A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor — for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
–Jessamyn West
Category Archives: Humanities
Minstrel
Minstrel
Words tumble from your mouth,
so many happy children rolling
down fields at play;
vibrant, sonorous, thrilling with energy
as they leap and chase each other.
Your voice a symphony,
a rich honey tenor pouring into me
inscribing life on my heart;
crescendoing in passionate explanation,
now resting, silence drawing me forth
into the next movement
and your heartbeat a metronome
beating a river of strength
beneath magnificent melodies.
Your breath whispers caresses to my soul,
tender wisp of touch here,
long circling stroke there,
wooing me to dance the delicate cadence of love.
Crucifixion
Crucifixion
She wills him to leave.
He shred her with words and now
she is every slut who ever lived,
the Levite’s worthless concubine from Bethlehem
as she stands scrubbing under
stinging, steaming needles of water,
as she cooks him out from under
her flesh, now banana tender,
welting purple at the wrists, breasts, thighs.
He permeates her head, the
musky mushroom scent stubbornly
remains regardless how much
she retches and spits;
she bites the bar of soap as though
taking communion, seeking its promise
to trade cleanliness for evil.
She stands, trembling and heaving
from gut to fingertips
shaking bone deep cold,
and the blood,
the blood won’t stop,
evidence of a sacrifice
that was not his
to make.
Full Circle
Full Circle (for my mother)
You held your infant daughter
in your arms
agonizing, cajoling,
willing your love to her.
This baby expected
perfection–
that you read her mind
and provide
every need, every want.
Sometimes that infant
arises now,
and your daughter rails
against you
for not possessing omniscience.
You jiggled your toddler daughter
on your lap
as she laughed,
singing to her,
calling her your “little Punkin.”
This half-pint drank
your love
as a thirsty babe
guzzled the milk of life into every cell.
Sometimes that toddler
gazes now
with adoration for her infinite
mother
content and whole in her trust.
You watched your teenage daughter
from afar
as she brooded,
wishing her victory
over that devil called depression.
This young woman envied
your detachment
and accused you
of confusing her
and burdening her beyond control.
Sometimes that girl-woman
rages now
crying, wondering where
you hid
your secret fountain of peace.
You love your grown daughter
with all your life
as she strives,
reaching to her
with the gift of friendship.
This woman recognizes
your humanity
and gently removes you
from the pedestal
to a place in her heart.
Sometimes this woman
perceives now
that though we are family
we can meet
somewhere in the middle.
Cannot Be Freed
Questions which cannot be freed by words find it easy to slip into the blood stream, changing the body’s chemistry, changing a whole life, sometimes.
–Lillian Smith
Dissolving the Puny Illusory You
Be one with your blog but don’t get too attached. Blog about anything, everything, and nothing. Get a life. Have fun. Practice. Then ponder this: blogging as a transformative practice is NOT a surrender of the ego. In fact, it makes your ego even bigger, in hyper-speed. The trick is to make your ego bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, by blogging, reading, linking, blogging, and learning. So that in time, you can sit back and watch your ego as it grows in cyberspace, spilling gently into meatspace, growing, growing, expanding into Infinity itself… dissolving the puny illusory You who thought of blogging in the first place.
–CoolMel, Kosmic Blogging: 101: How to Blog, What to Blog, Why the heck Blog, and Whatnot
A Different Pledge
A Different Pledge
I pledge a grievance, trying not to gag,
at the disarrayed state of America and
to the conglomerate, under Bush’s command,
inflation, plundered debt,
invisible, with classism and racism for all.
Poetry Compared to Prose
When I encountered this quote, I thought of Laurel.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind entire.
–Virginia Woolf
She is achingly gifted in writing both.
A First Draft
| California Living
After supper I make amends to I am bathed in a sodium yellow Gazing up, I wink at the moon its spicysweet gift. It’s not paradise, |
Just Stillness
Still Still The cats sleep. The furnace belches
dust and heat. A dying man triesto breathe. Just a machine, your chest rising
and falling. Bleached leaves flap like wings.The creek, still still, still solid. The hole
in the oak, abandoned. Frogs dream of lifebeneath the ice. The hole longs to be filled.
The concrete angel on the patio sulks.Last night I dreamed the farmer was reaping
snow, that his harvester was eating mealive. Husked. Hulled. This morning light fails
to be described. A skein of geese unravels.Boring, predictable. I glean the field for signs.
A crow ruins the silence. I breathe, ignore it.–Laurel Dodge, La Chambre d’Ecoute
There is something stark, austere, beautiful, and reminiscent of Zen in this poem. I discovered Laurel’s blog last year. I read it often. (I also visit because I have a huge crush on her cat, Bob, who is featured frequently.) What I find compelling about Laurel is her willingness to dwell on the edge; she converses with death, loss, and grief in a way so intimate it makes me uncomfortable. That is why I visit her — because she explores places I don’t feel brave enough to pursue. Also because Bob is so gorgeous, and she captures his catness in all its variety.
Something Wonderful & Sacred
It’s something wonderful to get a letter. The paper, the stamp, the envelope. It is not just a piece of paper. It is something sacred.
–Ibrahim Ismail Zaiden
Neither Rain Nor Sleet Nor Threat of Death
The closest call came when he was stuck in traffic and a group of gunmen walked up to the car in front of him to drag out the driver, kicking and screaming. He watched silently, hoping the gunmen would not take him, too.
“I cried when I got back to the office,” Mr. Mikayel said, pushing his large-lensed glasses farther up his nose.
—Neither War Nor Bombs Stay These Iraq Couriers (New York Times)
Only to the Extent
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
–Pema Chodron
This quote is from a beautiful handmade collaged postcard I received Tuesday from a member of PostcardX.
Self-Portrait Tuesday: All of Me Week 3
We are still exploring the “embrace the mistakes, love the ugly bits” theme. This week I don’t have a deeply personal story or contemplation to share. What you see here is the fruit of my labor: my first ever knitted hat. I am little-girl proud — “Lookie lookie what I made!” I’m pleased to have completed it and equally gratified that it fits. Is the hat a perfect rendition of the pattern I followed? Heck no! Some of my stitches are looser or tighter than need be, and the seam isn’t exactly right. I had to tink a couple of rows. (Tink is knit spelled backwards and means one carefully un-knits a row with a mistake in it. Knitting slang, yeah baby!) Yet I learned much making this (how to read a pattern, how to decrease stitches), and the next hat I make will be better. When I was younger, I used to be afraid to start new things, because I wanted to get it right the first time. The judge in my head was quite adamant that I was only valuable if the outcome of my action was exactly right. What a fallacy that is! I’m glad I learned to move through fear.
Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
–James Joyce
It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.
–Ornette Coleman
Just because you made a mistake doesn’t mean you are a mistake.
–Georgette Mosbacher
I Was a Teetotaler
If arrogance is the heady wine of youth, then humility must be its eternal hangover.
–Helen Van Slyke
The Appeal of Psychology
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.
–Susan Sontag
Small Sips
Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows.
–Stephen King, On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft
What Writing Is
Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as what they say; they are maps of intent.
Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. The single-sentence paragraph more closely resembles talk than writing, and that’s good. Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?
–Stephen King, On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft
Resting, Dancing
Sometimes I experience God as this Beautiful Nothing,” he said. “And it seems then as though the whole point of life is just to rest in it. To contemplate it and love it and eventually disappear into it. And then other times it’s just the opposite. God feels like a presence that engorges everything. I come out here, and it seems the divine is running rampant. That the marsh, the whole of Creation, is some dance God is doing, and we’re meant to step into it, that’s all.”
–Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair
A Drop of Fire, a Million Indentations
Soul. The word rebounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I’d pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person — a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person’s experiences — a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we’ve ever grown.
–Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair