1. The first garden harvest graced the table tonight: spinach. I melted butter in a pan, cooked it down pure and condensed, salted and peppered. Like Popeye, I'm twelve times stronger than I was just yesterday. This is because of the spinach and because of you, Love.
2. A preschool field trip became the canvas upon which every 5 year old emotion could express itself. It was a good day. I'm not afraid of intense feelings. And neither is Nora. This is a strength, and that's how I'll approach it tomorrow and the day after. All is gift. Lift me into this lesson.
3. I've been spacey. The freedom of summer break releases me...where will I land, and what will I be holding in my hand when I do?
4. [ ]
Monday, May 14, 2012
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Fire, Fallow, and Field
From The Faithful Gardener by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
"So you see," Uncle said, "this burning and blackening of the soil here? Soon much will come of it, so much that you will not believe it."
"What will you seed here?" I asked.
"I will seed nothing," said Uncle.
I did not understand. We had burnt land before, for the ash made tired ground more fertile again.
"Why will you leave the land bare and unseeded, Uncle?"
"Ah, as an invitation, my girl."
------------------------------------------------------------------
A map of burned places:
Ila's Iris: I am deadheading. To make space, he says. Yes. To say the sacred Yes is to also invoke the sacred No. We were made with birth and death, the left and the right, cupping our lives on either side in strong hands like those I've seen on women who have raised children, let go of husbands, found peace in the earth. The spent blossoms fall to the ground, lifting green life above them as the mother's hands lift the wise and innocent children into the pages written for them by the Author.
Grandpa Smith's Alfalfa Fields: We leave the land of our lives to each other, passed down as we are lifted away from the spaces we have walked, talked into, struggled through, danced upon. I can see him stern on his tractor, the bailer behind him, his gray felt cowboy hat sweat stained and oil marked. When I dream of him after the funeral, he is fishing from the top of this same tractor, throwing his line into the green and purple fields he worked. He smiles and waves.
In the House: I leave the burned spaces of my life open. I pass through the lonely night. The empty chairs around the kitchen table sit in expectation of the arrival and the joining of the deepest laughter, the food shared in love, the thanksgiving, the family.
My left arm and the palms of my hands: The skin is still scarred, soft and delicate old woman palms. Where the prayers grow, the two empty hands pressed together, holding grace. Where the hair is smoothed from golden forehead of daughter. Where the words collect and how they are thrown into the white air to land breath-hopeful, story seed whispering: I need to be understood. Where the face is cradled, tears pooling, the heart still willing to break and sustain. Where the strings vibrate, the sound being woven between my fingers so I might touch something invisible.
Where Love also Burns: May my hands be empty when you come to fill them with your own. You will find them resting in my lap, and I will be staring into the empty field.
"So you see," Uncle said, "this burning and blackening of the soil here? Soon much will come of it, so much that you will not believe it."
"What will you seed here?" I asked.
"I will seed nothing," said Uncle.
I did not understand. We had burnt land before, for the ash made tired ground more fertile again.
"Why will you leave the land bare and unseeded, Uncle?"
"Ah, as an invitation, my girl."
------------------------------------------------------------------
A map of burned places:
Ila's Iris: I am deadheading. To make space, he says. Yes. To say the sacred Yes is to also invoke the sacred No. We were made with birth and death, the left and the right, cupping our lives on either side in strong hands like those I've seen on women who have raised children, let go of husbands, found peace in the earth. The spent blossoms fall to the ground, lifting green life above them as the mother's hands lift the wise and innocent children into the pages written for them by the Author.
Grandpa Smith's Alfalfa Fields: We leave the land of our lives to each other, passed down as we are lifted away from the spaces we have walked, talked into, struggled through, danced upon. I can see him stern on his tractor, the bailer behind him, his gray felt cowboy hat sweat stained and oil marked. When I dream of him after the funeral, he is fishing from the top of this same tractor, throwing his line into the green and purple fields he worked. He smiles and waves.
In the House: I leave the burned spaces of my life open. I pass through the lonely night. The empty chairs around the kitchen table sit in expectation of the arrival and the joining of the deepest laughter, the food shared in love, the thanksgiving, the family.
My left arm and the palms of my hands: The skin is still scarred, soft and delicate old woman palms. Where the prayers grow, the two empty hands pressed together, holding grace. Where the hair is smoothed from golden forehead of daughter. Where the words collect and how they are thrown into the white air to land breath-hopeful, story seed whispering: I need to be understood. Where the face is cradled, tears pooling, the heart still willing to break and sustain. Where the strings vibrate, the sound being woven between my fingers so I might touch something invisible.
Where Love also Burns: May my hands be empty when you come to fill them with your own. You will find them resting in my lap, and I will be staring into the empty field.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Praising is What Matters! -- Rilke
To wake to coffee and banana bread (different than bandana bread, which is chewier). There is almost nothing to do, and this is a new kind of abundance.
A little one, fierce and love-brimming creature, continues to teach me the gentle heart and walk softly and see it through her eyes. Dance wild. Speak always comfort.
Fragrant grass newly cut and a windmill spinning gray metal in the silent eye of peace. The earth meets my back, and Nora stretches young beside me. Piggy back rides as we consider the fruits. I'm in Eden.
Late night sitting on the steps. The trees breathe green ocean waves and surging. There's Cassiopeia. A frog jumps on my back. Jumps off. I don't panic. All is gift. I pick the dead blooms from the pansies.
When we talk of families and the different configurations, she says she'd like to have a husband who lives with her. "I want this for you, too, Nora." "And maybe if there's a daddy who doesn't have a mommy and a mommy who doesn't have a daddy, they could love each other and come together." She presses the palms of her hands together. We're playing Barbies, the house Grandma and Aunt Dottie made for me back in the '80s set up between us. "And what would you think if I met a daddy who didn't have a mommy and he had lots of kids?" There is a light in her, and she sits up straighter. "I would love that. I would have lots of kids to play with, and you could do laundry together and cook all of us food to eat."
A light burns from the cottage I see through the dark forest, has burned forever, and I'm wandering home heavy and educated. He left it glowing. This long. I pull my blanket closer around me and step inside for good this time. This rain has been falling for ages, I think. The trees are tired of my wandering.
Reconciliation: to bring into harmony.
Hall and Oates. Yes. I'm serious. They were great.
A little one, fierce and love-brimming creature, continues to teach me the gentle heart and walk softly and see it through her eyes. Dance wild. Speak always comfort.
Fragrant grass newly cut and a windmill spinning gray metal in the silent eye of peace. The earth meets my back, and Nora stretches young beside me. Piggy back rides as we consider the fruits. I'm in Eden.
Late night sitting on the steps. The trees breathe green ocean waves and surging. There's Cassiopeia. A frog jumps on my back. Jumps off. I don't panic. All is gift. I pick the dead blooms from the pansies.
When we talk of families and the different configurations, she says she'd like to have a husband who lives with her. "I want this for you, too, Nora." "And maybe if there's a daddy who doesn't have a mommy and a mommy who doesn't have a daddy, they could love each other and come together." She presses the palms of her hands together. We're playing Barbies, the house Grandma and Aunt Dottie made for me back in the '80s set up between us. "And what would you think if I met a daddy who didn't have a mommy and he had lots of kids?" There is a light in her, and she sits up straighter. "I would love that. I would have lots of kids to play with, and you could do laundry together and cook all of us food to eat."
A light burns from the cottage I see through the dark forest, has burned forever, and I'm wandering home heavy and educated. He left it glowing. This long. I pull my blanket closer around me and step inside for good this time. This rain has been falling for ages, I think. The trees are tired of my wandering.
Reconciliation: to bring into harmony.
Hall and Oates. Yes. I'm serious. They were great.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Please Pass the Anonymous
1. And we talk about passing the plate, how the food we grow doesn't come from us, how we share these meals, and it's in the passing of plates that grace happens. I grew this, but I didn't. I cooked this, but I didn't. There is a generosity in allowing the gift to exist before we give it because the anonymity of the gesture speaks of the Benefactor.
2. I have discovered cooking again, and this is a joy. An appetite restored to sweet and sour and salt. The speed at which this crazy life functions is antithetical to the moment of presence and grace that each mouthful offers. Be here. Receive this. Enjoy this. Live abundantly, child. Play.
3. I check the garden each day, sometimes several times a day, welcoming the new green shoots that find their way triumphantly through the crusted dirt. I talk to them using the same voice Nora uses with Henrietta and Tweetie Sweetie: hellooooo little radish. Helllooooo lettuce. How are you? Come out, come out whatever you are.
4. Flowers are purchased and we make it out with two big bundles of pink and purple and white light. Nora stops before we leave: "Mommy, I want a bleeding heart." At first I don't process it the way she intends. I see whole arteries flowing, an opening blossom breaking free, light pouring out: we are alive and our hearts are beating and breaking and mending and singing. The image stops suddenly like a tripped fuse. "Oh, yes, a bleeding heart. I love those, too." We add another green thing to the back of the pickup, this one with heart-shaped drops of color hanging from the life-root that sustains us all: love.
5. And when I pay for the flowers, I dig out the gift certificate someone anonymously left on my step last summer. And I want to be a part of this circle. I'll have to work at it. We are self-feeding machines, and this turning outward brings us to the overwhelming view from that tower, a view so different than the one at the bottom of the mirror.
2. I have discovered cooking again, and this is a joy. An appetite restored to sweet and sour and salt. The speed at which this crazy life functions is antithetical to the moment of presence and grace that each mouthful offers. Be here. Receive this. Enjoy this. Live abundantly, child. Play.
3. I check the garden each day, sometimes several times a day, welcoming the new green shoots that find their way triumphantly through the crusted dirt. I talk to them using the same voice Nora uses with Henrietta and Tweetie Sweetie: hellooooo little radish. Helllooooo lettuce. How are you? Come out, come out whatever you are.
4. Flowers are purchased and we make it out with two big bundles of pink and purple and white light. Nora stops before we leave: "Mommy, I want a bleeding heart." At first I don't process it the way she intends. I see whole arteries flowing, an opening blossom breaking free, light pouring out: we are alive and our hearts are beating and breaking and mending and singing. The image stops suddenly like a tripped fuse. "Oh, yes, a bleeding heart. I love those, too." We add another green thing to the back of the pickup, this one with heart-shaped drops of color hanging from the life-root that sustains us all: love.
5. And when I pay for the flowers, I dig out the gift certificate someone anonymously left on my step last summer. And I want to be a part of this circle. I'll have to work at it. We are self-feeding machines, and this turning outward brings us to the overwhelming view from that tower, a view so different than the one at the bottom of the mirror.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Ghosts in the Acres We've Already Harvested
We have a haunted place, ghost-traveled, a field of bleeding roots, the heavy footprints sunk deep, marking some headless and inconsiderate deceit or abandon or violence. Something we can't even
speak about.
Sometimes I feel myself there huddled against the dark winds that threaten to exhale the topsoil like angered smoke. Don't say it. Lie still.
The sounds of past keening
surface from the covered well north of the field. The secret words rise to the surface like a killing oil, dark rainbows of some future healing
that has yet to be spoken about, the eight pennies we threw down that, when fished to the top, would reflect the story of "how I made it
through." Wishing and throwing. Wishing and throwing.
They're setting fire to the corn fields, and you're driving me home.
Angel.
Siren. Love.
And then.
That's the secret place, isn't it? That's the place we meet the ghost army, the tortured, diaphanous rows of "how we were hurt" and how we simply walked away from the war.
I'm in my truck driving this row and she's singing: Just you wait and see: someone will come to help you.
Listen. We have all held the hurting seed, burst-shy and cautious. We have held the penny wishes. We must be gentle with each other: broken-winged, song-bound, copper-colored birdflowers.
Take me to a place where the specter retreats clutching its only possession in a greedy-lidded mason jar : You must fear being loved.
Let it out and move on.
Reach the determined, sun-strengthened arm down to the depth of wells and oil and rich soil: two times the measure of our sorrow because this is the length of our joy, and I will not let go, riding the green shoot all the way to the full mouth of a new harvest. Let it speak the gift through the ghost, a light that reveals everything. I'm not afraid of this.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Blooming And Being
Full days: finals and summer's early arrival, a garden planted, and a farm and a mother and a daughter responding to the sun's invitation.
Mulched and watered and staked: growing a new pin oak to replace the one that fell the first year we lived here.
A hamster cradled.
A dress ironed.
Sun tea and pansies and a door that invites us in then sets us free again.
And I remember, too: whole days spent charming the garden hose like a snake handler.
Usually the peonies bloom around Memorial Day, and, at that time, they're covered in ants (pesky fellows--try chalk and cloves). If you cut a few for the house, you inevitably invite the whole armada indoors. This year they bloomed so early the ants were too late.
The seeds are in. Holy. Yes. Very.
The Good Friday potatoes and onions are up. The broccoli transplants are thriving (I knew they would!) and the spinach and dill have announced themselves along with a few volunteer tomatoes. Let them grow.
And all the while above the garden, this spins the wind and the invisible.
The yellow roses (right) have bloomed. When I walk by this bush, I am immediately at the ranch on Silt Mesa smelling Grandma Smith's row of yellow roses.
And the view is as deep as the day is long, and as I finish up the final grading for the school year, I begin to understand how much I need this room to stare and sit and let every detail of this suddenly abundant story settle into my bones.
And everywhere around the house, Ila's peonies are blooming and being: something I'd like to practice with some help from Love.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
The Reading
The room is filling and the voices lift to the high ceiling and echo down on us, indecipherable meaning. They look nervous, wanting to know how many poems to read, and they are dressed nicely, and they are gentle people.
Though it is our job as poets, I'm not sure how to put into words the experience we have shared over the last four months as we met each Tuesday night to discuss, encourage, explore, share, critique, and create a language beyond everyday use. Yes, we wrote poems as a poetry workshop is apt to do. But something else began to happen--something larger--something that only occurs when you find that rare combination of people capable of bringing out the best in each other, capable of "critiquing with love," capable of breathing language into being, and being into language. This was such group.
There is a little girl, maybe three years old, drinking a smoothie. Somehow it ends up on the floor, a pink blossom on hardwood, and she is holding back her tears, and it is this that makes our hearts rise to comfort her. Four people get up to help.
I have watched all of you grapple with the question of whether or not it is truly possible to put the world and all its people, places, and things, all its complications and joys into this prearranged system of thought we refer to as language. And even though it may have felt as if you were attempting to cage a tiger, placing your raw and often untamed feelings and experiences within the bars of language, your words broke free, singing of the freedom to express, the courage to put your finger on that very real and very intense heart that beats within you. And I love you for this courage.
They come up one by one, and not one voice shakes even though I know there are earthquakes happening within them right now. And this too is necessary. To share is to be willing to spill yourself onto the floor, and this is when we all rise to meet you there. Don't worry. We are here.
I think I can speak for these eleven writers (you were with us, Jacquelyn, and we have been praying for healing for you) when I say that we have wished to experience the gifts of this life through our poetry as we tuned our entire being to the world around us and inside us, and all of these courageous insights have been a gift from God. And while we may not find the exact words to explain the beauty and complexity of our experiences, we can come very close, for it is this same language and breath that allows us to articulate to our Creator the hard work we have undertaken as humans, tracing all that has always already been written in our heart into our prayers and onto the page before us.
The words have flown now, lifting the ceiling and audible, lifting us from our lives and setting us back down better for it. The floor is clean as if the spill never occurred. What remains is that invisible hand that reached out from within all of us to comfort, to help.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
