Rhythm & rhyme of healing

Recently I attended a song writing workshop (http://www.bravevoice.com/), not really sure that my poetry would translate into song because I rarely use rhymes. I did manage to get a spoken word piece put together with an amazing R&B artist, Kelley Hunt (http://www.kelleyhunt.com/). She was graciously open and generously found a hook line and a gospel rhythm for me to sing my poetry to. Kelley and Kansas poet laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg (http://www.carynmirriamgoldberg.com/) have co-created some brilliant work on the CD Mercy. And some of the lyrics don't rhyme.

This weekend, as I dug away at the neglected dirt in my garden and reflected on the Law of Attraction, I listened to Jewel. Many of her songs stand alone, without the music, as poignant poems. There's a place for me, I thought. My poems do have a musicality to them that I'm certain reflects my former career as a modern dancer. One of the reasons I took this workshop was to be able to move and sing with my poems. Rhythm and rhyme help to make words stick with us (as in mnemonic devices, nursery rhymes, and hymns).

In my morning meditation, I challenged myself to write at least three rhyming poems that I could remember and repeat throughout the day like an affirmation. I've been working hard to shift my thought patterns from depressed and negative to positive, hopeful, affirming, with a desire to attract more positive into my life. Most of my spiritual lessons I learn from nature, so I decided to write short "songs" about the seeds I had planted the previous weekend. I'll refrain from over editing and intellectualizing. Below are three simple poems:

Portulaca Portulaca
What a funny, sunny name.
Portulaca Portulaca
will you join me in a game?

I planted you three days ago ~
how about we make a bet?
By the time I see your tender stems,
a gentle lover I will get.


Once upon a time
I planted Columbine ~
tiny seeds hidden in my hand.
Life line creases
palmed possibility,
sifted through fingertips to the land.



I asked the impatiens seeds, "What will it take
to release me fully from this sorrow-filled wake?"

Sunshine and soil, sweat of the brow
Tend to your needs, water us now.

Time is all, let the wait be your bliss.
Be patient my friend and you'll be kissed

by joy as verdant as my sprouting leaf.
It took so little, less than a week

for me to reveal what's been seeding underground ~
new life, new life, this morning you found.

To Mina Loy~

just for fun, across time and space, through my acclivity

...for a declivity
into depravity
there is no first or last,
only equality,
which is, perhaps,
why it appeals to me ~
we are all the same
at the bottom
of the slippery slope,
no One better
only worse
for space and time.
We can merely hope
that our propensity
for Liquor, Love and Lust
is just a side Bar
with little immensity
in the thrust toward Absolute.

Tell Me

How is it that the first sighting of delicate, new blades of grass can bring me such pleasure. I actually gasped with excitement when I saw that the seeds planted 10 days ago actually sprouted in nubile wonder...and on May Day. Happy verdant Beltane to all.

Leisure

by William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Cape Disappointment

You broke my horizon,
claiming a noble neglect,
"I don't want to hurt you
like others have hurt you."





Yet, we became a tragedy anyway,
one of recognizable proportion.

Now, knowing the sorrow
of waves on ragged rock,
wounded shorelines,
and a seagull's scream,
the ocean is no longer a lullaby
unless this song was our last.

I have loved, oh God, the beauty...Psalm 26

Why is that not enough ~
loving the beauty, oh
when everything else is gone
does the etching of love remain ~
yellow lips deep within
open petals of violet iris,
echos of a poet's heartbeat,
cello vibrations, strummed,
rippling out, faint but still
audible, attainable
when all else is said and done?

The sword fern awaits
my planting.

My Nephew Grows Up

From dressed to charm at 4 months to dressed to...protect.

I yam what I yam

THAT SORT OF WOMAN
by Jan L. Richardson

She is that sort of woman
so annoying
not content
to let the truth stay hidden.
Discovering
is her forte,
revealing the masks
that others choose,
reminding those
who dwell near the holy
fire will find them
shadows will take form.

Restless Spring

The first hummingbird buzzed by
yesterday late ~
fluttered in place
against an airy wake
and sucked the sweetness
I’d put out for her.
Essence

yesterday late
afternoon ~ a brief visit
from an old friend ~
And the ebony crow, too
cawed his thrice warning
about the ache of love,
as he bent a lofty bough
with a scold, then flew away
as shadows fell.
How straight the crow flies.


This morning, a riotous flock
of starlings commune
in the camellia bush.
It’s warm enough
to sit on the porch
in shirt sleeves with a second
cup of coffee and Mary Oliver ~
Our Story, her 40-year conversation
with a lover, her partner, her mate.

My craving for companionship ~
to be with one who understands
me without explanation ~
that craving is at odds
with a seasonal, burgeoning
desire to experience life,
once again, autonomously.

This is my half-story,
always a partial contentment.
I really am trying
to let loneliness and fear
rest from their vigil
over my life.

Today, I accept the silence
from a friend, trust
what is stirring and growing
healing and becoming
in the spring soil.
She has imposed
a silence on me as well,
“Do not write me anymore.”
Heard too much from me
I imagine, my muffled
half of the story.
Why is it we only wish
to hear and tell our stories
from the safe side
our side?

Just now, a pit bull
and its owner walk by.
I hear the innocent
click click of the bull’s nails
on pavement and see only
an easy saunter
in the black man’s gait.

For our Journey

This being human is a guest house

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.
-Rumi

Lenten Renewal

I haven't written for a very long time (as some of you faithful ones have noted). There is a reason...I haven't been myself. This January I crashed into that realization and started looking for solutions to find myself again. One solution was to rent my own space again. It has been wonderful sharing a space with my friend...she has been generous and we have been relatively compatible, but I really am a soloist when it comes to living space. I missed my art work on the walls, my own garden space, talking to myself without getting caught. :-).

So I came upon a little yellow house to rent, only a mile away from the "fun house" with the poetry pole. With great intention, I found a place for every knick-knack and wall hanging. If the piece didn't fit, I stored it, threw it away, or gave it away. Slowly, I am finding a rhythm to my day in this house. I am reading, writing and meditating again in the mornings...renewing my spiritual self...reading at night again. Most importantly, I am addressing old habits (addictions if you will) that have kept me from me. This is the hardest part, being still and silent, grieving if that's what comes up, until I can feel me in my body again. I wake in the mornings in my lavender and white room feeling my spirit hesitating to re-enter this body. "How are you going to treat me today?" it seems to ask.

My little yellow house has some small neglected gardens in front and back. There is a hunk-o-bamboo that appears randomly placed in the middle of the lawn. I was going to try to remove it, but it is too big and too deep. As I looked closer, I realized someone had a plan with this bamboo. Someone left before the plan was complete. It is my job to wait until I can see where that garden wants to go next.

To the right of the front door is a garden bed with lavender and tulips popping up. I planted some baby rust hens and chicks barely visible in the red rock right now, but I know they will spread and acclimate quickly. Purple heather and euphorbia will also fill out nicely in a zero-scape kind of way. Calluna vulgaris, with its downy gray leaves and pink tips, is so rooted in her pot that it takes quite a bit of coaxing to get her out and planted in the new space. I decide to transplant the tulips and other spring bulbs into the center bed where I have planted the proverbial purple lupine, already catching tear drops of rain in its open palm of green.

One tulip, a single leaf, that I think will be shallow and young, easy to move, refuses to reveal its bulb. I dig my trowel past the red rock, inching into clay soil, blindly easing around what I assume is the bulb. Then I press down on the handle, lifting a hunk of soil, no bulb; only the broken stem.

This week I broke a friend's trust. I hurt someone I love. I dug too deep (or not deep enough), pushed too soon and now I believe she will no longer bloom in my presence. Who am I to be someone a friend can't trust? Who am I to be so cruel? I can't just say, "Oh well, maybe next year. At least I didn't slice the bulb. I only broke off a stem. That's life. I'm not perfect." I can't say any of that right now. I have to say to myself that I didn't take care enough, I didn't let well enough alone. Why? Because I have not been myself? Why, because I have numbed myself with all sorts of distractions and addictions and it is time to fully admit that I am lost and must do all I can to find myself again.

I am paying the price of losing myself (in some ways literally- as in a car payment and higher insurance). My Epiphany word this year (we get one every year at church) is ALERT. I get it now. I thank the garden, I thank my friend, I thank my little yellow house, and I thank God that I didn't do more damage than I did, that I am awake now and ready to take that first humble step of renewal.

Advent reading

I've been reading Jan Richardson's Night Visions, which, by the way, is out of print and you can only get copies for $75-$100. Anyway, week two is about desire with a reflection on landscape and place. I wrote about the landscape most spiritual to me:

I long for high desert
dryness, heat-hot sweating
raw heat, draining me
of all my impurities:
1) This virus that clings
to my lungs ~
sweat it out;
2)This addiction to whisky:
watch me, three days in the desert
I could sweat it out;
3) This longing
for earthly love ~
I have only to look up
at vast blue beyond blue
to know my desires
are small in contrast
to possibilities.

Sweat them all out.
In the desert
I have no need
for anything ~
not even food
as my stomach shrinks
into lightness.
Not even water
as I push myself
through hallucinations
of dehydration
and am pleased
with what I see ~

Simplicity.
Light, warmth,
melt down
to the skeleton of me.
Bones whitened
in a blazing sun ~
the color of purity,
the absence of all color
is me in this high
desert light.

for Leslie

Hey Leslie, thanks for your faithful reading, finally something new for you:

Hibernate -
sleep is for the unconscious.
Germinate
deep in dark, moist soil.
Activate
only the necessary.
Rumi-nate
on the compost within.
Then, when the spring shovel
taps the cold ground,
Emerge
lime green and ready
for a new dance.


by Wendy Thompson
published in Museletter, Volume XXVIX, Number 3, November 2008

Almost two years in this home now

Light

Breadth of autumnal sunshine
and the five-year-old
neighbor boy's call
to come out
and play ball.

Towering oak
above impatience ~
I miss you, where are you?
There is no ceiling
to love.

That moon, orange
as a thunderous symphony,
announced a triumphant end
to loneliness
and summer.

Even in the darkest depths
a porch light shines
somewhere,
here or there,
guiding me home.

Written the first summer during Iraq war

Hope Over the Willamette

On the riverbank, a sienna night,
the symphony explodes in black and white.
It's an 1812 Overture. And we hesitate
in the patriotic.

A raging red Mars enters our sky
while the war still simmers, shock of the world,
in a cauldron of gray. And yet
a single goose sails by.

A bold gift, innocence begun? And the moon
rises on the largo like a New World arrival,
still wet from birth
and teary-eyed wonder.

Some thoughts on intuition

Sophia Speaks to Me

Wisdom comes
with the second spoonful
of breakfast cereal,
morning sunlight on my back,
and the journal,
marking concerted concentration,
unattended, left flipping its pages
of purple words into the summer breeze.

Wisdom comes when I brush
my teeth, and realize
Spirit speaks with ‘aha’
and ‘of courses’
easily coursing me to freedom
from known pathways and destinations.
Like the river flows
and slows around boulders
or even pebbles, unevenly
in the way, yet very much
a part of my day, this journey.

Like the blood flows
each month
cleansing me
from cranium to sacrum
toward that arid truth.
Wisdom comes
when I stop waiting,
pause in the writing,
that sweetly surfaced
those soulful stones.
I see the barriers,
rocks, bricks, by ways;
I thank them
for their lessons,
the rhythm they bring,
the bob and bump,
surge and spray,
the crash or avoid,
creating theme and variation
to every one of my days.

Wisdom comes
when I am least expectant
most listening,
most accepting.
She comes
when I reframe the mistakes
and when I surrender
to the wake,
when I wake,
and grin at the sun,
before coursing on.

Do you know me?

What is my identity, you ask:
I am a poet
a teacher
a seeker
a healer
a guide.
I am unique to this world
and wish to lounge
in the light of that knowing
like Sheba, the cat,
who fritters away her morning,
sprawled effortlessly, carelessly
across my unmade bed.

By what name am I known, you ask:
You may know me by
Wendy, Wandering One
Wendy Jean
Friend Wend
Wend-i-kins
Ulindy
Prima
Bella
Sulia
Sulia Grace,
but mostly, you know me
by the way I hold my hands,
which shall remain nameless.
You know me through gesture,
through the timbre of my voice,
through the scent of Boucheron, so named.
You know me by the liveliness
in my face when I am delighted
by words,
by music,
by dance, or other such passions.
You know me by the dark depth
of my hazel gaze,
which shall remain nameless,
the generosity of my heart,
which shall remain nameless,
and by others who know me.
But most of all
I want you
to know me
by the unconditional love
I offer you,
which shall be called
the One
G-D
Yahweh
Creator
Grace,
a gift to you
through me.

Transformations

Paradigm Shift

Night breeze
cooled, bare arms
and mind.
Glass wind chimes
clank, a tuneless
companion
under the inquisition
of a patio light
mid-July
mid-life.

A garden mobile,
Egyptian princess
made of weak wood
with charcoal eyes,
spins like she always has,
round and round in the breeze.
Her Mardi Gras beads
dangle heavily
from her thin neck.
She gets nowhere
in love tonight,
suspended
from a triangle of strings,
spinning
clockwise, counter
clockwise,
she retraces her flight,
the same pattern
over and over again.
Her arms reach
toward Orion,
a longing for a new
constellation of being,
yet, all she can do is spin
in the same circle,
round and round
over and over again
unless, maybe,
what would happen
if I cut her strings?

begin again on this journey of faith

It is time to start over again.

When morning begins
with a crow caw
and the garbage truck
brakes like a distant urban rooster,
it is time to start over again.
With meek courage,
I plant bare feet
on cold hardwood and groan,
“Must I, really, must I?”

When Kona coffee brews
a mild chicory, and the daily
news thuds onto the front porch,
it is time to start over this one life
I’ve been given, this one journey
I’ve failed, foibled and tripped through
like a crippled gray squirrel
Which way do I go? Which way do I go?
What next? What next?

Today, I will
eat oatmeal instead of donuts
to lower my cholesterol.
I will
pour the half bottle of cheap wine
down the drain.
I will
ride my bike to work.
I will,
with dubious courage, try
to start over again.

Today, I will begin
with poetry, a collection of Whitman
Earth, My Likeness.
The cover, a watercolor
of egrets in a shimmering
reflective pool.
Last night I dreamt
of egrets in a marshland,
a place of decomposition
where old dies
to make space for new.

Today, when an emerald-breasted
hummingbird thrums through
blooming honeysuckle and the rotting
apple tree, I remember:
sometimes we must fly backwards
in order to start over.
So backwards I fly
to a righter time of living,
a time of poetry
and meaning-making
among the towering ponderosa pine.

I start over again
in the forest with Whitman
on my narrow path, soft under foot,
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow…”
Today, when pine branches
linger over me
I am called to rest
in my own likeness
I am called to be still,
to watch and listen.
I am called to start over again.

Trees

Finding Center among Tree Trunks

Once there was a woman who spent a morning with a tree. They were well known to each other, having spent many mornings together, afternoons and evenings too. She called this tree the Leaning Tree, its sturdy cedar base growing from the lenient earth on a diagonal slant as if people had been leaning against it since it was an innocent sapling. The Leaning Tree supported her pondering, her sobbing, her anger, barrenness and even her lover’s back as she once dared some forest passion. This morning she leans back, heedless of sap, then slides down the trunk to sit on the meandering roots. Her weary spine presses in until she feels the sap flow slow, so slowly. The Leaning Tree teaches her that slow is good, so good. “Why can’t you remember that?” the Leaning Tree chides. Why can’t I remember? Because remembering hurts.
Her shoulder blades fit into the cedar bark like missing puzzle pieces, like tessellations, a mystery of no beginnings or endings and no need to know the answers to her questions. Tears flow, blood flows, sap flows so slowly. Her heart, the knothole of a broken branch that once reached out, greening into love, now snaps back to her core, her sturdy trunk. She presses her sacrum into forgiving soil ~ quieted by fallen needles and death. She slows, so slow in release of grief, comforted by the natural cycle of things ~ a cycle she knows, but sometimes forgets. Remembering hurts.

Why is it that I always need to go beyond, beyond the swallowtails mating in the air, beyond site of base camp, beyond the Wooly-Mullen and the last participant in this workshop? I keep walking to a periphery, a road, a divide, a threshold. It is there I spy you, a ponderosa snag ~ dead from the inside out. Your needle less limbs draped like a swooning maiden, drip-line dry, stripped of all but a patched, red-bark skirt. And yet, your gnarled branches still offer a resting place for the chick a dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.

Finally, I am alone, and with that thought the urge to turn on my cell phone is almost overwhelming ~ connect, connect, connect, the need to connect is stronger than the need for solitude. Where is my place in the circle of mariposa? Mariposa de sueno, te pareces a mi alma. You are like my soul, a butterfly of my dream. Where is my place beyond Neruda, my place amidst fading larkspur? On which sedimentary rock do I rest?

Ponderosa, you stand alone as I do, somewhat aloof. You do not beckon me like the cedar Leaning Tree. I keep a respectful distance, my elder. Perhaps you are tired of serving, tired of reaching out, always the giving tree. Perhaps you only need to stand rooted, pocked with woodpecker holes, sapless as I am soon to be, and just be. Let that be enough. If some little critter chooses to nest in you, fine, she is welcome. It is you, Ponderosa, to which I need to connect, not the tenuous and wireless, 1,000 miles away. It is you, in this chattery silence, which holds the questions for my answers, the calm for my chaos, the acceptance of empty.
I ask you, may I come closer? May I step in to you? May I touch you, cracked and dry ~ you offer no shade. Brittle bark scratches my back as I lean in. But you still smell like grandmother's closets. Grandmother pine, I call on you now as the blood leaves my body, perhaps for the last time. Sapless, childless, what will I leave behind? What seeds have I planted, like your tender saplings greening around you now? What poetry will come as I stand on the threshold of just be, rejoicing in my rooted ness?

Mesa Memories

Once, she would contract
into the clamor
of yesterday and tomorrow.

But today, under a relentless Sedona sunshine,
she seeks the silent abundance of now.

Like a saguaro cactus
she holds water in her ribs ~
red rock reserves

A foundation of readiness for spring's
release of prickly pear blooms.

This sundance of in and out
give and take, contraction and release,
is her brittle-brush journey

Between desert expansion
and blue-green sage retreat.

But tonight,
like a single taper, long and unflickering
in an Arizona night wind

She holds steady only
to what Is. Only this. Only now.