Gratitude List:
1. Art
2. Play
3. Prayer
4. Work
5. Breathing
May we walk in Beauty!
work
Panda and Panther
I am rather proud of these two paintings which I managed despite the fact that the canvases constantly twitched and squinted. Panther requested that I paint green eyes on his eyelids, which meant that he went around with his eyes closed for a while. When he smudged his paint, he touched it up himself. He has requested that we buy ourselves a family set of face paints. I think I will.
Gratitude List:
1. A day of play
2. Public spaces that are created specifically for children. (Yes, I know it’s a lucrative business. Still, the Hands on House is particularly well done. My boys were some of the older ones there, and they became obsessed with keeping the factory room tidied and organized.)
3. The determination of a small child to participate in the cleaning of the garage, the preparation for the first share of the season on Monday.
4. Mist in the mornings. Makes me want to hike to Rivendell.
5. Courage, which I think is different than bravery, because the courageous person recognizes that she is terrified, but she takes the next breath anyway. I have friends who are deeply courageous, though perhaps they don’t realize how deeply courageous they are. (Root is couer = Heart.) I want to start a poem like Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” only to say:
You do not have to be brave.
You only have to fill your aching lungs with one more breath.
You do not have to wait until you no longer feel afraid.
You only have to step from this moment into the next one.
May we walk in Beauty, in Couer-age.
Surprises
Gratitude List:
1. When we all work together. . . There is just something about coming together with a group of people to accomplish a specific task that creates a sense of community and tribe. I’ve experienced it in various ways this week–a listening committee, a group helping a friend move, being part of a web of people holding someone in prayer/love/light, classroom work, collegiality.
2. Mockingbird is beginning to welcome everyone back to the hollow in their own languages. (Okay, I know he’s actually establishing territory, but the effect on my grateful ears is the same either way.)
3. Chocolate. Especially fair trade chocolate. It is almost impossible for us in the US to extricate our pleasures and our luxuries from the economic and trade systems that oppress others around the world. May we keep edging our way toward freedom and justice for all people.
4. This coming week. I don’t know who to thank for the incredibly brilliant idea (whether it’s principals or superintendents)–padding the potential snow days into Easter Break, just after the switch to the final quarter–but it feels like I have been given extra days in the world, like I can slip between times for the next couple of days, get my work done, catch up on my rest, prepare for the coming month, and get back to work reinvigorated.
5. Needle felting. I started making a couple teeny tiny totoros for a small boy’s upcoming birthday, and his older brother has become obsessed with helping with the needle felting. I’m a little anxious about a nine-year-old and those tiny spears, but it is perhaps a good exercise in intent focus, and I love doing handwork with my kids.
6. Hmmm. I worked hard on this list just now, but I missed this one: new life, birth, how the heart is constantly being resurrected.
7. Oh, and this one: My favorite Jesus stories are coming up, beginning today: Jesus surprises Mary in the garden. (My friend’s daughter also loves this story: he surprises”his best best best friend,” she says. Yes.) Then he surprises Thomas and his terrified friends. Then he surprises the walkers on the Emmaus Road. Life-transforming surprises.
8. I’ll just keep going: The poetry of David Whyte, particularly Sweet Darkness and Easter Blessing.
May we walk in Beauty!
This is How It Begins
This is how it begins:
each year, each week, each day,
each golden shining drop of moment
approaches,
full of expectancy,
dawning,
ready for our use.
How will I inhabit the house
of the now that approaches?
How will I wear the cloth
of the day that is given?
How will I wander the story
of the year that has just now
leapt into shining view
through the gray clouds of winter?
I will face this year with resolution
(this week, this day, this moment)
not to wait until this whirling planet
has danced around the sun
to make the new thing new,
but to step into each freshly-birthed now
with eyes that see the golden shine of possibility
and ears that hear the note of each plucked strand of moment.
Dew on Mullein.
Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday, the family together celebrating a woman of wisdom and compassion. Some families celebrate the New Year. We celebrate a birthday.
2. More conversations with the beloved community, with wise parents and in-laws and out-laws. How listening well and sharing ideas becomes more than the sum of all the conversational bits that appear. How ideas build upon ideas, and shape the ones that came before, and open up spaces for new thoughts to appear. How iron sharpens iron. How certain conversations at certain moments prepare me to do the Work that approaches.
3. Three golden rays of sun yesterday before the sun set, shooting through a rift in the grey cloud. The sun, the sun, the sun: I saw the sun! And now, here in the crisp morning, nothing but blue above, and golden shine now slipping over the ridge and into the hollow.
4. I have been listening this week to Mindy Nolt’s Movers and Lovers, deeply and intensely, grateful for each phrase. Move. Love. Listen.
5. The Work. I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment. And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.
May we–in each dawning moment of this coming year and week and day–walk in Beauty!
Fishing
I don’t fish in the actual sense, but I have been thinking about poetry and fishing for the last few days, and this morning I read something about how poetry is both art and craft, both inspiration and work. Sometimes, it’s like the fish are just jumping out of the water, waiting for me to hold out my net and catch them. I love it when that happens. Sometimes I have to have two nets available to be catching them all as they rain past. It’s important not to get too attached to every fish I catch in this manner. Some are real stinkers, but occasionally I can catch a nice rainbow trout this way.
But more often than not, I just have to show up at the river, day after day, with my fishing rod, and sit there in the hot sun or under a shady tree, and wait and wait and wait. Lots of times, I’ll hook an old boot or funny piece of wood. Most of these things I’ll toss back, but some of them I can use. It’s particularly rewarding to catch a beautiful fish this way–the wait and the work of it makes it especially satisfying.
When I first started writing poetry as a teenager, I didn’t have time for revising or perfecting. I ended up throwing away most of that stuff when I reached my twenties. Then I got into a phase where I didn’t believe anything was truly good until it had been worked over and wrangled repeatedly. I sucked the life out of many a good poem that way.
I think sometimes really good poems do just drop out of the sky with little need for change. Most of the poems I write need a little more tweaking, though. During those times when they’re just jumping out of the lake, I need to just write it down like dictation without thinking about whether this is the perfect word, or whether the sounds work together or the rhythm is compelling. Then, when the rush and whoosh is done, I can go back and see what I have, and organize it into a more complete form.
The other night, half a poem jumped out at me that way. Had I not been on my way to an appointment, perhaps it would be complete, but now that I’ve lost the moment, I need to go back and sit by the river with this one, wait for inspiration to strike on the next line.
Gratitude List:
1. Milkweed everywhere
2. Quiet mornings
3. Super moon, though it does cause some sleeping difficulty
4. How inspiration strikes
5. Crafting
May we walk in Beauty!
Love Songs to the Hens
Cheshire Fred
Gratitude List:
1. Catching Ellis in an unguarded moment singing love songs to his hens.
2. Hard work, and then more hard work.
3. The love songs of bluebirds.
4. This moment.
5. And this one.
May we walk in beauty.
The Soul Purpose Is to Love
This morning, I spent some time writing about how my rages and my fears and my sadness are the things that help me to discover my Work in the world, my Soul Purpose. I’ve been thinking about how to better integrate those uncomfortable emotions rather than to sweep them under the rug, where the tend to either burn things or start to mildew and rot.
I was raging and tearful after reading about the recent slaughter of the last 15 surviving white rhinos of Mozambique. I was going into the red tunnel of fury. And then it hit me that this was a message. This is one of the clues to my Work. And I don’t just mean my vocation, I mean the work I do in the world. It may be activism, it may be writing letters or poems, it may be prayers and magic spells. But the things which I love so deeply that to lose them drives me into that red tunnel, those are the things which are my Soul Purpose.
“What are my tasks?” I wrote. “What is my Work? I think the place to start is in contemplation and meditation, connecting myself to the Deep Well of Love that makes me want to protect, to heal. Prayer, magic spells, weaving and shifting energies. Behind the scenes work. I don’t think I can stop there. I think prayer and contemplation need voices, need fingers.”
Later in the morning, a friend shared this Wendell Berry quote that says it more eloquently than I think I can: “What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how baldly and embarrassingly that word now lies on the page—for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love (adolescent, romantic, or “religious”), which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creatures, and people, requiring stands, acts, showing its successes and failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity. I think that this sort of love defines the effective range of human intelligence, the range within its works can be dependably beneficent. Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous. Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows.” ~Wendell Berry
Gratitude List:
1. Much as I loved having babies, and proud as I am of that part of my journey, I am grateful that I am here contemplating and writing tonight instead of walking the labyrinth of labor that I was experiencing this night seven years ago (I was nearing my 24th hour of labor at this point).
2. I am grateful for that baby, for the boy he has become, for the ways in which he becomes himself more and more every day.
3. Frogs and creeks and glorious cousins.
4. 8 1/2 hours of healing sleep last night. I can hardly believe that my children and my cat and my own head let me manage that one.
5. The Columbia Re-Uzit Shop. I bought a new dress and summer shoes and some colorful plates.
May we walk in Beauty. All the days of our lives.
Toad Redux
A week or so ago I posted a collage-style poem, “The Song of the Toad and the Little Birds.” Toads seem to be lurking their way into my work of late. Here’s a sequel, or perhaps a Part II:
The toad squats
behind the poem
of the little birds
Underneath its tongue
is a red jasper
and its name is Patience
It is listening for the sound
of the sound of your name
in the falling rain
in the sound of a car
turning the corner
It is listening for your heartbeat
as you wait to be born
If you look closely enough
you will see the thin golden chain
around its left wrist
If you wait
you will hear a sigh
like the settling
of a leaf
in the grass.
Gratitude List:
1. Feeling energized by the work of the day
2. Toads
3. Dragonstone
4. Balance and paradox
5. Layers of meaning
May we walk in beauty.
Toad visiting the Faerie house, Summer 2009
Highlights
Gratitude List:
1. The Wisdom of children. (“Mom,” says Joss, “we have boats because of salt. Because we need the boats to go get the salt.”)
2. True entrepreneurial spirit. Kristen is building her own business, and doing it with flair and panache. And she makes people feel beautiful in the process. I love it.
3. Flavors of East Africa
4. The wolf is not at the door, and even if he were, he COULD be a friendly wolf.
5. Loving the work.
May we walk in beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 