Gratitude List:
1. Two hands: one to hold the terrible, and one to hold the wonderful. Breathing into the spaces between.
2. How the heart holds stories
3. Shades of red. Shades of green. The red buds of leaves popping out on the tree outside my classroom window, against the mossy green of the trunk.
4. Burrito for lunch
5. Transformation
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. This is what I signed up for. I don’t know quite how else to say it. It doesn’t sound quite like a gratitude, perhaps. More a statement of intention. The gratitude comes from knowing where the priorities lie, I think. It’s not about being comfortable or happy or at peace. It’s not about fulfilling the needs of the ego. It’s about doing the work that I am here to do. That’s when it feels right. That’s when it clicks, when I know I am in the right place. I am grateful for that, even if it challenges the equilibrium.
2. Heart Prayers
3. Green
4. The renewed courage and fortitude that dawn brings.
5. Humans of New York. When I get overwhelmed by the viciousness and bombast of the political rhetoric, I scuttle over to Humans of New York and read the comment threads. These days they are full of people’s open-hearted offers of help and connection and friendship to people who are in dire need.
As salamu alaykum. Peace be unto you.
Today’s prompt is to write an across the sea poem. Here’s a haiku:
Alas! I’m awash
in this sea of a season.
I’ll drown in that green.
Gratitude List:
1. Ferns unfurling
2. YWCA and its anti-racism work. I was proud to support it by joining the Race today.
3. Shakespeare. I am awash in his poetry.
4. The way the streetlight turned the new leaves on those trees by the Rutt building to a fairy golden.
5. Reading books with the kids in the new fort that Jon built out by the United Melvin Hall.
May we walk in Beauty!
Sometimes you start to write a poem, and an interesting structure emerges, and so so go on and formalize it and make your own structure. What emerged here was a 2/8/8/3 syllable-count poem. These really busy summer days when the farm is ramping up, but the feeling of the world is slow and lazy and dreamy, something about the structure of this appealed to my sense of being caught behind a veil, stuck in a conflict where something in me wants to live in a quiet instinctual place while the world is bustling about me.
The song
of the house finch is green, and the
way the sunlight dapples the wall
in shadow.
Green is
the soul of the field mouse, and the
way that the brook meanders through
the meadow.
The heart
of this morning is green, and the
morning breezes that eddy in
the hollow.
I realize that Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are crunchy for many people, for many reasons. If this is the case for you, I wish you comfort and solace, a chance to look quietly at the attendant pain, and good strong breath to carry you through. Much love.
Gratitude List:
1. For my father, for the way he so gracefully blends reason and wisdom and compassion.
2. For Jon Weaver-Kreider, and his gentle spirit.
3. For books and stories, myths and fables
4. For work, preparations, and planning (opening day on the farm is this week!)
5. For that green sun peaking over the hill.
May we walk in Beauty!
You know about the woman
who walked through walls, right?
Her long-eyed gaze.
Her straightening of shoulders.
Lifted chin.
Deep breath.
Then
she’d slide right through.
A shimmering.
A sucking sound.
And then a ringing in your ears,
like a chime.
I don’t know if this
is story or poem or dream.
You saw her go,
you knew the distances
she’d traveled to get here.
I will never forget
the color of her eyes.
(That one needs a Dali clock in it somewhere. Not sure exactly where it came from. Sometimes those are the most delicious to write.)
Gratitude List:
1. Wild weather. Yes, I am anxious, too, about the possibility of flash flood, especially here on the farm. But something King Lear-ish in me wants to go wander the hills in it. It makes me feel so alive.
2. A lovely morning yesterday with my five-year-old. He likes to shop. So we went shopping. Spent a long time at Hinkle’s just looking at all the little Schleich animals. I fell in love with a chimpanzee mother and her baby. He liked the alligator. This is bittersweet. In the fall, he and I will both be in school, and we will both be older and wiser. May he always access his powerful ability to marvel and wonder.
3. Doodling. It releases some sort of blockage in the brain, doesn’t it? Makes you able to walk through walls, perhaps.
4. Bats. They’re back in the hollow or out of hibernation, if that’s the story. May they thrive here.
5. Did I mention the weather? This wild rain. It evokes. Remember the sound of it on a tin roof? Ooooh, wild rain, wild green.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. Nettles, mint, and honey
2. Green, viridian, verdancy
3. Shiny bits of quartzite
4. Nearly a dozen small boys and a girl playing at the pond and in the creek, catching polliwogs and crawfish and little fish, moms talking and picking watercress, Golda the giant koi swimming up to see what was going on.
5. Listening to mockingbird and phoebe and the longingly off-key song of the white-throat.
May we walk in Beauty.
Photos by Angel Brown
I have written this poem before. The one about the Open Bowl. How I will hold the circle of my heart to encompass it all.
Not just the little birds singing the dawn into being or the silent toad under her litter of leaves, not just the achingly beautiful green of the fields in spring or the blue eye of the speedwell, not just the snugglesome child or the soft feathers of a hen.
Not just that. Not only that.
But also the brooding ache of estrangement, and the dull thud of the impossible choice, the anxiety over an ill child, the grieving of a friend. Also the deaths of the bees, the scarcity of monarchs, the oil-covered ducks. The deep sadness of all that we are losing so wantonly. The rage, the helpless and blinding white fury at the destroyers, the greed-mongers, the war-profiteers, the glibly malicious purveyors of illness and oppression.
This is why I write gratitude lists. I will hold all of these stones in the Open Bowl of my heart. Some moments, the bowl is so brimming with the rages and the despairs that I don’t know if I can bear it. And then comes a moment of pure numinous wonder and delight, not to erase the other things, but to ease them. To make the bearing of them bearable.
These difficult ones, they are there for a reason. I hold them, too, because they demand my soul’s attention. They call me to my work here in the world. I refuse to walk the world with blinders on. But there is also so much joy to be found in the midst of it all. So much joy. So much love.
I have written this poem before, and I will write it again. Perhaps every day I will write it, until I understand what I am writing.
Here are six shiny stones for your consideration:
Gratitude List:
1. Green, green, oh the green! Green says, “Have you been watching? Have you been paying attention? Surprise!” Oh, yes, yes, and. . .
2. Hello, Little Daffodil, whose name is full of goofy whimsy and whose cup overfloweth with sunshine.
3. The spaces between. I will gaze into them, breathe into them.
4. Doubt. And the places where faith and trust and safety rest even within doubt.
5. An afternoon with my parents and uncles and aunts. Putting puzzle together with Mom and Uncle Henry. My father and Aunt Ruth and Uncle Harold playing harmonica trios to old hymns while the rest of us sang and hummed. (“When through the woods and forest glades I wander and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees, when I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and hear the birds and feel the gentle breeze. . .”)
6. The Navajo People, whose sacred phrase I have borrowed for my little daily prayer:
May we walk in Beauty. So much Beauty.
Here was the prompt for a borrowed poem: Because today is 3/11/13, I decided to go to a book near at hand, turn to page 13, scan down to the 3rd line, and choose eleven words to use in some form in a poem. I sort of cheated, by looking through four books until I found one that I could work with. This was Barbara Walker’s Feminist Fairy Tales, from the tale of Princess Questa. I chose the phrase, “. . .went out to walk the dunes in the wintry wind, weeping. . .” The final poem is perhaps a little overwrought, but it was cathartic to run with it, to see where it took me. (This was to be March Monday Morning, but I seem to have trouble posting poems in the mornings).
Out you went in the wintry wind
to walk the dunes, weeping
with only a scattering of sandpipers
to witness, and a scuttling crab.
The wind tore the tattered foam from the waves,
sent shreds of lather scudding like sailboats
over the sands, and wrenched your voice from you.
You keened your word
into the force of the gale
a wail, like a siren.
The wind snatched it up with such unholy force
it sucked the breath right out of you.
But your word was carried like a seed pod
in the womb of the wind, to break open
high above all our fields, releasing
a thousand seeds to fall to earth
as the wind itself grew ragged
and shattered into calmer breezes.
We felt them fall, like a net upon us,
and now we wait, our breathing bated
to see what will grow.
Gratitude List:
1. The perfect hexagonal symmetry of a purple crocus in the lawn, three petals curving inward, three curling out. No wonder the bees find themselves at home in there.
2. Sorted Legos. That seems a little OCD, but something about having them all sorted into piles of color shifted the boys’ attention, and their play become more focused and cooperative for a time.
3. Tiny green things poking up their heads in the greenhouse. The way onions come up folded like laundry and then gently unfold into the sun.
4. Corn casserole–yay for last summer’s frozen bounty!
5. Courage for the difficult conversations.
Namaste
One way to keep the cats from actually sitting on the counter. . .
This is Saturday’s poem. It is so easy for me sometimes to let myself feel caught or bound by the whims of fate, or by other people’s expectations. I often forget the principle that when I feel stuck, it’s usually my doing. Here’s a poem about that feeling.
The fingers, the wickets, the Bandaids, the rut,
Raspberry jam on a three-year-old’s face,
It’s where I am in the middle with you,
Between that rock and hard place.
I’m rubber, Baby, you’re glue.
You know what happens when that stuff
bounces off me toward you.
You have me cornered in this muddle, this muck,
Wheels spinning in the mud,
Won’t you get me unstuck?
Prompt for Sunday
I’m going to leave the prompt open-ended today and see what finds me. Join me?
Gratitude List:
1. Sparkly greens
2. Kale burritos
3. Hard questions to consider
4. Always something more to learn
5. That singing purr of a warm cat on my lap.
May we walk in beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 