The ghost of an old enemy appeared in the night, during a bout of anxious insomnia, in the form of an attack written on a friend’s vulnerable social media post. His response was rife with privilege, entitlement, and barely-masked bigotry couched first in the form of seemingly innocent questions, and then in disdainful and contemptuous put-downs.
Get Ready by Beth Weaver-Kreider
When the bigot blows in with his bombast, his bluster and menace and gall, will you stand between him and the trans girl walking to school, the small boy called Dreamer, the young woman whose face shows the strength of her Navajo ancestors, the man whose accent dances from his tongue with a salsa or merengue beat?
Will you let yourself be counted among them, among those at the dagger-end of his vitriol: the laws he will make to cage them and demean them, the bloody trail of his deportations, the snarling and biting of his vicious hounds?
Will you stand with those on the edge of the page, offer your strength, build the resistance, focus your rage and your grief for their safety?
Can you be stronger than the waves of exhaustion which threaten to engulf you and pull you under? Fiercer than the raw bite of winter, but with love in your heart, and a tender eye? Can you be true to the stories you’ve lived by, now when the tales are being told in real time?
Gratitude List: 1. Watching my Middle Schoolers interact with elders from a local nursing home yesterday 2. How the circles are gathering 3. A salty bite of peanuts for an energy boost mid-morning 4. Coaches–these folks really invest their time and heart in helping my son’s team be healthy in body, mind, and spirit 5. Blue blue blue blue sky May we walk in Beauty!
“The stories I’m trying to write, and which I want to promote, are stories that contribute to the stability of my own culture, stories that elevate, that keep things from flying apart.” —Barry Lopez
“What the world wants, and people need, are people who believe in Something—Something that will lead them to the good, the beautiful, the true, and the universal.” —Richard Rohr
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” —James Baldwin
“I am not talking about giving our hearts over to despair. I wonder if we can train our hearts, intentionally, like athletes who train for a marathon, to bear the load without crumpling under the weight. I think that’s what the children need from us, for us to bear them, bear the stories, hold them as though they were our own, to be prepared to act at any moment for any one of them within our reach. I think the times call for hearts strong enough to be tender, to bleed without weakening, to rage and protect and pray and hope without numbing out.
“I don’t think it has to be a choice. We don’t have to choose between the closed heart and the broken heart. We can be awake and yet not despair. It’s worth a try.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“If we are going to see real development in the world, then our best investment is in women.” —Desmond Tutu
“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.” —Alice Walker
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” —Marcus Aurelius
Found on a T-shirt: “I am totally happy and not dangerous mostly.”
“Part of the tragedy of our present culture is that all our attention is on the outer, the physical world. And yes, outer nature needs our attention; we need to act before it is too late, before we ravage and pollute the whole ecosystem. We need to save the seeds of life’s diversity. But there is an inner mystery to a human being, and this too needs to be rescued from our present wasteland; we need to keep alive the stories that nourish our souls. If we lose these seeds we will have lost a connection to life’s deeper meaning—then we will be left with an inner desolation as real as the outer.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Adrienne Rich: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility of more truth around her.”
“I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
I’m exhausted with this grief and fury and disillusionment and shattered hope. I want to curl up into a ball and sleep for a week. Yet there are also small joys and wonders in the midst of the agony. Here is a cloud that looks like a bird that brought me joy today.
And a rose that a colleague gave me this morning.
Bringing Each Other Back by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Give me a word that means something akin to the feeling of finding yourself safe in a cave at the moment the heavens explode with lightning and thunder and rain.
Tell me a story so shining with wonder that foot-weary travelers and lost souls gather in the shadows around us to be warmed at the fire of your telling.
Spin me a strand long enough for my weaving, rich with color and hints of bright sunlight so that I may make a cloak to protect us and keep us from harm in the shadows.
When you look into the eyes of strangers let softness come into your gaze sweep tenderness through the glaze of anxiety, fury, and grieving.
Gratitude List: 1. A gift of a rose when my spirits are tattered 2. A cloud in the shape of a bird 3. Chocolate as medicine 4. How people circle around and care for each other in times of crisis 5. How music soothes the soul May we walk in Beauty!
“The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.” —bell hooks
“People who love the divine go around with holes in their hearts, and inside the hole is the universe.” —Peter Kingsley from the Dark Places of Wisdom
“When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.” ―Sally Kempton
“Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.” —Mae Jemison (Astronaut/Medical Doctor)
Adrienne Rich: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility of more truth around her.”
“Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains – a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.” —Henri Frederic Amiel
There is a legend that has its roots buried deep inside the prehistoric culture of these lands. It is a myth that was seeded before the stories were anchored onto the page, before rigid systems of belief tied gods and spirits into names and form, even before the people were persuaded from paths of individual responsibility into hierarchies of power. This story has been fluid and flowing, changing shape and growing over many thousands of years. It is a story of ancestors and a deep relationship with the ancient land. It is a story of memories that permeate stone and wood to rest within the body of the earth. This legend is too old to be defined by history and therefore we are not limited in our own remembering of it; creative recollection lies at the heart of our very best tales.
Memory may arrive at odd moments and in unexpected forms. Recognition may unravel along strange paths. Wherever the wild reaches through the land, we may touch the edges of this story. We start to tease out a thread, then pick and pull until first a fragment of colour, then a whole strand of story, is revealed. Now we peel away the layers, glimpse the traces of a design, watch a pattern grow until an entire story emerges, then a cycle of stories, and now we are unwinding the fabric of our ancestors’ lives.” —Carolyn Hillyer
Liberty and Justice: Invocation on Election Day by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Liberty, I too will lift my lamp, the hope of my vote, to make good on the words they spoke and wrote, before they even meant them to belong to all of us.
And Justice, carrying the weight of all our stories on your golden scales, you too were meant for all of us. For, all men, they said, which word they claim includes the women, too, both rich and poor, and those with roots here in this native soil, and Africa and Europe, Asia and the islands. although perhaps they never really meant it.
We do now.
We base our hopes upon those words, like sacred text. We hold the truths, self-evident, of course, that humans here have hope of that equality. I cast my vote for that lamp, that book, that scales which weighs us all equal in the eyes of Lady Liberty and Justice For All.
Starhawk has begun calling her LAJFA, Liberty And Justice For All, a goddess of this place–a deliberate syncretism of Lady Liberty and Lady Justice, a manifestation of the intent spoken and written by the founders, whether they truly believed it or not. Her robes are rainbows, and her emblems are the lamp and the sword and the book and the scales. Her face is perhaps indigenous, perhaps an amalgam of all the races that now call home this place which she protects. All. Not just wealthy white male Christian landowners. And this vote, this thing we do today? It’s our sacred pledge to LAJFA, to Democracy, to make it so.
Gratitude List: 1. These brilliant and playful and thoughtful young people 2. A glorious fall day 3. Voting. Getting to choose. Having a say. 4. Breathing and centering and grounding–how the Earth holds my roots 5. Chocolate-covered coffee beans May we walk in Beauty!
“Safety is not the absence of threat. It is the presence of connection.” —Gabor Maté
“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan
Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison
“You need not wade through the mists and bogs to reach the moon. You need not climb a ladder of cobweb. You need not ride the stallions that wicker in the sea’s pounding surf.
Draw back the curtain and open the window. Breathe the bracing air and listen: The whinny of an owl, the click of the bat, The grunt of a buck and the distant roar of the train.
The full moon will spill a milky road before you. That is all the pathway you will need.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“The word is the making of the world.” —Wallace Stevens
“Through the empty branches the sky remains. It is what you have.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“The leaves of the tree become as pages of the Sacred Book to one who is awake.” —Hazrat Inayat Khan
“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” —Albert Einstein
“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” —Coretta Scott King
“When you feel the suffering of every living thing in your own heart, that is consciousness.” —Bhagavad Gita
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…” ―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.” ―Naomi Shihab Nye
It was a ripple a glimmer a golden ray shimmering just a moment shining on the twilit waves percolating like a cooling stream of water trickling down my soul just a whisper in the wilderness a fragment of a fragment of a fragment of an almost-remembered dream, and nearly as ethereal, yet almost tangible too a brewing of hope on the horizon
Gratitude List: 1. A moment of Hope 2. Remembering beauty and goodness 3. Chocolate-covered Holiday Star cookies 4. Music to calm the anxious spirit 5. Good stories 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
I’ve written about this one before, but it really is a fascinating way to break out of a rut. It’s a common problem for me, at least, looking back through poems I have written and noticing that I use the same words, the same phrasing rhythms, the same ideas, over and over again. Part of this is Voice, and I want to keep honing and focusing my Voice in my poetry, but part of it is the worn place on the carpet where everyone walks, the dip in the marble step where centuries of feet have worn the stone away. Again, there is a certain character to the worn places, but there’s value, too, in forging the new path, finding the new word, creating a new bounce to the rhythm.
Take a poem you’ve written, or write one for the occasion.
Here’s mine, which I am going to write as soon as I finish this sentence:
First it was five deer two does and three fawns moving through the meadow and then five starlings in formation a W against the sky. And was it a pensive and beautiful moment followed by another? Or was it the Mother whispering, Follow this trail, seek this path and pattern?
Then, copy and paste it, go to Google translate, paste it in the box, and translate it into any of the listed languages. Then switch the boxes so the new poem–in Urdu or Tagalog or Malayalam–is in the Translate box. You can either simply translate it back into English, or choose another language. I like to go through eight or ten languages before I come back to English. Errors happen on the way, and often the errors actually enhance the poem, and usually they give me some insight into the way my mind works to create ideas. Sometimes I keep parts of what happens when I come back to English, and sometimes I mash up bits from the “translation” with bits of the original.
I tried it in ChatGPT, asking for specific languages, but that AI has gotten so good that, after translating it into Malayalam, then Swahili, then Spanish, then Japanese, then Urdu, then back to English, the only difference was that it had translated “pensive” to “contemplative.” That’s a lovely synonym, but I am looking for crunchier bits.
I copied the Urdu from the ChatGPT session into Google Translate to begin. I love the look of the Urdu script: سب سے پہلے پانچ ہرن تھے، دو مادائیں اور تین بچے، جو میدان میں حرکت کر رہے تھے۔ پھر پانچ ستارے تھے، جو آسمان پر ‘W’ کی شکل بنا رہے تھے۔ کیا یہ ایک سوچنے والا اور خوبصورت لمحہ تھا، جس کے بعد دوسرا لمحہ آیا؟ یا یہ ماں تھی جو سرگوشی کر رہی تھی، “اس راستے کی پیروی کرو، اس راستے اور نمونہ کو تلاش کرو؟”
Then Hawaiian, then Icelandic, then Assamese. Look at the Assamese script! আৰম্ভণিতে পাঁচটা হৰিণ, দুজনী মহিলা আৰু তিনিটা ল’ৰা-ছোৱালী, পথাৰত খোজ কাঢ়িছিল। তাৰ পিছত আকাশত “W” আকৃতিৰ পাঁচটা তৰা আছে। চিন্তাশীল নে সুন্দৰ মুহূৰ্ত, তাৰ পিছত আন এটা মুহূৰ্ত? নে এই মাতৃয়ে ফুচফুচাই কৈছে, “এই পথ অনুসৰণ কৰক, এই পথ আৰু এই উদ্দেশ্য বিচাৰি?” Then Samoan, Hmong, Swahili, Kazakh, Telugu. I am swooning at the Telugu script: మొదట్లో పొలంలో ఐదు జింకలు, ఇద్దరు మహిళలు, ముగ్గురు పిల్లలు నడుస్తున్నారు. అప్పుడు ఆకాశంలో ఐదు నక్షత్రాలు “W” ఉన్నాయి. లోతైన లేదా అందమైన అనుభూతి, మొదలైనవి? ఈ తల్లి “ఇటువైపు వెళ్ళు, ఈ ప్రయోజనం కోసం ఈ దారిని వెతుకు” అని గుసగుసలాడుతుందా? Takij, Krio, Ewe, Dogri (another incredible script), Xhosa, and finally back to English. Here is the fascinating result:
The first five deer, two females and three calves were roaming the wild. Then there are five stars “W” in the sky. Deep emotions or beauty etc? This mother is shouting “go over here, find this way to this goal”?
Oh my heart! Some bits are funny, and others really move me. The final three lines, although the question mark survived, are no longer a question, and the Mother–THIS mother–is no longer whispering, but shouting. Hmmm. Maybe shouting is better. I tend to see the moment of visionary and intuitive awareness as a Holy Whisper, but maybe it is actually a Divine Shout? I’m going to try keeping the new sentence structure of the first lines–it takes it into a mythological sort of place rather than simply sounding like my retelling of the moment.
I ran “pensive and beautiful” through several layers of translation and ended with “retired and handsome,” which is no closer to the specific adjectives I want, so I’ll leave that part as is for now. Here’s a mashup.
The first five deer, two does and three fawns, were roaming the wild. Then there were five starlings, a “W” in the sky. A pensive and beautiful moment followed by another? Or the Mother shouting, Follow this trail, go over here, whispering, seek this path and pattern?
I like how the translator eliminated some of my little introductory bits to my sentences and phrases. I can certainly afford to simplify. I think I like having the Mother both shouting and whispering, but I’m not sure. I might tinker with that some more. I think it has taken my moment from the contemplative and pensive to the mystical and mythical, which is what I am seeking to do with my poetry in this season.
Gratitude List: 1. Such bountiful and beautiful communities that hold and support. 2. Hope and Joy. Finally. Hope and Joy! 3. School begins next week! And In-service starts this Friday! I am intensely eager to get back to it! 4. Holy shouts and whispers from The Mother. 5. Thermal delight after weeks of thermal discomfort. May we walk in Beauty all around!
“Be softer with you. You are a breathing thing. A memory to someone. A home to a life.” ―Nayyirah Waheed
“This beautiful word “mother” is so sweet and kind in itself that it cannot be attributed to anyone but God.”—Julian of Norwich, Revelations 60, trans. M. Starr
Late Fragment
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. ―Raymond Carver
Powerful words from Rob Brezsny: “The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words,” said Terence McKenna in “Alien Dreamtime,” “and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
Here’s my version of that hypothesis: What world you end up living in depends at least in part on your use of language.
Do you want to move and breathe amidst infertile chaos where nothing makes sense and no one really loves anyone? Then speak with unconscious carelessness, expressing yourself lazily. Constantly materialize and entertain angry thoughts in the privacy of your own imagination, beaming silent curses out into eternity.
Or would you prefer to live in a realm that’s rich with fluid epiphanies and intriguing coincidences and mysterious harmonies? Then be discerning and inventive in how you speak, primed to name the unexpected codes that are always being born right in front of your eyes. Turn your imagination into an ebullient laboratory where the somethings you create out of nothings are tinctured with the secret light you see in your dreams of invisible fire.
“The power of love is stronger than the power to destroy.” ―Vandana Shiva
“And then– and then your eyes will open as if waking from a dream or waking into a dream and the dew-drenched grasses will sparkle before you like gold in the morning and you will know.
You will know what it is you have come for.” ―Beth Weaver-Kreider
“Writing is one of the most ancient forms of prayer. To write is to believe communication is possible, that other people are good, that you can awaken their generosity and their desire to do better.” ―Fatema Mernissi
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” ―Robin Williams as Mr. John Keating in Dead Poets Society
“Well, I don’t only think that the biosphere is in trouble, I know it is. I just have to look around in the environment, in which I live. In my own part of the part of the world, I keep telling people, let us not cut trees irresponsibly. Let us not destroy especially the forested mountains. Because if you destroy the forests on these mountains, the rivers will stop flowing and the rains will become irregular and the crops will fail and you will die of hunger and starvation. Now the problem is, people don’t make those linkages.” —Wangari Maathai
“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” —Robin Williams
“All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted so long, the good is close at hand.” —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“I saw three ways to look at the Motherhood of God. The first is that she created our human nature. The second is that she took our human nature upon herself, which is where the motherhood of grace begins. And the third is motherhood in action, in which she spreads herself throughout all that is, penetrating everything with grace, extending to the fullest length and breadth, height and depth. All One Love.” —Julian of Norwich, Revelations 60, trans. M. Starr
Here’s a common poetry prompt, taught in workshops and classes. It’s commonly called a copy-change. You simply take a few lines of poetry that move or inspire you, and use the structure of that poem like a template into which you insert your own words, kind of like a Mad Lib. And in this form of poetry, you must always give credit to the original poet. It’s called copy-change because you are copying the style or structure or voice of a poet, and changing it into your own piece.
George Ella Lyon made it a favorite of US English Language teachers after she published her poem “Where I’m From” and realized that teachers were using her format as a template for teaching the writing of poetry as a form of self-exploration. She created a template of her poem with missing words, encouraging students and writers to insert words that described their own lives. Or, if they want, they can just use her poem as inspiration and write whatever they want. Click this link to go to her page.
The Astrologer Rob Brezsny has created a similar exercise using a stanza from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, which encourages his social media followers to explore symbols of their inner life. He suggests using the second stanza of this poem:
Widening Circles by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Joanna Macy)
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?
Here’s my copy-change of stanza 2, formatted as I would format the poem in order to be sure that I am giving credit for the original. I used Rilke’s first stanza verbatim, so I italicized it, to add another signal that this part is not mine:
Deepening Spirals by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider after by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Joanna Macy)
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. (Rilke)
I spiral into the Goddess, toward the center of Earth. I’ve been descending for a thousand lifetimes and I still don’t understand: am I a snake, a labyrinth, or a wild dance?
This exercise has various benefits for the beginning or blooming or stuck poet: It gets you past the freeze that sometimes happens with the blank page. It’s a super low-stakes poem–because it’s “just an exercise,” you don’t have to perform on the page, and so you can break more rules and boundaries, and let go of the control of your brain for a little while. I especially love that it’s a Voice experiment–you get to try on different poets’ voices, see how they fit, feel the way someone else’s words and phrases inform yours. And as a reader, it gets you into the poet’s head and helps you to make sense of their diction and lyricism.
Here is your challenge: Visit Lyon’s page to write a “Where I’m From” poem, or use Brezsny’s Rilke prompt. Or go seeking a short piece of poetry that inspires you and create your own copy-change poem. Don’t forget to credit both yourself and the author. Share it with someone!
Gratitude List: 1. My wise and tender and compassionate friends. I often wonder how I got so lucky. 2. Daily grounding and centering. And other rhythms of grounding–the yearly reunion with my college friends is an incredibly powerful reset and re-centering for me. 3. The nibling-weddings! Because family celebrations! 4. The several delightful years we got to spend with our marvelous vampire cat, Erebus. 5. My school community. May we walk in Beauty!
“Be wary of any influence in your environment which dismisses or judges your enthusiasm. Without it, we would become anaesthetised to life itself. Anyone who demands this smallness of you is in danger themselves and may have contracted this insidious, deadening monotone. Enthusiasm is the vitality of spirit expressing itself through us and its grace in our voice should be welcomed and cherished. The word originates in the early 17th century, from the Greek enthousiasmos meaning ‘possessed by god.’ Now, more than ever, the world needs your enlargement, your weirdness, your fiery crescendos of rebellion from boring.” —Toko-pa Turner
“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” —Ray Bradbury
“How do you think you’ll ever see the fairy underneath the flowers, if you never stop to notice the flowers themselves?” —Marie Winger, storyteller
“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing Light of your Being.” —Hafiz
“We do not become healers. We came as healers. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are. We do not become storytellers. We came as carriers of the stories we and our ancestors actually lived. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
“We do not become artists. We came as artists. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
“We do not become writers, dancers, musicians, helpers, peacemakers. We came as such. We are. Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
“We do not learn to love in this sense. We came as Love. We are Love. Some of us are still catching up to who we truly are.” —Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.” —Desmond Tutu
“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” —Dalai Lama
“You were wild once. Don’t let them tame you.” —Isadora Duncan
“If the only prayer you say in your life is thank you, that would suffice.” —Meister Eckhart
“We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.” —Barry Lopez
I think I may have made up that title: Wordpool Poem. But the practice of this playful prompt for starting a poem has been around a long time. Early in the days when I was beginning to call myself a poet, I read an exercise by Gwendolyn Brooks in which she gave six words and said to set a timer (was it for five minutes? Eight?) and write a poem using her wordpool.
Here is the edited and refined result of that exercise, as it appears in my 2013 book, The Song of the Toad and the Mockingbird:
Chasing Chickens by Beth Weaver-Kreider
I’ve counted my chickens. A dozen times or more they’ve dashed— Dashed, I tell you— Into blackberry canes, Wings whirring. White clouds of dust engulf me. Their voices chuckle from the cliff’s edge. Don’t tell me about chickens. I’m green, baby. Green. And I don’t know how I’m getting home from here.
I love how the imperative of fitting those random words into a poem set me off-kilter enough to write something that felt new and fresh, and held the angst and anxiety of my life at the time in a layer beneath the surreal “story.”
Here is my take on the Wordpool poem game: Scrolling for Words–
Open up one of your social media pages. If you aren’t on social media, find a book or magazine. Set a timer for one minute. Your goal is to harvest 8-10 at least mildly interesting words in one minute. Turn the timer on, and scroll (or skim, if you’re using printed text), copying down words that catch your eye. Pace yourself. You don’t want to end up with 30 words, and if you end up with fewer than 8, you might want to start over.
Once you have your wordpool (at least 8-10!), reset your timer for 8 minutes. Your challenge is: In that 8-minute time period, write a poem using your words. (You may change forms and parts of speech as you go.) Take a deep breath, unhitch the horse of your brain to go racing through the meadow, and GO!
Write, write, write, don’t think!
What a ride! What a rush! Can’t stop, can’t ponder, can’t let the brain take over! But now here’s the grace. Take whatever time you need to edit and revise. Shift line lengths. Listen for sounds that you can enhance or repeat, rhythms you can lean into. Just try to keep your wordpool words there in some form.
Here is my revised and tweaked poem, with the wordpool words in bold:
Chasing the Vision by Beth Weaver-Kreider, July 2024
I believe in the fire of that vision, in the possibilities you created when the other world trickled through, its light sifting into the collection you’d made of saints’ icons in glass canning jars, the blue of that other place shining in your eyes.
I believe in the small angel who crawled through your doorway, sank into the feral dreams of your four-poster bed, in the way you harbored those ghosts in your head, how you’ve been feeding the schemes of the trickster and learning a new way to exist in the between.
Behold! today you will see a new thing (no false vision this), never seen by human eyes: a wing on a fawn, or a cryptical creature of moss and fur, fangs, and scales, and dream. Make the most of the message before it dissipates like mist over the River on those impossible mornings in fall.
Amazingly, somehow–despite the fact that my brain was unhitched and frantically seeking to just get all the words in–this poem feels like an accurate and holy weaving of several conversations I have had in the past week about magic and mystical and cryptical experiences. I’ll come back to it another day to see if it is finished, if it needs more work.
As I tell my students: Break the Rules. The rules are there to give you a specific field in which to play, but you can discard or change the rules I’ve made up at any point that you feel life they’re holding you captive.
Variations: 1. Use a random word generator online. Ask it to give you a set of random words. 2. Eavesdrop. Collect a batch of words throughout your day to use as a wordpool. 3. Try using the same wordpool for two different poems. 4. Generate a wordpool with a friend, and write your own poems using the same pool. 5. For a little harder challenge, begin each line with one of the words in the wordpool.
Gratitude List: 1. My amazing kids, who figured out what was wrong when the water stopped, and fixed the pump. 2. Mystical encounter with a fawn (mine did not have visible wings like the one in the poem) 3. A lovely group of folks in my magical doll-making class yesterday. Meeting online friends in person. Making new connections. 4. People who respond to crises with kindness, by unleashing more goodness into the world. 5. It’s okra season! And even if our heirloom tomatoes aren’t ready, Flinchbaugh’s sells them! May we walk in Beauty!
I’m flying a little by the seat of my pants these days, trying to maintain all my daily rhythms, and still not get stressed by all the little things to keep up with. SO last night, I just didn’t do my daily April poem-a-day post here. Sometimes I beat myself up a bit for not being the energy powerhouse that so many of my friends seem to be. I need to protect my energy, gather and store.
Gratitude List: 1. The Dawn Chorus these days. Oh, the birdsong! 2. All the different smells 3. Friends and beloveds who invest time and heart in each other 4. How the beauty just explodes all of a sudden here in the spring. One minute you notice the leaves of the bleeding hearts appearing, and then SUDDENLY they’ve bloomed! 5. Movements for peace and justice. The people who are doing the work, whatever their piece of the work may be. May we walk in Beauty!
“I love to write to you – it gives my heart a holiday and sets the bells to ringing.” Emily Dickinson
“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.” —Rumi
I called through your door, “The mystics are gathering in the street. Come out!” “Leave me alone. I’m sick.” “I don’t care if you’re dead! Jesus is here, and he wants to resurrect somebody!” —Rumi
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” ―Buddha ****” Some words on my River, from Robert Louis Stevenson: “I have been changed from what I was before; and drunk too deep perchance the lotus of the air, Beside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson
“. . .and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.” ―Robert Louis Stevenson
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ―Elie Wiesel
Rob Brezsny: Plato said God was a geometer who created an ordered universe imbued with mathematical principles. Through the ages, scientists who’ve dared to speak of a Supreme Being have sounded the same theme. Galileo wrote, “To understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.” Modern physicist Stephen Hawking says that by using mathematical theories to comprehend the nature of the cosmos, we’re trying to know “the mind of God.” But philosopher Richard Tarnas proposes a different model. In his book “Cosmos and Psyche,” he suggests that God is an artist—more in the mold of Shakespeare than Einstein. For myself―as I converse with God every day―I find Her equally at home as a mathematician and artist.
Gratitude List: 1. Makin’ little ‘zines–so satisfying 2. Our History teacher is having her tenth-graders make a Hooverville as they study the Great Depression. They’ve actually made a little box town outside where they’ll be having class for the next few days. They have signs with the boxes, and they’ve written paragraphs about them, and now she’s given all the Middle Division teachers a note-sheet with reflection questions so we can take our classes out to experience it, basically turning it into a whole school lesson. So inspiring. Brilliant pedagogy. 3. Roasted cauliflower. Our school has a healthy living committee which challenged us to strive for five a day (veggies and fruits) in the month of March. We are definitely eating more fruits and veg in the WK household. 4. Track and field coaches–I’m grateful for all the time and heart they invest in our kid and his classmates 5. Yellow. I had a fascinating conversation with a friend a few weeks ago about tetrachromatism, the condition where the eyes have more rods or cones or something, causing them to actually see more colors than other people, and how people with tetrachromatism often don’t really like the color yellow. I think I probably don’t have it. Yellow makes me jubilant. May we walk in Beauty!
“Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
“We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are “nothing but.” —C. G. Jung
Listen by Shel Silverstein
Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child, Listen to the DON’TS Listen to the SHOULDN’TS, the IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS Listen to the NEVER HAVES, Then listen close to me- Anything can happen, child, Anything can be.
If you are a dreamer by Shel Silverstein
If you are a dreamer, come in, If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer… If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire For we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in!
“It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.” —Mary Oliver
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” —Once-ler, in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” ―Nelson Mandela
Twelve Things I Have Learned So Far: (1) You do not always have to be right. (2) People can change. (3) Loss comes to us all, but so does grace. (4) We can disagree and still be together. (5) Kindness is the greatest treasure I have to give away. (6) We are all healed even if it does not happen on our timeline. (7) Imagination is a form of prayer. (8) I own nothing. (9) Life is full of sacred signs if only we look to see them. (10) The ancestors are real. (11) Not all of my friends and mentors are human. (12) Now is eternal and it is my home. —Steven Charleston
Gratitude List: 1. Cosmic Events 2. The community of people all enjoying the same thing 3. Mac ‘n’ Cheese 4. Sheri S. Tepper’s world-building 5. We went owl-watching today! May we walk in Beauty!
“You have to really hug the [one] you are holding. You have to make him or her very real in your arms.. breathing consciously and hugging with all your body, spirit, and heart. Hugging meditation is a practice of mindfulness. “Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms, alive. Breathing out, he or she is so precious to me.” If you breathe deeply like that, holding the person you love, the energy of your care and appreciation will penetrate into [them] and they will be nourished and bloom like a flower.” —Thich Nhat Hanh
“For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.“ —William Blake
We, unaccustomed to courage, exiled from delight, live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.“ —Maya Angelou
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” —Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“Where there’s life there’s hope, and need of vittles.” ―JRR Tolkien
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” ―June Jordan
“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ―Albert Einstein
“We are all the leaves of one tree. We are all the waves of one sea.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“It is respectable to have no illusions―and safe―and profitable and dull.” ―Joseph Conrad
“I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether they are worthy.” —Thomas Merton
Rilke: God speaks to each of us as [s]he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.
Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
“What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage. And is our life not a mystery school, a seat of earthy instruction?” —Martin Shaw
Mockingbird Chronicles 