Ten years ago, I ventured into the world of self-publishing. I created my own little imprint called Skunk Holler Poetryworks (we live in a dip between the arms of Pisgah Ridge casually known as Skunk Hollow). Then I published a book of Poetry called The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird. It’s a mouthful of a name, which is often the burden of first children. A year later, Skunk Holler Poetryworks published a second volume: Holding the Bowl of the Heart. Then I dithered. The company I use to publish the books can print a single copy or dozens, as demand requires. That means no up-front capital for me unless I buy a batch of author copies. The downside of this marvelous situation is that the company is an Amazon company, and I feel like I am working within the belly of the beast. So for years, I just didn’t publish anything. I haven’t been able to find another company with the incredibly user-friendly design system, the marketing potential, and the one-off printing. So I didn’t publish for almost a decade.
But then last year happened. I became The Heretic. I wrote some of my best poems. And The Heretic’s Book of Prayer was born. I wanted to publish it, but I am essentially an unknown poet, and I like having total control of everything from font to layout to organization to cover design, so I jumped back into the belly of the beast.
This is definitely my best book so far. The poems are stronger and more confident. The organization tells a story that I want to tell. The focus is crisper. And in the sorting and editing of poems, I actually found that I have enough poems for a second book, possibly titled Seasons of the Witch.
You can buy The Heretic’s Book of Prayer on Amazon. My dream is to eventually set up a page on The Mockingbird Chronicles website where you can order all of my books directly from me, but I am not that smart yet. I’ll need some tutoring to manage it, and my IT Guy is leaving for college in two weeks.
Shameless ad: Buy my book, please!
And. It’s my birthday! I’m turning 56. I’ve done my yearly research, and there doesn’t appear to be anything mathematically interesting about the number 56. There’s something about it being the sum of the first six triangular numbers, making it a tetrahedral number, so there’s that.
The angel number and numerology people all seem to agree that 56 is a number of transformation and change. I’ll take that! As I have been praying along with the current Way of the Rose Novena, I have been asking for focus and determination, and somehow that seems to have translated to the focus I needed to get this book done. Also, I recently asked my doctor how I can deal with the exhaustion and aches. She suggested, I start eating a careful Mediterranean diet, and exercising more. Exercise has always been my bugaboo, but then I thought about the fact that I am already spending 30-40 minutes a day saying my rosary–What if I would walk during that time? So I’ve added a brisk walk every day. In a week and a half, I am feeling a change. So maybe the transformative aspect of 56 can help me continue to develop greater health in the coming year.
Gratitude List: 1. How people circle ’round to protect the vulnerable. 2. Examples of people who offered their lives for justice for others. 3. Goldfinches along the roads these days, how they fly up twittering so joyfully. 4. The little fairy birds that flitted ahead of me on my walk today. I think they must be field sparrows, but in the dusk they looked tiny and fairy-like. 5. Aging. Yes, really. Despite the aches and the hormone shifts and the new and edgy anxieties. I love how we change and ripen, how our faces begin to show the art of our living. Birthdays remind me that I am always on the turning wheel, and what a glorious ride it can be!
May we walk ever in Beauty!
“Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.” ― Tom Robbins
Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that —
It lights the whole world. —Hafiz
“The Seven of Pentacles” by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup she is looking at her work growing away there actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans as things grow in the real world, slowly enough. If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water, if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food, if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars, if the praying mantis comes and the lady bugs and the bees, then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
“Life…is a wonder. It is a sky laden with clouds of contradictions.” —Naguib Mahfouz
“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” —Coco Chanel
“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Teilhard de Chardin
“Soul of my soul … be water in this now-river.” —Rumi
“You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe, and your name is Love.” —Rumi
“There is one masterpiece, the hexagonal cell, that touches perfection. No living creature, not even human, has achieved, in the centre of one’s sphere, what the bee has achieved on her own: and if intelligence from another world were to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation, I would offer the humble comb of honey.” —Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life Of The Bee, 1924
“If it is bread that you seek, you will have bread. If it is the soul you seek, you will find the soul. If you understand this secret, you know you are that which you seek.” —Rumi
“In these cataclysmic times, living in what Michael Meade calls the ‘slow apocalypse,’ despair can be dangerously seductive. Our lives may feel inadequate to the terrible momentum of our times, but it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.
“While despair traps us in the bog of despondency, grief carries us into life. Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.
“If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings, and slip the poetry between our words.
“Rumi says, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude, our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation that medicine might reach through and towards us.” —Toko-pa Turner
I had all sorts of ideas about items for today’s list, but here in the foggy-brained morning, they’ve fled. It’s nice to know that I have been actively feeling gratitude, even if I can’t remember the exact moments.
Gratitude List: 1. At first, it felt like “Oh no! This again?!” when an internal itch came back. I thought I had resolved that, packed it up, and put it to rest, for Pete’s sake. But Pete or someone else had other ideas, and I’ve reopened the case on it. When conflicts and obsessions and simmering rages that I thought I had finished with come roaring back to life, it means they’re not really done yet. They’ve got more work to do in the psyche. So instead of panicking and getting back into the frenzied cycle, I can tell myself that time and distance enable me to be more circumspect now, to find the deeper themes and meanings, and to turn myself even more directly toward grace, to spiral more toward my center. So, I will be grateful for the next level of messages and learning that come. 2. LeVar Burton’s podcast. Short stories! Read by one of my favorite voices of all time. 3. Aging. Changing. Entering the doorway of the Crone’s Hut. It’s time to take up the threads of the fairy tales again. 4. Oak trees. Really, these are the people you need to be noticing right now, how they hold their leaves and spin them into leather of rich colors. Not the shiny brights like the maples, but equally sumptuous and eye-catching, if you look. 5. Morning quiet. Always, the morning quiet. My brain is alone for a little while every day in this morning quiet.
Gratitude List: 1. Advent, expectancy, hope 2. Getting older (I am not finding parts of this particularly enjoyable right now, and I put it here to remind me that it really is a wonderful thing despite the grouchy bits) 3. Hot coffee and cold water 4. Cozy warm morning house 5. A refreshing break (I am still holding back a bit on whether I really want to get back into the swing of things, but I’ll be ready when the dawn comes)
May we walk in Beauty!
“The heart is your student, for love is the only way we learn.”
—Rumi
Poet Joy Harjo, from 2012:
“Visited with my cousin George Coser, Jr yesterday at the kitchen table. He’s a gift. Always something profound among the stories. The sacred lies at the root of the mundane. And every word is a power element. Each word or sound, whether thought, written or spoken grows our path, the path of our generation, the children, grandchildren, the Earth. . . . We become the ancestors. A sense of play gives a lightness of being. So get out there and play—and be kind while you’re at it. To yourself, too.”
Help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways
and break fresh ground with You.
Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You.
—The Prayer of St. Brendan (attributed to Brendan)
The Wild Geese
by Wendell Berry
Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
This morning, I am sitting outside with cool breezes, delicious morning sunlight, the calling of the wingfolk all around, a not-so-small boy playing in the sandbox, and an old man cat resting in his bed beside me. It is a perfect moment, one I want to hold forever, inner and outer worlds aligned. Grief is here, too, in the perfect moment: the old man cat has gone nearly blind in the past week, the marvelous boy with the giant-sized heart is growing so fast I cannot keep track of the changes, some of my beloveds are hurting and anxious. It is all part of the wheel of changes, and grief and uncertainty have their place. It is part of the package of being human.
And it’s not only the boys and the cat who are aging and changing. I am about to complete my fiftieth year. It feels right and good to be here on the cusp of my half-century, still learning to be who I am: mother, spouse, teacher, friend, writer. I feel a new story rising, wanting to burst forth. I have spent this past decade learning to trust my voice, honing my craft, taking baby steps. Now it is time to find a way to take my words out, further out. I’m not entirely sure what that will look like, but it is the promise that I am making to myself in this moment. I am ready to leave the safety of the chrysalis.
(And now there is an older boy here, golden as the sunlight, and he is telling me words that are beyond my understanding, this child who came from my body–he is so much smarter than I am, already–his mind making connections at lightning speed, learning every new thing. What a marvel it is to watch these beings absorb information and grow and develop, extending ideas of their own, creating new things. The wheel turns. . .)
“I saw you once, Medusa; we were alone.
I looked you straight in the cold eye, cold.
I was not punished, was not turned to stone.
How to believe the legends I am told? …
I turned your face around! It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore —
Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!
That is the gift I thank Medusa for.”
―May Sarton, “The Muse as Medusa”
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Pablo Picasso:
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”
*
“Our religion is relationship. Our relationships are our religion.” ―Bruxy Cavey
*
“The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work
on the images imprisoned within you.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
Gratitude List: 1. (How did you encounter the Divine Wow?) Synchronicity. In this case, it had to do with armadillos. “Protect yourself,” says the wise woman, and the Mystery adds, “What she said.”
2. (What awakens you?) All the butterflies swinging down the breezes: monarch, swallowtail, fritillary, buckeye. “Isn’t that chrysalis becoming a little claustrophobic?” they ask. Isn’t it time to emerge and fly?
3. (What quickened within you?) It is time to fly, time to learn a new kind of noticing, time to address the claustrophobia, time to break out of the chrysalis.
4. (What do you take deeper?) The layers of my living–photos of very young children who are both gone and here in this moment, time with friends which is both this moment now and last year and the years before, this morning sun slanting into the hollow and the blue jay and doves calling which is the essence of this very moment and also a hearkening to my own ancient story.
5. (How will you carry the past and the present into the next moment?) Allowing the little bird of grief for what is past and gone to sit on my shoulder and sing her songs. Anticipating the joy that comes with the next ray of sunlight, the next bird call, the next “Mom, look!”
Like Mary Oliver, I can worry a lot.
Will the hummingbird eggs be viable?
Will the bats return every summer?
Will the children be safe?
Will the people like me?
Will I be sufficient to the tasks before me?
Have I given birth to children in the era before the end?
Will their adult lives be spent in a constant effort to survive the heat?
Will elephants become extinct in my lifetime?
Will courteous discourse die out?
Will fascism rise again?
Sometimes I can make my way to her last stanza, to see that it all comes to nothing. Simply giving it up is harder. But some days it helps to write it out. I go back to that Little Red Riding Hood image I posted a few days ago. As long as those worries are lurking out in the dark woods behind me somewhere, they could be anything. They become monsters beyond all proportion. Even if they’re big and scary like the wolf in that image, or like the looming monsters of terrorism and climate change, it’s somehow a comfort to finally look them in the eye. “You might be big, you scary old thing, but you have no power over me as long I can see you.”
Gratitude List: 1. Yesterday’s Reiki class. My cohort of co-students. Sarah, who teaches with such love and grace. Love and Life Force and the prayerful laying on of hands.
2. One more family hurrah before the end of summer. My marvelous siblings and their spouses. Their kids. My parents. I think that is probably a blessing not to be taken for granted. It’s not just that I love my parents, and my brother and sister and their spouses, but that I really like them. I like to spend time with them and converse with them. And the same goes for the nieces and nephews.
3. New stretches. I am adding some new stretches to my daily yoga movements. They’re harder than they were 20 years ago, even when I was thirty-five pounds heavier than I am now, but in just a week, I am feeling more and more comfort in the new stretches. I may be talking about yoga here, but I think this applies to quite a lot of the middle-aging process. I hate to sound slogan-y, but I think Use It Or Lose It might apply here. So yoga stretches and geography quizzes will be part of my regular established routine now.
4. Racing down the home stretch. Getting the papers and the space and the ideas all in order. Opening the heart to receive the new people and ideas who come my way. Developing and organizing the plans.
5. Sorting tomatoes. The tomatoes were late this year, but when they came in, they exploded off the vines. I haven’t done a lot of the sorting this summer–it used to be one of the tasks I owned, but now others often do it. Today might be the last time I sort them for the summer. I love lining up the colors, putting the paste tomatoes into their own bin, setting the ones with a little disease or damage in their own beautiful rows over on the extras table.
Listen for the songs
of the thousand grandmothers
who sing in your blood
whose voices echo in halls
of wakening memory.
Gratitude List: 1. That sunset. Magenta and true orange, indigo and aquamarine. The sunset-washed clouds were like wispy versions of mammatus clouds.
2. Volunteer Fire Department. Our local FDs are all staffed by volunteers. These people are amazing. We had a ride last night in a fire engine at the Wrightsville FD Open House. It was like being inside the Tardis–bigger on the inside.
3. Aging. Looking at some photos of myself yesterday, I noticed how my face is showing my age, and I was happy about that. Something about seeing pictures of myself in my late teens and early twenties makes me a little uncomfortable–I seem so raw and unripe and unseasoned. Yesterday I realized that I feel comfortable in my skin–creaky knees and achy back and marks of age–in ways that I don’t think I ever have before. I am incredibly grateful for that. I just might start calling myself a grown-up pretty soon.
4. Rain.
5. Giving myself permission.
Mockingbird Chronicles 