a labyrinth. As she walks, she spins and the fine threads fall behind her following her way, telling where she is going, telling where she has gone. Telling the story. The line, the thread of voice, the sentences saying the way. —Ursula K. Le Guin (from “The Writer On, and At, Her Work)
“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.” —President Franklin Roosevelt
“A condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything…” —T.S. Elliot
