First Rain

"In the words of Terry Pratchett - Leopards don't change their shorts."


Bah, life is good!


Good life holler to all kindred spirits out there :)

We Become our Choices

'When will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.'

When indeed?


Rebus


By
Jane Hirshfield


You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.


Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.


This rebus - slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life -
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.


As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.


The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.


How can I enter this question the clay has asked?


(Rebus -- "A representation of words in the form of pictures or symbols, often presented as a puzzle.")

Via Asha's blog

A Sofa in a Room

The second coming is indeed at hand.
I watched the moon flicker blue behind thin twilight clouds in the city of thousand thoughts.
I drove by a woman unsteadily cradling a bouquet of fragrant flowers - on a street corner with no takers.
I wandered the streets in search for a sofa, a sofa in a room, a room in a clutter, a clutter called home.
I met myself, at every corner, from years past and years thence, shuddering off the spiders of moldy memories.
I watched machines doing mechanical things in robotic repetition; boys stealing kisses; men mauling mistresses; women pecking men - all masquerading meaning.
I saw raindrops marching in yellow reichs on shriveled flowers of christmas-lit silver oaks.
I reached out and found myself again, in a gentle smile across the table; in locks of blonde hair in a faraway land; in a pair of soft brown eyes at the breadth of a breath.
I grew my nails long and they stretched out farther, divorcing my fingertips.
I thought and thought, wave upon rising wave, on the night the moon was largest.
I crashed on my rocky shores and crumbled to sand.


Through long labor, I delivered myself, heaving a fresh sigh in this strange old world.


Jun 27th, 2012.

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted

...You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

~ John O’Donohue

We owe so much to certain people, of those - the greatest are the ones that offer us healing. And that such people exist, are allowed to exist...brings faith. There is something to love on for, yet.

Who Deserves What

“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

We die when we can, not when we should

From One Hundred Years of Solitude

“'What does he say?' he asked.
'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.'
'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

"We don't die easy,

We're slow

lazy even here

at dying."

~ We Don't Die Easy


http://m-sirius-shams.blogspot.com/2008/08/we-dont-die-easy.html

Even if you are dying of fear

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

“Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.”

“sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love”

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.” 

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez


Don't let love walk by, not when you see it, for fear.

Growing a Garden

Rukhiya emailed me this peace today. It speaks to me of grace, the grace of a woman...and integrity and self worth. Many of these walk my mind nowadays. Between waiting and seeking for answers, I have but one usurper of norms, one disturber of peace ~ hope. It barges into my world like the Tasmanian devil, displacing everything. Poking at little tucked in dreams, growing red wings for large chained ones. Hope I must lose and then I may finally - rest in peace.






'After awhile you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul.
And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
And company doesn't mean security.
And you begin to understand that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head held high and your eyes wide open.
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child.
You learn to build your roads
On today because tomorrow's ground
Is too uncertain for plans, and futures have
A way of falling down in midflight.
After awhile you learn that even sunshine
Burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate
Your own soul, instead of waiting
For someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure,
That you really are strong.
And you really do have worth.
And you learn and learn...and you learn
With every goodbye you learn'




~ Veronica A. Shoffstall

Call me, maybe?

"When I go mad,
I call my friends by phone:
I am afraid they might think
They're alone."

 ~ Theodore Roethke

The year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway

What surprises me about certain prose is the poetic charm it holds. Like a slender, gently spiraling vase, holding a singular long-necked white rose. Grace, may I call it?

Grace

BY Joy Harjo


I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.

The Listeners

BY WALTER DE LA MARE

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Let me be a Bird

Suddenly very grateful to life for the privilege of being able to have fine teas, listening to BBC radio (Honest Doubt). Sitting outside my own body on the road, hypothetically selling hair clips, I am watching myself through chinks of the draped window.... And am envious.


Let me be a Bird


Many gardens, we love like needy lovers
Entering
to pluck fruit
drink off a stream
snip long-stemmed roses.


Some gardens, we nourish like mothers
Bringing
water in urns
to parched grasses
planting pale purple irises.


Rarely, we watch over like birds
Picking
dead leaves
to build houses
Twit at strangers
Guarding the fruit
Kissing flowers - giving and taking.


I choose to be a bird,
Small, swift, full of song
Pollinating
Tilling the soil
Sewing long leaves to live in.


June 22nd, 2012.