A Poem by May Sarton

 

                                               "There is time and Time is young."

i have been thinking of this poem, as the Summer Solstice again approaches.  It seems perfect, somehow, for who I am now, in my 7th decade, and all my friends who also are in their 7th decades, and for the fullness and ripeness of the Solstice, and for the Great Mandala of the glorious planet we live upon, more appropriately, live within and the Great Mandalas of our lives within that Greater Circle.  

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
‘Hurry, you will be dead before-’

(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)

Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.

All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.

Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

May Sarton

                         

My Interview on LITTLE GIFTS Podcast

"A Mask for Talking to the Ancestors" (2024)

 Very pleased with this conversation I had in LITTLE GIFTS Podcast in May, with the wonderful grandmother and granddaughter team of the extraordinary artist Sue Ellen Parkinson and her amazing granddaughter Savannah Wonderwheel.

We talked about, well, what I mostly talk about: the Goddess, masks, magic, and healing in a difficult world. And I love that the conversation spans generations! Thank you to both of them!

 https://open.spotify.com/episode/2J1rqRrdqoGptj7PwjzOag

"A Mask for Shattering Old Paradigms" (2024)

"A Mask for the Crossing of Dimensions" (2022)

"A Mask for Chaos and Order" (2024)

Sherry Glaser takes on Gaia

 I've posted this before, but this brilliant comedic voice never grows old, nor especially does the message she makes.  Sherry Glaser lets Gaia tell it like it is: 

https://youtu.be/xkztSqqBSO4?si=84P-UtYB6gNuh2o_

A Blessing by Mary Oliver

Photo by Theresa Barney

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

~Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses

 

          

                   Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
                   Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
                   is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

                   ............ Mary Oliver

Persephone

                                                My audio poem Persephone's Feast Day 

was presented at Kathy Keler's Carport Theatre recently, put to the extraordinary  music of Metisse (the piece is from their album Nomah's Land)  

I was pleased to share this poem, which has a lot of meaning for me.  Persephone is the Goddess of the turning wheel of planetary life;  for she is both the Spring Maiden who brings the rebirth of the world at the spring equinox, and she is also the fearsome Queen of Death, who rules for part of the year in the underworld with Hades.  She is the ever changing Goddess of liminality.  

 https://soundcloud.com/user-972033003/persephones-feast-day

The Ghosts of Mendocino

 

There are seamless  moments that reveal

a pulse

rolling down 47th street, or the freeway

a pulse, not apart perhaps

from a white capped wave that just

broke on a summer shoreline in Mendocino

and now ripples a white farewell to Africa.

I want to tell someone (who will believe me?)

that if I lift this foot

a spiral galaxy

will spill like cream

across the fine dark pavement of eternity.

(1989) from "A House of Doors - Open Poems"

Saying Hello to Mother Ocean

The Way I Think It Really Is......

 The green plants

         magically
from water      air
the soil
from water      earth
    air
earth        water
air            light
earth and sunlight

sunlight
vibrating waves
        shimmering
grasses in the sun

........Felicia Miller*

Saying Farewell 

Pink Ladies say "Hello"

 "Then what is the answer?— Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times.
To keep one’s own integrity, 
and not wish for evil and not be duped
by dreams of universal justice or happiness.
Those dreams will not be fulfilled.
To know this, and yet know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. 

Integrity is wholeness, beauty is
Organic wholeness

Love that, not man apart from that"

Not Man Apart - Robinson Jeffers

 

*My friend Felicia passed away in 2010 - she was a mermaid never entirely easy on land.  Robinson Jeffers spent much of his life wandering the Big Sur coastline of California.  I always think of them both when I visit the coast, feeling perhaps their spirits leaving footprints in the sand still. 

Respecting that darn Yellow Dog

 .

"Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans"   Allen Saunders

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“The truth is all of life is a grand, blooming ambiguity"

James Hollis: WHAT MATTERS MOST: Living a More Considered Life

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"Coyote is an anarchist. She can confuse all civilized ideas simply by trotting through. And she always fools the pompous. Just when your ideas begin to get all nicely arranged and squared off, she messes them up. Things are never going to be neat, that's one thing you can count on.   Coyote walks through all our minds. Obviously, we need a trickster, a creator who made the world all wrong. We need the idea of a God who makes mistakes, gets into trouble, and who is identified with a scruffy little animal."

Ursula Leguin, "Coming Back From the Silence"

                                                                       🐺

I do think Ursula Leguin has it entirely right.  A great deal, if not most, of the human experience has to do with the human hubris (I  do like that word, which rhymes with nothing I can think of) that makes us think we can somehow "control" things.  Actually, all the things that mostly count it seems to me we can't "control".  Rather, the Gods or Goddesses or Fates or perhaps most of all Coyote/Trickster enjoy creating the necessary chaos of uncertainty.  

Yellow Dog

 

Coyote howls a midnight serenade

to the desert tonight,

Her chorus answers, noisy as all hell. 

She brays down a tale about the frayed moon,

a prairie dog’s misfortune,

old dancing bones,

and all my carefully conceived plans.

 

Coyote is running tonight

between the splintered shutters

of my house of doors,

laughing through every tattered crevice

in all my certainties.

 

That yellow dog

Is a real pain

 

(1996)

 

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent,

intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Ursula Leguin