Birds in Winter-Judy Loest, local poet.
Hokusai’s crane stares down
From my bedroom wall
Graceful on his icy bough
Like doves outside in snow
These January mornings are truth
Laid bare, a cold combustion
Of white winnowing earth
And air. Even the sparrows
Have fallen, tucked around
And still as stones
While earth takes back
It’s dead. A single crow
Skims the grizzled hair
Of kudzu along the river,
Vanishing in hoary smoke,
There is no hiding here
In this unforgiving season,
In the silent stare of sparrow
And the dove unimpaired
By guilt or reason
Nothing reminds the body
Of it’s simple needs or place
In the inscrutable hurl of time
Like the stillness of birds in winter.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Einstein's Miracles
Here is a weekend of little miracles. This is how they came about.
For the last 9 months I have lived in the open air above market square and the open doors to rooms of 10 other people. Myself rest of the people in the Fellows program have lived Christian Knoxville Real World and there are great and wonderful thinks about that. Lets just talk about some of them: I love that the 402 girls keep a calendar of our life together via the magnet letters on the fridge. Icemaker? it said last week. Wine? this week. Such a challenge because there are only one of each letter but M and W are interchangable and either one sideways is E. Creativity, you see. I love our impromtu dance parties. I love that we have a roof to hang out on. I like that a few weeks ago on a regular Wednesday night Austin made a serious, thorough, exhaustive list of things he could possibly do that night and brought it upstairs to discuss it. I love that Jess has makes consisently excellent playlists and that at night we read each other tweets, texts from last night, quotes and, sometimes, I like a poem. "we have fun" jessica boyd. direct quote. But in the rhythm of these things I have learned about myself that sometimes I need less things. In the muddle of a lot of even good things, I get strung out and exhausted and distracted. I am an INFP, through and through, and sometimes I feel like I'm living in an extrovert's skin; And then I get tired, like I have been lately, in every single way, and feel it in my bones and know it when I yawn, I know it by how sick I get of my own attitude and the way it seems like my prayers hit the ceiling and bounce back to me or don't come up at all. Sometime last week I had prayed what Anne Lamott calls beggy prayers, just messy things. In a very small moment I gave a very small prayer where I probably prayer-whined a little about being tired, might have told God the bit about my bones and my yawn and might have said sorry about my 'tude and then I said, just please remind me what it looks like for you to answer a prayer. I might have forgotten. Just please give me Something. Amen. And as creative as he is and as oblivious as I am, he chose that Something to be big, broad side of a barn big, a whole weekend by myself BIG. This weekend is the National Fellows Conference in Washington DC. I have to work tomorrow night and I couldn't organize my life accordingly and I found myself to the proud owner of an exceedingly rare weekend of solitude and quiet. And as the jolly good fellows piled in yesterday morning, like little peas in a church van pod, I laid upstairs, still snoozing away. I woke up this morning to no sound, to no alarm, and the distinct feeling that I was doing something subversive. Imagine how McCauley Culkin felt in home alone. Enter, Kevin McCallister: "I took a shower washing every body part with actual soap; including all my major crevices; including in between my toes and in my belly button which I never did before but sort of enjoyed. I washed my hair with adult formula shampoo and used cream rinse for that just-washed shine. I can't seem to find my toothbrush, so I'll pick one up when I go out today. Other than that, I'm in good shape." Jump back to my life. Einstein said, there are only 2 ways to live life, One, as if everything was a miracle, and the other, as if nothing is. This weekend, my little given Sabbath, was a most unusual experience, it was the Something my bones and my heart needed: The quiet that was strange and lovely, steady like the rain that is falling right now, and everything seemed heightened, as if there were a bunch of small miracles. I decided earlier this week to embrace my little sabbath, I would make no plans, I would make no to-do lists to find freedom in my silly little weekend; I am, by nature, and anxious little creature, and sometimes silence gets all big and loud and its scary and in no way is it restful. This weekend though, was that not only my schedule mostly clear and my to-do list mostly ignored, my mind was quieted too. Miracle # 1. No small thing. So my weekend was plain, ordinary and free. I want to the gym and took a shower on account of that I needed one and that I like to hook my computer up to Jess's speakers and perform my covers of Coldplay and The Dirty Guvs while I get ready. And, also, because I had told Jess the night before, 'Listen, tomorrow is the day. I'm showering. No questions asked.' I like to keep my promises. So I perform my concert to rave reviews, pulled on the old jeans I stained last week gardening with Sam and my plain target grey t-shirt and went to a bookstore in the afternoon, as a customer. which I never get to do. As it turns out, bookstores are wonderful, relaxing, places to be with lots of things to read for free where no one talks to you or asks you questions and you don't have to clean up any messes. This discovery could only have been a miracle. So I took myself home after a while and layed on the roof with podcast of Krista Tippet interview Paul Eli, author of a book called The Life You Save May Be Your Own about the tradition of great Catholic Writers Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery OConner, and Walker Percy. Eli said that these writers had their lives and their faith "fired by literature", that they had an incredible openness to books as condiut for life. Eli wrote that each of the writers struggled against unbelief as much as they struggle with belief. As a young girl, Dorothy Day had stood in the midst of the San Francisco Earth quake and had watched people mobilize and help each other. She wrote that this made her believe that basically people must be good and created to love each other. That was natural to her, and war and strife were a deformity of that. But what we were made for is to love one another. She went on to live a wild life of a bohemian artist in New York. She seperated from her common law husband and was a found herself as a single mother. She had the baby baptized, and she herself converted to Catholicism and eventually began the Catholic Worker Movement with Peter Maurin in Chicago. While reading the 19th century authors, Dostovesky and Tolstoy, she wrote that she felt like her faith was unlike anyone else that she knew. Those books gave her a sense of the human race as one family, of the interdependence of people; she saw it in the books and knew this was true. In the epilogue to The Long Loneliness, she wrote, It all happened while we sat their talking, and its all still going on. Aint that how life is? Little altars everywhere. Last night I went to a lovely dinner with some rather unusual suspects. As a group we looked like a little mismatched china, charming, slightly strange and a perfect place setting for the evening, which we spent outside for a wine drinking, patio sitting sweet little night. All introverted pre-wine, post-wine we had a big ole time. I went to bed that night sweetly and thankful for all Einsteins little miracles. The next day I woke up to take a little run downtown and met the Rossini fest lining Gay Street. jewerly and music and funnel cakes oh my! I finished my run and talked to my brother for a long time sitting on the bench in Krutch park, right before the rain. I bought some jewelry which I am wearing right now. So I don't know what DC was like, or the car ride in which the guys allegedly spent thursday eating mexican and excess dairy to properly prepare to be road trip intestenal terrorists. With all the quiet of the third and fourth floor, going to a bookstore and not working in it, the rossini, the rain, the forgotten to do list (what list..?), all of this was just to say that I'd whispered up a prayer for Something and in these little things, God has given me what I asked him.
For the last 9 months I have lived in the open air above market square and the open doors to rooms of 10 other people. Myself rest of the people in the Fellows program have lived Christian Knoxville Real World and there are great and wonderful thinks about that. Lets just talk about some of them: I love that the 402 girls keep a calendar of our life together via the magnet letters on the fridge. Icemaker? it said last week. Wine? this week. Such a challenge because there are only one of each letter but M and W are interchangable and either one sideways is E. Creativity, you see. I love our impromtu dance parties. I love that we have a roof to hang out on. I like that a few weeks ago on a regular Wednesday night Austin made a serious, thorough, exhaustive list of things he could possibly do that night and brought it upstairs to discuss it. I love that Jess has makes consisently excellent playlists and that at night we read each other tweets, texts from last night, quotes and, sometimes, I like a poem. "we have fun" jessica boyd. direct quote. But in the rhythm of these things I have learned about myself that sometimes I need less things. In the muddle of a lot of even good things, I get strung out and exhausted and distracted. I am an INFP, through and through, and sometimes I feel like I'm living in an extrovert's skin; And then I get tired, like I have been lately, in every single way, and feel it in my bones and know it when I yawn, I know it by how sick I get of my own attitude and the way it seems like my prayers hit the ceiling and bounce back to me or don't come up at all. Sometime last week I had prayed what Anne Lamott calls beggy prayers, just messy things. In a very small moment I gave a very small prayer where I probably prayer-whined a little about being tired, might have told God the bit about my bones and my yawn and might have said sorry about my 'tude and then I said, just please remind me what it looks like for you to answer a prayer. I might have forgotten. Just please give me Something. Amen. And as creative as he is and as oblivious as I am, he chose that Something to be big, broad side of a barn big, a whole weekend by myself BIG. This weekend is the National Fellows Conference in Washington DC. I have to work tomorrow night and I couldn't organize my life accordingly and I found myself to the proud owner of an exceedingly rare weekend of solitude and quiet. And as the jolly good fellows piled in yesterday morning, like little peas in a church van pod, I laid upstairs, still snoozing away. I woke up this morning to no sound, to no alarm, and the distinct feeling that I was doing something subversive. Imagine how McCauley Culkin felt in home alone. Enter, Kevin McCallister: "I took a shower washing every body part with actual soap; including all my major crevices; including in between my toes and in my belly button which I never did before but sort of enjoyed. I washed my hair with adult formula shampoo and used cream rinse for that just-washed shine. I can't seem to find my toothbrush, so I'll pick one up when I go out today. Other than that, I'm in good shape." Jump back to my life. Einstein said, there are only 2 ways to live life, One, as if everything was a miracle, and the other, as if nothing is. This weekend, my little given Sabbath, was a most unusual experience, it was the Something my bones and my heart needed: The quiet that was strange and lovely, steady like the rain that is falling right now, and everything seemed heightened, as if there were a bunch of small miracles. I decided earlier this week to embrace my little sabbath, I would make no plans, I would make no to-do lists to find freedom in my silly little weekend; I am, by nature, and anxious little creature, and sometimes silence gets all big and loud and its scary and in no way is it restful. This weekend though, was that not only my schedule mostly clear and my to-do list mostly ignored, my mind was quieted too. Miracle # 1. No small thing. So my weekend was plain, ordinary and free. I want to the gym and took a shower on account of that I needed one and that I like to hook my computer up to Jess's speakers and perform my covers of Coldplay and The Dirty Guvs while I get ready. And, also, because I had told Jess the night before, 'Listen, tomorrow is the day. I'm showering. No questions asked.' I like to keep my promises. So I perform my concert to rave reviews, pulled on the old jeans I stained last week gardening with Sam and my plain target grey t-shirt and went to a bookstore in the afternoon, as a customer. which I never get to do. As it turns out, bookstores are wonderful, relaxing, places to be with lots of things to read for free where no one talks to you or asks you questions and you don't have to clean up any messes. This discovery could only have been a miracle. So I took myself home after a while and layed on the roof with podcast of Krista Tippet interview Paul Eli, author of a book called The Life You Save May Be Your Own about the tradition of great Catholic Writers Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery OConner, and Walker Percy. Eli said that these writers had their lives and their faith "fired by literature", that they had an incredible openness to books as condiut for life. Eli wrote that each of the writers struggled against unbelief as much as they struggle with belief. As a young girl, Dorothy Day had stood in the midst of the San Francisco Earth quake and had watched people mobilize and help each other. She wrote that this made her believe that basically people must be good and created to love each other. That was natural to her, and war and strife were a deformity of that. But what we were made for is to love one another. She went on to live a wild life of a bohemian artist in New York. She seperated from her common law husband and was a found herself as a single mother. She had the baby baptized, and she herself converted to Catholicism and eventually began the Catholic Worker Movement with Peter Maurin in Chicago. While reading the 19th century authors, Dostovesky and Tolstoy, she wrote that she felt like her faith was unlike anyone else that she knew. Those books gave her a sense of the human race as one family, of the interdependence of people; she saw it in the books and knew this was true. In the epilogue to The Long Loneliness, she wrote, It all happened while we sat their talking, and its all still going on. Aint that how life is? Little altars everywhere. Last night I went to a lovely dinner with some rather unusual suspects. As a group we looked like a little mismatched china, charming, slightly strange and a perfect place setting for the evening, which we spent outside for a wine drinking, patio sitting sweet little night. All introverted pre-wine, post-wine we had a big ole time. I went to bed that night sweetly and thankful for all Einsteins little miracles. The next day I woke up to take a little run downtown and met the Rossini fest lining Gay Street. jewerly and music and funnel cakes oh my! I finished my run and talked to my brother for a long time sitting on the bench in Krutch park, right before the rain. I bought some jewelry which I am wearing right now. So I don't know what DC was like, or the car ride in which the guys allegedly spent thursday eating mexican and excess dairy to properly prepare to be road trip intestenal terrorists. With all the quiet of the third and fourth floor, going to a bookstore and not working in it, the rossini, the rain, the forgotten to do list (what list..?), all of this was just to say that I'd whispered up a prayer for Something and in these little things, God has given me what I asked him.
Monday, April 19, 2010
poetry monday
today is poetry monday.
this has been posted before but I kept thinking of it today. Good start to the week and to Poetry Mondays. Go ahead, Madeleine.
I hate you, God.
Love, Madeleine.
I write my messages on water
and at bedtime I tiptoe upstairs
and let them flow underneath your door.
When I am angry with you
I know that you are there
even if you do not answer knock
even when your butler opens the door an inch
and flaps his thousand wings in annoyance
at such an untoward interruption and says the master is not at home.
I love you, Madeleine
Hate, God.
(This is how I treat my friends, he said to one great saint.
No wonder you have so few of them, Lord, she replied.)
I cannot turn the other cheek.
It takes all the strength I have to keep my fists from hitting back.
The soldier shot the baby
the little boys trample the old woman
The gutters are filled with groans
While pleasure seekers knock each other down
I'm turning in my ticket
and my letter of introduction.
You're supposed to do the knocking. Why do you burst my heart?
How can I write you to tell that I'm angry
when I’ve been given the wrong address
And I don’t even know your real name?
I take hammer and nails and tack my message on two crossed scraps of wood:
Dear God, Is it too much to ask you to bother to be?
Just show your hindquarters
and let me hear you
roar.
Love, Madeleine.
"love letter" Madeleine L'engle.
this has been posted before but I kept thinking of it today. Good start to the week and to Poetry Mondays. Go ahead, Madeleine.
I hate you, God.
Love, Madeleine.
I write my messages on water
and at bedtime I tiptoe upstairs
and let them flow underneath your door.
When I am angry with you
I know that you are there
even if you do not answer knock
even when your butler opens the door an inch
and flaps his thousand wings in annoyance
at such an untoward interruption and says the master is not at home.
I love you, Madeleine
Hate, God.
(This is how I treat my friends, he said to one great saint.
No wonder you have so few of them, Lord, she replied.)
I cannot turn the other cheek.
It takes all the strength I have to keep my fists from hitting back.
The soldier shot the baby
the little boys trample the old woman
The gutters are filled with groans
While pleasure seekers knock each other down
I'm turning in my ticket
and my letter of introduction.
You're supposed to do the knocking. Why do you burst my heart?
How can I write you to tell that I'm angry
when I’ve been given the wrong address
And I don’t even know your real name?
I take hammer and nails and tack my message on two crossed scraps of wood:
Dear God, Is it too much to ask you to bother to be?
Just show your hindquarters
and let me hear you
roar.
Love, Madeleine.
"love letter" Madeleine L'engle.
Friday, April 2, 2010
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)