Gratitude List in Tanka Form:
1. Misty day and the
2. village raising my children
3. and bird calls at dusk.
4. The way you speak to my heart.
5. Always anticipating.
May we walk in Beauty.
gratitude
Tanka Play
For tonight, a little tanka, a syllable count poem of five lines (5/7/5/7/7). I am not sure exactly where this came from, but sometimes you just have to let a poem happen, as Winnie the Pooh says you should.
Well, They Do
The tree is behind
the big red barn is behind
the swing is behind
the sweat lodge frame is behind
the field where vultures lay eggs.
Here is a picture of an African Eagle Owl, not a vulture. Just because.
Gratitude List:
1. First Responders
2. Red Poppy
3. Second Chances
4. Warm Hugs
5. General Silliness
May we walk in Beauty.
Story Ramble
This week I have been thinking about the layers of stories that I experience. There’s this story of mine that I am creating with every thought or idea that I latch onto or release, every image I carry with me, each action, each refusal to act. I create the tone and subtext for my story, and even develop the plot with a certain amount of control. A fair bit of the plot is beyond my control, and then my role in the story becomes how I respond and shape myself in relationship to the plot.
My story is interwoven with the stories of my husband, my children, my parents and the rest of my family, my friends and community, the folks who work on and who visit the farm, my internet network. And they shape my story as I shape theirs. We hone and whittle, we tweak and trigger and tickle each others’ stories. When your story gets rocky and challenging, it shakes my story, too. I sort of think that’s the work we’re here to do, to help each other hone and perfect our stories.
There’s the living of story and the telling of story. Someone told me part of his story this week, and said, “It helps to tell it. There’s no point in keeping it inside.” Something in the experience of being present for the telling, being tuned in to the mixture of pain and relief and terror and hope, something in that changed me in a way that I can’t quite understand. I am glad that telling the story helped him. How is it that it healed and completed something within me as well?
I think, too, about the religious and spiritual stories that inform our lives, the way they overlap and challenge us, the ways that firm adherence to a story can close and calcify hearts. The ways that tender adherence to a story can open a heart to acceptance and compassion.
And fiction and myth. Why is it that we need to talk with other people about Downton Abbey and Mad Men and Six Feet Under? About The Fifth Sacred Thing and The Hunger Games and Harry Potter? Why do we get obsessed with Star Trek and Doctor Who? There’s something in the public, corporate sharing of story that develops and hones community experiences, that helps us explore more deeply what is means to be human, what it means to be community.
We’ve been pretty careful to shelter our children from the frenetic pacing of much of contemporary movies and television shows. And I will continue to do so, but I am realizing that I also want to be careful not to stunt their opportunities for community-making through story-sharing with their peers. Of course, I want them to create story with their friends as much as possible, which is what imaginative play is, but I also want them to have storylines to discuss and ponder with their friends. Shared story is so important to community-making.
I feel a little like Andy Rooney on a ramble, without his skill at wrapping up the free association. So I’ll leave you with a few pieces of my story from today, in the form of my current gratitude list.
Gratitude List:
1. That the elder patriarchs in my life are not The Patriarchy. Such wonderful hearts, such rich meaning-making and humility and acceptance and tolerance.
2. That the matriarchs continue to hone their voices, to lead the way into the story. The ways they lead the charge to defend justice, to admit anger, to fiercely and joyfully protect and nurture. Their solid practicality.
3. Spirit, the fifth sacred thing, the wind that makes all winds that blow, the flame, the Center, the Mystery.
4. The LCCN came for my book. Conservative estimate is that it will be ready to purchase within a week. I stated that with much more calm than I feel. I am extremely excited.
5. Being in a community where people pass babies around. Watching the way people’s eyes change, the way their energies shift into such a tender place when they hold a baby.
6. Bonus: The way Jon can make me laugh by throwing out some little Jon-ism. Still. After more than half our lives. I still love the way he makes me laugh.
May we walk in beauty.
Making Meaning
I have been thinking about how I make meaning as I speak. As I am talking, I come to know what I mean. I might have ideas and thoughts in my head, but the nuance and subtleties of language shift and tweak the essence of a thought. It grows or shrinks as I speak it. Sometimes in conversation I find myself saying a thing, only to realize that it’s not exactly what I meant, so I need to re-phrase and re-re-phrase it. I love conversations where people work at that process together. Sometimes I am left confused when I assume that someone will be joining me in that conversational work, and then they don’t really get it.
I think that’s why I like poetry. Using words so intentionally, packing so much meaning into each word, means that the landscape of meaning shifts and twists with each reading, sometimes becoming clearer and more defined, and other times deconstructing and separating out into many threads.
Gratitude List:
1. The wonderful owl kites that Suzy Hamme gave the kids. Ellis ran around the farm for hours today with an owl flapping behind him. What magic you gave us, my friend!
2. Picnic at Sam Lewis State Park, flying kites, rolling down the hill, climbing the rocks, playing on the playground, pretending to be astronauts and aliens.
3. Planting a garden with the kids (which was mostly me planting and them sort of diddling, but still, it was a fun project.
4. The way the sun rays sparkled through the cloud just before sunset.
5. Dreams that bring comfort.
May we walk in Beauty.
Hold Your Heart
Here’s a poem I posted here back in January. It’s in the chapbook that I sent to Finishing Line Press for their Emerging Women’s Voices contest.
I spent some time today thinking about not knocking people over the head with hope, especially when they’re walking in the wasteland and the hope-talkers can even appear threatening. I have so much to learn about being a compassionate presence, about acknowledging pain without trying to shift it, to fix it.
Still, I don’t think that a poem about hope by a random blogger can go amiss.
Sing You Gently Joy
Here in the house of exhaustion
Here in the place of retreat
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here when your way is weary
Here where your heart is uneasy
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here when the day closes over you
Here when your sighs bring tears
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here where the way seems hopeless
Here where the rage overflows
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here where the No overcomes you
Here where despair abounds
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Here in the birthplace of fear
Here in the abode of loneliness
We’ll sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope
Each morning a new sun rises
and the stories are always renewed
As we sing you gently joy
and hold your heart in hope.
Todd and I were about the ages of my children today.
Gratitude List:
1. Peregrine flying over the farm today. What a gift. The Wanderer winging across the ridge.
2. The healing power of story. Unexpected story of intense pain and tender joy and hope. From the man who fixed the tractor. What a gift. What grace.
3. The tractor is fixed. A little less stress for the farmer I love. What a gift.
4. Wild chamomile. What a gift.
5. Learning what my work is. What grace.
May we walk tenderly, in Beauty.
Let’s Get Down To Business
First, some mulling drawn from today’s Facebook conversations. Then a poem. Then a Gratitude List.
Sometimes I don’t know if I can bear the weight of the problems of the world. I get so furious, not just at the military-industrial complex, but at the way corporations have become the ruling classes, the way Monsanto has taken over the USDA, the way our consumer culture is balanced on the backs of slaves and oppressed people elsewhere in the world. I don’t know if we can turn things back. But I know that there are lots of like-minded people out there who want to turn things back. I’m not sure how we do that, but I want to start by putting as much love out there as possible in the meantime.
I don’t mean for that to sound childish or like I am ignoring the problem. I bring it back to the metaphor of the bowl for the heart. I used to think that I could only have one thing in there at a time, either the joyful things full of wonder, or the angry and despairing things. But recently I have pledged to just sit with the bowl open and let it all fall in together. And the whole crazy mix belongs there. The love I have for butterflies and songbirds is precisely why I hate Monsanto so. The delight I take in my children is precisely why the military-industrial complex terrifies me.
How can I maintain the balance in my head when I get so furious and despairing and tired and sad about so much that is happening in the world? Sometimes it feels so schizophrenic to speak of beauty and wonder and delight when something in my heart is cringing in fear of what the future holds for my children. I know that remembering what I love, remembering what holds my heart, reminding myself why I fight, all this helps me to keep doing my work.
If we who care deeply enough to walk the cliffs of despair, if we let ourselves get frozen or lost or broken on those cliffs, then whatever it is that we’re fighting against has begun to win. Maybe that’s it. Instead of just using my rage and despair to fight this thing, I want to find ways to use my love and wonder to overcome it.
Perhaps my work of late has been too passive, too much in the realm of prayer and contemplation. What is the next step, I wonder?
These Are the Words
These are the things that I tell myself, over and over again.
These are the words I use to remember.
Don’t forget to do your soul-work.
Don’t stop because it seems like no one is watching,
because it seems like no one else is doing their work.
They are working.
Ask around. Tell your own story.
Suddenly they pop up like mushrooms,
all over the yard,
like fairy rings that fairly sparkle in the moonlight.
I always say, Be the web. Throw the lines from one to one to one.
Today I say, Be mycelium.
All those underground signals racing through the soil,
through the roots, through the fine hairs so tiny,
so tiny they are more energy than matter.
But that’s what matters.
That’s the heart of the matter.
We’re all doing our work, sending messages to each other,
invisible like energy,
like the sermons of the fungi
traveling those invisible underground highways.
Something is going to pop up.
I say, Something is going to pop up!
One morning you will wake up
and they’ll be there,
not just hiding underneath the leaves
with the shy toads and salamanders,
but spiced throughout the lawn
throughout the lawns
all over the world,
saying
We are here!
We are doing our work!
In the meantime, keep hoping,
keep praying,
keep making magic spells,
like the one my son made today
from dandelions and Virginia Creeper
to bring peace among the chickens,
and from them to their eggs and to us
and then to the whole world.
In the meantime,
keeping speaking the names of the captives.
Your words will set them free.
Keep singing and dancing,
praying and hoping.
Be the Underground Laureate of The Poetry of Waiting.
Be the One who Sings to the Dark Moon.
Be the Dancer in the Sullen Crowd.
Be the Painter of Speckled Eggs.
Oh, I have to say it, though the activists have said it a thousand times,
like Gandhi said it:
Be the change you wish to see.
Until the twining vines of the sacred squash
grow from your heaving heart,
until the song of the whale echoes through your deserts,
until the world is born afresh.
Until the world is born afresh.
This is the song. This is the poem.
This is the story that will heal the world.
Now.
Let’s get down to business.
Gratitude List:
1. A pair of indigo buntings feeding in the dandelions before the rain. (Perhaps some day I will write a gratitude list without the wing-folk. Or perhaps not.)
2. Ferns. The ones I transplanted today from the barn wall to the house and walkway were taller than my children. I think I may just keep adding and adding until the lawn is gone and the children can walk beneath their waving fronds like hobbits.
3. The feeling of something being released in my spirit as the air pressure changes before rain.
4. The way people care for your spirit when you ask for help. That’s what I mean by asking around. All that good work is being done, all that hopeful energy, all that intentionality, all that tremendous love waiting to spring into action, springing into action even before it is called upon. Oh, I believe in angels, and some of them take human form.
5. Conversations about the grandmothers that bring them into the present moment.
May we walk in beauty. May we walk in love.
Where is the Moon?
This is pure play, loosely based on a game we made up during supper tonight. I think I might want to come back to it at some point and re-work the idea. It reminds me a little of Ted Hughes’ “Amulet.”
Where is the moon?
I think it is in the pond.
Where is the pond?
I think it is under the mountain.
Where is the mountain?
Inside the eye of the dragon.
Where is the dragon?
In the dreams of the fox.
Where is the fox?
In the egg of the hummingbird.
And the hummingbird?
In the shimmering colors of the sunset.
And the sunset?
In the spider’s web.
And the spider?
Oh, the spider is on the moon.
This is a photo of my grandmother Lura Slabaugh. I wonder how old she was in this picture?
Gratitude List:
1. All the birdie love in the air today. A bluebird feeding his sweetheart. Grackles mating–he did such an elaborate dance with his wings in fans while he sang her a sweet song, and watched her so intently with his bright white eyes.
2. The way the sun suddenly shone through the clouds when my boy and I were out checking the chickens this morning.
3. The way the big carpenter bee at the barn swims through the air to check me out–eye to eye–whenever I pass, and then zzzzez away.
4. Words, resplendent words, audacious, precious, unique, absurd, fetching, delightful, breathtaking words.
5. The way the Earth feeds us, even beyond what we can plant. There’s food out there, in the dandelions, the poke, the soon-to-ripen Juneberries, the dock and thistle and plantain. I use most of these mostly for tea at this point in my learning. Still, they nourish me.
May we walk in beauty.
Soft
for Leigh Phillips
Tell me something soft, you said,
and all I can think is the soft bellies of my hens,
the place on the inside of the elbow,
or the tender skin on the head
of the woman of Goose Creek
who has shaved her hair
and walked into her story.
Soft, like the ashes that have cooled
when the burning is done,
when you sift the remnants of the past
between your open fingers.
Even the word loss has a softness to it,
the rounded vowel, the soft hiss at the end.
Are there breezes in your Brooklyn,
soft whispers in the air?
Can you hear how a tree in Pennsylvania
murmurs with your voice
into the soft and tender wind?
Gratitude List:
1. Noticing. Today I have been thinking about the spiritual practice of noticing, and of all the ways
2. My parents have taught me to notice. How noticing keeps me conscious of
3. The present moment. How the present moment is
4. The Exquisite Doorway between past and future. How that transition from past to future is always taking place, as naturally as
5. Breathing out and breathing in.
May we walk in Beauty. Namaste.
Ducks in the Rain and a Dove with the Fire of the Sunset in Its Eyes
It happened to me again this morning. I woke up with the fragments of dream-world swirling through my brain, but as text, not as image.
“I place it into my bowl full of winter.”
And then there was more, several more surreal, semi-attached bits of cobweb-phrases. But those I don’t remember.
Something about the key to my grandmother’s house.
I woke up and tried to write it as a poem. All I could do was to write and re-write the phrase. Again and again. So this will be my next poetry prompt. I’ll try again tomorrow. Join me, if you like, or pull an image or phrase from your own dreaming to join to mine. We’ll see what we come up with, eh?
In the meantime, here’s a photo of my goofy son and a blue egg. And a gratitude list.
Gratitude List:
1. Funny Blue Cat: Winky sat on one of Ellis’s pastel drawings last night and now she is blue, providing lots of laughs today.
2. White ducks in the rain on the green grass. I’m not trying to channel WCW, but I love this pair of white farm ducks that seem to love sitting on the lawn of the Rutter’s right next to the road. They could be under the forsythia bushes. And I love the look of them in the rain.
3. The lovely people who send me images. My heart is so warmed and encouraged by the photos, the wonder, the story my cousin Don told me about seeing a white dove with the fire of the sunset in its eyes.
4. Community-building. Changing the system together. I went to see the movie Fresh tonight. Family First Health, a local medical practice offered the screening free at York Little Theater. They’re pushing for real health, those folks, eating real food. I love Joel Salatin and his “Chicken-ness of the chicken, pig-ness of the pig, tomato-ness of the tomato.” He gets the deep archetypal import of it all. And Don Ikerd. I love Don Ikerd–he says we can change, we can wean ourselves from industrial ag and back to real actual food again. Now, if only the small farmers can make a living in the meantime. . .
5. Being who I want to be. I feel like the chrysalis may soon be ready to crack open.
May we walk in beauty. So much, so much love.
Finding Your Sacred Song
I looked up mockingbird in Ted Andrews’ Animal Speak. He says the keynote of the mockingbird is “Finding your sacred song.” In these days when the mockingbirds are singing from treetops in every hollow and on every hilltop, I wish you that finding. May your song rise clear into the air.
Gratitude List:
1. Deer and lion and rabbit and Suzy. Messages of compassion and courage and listening.
2. We managed to catch Pepita without too much trouble after she ran across the street and under the grumpy neighbor’s forsythia bush. And we have a sort of funny story out of it.
3. I feel so good about what I accomplished today, all that mowing and making supper (Shepherd’s Pie) and spending time with a friend–and the children didn’t melt down and fall apart in the meantime.
4. The way swallows climb the sky. How they beat their wings against the wind and rise up it.
5. Forgiveness.
May we walk in Beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 