The prompt today at Robert Brewer’s blog is to write a (blank) for (blank) poem. I am letting it be my invitation to play with sounds today:
Hoping for the Best
always hoping hope against hope just groping for hope hanging from a thin rope
waiting for a train sitting in the rain train upon train of thought making me insane
seeking a reason in a season of reasons speaking of treason in a fit of high pique
going for broke stoking a last hope quoting a provoking quote invoking the ghost
Gratitude List: 1. Have you read Julian Is a Mermaid? What a sweet, sweet book. What a tender and understanding abuela. 2. Friends in Scotland are posting pictures of their trip, and I am loving traveling vicariously. 3. Red oaks! Red, red, red, red, red oaks! 4. Living in the flames of the colors of the trees in this season 5. Talking to one of my young friends today about how she writes stories. I love watching kids catch the writing and reading bug! May we walk in Beauty!
“Through a process of perpetual discernment and “prayer unceasing” we may dive into the well of each faith and emerge with the treasure that connects us all.” —Mirabai Starr
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” —Carl Sagan
“If the Rhine, the Yellow, the Mississippi rivers are changed to poison, so too are the rivers in the trees, in the birds, and in the humans changed to poison, almost simultaneously. There is only one river on the planet Earth and it has multiple tributaries, many of which flow through the veins of sentient creatures.” —Thomas Berry
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” —Kurt Vonnegut
”So much of bird flight is really expert falling, slipping into that delicate space within the argument between gravity and air resistance. That natural alchemy transforms a plummet into a glide. Someday, I hope to learn to fail like birds fall.” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist
“Reading and writing cannot be separated. Reading is breathing in; writing is breathing out.”
“For a Star to be born, there is one thing that must happen; a nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your Destruction. This is your birth.” —Zoe Skylar
Look. I know you probably wouldn’t gas and burn your city’s police precinct station. I know you’re not a fan of the flaming and looting of private property, first and most sacred commandment of our common capitalist religion. But if cities inside you are not burning, perhaps you haven’t been paying attention. If it’s easier to condemn the people who make their rage into a massive public art demonstration, setting their symbols of oppression raging through the streets, than it is to condemn the smug and public murder of a man in those same streets, perhaps you need to get an education. Perhaps you need to study the whole cloth of an ethic of respect for human life. Listen to the rage. It has a reason.
Gratitude List: 1. Snuggling my shadows (I wrote this one last year, and while I forget the context, it feels right for right now). 2. Grades aren’t done, but I can rest for a day or two now. 3. Oh dear. I’m just copying and pasting bits of last year’s list. Call me lazy, but this fits right now, too: Curiosity. When people get curious about each other. Curiosity is a fine engineer, building bridges of gossamer web and light across chasms. But stronger bridges than you can imagine. 4. Living in layers of memory. 5. Even this one, slightly re-tooled from last year: Cool breezes. This means exactly what it says, because our house can get hot as a sauna. But then it means more than that because your poems and your wisdom and your presence in the world are cool breezes to me, my friends.
May we walk in Beauty!
“Jesus often said, ‘It’s very hard here. Have you eaten? Look―you all stick together, go to the beach and have some fish. Share what you have. We’ll talk later.'” ―Anne Lamott
Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap them around You like a shawl —Alice Walker
“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” ―Martin Luther King Jr.
“A [person] should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a beautiful picture everyday in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of Beauty which God has implanted in the human soul.” ―Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” ―Walt Whitman
“Empathy has no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It’s simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘you’re not alone.’” ―Brene Brown
“Don’t die with your music still inside of you.” —Wayne Dyer
“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.” —Colette
“Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is not stasis but the essence of giving and receiving. Rest is an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to become present in a different way than through action, and especially to give up on the will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals.” —David Whyte
“Soul is not a thing, but a perspective. It’s the slow courtship of an event which turns it into a meaningful experience. It’s the practice of trusting that if one sits silently and long enough with the absence of magic, the miraculous will reveal itself. Nothing is sacred until we make it so with the eloquence of our attention, the poetry of our patience, the parenting warmth of our admiration.” —Toko-Pa Turner
“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, – is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.” —Rainer Maria Rilke
There is no reason. Simply this: The Beloved is. And you are. And that is all there is for reason.
Oh, there’s a tiny blue butterfly on a golden flower in a field of green. And the way that vulture stood upon the wind above the river last winter, how you could see the snow-furred animal shape of the ridge through the stripes of naked trees.
Love slips out through the bars of reason. Like the butterfly, like the vulture. Like golden, like whisper, like tears. It’s more vision than reason, more realm, more white horse galloping through dream. More one single ray of light shining through the forest canopy to sparkle on a stone at your feet.
Why do you love me? has only one answer: You are. But how? Now there is a question with myriad answers, vast as the universe. Look up and outward, and you will see.
How do you love me? you ask the Beloved. She answers: Stone, sunshine, horse, breeze, butterfly, waterfall, and blue, blue, blue.
What can we give besides our prayers and rage?
And what will that avail?
Send out the story on October winds.
Fling it high, where crows are flying.
Send the message echoing into earth
with every pounding step you take.
Listen.
Let the shells of your ears gather the story.
Reel in the gossamer strands of the tale
and weave them into the veil you wear.
Listen for the stories of those who weep,
those who rage, those who only speak
with the shrug of a shoulder,
with a sigh, with a shudder.
Listen, too, to those who walk right in,
who step into your circle without invitation.
Listen to the voices that are hard to hear.
Offer only the bread that is yours to give.
Be like the old gods, with the raven Wisdom
on one shoulder and Memory on the other,
and Reason perched upon your hat.
Offer what is yours:
your rage,
your prayer,
your watchful quiet heart.
Gratitude List: 1. Rage and prayer
2. Memory and Wisdom
3. Reason
4. Listening deeply. Being listened to deeply.
5. Graphic novels. I know this one is rather out of the context of the others, but the boys and I are really into graphic novels these days: the Amulet series, Zita the Spacegirl, Knights of the Lunch Table, and Mouse Guard. We really love Zita and her poor friend Randy who has a case of the squeaks.
When you walk in the the rooms
where Mystery waits with an indigo hum,
listen for the thrumming
of hummingbird, feel the brush
of moth wings across your cheek,
watch for the scoop and swish
of a small brown bat
through the rooms
of your heart.
Unless you seek to see her,
you will not find her,
and the rooms where you wander
will appear empty
and devoid of beauty.
Gratitude List: 1. Walking back in time. I took my boys to the Infamous Unstoppables Parade in Lancaster’s southeast yesterday. We parked on King Street and walked up to South Ann. As we got to S. Ann, I could feel the body memories of place begin to kick in again. All those afternoons walking home from the YWCA after yoga or weight training, twenty years ago before we hiked the Appalachian trail, the sounds of people talking in Spanish, the glorious front yard gardens, the music drifting out of windows, the loud bass of a car driving by. Even the slope of the hill beneath my feet. We stood across the street from the house where we lived. I didn’t recognize anyone.
2. Learning to ask for help.
3. Doll-making. It has been a while since I have made a doll, taking the materials that come to hand and crafting a small being out of fabric or clay or wire or wood, working for those moments when the personality begins to develop. I have been wanting to make a Dream Maker doll for some time, and realized that if I am going to manage it this summer, I should get started now, working in short spurts each evening. I have taken more time with the face on this one than I ever have before, and I am feeling satisfied.
4. Reason, intellectual rigor, that which can be thoughtfully and wisely explored.
5. Mystery, magic, that which cannot be known or spoken, but only sensed or felt.
Mockingbird Chronicles 