The Journey...

I have been thinking a lot lately about the journey that we take to get from one point to another.  It is not linear, and I had thought myself a linear-type of person.  It is not about the destination or the product, and I had always thought that I was a destination type of gal too.  What I am seeing about motherhood, daughterhood, sisterhood, personhood is that there is so much to be learned at each step... if I will just let myself slow down and figure it out.  There is so much to be seen, and taken in if I will just remember that "it is supposed to be fun." There is also fellowship and enough room for all of us, if only I remember that our journeys take different paths at times.

I am still working on the things that need to be culled and purged from this path I am on now.  I am feeling the sweetness of carrying around less (20+lbs thanks goodness), but also that illuminates other things that were formerly precious and that I can be rid of.  I feel keenly that I need to get on with being myself, but that there is a process to it that can't be rushed.

There is anticipation, dreaminess,  and nervous optimism for the future.

I am busy Dreaming Bigger.
Nice to see you here.

JMB

Guest house

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're 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

--I don't think that it was this poem I found while cleaning my mom's house... but my mom loved Rumi's poetry and this fits her so well.  What a Woman!  I am so grateful be her daughter.

JMB

On the beach at night alone...

On the beach at night alone,

As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,

As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

 

A vast similitude interlocks all,

All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,

All distances of place however wide,

All distances of time, all inanimate forms,

All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,

All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,

All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,

All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,

All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,

This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd,

And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

-Walt Whitman

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Sleepy Friends?!

Hi all--

Why have I been posting poetry?!

There are animals in my studio!!  They have now made their way over to Fat Quarterly!  Maybe I can finally get some work done!!

(Issue 9 of Fat Quarterly is available here on MONDAY April 30!! You can also make the plunge and get a subscription-- I do not think you will be sorry.  This ezine is always bursting with awesome content and the staff are great people to swap with-- and there are great sponsor deals too!)

If you want to chat, I am busy cleaning up my most recent mess-- learning the "ins and outs" of twitter (@craftypickle -- YO!) printing some COOL stuff, digging the weeds out while the sun shines, and basically embracing the crazy around here.  Times they are a changing!!

-JMB

Enough

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
Until now

-David Whyte

The Summer Day

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