Spring Spell
Bee.
Crocus.
Hocus-pocus!
Gratitude List:
1. Music: Yesterday’s Beyond Ourselves concert (Good job, LMH Campus Chorale!)
2. More swans
3. Grapefruit
4. The Story continues (Yesterday’s sermon: Telling stories. Remembering that there is always more to come.)
5. Bees!
May we walk in Beauty!
A Shirati morning, circa 1970. Todd is holding
an African Green Pigeon.
Gratitude List:
1. That fog last night, how it swirled around the lamps on the bridge, how it turned the lamplight into a living, swirling thing.
2. Yellow aconite. Violet crocus. The boys say they have seen the bees.
3. Friends of Shirati banquet last night. Old friends. Lifelong connections.
4. Daryl Snider’s concert at the banquet, how every song seemed to be perfectly designed for the moment. Here is one of the songs he sang last night, “Nou se Wozo,” about resilience. This performance was from last fall when Sopa Sol (the singing duo of Daryl Snider and Frances Crowhill Miller) sang it with LMH’s Campus Chorale.
5. Dawn chorus
Gratitude List:
1. The way that sharing stories opens the heart to healing.
2. Songs that hold stories.
3. Vulnerability and strength together.
4. Clearing the yard of dead branches in the cool evening as the sun set below the rim of the hollow.
5. Eggs. For all the potential they hold, all the mystery, the warmth, the way they settle into your palm. I once had a postcard of an icon of Mary Magdalene holding an egg.
May we walk in Beauty!
Gratitude List:
1. Birds. Kestrel on a Wire. Snow geese in a corn-stubble field. Bluebirds muttering in the chestnut tree: “There now. Everything is going to be okay.”
2. Music. So much good music yesterday and today. Indigo Girls’ CD: Nomads, Indians, and Saints–for some reason I came back to it all fresh again yesterday. Then the Blossom Hill String Band. This morning’s singing and tears.
3. Holding it all in the Bowl of the Heart. It all has to go in there together, and somehow the mix of it all, all the beautiful and difficult and tender and angry and wretched stories, all in there together–somehow it feels right. That is how it is meant to be.
4. Spring, She rises. The footsteps of Persephone are visible now everywhere I turn.
5. Fire Cider, Elderberry Tincture, and Kombucha. Good Medicine.
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. Necessary Conversations: Heavy, beautiful, powerful, sad, life-giving
2. Music with the Family: Val’s fiddle, “Helpless and Hungry” behind “What Child is This?”, Isaiah’s clear voice singing “No Wind at the Window,” and “The Lord Bless You and Keep You”
3. Maklubbi. However it is spelled, it was a delicious Christmas dinner. And wonderful wine. And the figgy pudding. Always the figgy pudding.
4. Dutch Blitz. I am getting so slow. I need to practice, if I am to keep up with these young people.
5. You. You. You.
May we walk in Beauty. And Light. So much Light.
Oh, and rocks. #6 is Rocks. Susquehanna’s rocks. Hezza’s rocks. Goldfinch’s rocks. The Apache Tear that I wear at my heart.
<Prompt 9: Write a Poem titled “The Other _____”> I feel like this one is only a sort of a beginning, but it will have to suffice for today.
What if the other name of God is Magic?
If the other name for Magic is Science?
Is Wonder, is Awe, is Hope?
What if the other name of Goddess is Art?
Is Music, is wailing, is howling, is bells,
is the sound of the wind in the branches?
What if you call out Oh Beauty! Oh Marvel!
and the Voice Ineffable answers, Yes. I Am.
Or this: What if the other name for Divine is
I Want, is I Need, is I Can’t Take It Anymore?
And you call it out and the Mystery
at the Heart of Everything answers
I Am Here.
Gratitude List:
1. York’s amazing musicians and artists and poets. What an honor it was to share the stage with such intense forces of artistry.
2. How everybody’s secret nests are suddenly so visible, so vulnerable, without the leaf-cover.
3. Betsy’s words about what the farm means. This has been a day to feel deeply honored by the ways people feel a connection to this piece of land.
4. Tomorrow we are buying a family fish, and the boys are anticipating it like Christmas. Thank you, Sandra.
5. Revising, re-visioning
Blessings on the roots.
Tanzanian Silence (1966)
by Ruth Weaver
White hot noonday sun;
The earth, still;
Cattle and birds, silent at midday.
Later a breeze would come sweeping up from the shores of Lake Victoria;
And children would laugh and call and run home from school;
But in this time and place
And at this hour,
Sometimes,
The sound of sheer silence.
In that stillness,
That absence of all sound and movement,
There would come an awareness of sound beyond sound
Stars incinerating themselves?
Cosmic expansion?
The ongoing music of creation?
“And God spoke. . .”
I experience a knowingness
That beyond all the sounds of life on earth
And beyond all the noise of my own inner world
God still speaks.
In the Cosmos and in the heart,
God can be heard.
In stillness.
In silence.
Gratitude List:
1. Learning the poetry of my mother, Ruth Slabaugh Weaver, and my grandmother, Lura Lauver Slabaugh. Experiencing the wisdom and beauty of the voices of the women who have come before me, my mother and grandmothers, my friends who have paved such incredible pathways. (And for my father, for pulling out this poem for my birthday, for poetically suggesting that my mother may have been hearing my own music emerging as she wrote this poem in the year before I was born.)
2. Cicadas
3. Staying afloat
4. So many words, so many stories
5. The imagination of chidren
May we walk in Music, Silence, Stillness, Beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 