Here’s a quick attempt at a list poem. As always in these poem-a-day experiences, it’s raw and unrevised:
Reasons for Hope by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Peregrines nest on the Wrightsville Bridge The prophets are filling the streets again, calling, “Peace!” A human Wall of Love stands up to bigots, offering belonging How purple dead nettle creates a carpet in corn stubble Two I thought certain we’d lose are breathing and healing Those we have lost live on, for what is remembered lives The hollow here opens its arms like a green blanket A student who chooses invisibility called “Hello” to me last week There is always singing, and there will always be more singing I am here and you are here, and you and you and you. . .
Gratitude List: 1. Poetry 2. Keeping memories alive 3. How dreams inform waking 4. Housecats 5. All the people, like you, who are doing the good work of making the world a better place 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
“The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.” —Julian of Norwich
“Water flows over these hands. May I use them skillfully to preserve our precious planet.” —Thich Nhat Hahn
“At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realise I am fighting for humanity.” —Chico Mendes, Martyred Brazilian environmentalist
“It is everyone’s business is to connect with their ancestors, and to be in wholeness and peace. To know your true authentic self, it is required that you know your ancestors.” —Annette Mendoza-McCoy
View of Engitati Hill, the Round Table Hill, in the Ngorongoro Crater.
A week ago, I returned from a trip to the town of my early childhood–Shirati, Tanzania–and several days in game parks. One of my words for the trip, and for the current phase of my life, is INTEGRATION.
How do I integrate the layers of my life: the past, present, future selves? How do I integrate the sense of myself in a safe and loving childhood in a beautiful and tender community, with the awareness of how mission and religion has been an agent of colonialism in the world? How do I integrate my deep connection to the Jesus story with my adoration of his mother, with my universalism and witchiness? How do I integrate the activism and the contemplation, the magic and the prayer, the wildness of spirit with the deepening wisdom of middle age?
Within a day of our return, I received word that a beloved friend, a former student, had died. Now, how to integrate the bliss of my Tanzania Trip with the deep welling grief of losing someone I loved and admired? How to integrate my own grief with that of the many circles of community who loved him?
I’ve been going back through some of our text and message threads to find the poems and songs and kind thoughts Ash sent me over the years, revisiting some of the writings we shared with each other, the ideas we hatched, integrating those with the memories people have been posting to his Facebook page.
Before I went to Tanzania, I created a journal for the trip, an altered book made from an oldcopy of Birds of East Africa. True to Bethie form, I ended up taking notes not only in the journal, but in two of the Poetry journals I had taken along, and in the Notes app on my phone. This week, I hope to spend my Spring Break making sense of the various notes, sorting through photos, and integrating the sense experience with memories and scraps of poetry that have been filtering through. Somehow even the fact that I must weave together the various threads of my note-taking feels like part of the bigger process of sorting and integrating joy and grief and memory.
Ash was one of the editors of the literary magazine I directed at the high school where I used to teach. The magazine’s symbol was the flamingo, and I had promised Ash I would send him pictures of flamingos when I returned. I never had the chance. Here, Ash, are some flamingo pictures for you.
Check in on your beloveds. Remind them they are loved. And when hope seems far away, hold on for one more day. The morning, as they say, is wiser than the evening.
Gratitude List: 1. The beautiful journey. Return, belonging, joy, wildness, friendship, beauty 2. The privilege of knowing Ashton Clatterbuck, whose life touched so many, whose activism will continue to inspire and light the way, whose sense of justice will push me to stand up and speak out, whose courage knew no bounds 3. The birds of Goldfinch Farm and Skunk Hollow 4. The house lions: Erebus, Thor, and Sachs 5. The process of integrating heart and mind, memory and sense, grief and bliss, dream and reality May we walk in Beauty!
“Our capacity to create must overwhelm their capacity to destroy.” —Occupy Movement Quote
“Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.” —C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough. and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey. ” —Lemony Snicket
“Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.” —Emma Donoghue
“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.” —August Wilson
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” —Rumi
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” —William Faulkner
“For one human being to love another is the most difficult task, the ultimate, the last test and proof. It’s the work for which all other work is mere preparation.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
Teilhard de Chardin said: “Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire.”
Emma Goldman: “The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.”
“Everything I understand, I understand only because I love.” —Leo Tolstoy
“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.” —Blaise Pascal
“Who I was meant to be was a breaker of some stories and a maker of others.” —Rebecca Solnit
“You are not required to set yourself on fire in order to keep other people warm.” —Anonymous
“The job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.” —Dani Shapiro
“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” —Parker Palmer
“For education among all kinds of [people] always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.” ―W.E.B DuBois
“The phoenix must burn to emerge.” —Janet Fitch
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” —Ken Robinson
“When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.” —Ellen DeGeneres
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” —Thomas A. Edison
“Geometry draws the soul towards truth.” —Plato
“In which of the fairy tales does this wandering stream appear? Perhaps a golden trout swims through here every morning at dawn, or the three riders who pass Baba Yaga’s courtyard stop here to water their horses. A frog beneath that brightest mossy rock awaits your kiss. Just beyond your vision, through those trees, is a little cottage made of gingerbread and candy. An old man appears each day at dusk to sit on the tallest rock and ask you for a favor when you approach the stream for a drink.” –Beth Weaver-Kreider
Of Love by Beth Weaver-Kreider (after Mary Oliver)
It’s a process repeated everywhere you look: the way the beech tree catches and holds the wind in her hair, the way the meadow grasses gather around the tentative feet of the fox, the way the hands of the clay hold and guide the flow of waters.
What is attention, but a kind of loving? Living in awareness is a constant tumble into loves. The way your eyes twinkle when you tell a story. The way your listening hands reach outward. The way a new thought is born in your eyes. The hearty abandon of your laughter, the caress of your voice, the shine that surrounds you.
Today’s prompt is to write a Catching Poem. This is a little rough, but I like how it starts to say what I mean, so I’ll put it here as a place-holder today, with hopes to revise it when I get a chance.
How can I know if I’m remembering things as they happened to me or how they were told to me? I come from of family of memory-keepers and storytellers, and the branches of my own memory are caught in the branches of others, the narrative threads tangled in the repetitions, the colors and textures shifting from telling to telling, so that certain memories are like layers of film, each slightly different from the one below, the edges blurring and the colors deepening as the layers blend, the final picture an inaccurate representation and a perfect idealization of the actual event, clearer and more distinct than the moment of happening, gaining a tenderness in the telling and retelling that holds a truth more true than one person’s memory can catch.
Gratitude List: 1. Anticipating sleep. I have insomnia occasionally, but it’s always middle of the night insomnia. I almost always fall asleep immediately when my head hits the pillow. I love that feeling of letting sleep take me like a wave. 2. Winter sweaters. I got the rest of my winter sweaters out of the attic today. I love my sweaters. 3. Uji. I’ve been fermenting millet to make Tanzanian uji for breakfast. I love the sour taste. 4. Fall colors. Are the colors more beautiful, deeper, more rich, than usual? I think they are especially beautiful this year. 5. Art and drumming. I went with my friend Christine to PAVAA art gallery for a drumming and art show tonight. The drummer put paint on her drumsticks and drummed a painting onto a canvas she draped over her drums. Another woman, on a set of congas, did a spontaneous spoken word riff on the colors the drummer was laying down. May we walk in Beauty!
Saturday’s Falling and Getting Up Again: “Both when we fall and when we get up again, we are kept in the same precious love.” ―Julian of Norwich
“What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved–what then?” ―Carl Jung
“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” ―Eleanor Roosevelt
“If I had influence with the good fairy, I would ask that her gift to each child be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.” ―Rachel Carson
“Your problem is you’re too busy holding onto your unworthiness.” ―Ram Dass
“In giving of yourself, you will discover a whole new life full of meaning and love.” ―Cesar Chavez
“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ―Eugene V. Debs
“I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too. Ma Joad: I don’t understand it, Tom. Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.” ―Tom Joad, from the movie Grapes of Wrath
“And don’t we all, with fierce hunger, crave a cave of solitude, a space of deep listening—full of quiet darkness and stars, until we hear a syllable of God echoing in the core of our hearts?” —Macrina Wiederkehr
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” —Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
“The way that I understand it, dreaming is nature naturing through us. Just as a tree bears fruit or a plant expresses itself in flowers, dreams are fruiting from us. The production of symbols and story is a biological necessity. Without dreams, we could not survive. And though it is possible to get by without remembering our dreams, a life guided and shaped by dreaming is a life that follows the innate knowing of the earth itself. As we learn to follow the instincts of our inner wilderness, respecting its agreements and disagreements, we are also developing our capacity for subtlety. This sensitivity is what makes us more porous and multilingual, bringing us into conversation with the many languages of the world around us.” — Toko-pa Turner
Kirumi Bridge, across the Mara River: Ming’aro Pictures Empire
Brewer’s prompt today is to write a Childhood Object poem. A couple days ago, I was scrolling around Tanzania on Google Earth, and saw a bridge over the Mara River where we used to cross by ferry when I was a child. I think the last time I was there in 1988, there was already a bridge, but I was suddenly flooded with memories of waiting for the ferry at the Mara River. There’s even a little video of drone footage of the bridge on Youtube.
I have never seen it, but there’s a bridge there now across the Mara, steel and concrete on the Sirari Road. You used to need to catch the ferry to cross, waiting on the eastern shore of the river, bulrushes and papyrus lining the banks. What crocodile would have been bold enough to lurk among them, with the rattle and rev of lorries and garis lined up for the next crossing? Even fifty years later, and half a world away, I pass a truck idling diesel fumes, and I am back again on that riverbank, the sun sparkling on the water, the hum of Swahili in the drowsing afternoon, the distant ferry approaching from from the Mwanza side.
Gratitude List: 1. The threads which connect dreams to waking life 2. My colleagues–daily I am grateful for this thoughtful and caring group of people 3. Ethiopian food–Jon shared his leftovers 4. Origami–I love the meditative nature of paper folding–I have been making zhen xian bao (Google it) 5. Weaving the pieces together. May we walk in Beauty!
“No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member— No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds— November!” —Thomas Hood, No!
“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” —Mary Oliver
“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.” —Muriel Rukeyser
“We discover the Earth in the depths of our being through participation, not through isolation or exploitation. We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens… We belong here. Our home is here. The excitement and fulfillment of our lives is here… Just as we are fulfilled in our communion with the larger community to which we belong, so too the universe itself and every being in the universe is fulfilled in us.” —Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe
Words of Howard Zinn: “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win,’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.
“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
“If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.” ―Jelaluddin Rumi
“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” –Roald Dahl, The Witches
“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its’ knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” –Anais Nin
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“On such a day each road is planned To lead to some enchanted land; Each turning meets expectancy. The signs I read on every hand. I know by autumn’s wizardry On such a day the world can be Only a great glad dream for me– Only a great glad dream for me!” –Eleanor Myers Jewett, “An Autumn Day”
“Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.” –Alvin Toffler
“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightening flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” –Layne Redmond
Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all. –Thomas Merton
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” –Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein
“Learn to tell the story of the red leaves against water. Read the alphabet of walnut branches newly bared for winter. Become literate in the language of cricket and of wren, of the footsteps of skunk and the changeability of weather.
Interpret the text of the wind in the hollow. Scan the documents of cloud and constellation. Enter the tale of rose hip and nettle and sassafras. Study Wisdom and she will find you.” –Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” –Khalil Gibran
“Awake, my dear! Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of Light and let it breathe.” ―Hafez (Ladinsky)
“We who hobnob with hobbits and tell tales about little green men are used to being dismissed as mere entertainers, or sternly disapproved of as escapists. But I think perhaps the categories are changing, like the times. Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.” —Ursula K. Le Guin
Last year, when I made this with the help of an AI model, I called it “St. Martha Tames the Dragon.” Today, I am calling it: “St Martha Re-Wilds the Dragon.”
I have been away from the blog for a time. I am practicing living shamelessly, so this is a recognition of the hiatus and not a confession of neglect. I have missed this space. Somehow, the shift in my life has meant I don’t head here as often to voice my thoughts and ideas. I have been settling for the immediacy of conversation and Facebook, both of which are satisfying, but which don’t leave a record in the way that the blog does.
Today was a hard day, remembering how my world began to crumble this day last year, remembering how naive I was to think that someone with more power and say-so would help me to navigate the waters of a focused stalking and attack, to protect me. I’ve been on the edge of panic a couple times today. Small things, like worrying I had made a calendar mistake for the family–an oh-shucks moment became an I’ve-let-everybody-down moment. I’m pretty good at talking my brain out of those panic holes, and I’ve become good at focused breathing to get my body out of the fight/flight/freeze moments. Still, I’ll be glad to get through the visceral memories into calmer space.
On the other hand, today was a really pleasant day: My students bring me joy, the weather was great, I managed to do some excellent planning work for a couple things I am responsible for in the next couple of days, supper was delicious, I picked up my kid at track on time, I wrote a poem I am proud of. When I told a friend how on this day last year I was suddenly outed as a tarot reader in the Christian school where I taught, shamed and interrogated, and eventually forced to resign, she asked me to read a card for her, and afterward sweetly wished me a happy anniversary–turned it upside-down. And, a colleague offered some wonderful professional development tips on how to help scaffold and support anxious students to do the hard things instead of excusing them from doing the hard things–more strategies for my inner work as well.
All this to say, we CAN do hard and scary things. And it’s going to look different for everyone. A beloved of mine sent me a little cartoon yesterday of a person in a fetal position, hugging a pillow. It said, “Sometimes this is what resilience looks like.” I opened up the text right as I woke up from a nap, so it fit.
Great, great gratitude to all my beloveds who walked the hard road with me. You’ve modeled how to be Present to someone in grief and anxiety and rage. We are all, as Ram Dass says, walking each other home.
So it’s day 5 of National Poetry Month. Although I have not yet posted here, I have been writing a poem a day. Emily Dickinson wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” a week or so ago, I read my first batch of CAConrad poems, and I knew exactly what she meant. It was like a total revelation. CAConrad makes poems that are sculptures on the page, and I have begun playing with making my poems more sculptural, not with the physical-representation of a typical concrete poem, but with a sense of abstract structure. Some of these are attempts at poetic sculptures.
For the first line of this one, I stole a line I loved from Jindu’s poem from yesterday. I love how my own poetic voice is stronger and more on fire when I write with someone else.
A Line From a Song by Beth Weaver-Kreider
There’s a line from a song I don’t remember, something about the way November closes in, how thin the space between breaths, how roses still bloom in this bitter wind, but death stalks the room I’m in, walks in winter’s shadow.
I know that somewhere in the middle of the song was a line about longing for what I cannot have, about the wrong door leading to the right room, or the other way around. I’ve found I remember it better when I hum it right before I go to sleep.
But sleep is the best drug I know, when I can achieve it, when I can believe that I’m not just escaping the rattle and whir of my days. Sleep whirls the vortex that tosses the flotsam of poetry into the day, and I’m remade.
Gratitudes: 1. One of my students asked my advice about her outfit yesterday because she said she thought I was “fashionable.” That’s not a word I think anyone has ever used or me before, and it was startlingly sweet. 2. Also yesterday, a student knocked on my door during a class and asked if he could borrow my skull. I have a plastic skull in my classroom–named Yorick, of course (alas! poor Yorick!)–and I sort of live for moments when I can participate in surreal shenanigans like that. 3. Giant burgundy leaves on a little oak tree. 4. Writing poetry with others. 5. Horchata.
May we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in Beauty!
“When Tolkien needed someone to place in the face of the great rising evil in his story, he chose the small ones. You and I are the small ones, friends. Let’s join hands and stand together. Let’s work together, speak together, sing and whisper and shout together.” —EWK
“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.” —Terence McKenna
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” —Audre Lorde
“Don’t operate out of fear, operate out of hope. Because with hope, everything is possible.” —Winona LaDuke
Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure. —Rainer Maria Rilke
Praise Song by Barbara Crooker Praise the light of late November, the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones. Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees; though they are clothed in night, they do not despair. Praise what little there’s left: the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls, shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory, the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum, Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.
“Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.” —Betty Smith
One child woke up at the same time as I did this morning, and he woke up loquacious. My brain, full of fog, and just wanting to take the morning slowly, couldn’t keep up. I tried to be present to him, but all the chatter about video games and the differences in the hand controller thingies and whether it makes sense to buy a bundled package of two games that are really similar began to feel like waves crashing over me. He’s gone upstairs now to play some video games instead of talking about them, and I am finally here in silence.
I kept thinking about those pictures of the kids when they were little, how they pierce my heart with their beauty but also with the sense that I wasn’t Present enough, that I could have been more There somehow. We can’t go back and recapture the moments of their childhood, like this morning’s delightful chatter, which was in its own way exhausting, but also beautiful and tender.
It’s that bowl of the heart again. All the things go in together, both the longing for silence and reflective time, and the longing for the presence of the chatty child, all at once. The pain of the lost past, and the treasuring of its marvel and mystery.
At the same time that I wanted to tell this boy that he needed to be quiet a while so I could spend some time in my own head, I could see myself, ten years from now, longing for the sound of his voice in the silence of an empty nest. So much of life is never either/or. The tension is to feel the bright joy and the piercing ache together, and not let either lessen the impact of the other.
Gratitude List: 1. The chatty morning child 2. The silence when he gives me some space to be in my own head 3. We saw our first monarch of the season 4. The allure of this pollen-filled season, honey-smooth scent of catalpa blossoms, sparkle of sun, tender lullaby-call of oriole. I enjoy as much as I am physically able, though I sequester myself inside, away from the pollen, for much of the time. 5. Creative projects, and time to work on them 6. Yesterday, I did one of my Impossible Tasks, something that has been hanging over my head, making it hard to stay in the present.
Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly–in Beauty.
“The Wild Mother whispers, ‘Have you noticed? I left the gate open just for you.'” —Anonymous
“Now more than ever, we must catch glimpses of that which lifts us up. Now more than ever, we must notice the rarely noticed miracles happening right under our nose.” —Rachel Macy Stafford
“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.” —Jack Gilbert
“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” —Rumi
“Yesterday I was clever so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise so I am changing myself.” —Rumi
“I know I walk in and out of several worlds each day.” ―Joy Harjo
Andrew Harvey: “All mystical systems are addicted to transcending this reality. This addiction is part of the reason why the world is being destroyed. The monotheistic religions honor an off-planet God and would sacrifice this world and its attachments to the adoration of that God. But the God I met was both immanent and transcendent. This world is not an illusion, and the philosophies that say it is are half-baked half-truths. In an authentic mystical experience, the world does disappear and reveal itself as the dance of the divine consciousness. But then it reappears, and you see that everything you are looking at is God, and everything you’re touching is God. This vision completely shatters you.
“We are so addicted, either to materialism or to transcending material reality, that we don’t see God right in front of us, in the beggar, the starving child, the brokenhearted woman; in our friend; in the cat; in the flea. We miss it, and in missing it, we allow the world to be destroyed.”
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.
Mockingbird Chronicles 