Life is too short

Life is too short for advertisements.
Get back to the story. Will she find the person
who dropped the message? Will she keep her job?
Is the man in the mirror her true love? And which road will she take—
the one through narrow streets of the village leading her to a surprise
or the wide and fast highway?

Life is too short for long phone calls with someone
whose purpose is to hear himself talk. Commune
over a leisurely lunch or linger over dessert.
Life is too short to rush through meals, too short
to depend on wheels, too short not to take the meandering
path through woods, stroll along the beach,
pause and feel the wind in your hair.

Life is too short for memories. Write them down, pass
them around, repeat the details of an evening’s festivities
with laughter. Life is too short for tears. Soak hankies to
throw into the washer, bend over a flower and add to the music of
a river. Fill up a chalice on the altar. Sprinkle them over the cuts
and burns as needed. Give them away.

Heal the Earth: a celebration with poetry and music

Heal the Earth
a celebration in poetry, music and dance

of our connection with Mother Earth
with musical interludes by Eunice Collette,
a blessing by healing facilitators

Chrisma McIntyre and Kristin Burich,
and poets Wendy Brown-Baez, Nancy E. Cox,

Didi Koka, Nicole Lynskey, Margareth Miller,

LouAnn Shepard Muhm, and Zilla Way
featuring original artwork by Laurie Langer

and a dance by Amy Sabrina

Saturday Oct 9 @ 3:00 pm
St Paul Central Library
90 West 4th at St. Paul, MN 55005

A Plea

Today I am thinking about the violence in my neighborhood. I am remembering the young 17 year old girl who was shot coming out of a party one block away. After she died, during the prayer walk, her sisters begged that the violence stop, that there be no retaliation. I am thinking about the recent question asked on my list serve of women poets about myths where a woman attacks another woman. I am thinking about the article that I read in the City Pages about the girl gangs: the Ladiis and the Baddest. I am thinking about the dog my room-mate just got for protection because one of our neighbors had his home broken into in the daytime, while he was at home. And I am thinking about the dreams I once had as a young woman of Peace and Love, to unite us all in brotherhood, recognition that we all share the planet.

Feminism? It has not filtered down to my neighborhood. Poetry? The kids walk along the street repeating rap and hiphop lyrics to themselves, ready to burst into cussing and screaming at the least provocation.

But I can’t sit still and watch the chaos around me without doing something. So I go down to my local library and volunteer to teach a writing workshop. I call my workshops Writing Circles for Healing: words to light the way because it is something I know. I have experienced the violence of losing my partner and my son to suicide and the shock, despair, anger and guilt this has put me through was assuaged by prayerful patience, by the love and support of friends, by dark hours of shaking a fist at God, by putting myself into challenging situations where I didn’t speak the language and knew almost no one, by loving and surrendering my expectation, and by writing down my words: poems, stories, memoir, essays, and then acting them out and sharing them. And by holding the space for others to be vulnerable and to dip into the deep well of their pain, their memories, their losses and their passions.

So. I have to be trained as a volunteer, I have to go through an orientation, we have to see who will come and sign up for creative writing. But I will be there. Ready for whomever shows up. Ready to walk through my neighborhood with a notebook in my bag and a smile. Maybe, just maybe, the light will shine and get us through these times to something that resembles my first dream of peace and love. Maybe I can convince the girls to be powerful with hope and openness and courage to speak their truth as much as with fists and weapons. Maybe we can start a revolution to take back our homes and to feel part of the neighborhood instead feeling that we are at war.

writing in a group

A few week-ends ago I led a writing workshop as part of Celebrate Yourself week-end women's retreat. The Saturday workshop was a writing circle for healing and Sunday's I call Spiritual Tune Up. The process of writing circles is simple: we read a poem, write spontaneously, then read what we have written without critiquing. All comments must consist of positive feed-back. The purpose of this is to quiet the left brain critic who tells us we can't write or that we're not good enough or what will the others think? The Judge, the Critic, or the child who was criticized for her creativity, this part of ourselves that watches us without tolerance or amusement at our efforts, not to mention never praises us for taking a risk, is calmed. Reading what we have written aloud is a risk; we feel vulnerable and sensitive and courageous. I acknowledge that.

Sunday's workshop starts with a meditation and uses poems with a spiritual slant to inspire us.

I have learned through the years of leading workshops to trust the process. Natalie Goldberg says go for what is rich with emotion, go for what you feel reluctant to say, go for the material that is hardest to write. Sometimes what we begin with: an image, a memory, a feeling, is not at all where we end up.

This week-end, someone thoughtfully brought along a box of kleenex, because as we opened our hearts, we needed it. There were losses and griefs that were heart-wrenching, there were stories of self-denial and fears of not being enough, not being held as precious and beloved. And as well, as I used prompts that focused on our blessings and our passions, there was laughter and remembrance of our innate worthiness. We honored our wholeness within our pain and brokenness.

Remembering is important for me, too. One line came into my head as I wrote: What would it be like to look up to myself?

I know the stories we are compelled to share are sometimes the ones we don't feel safe enough to share. How many of us have taken a writing workshop only to feel ripped to shreds by a critique that ignores the hard work we did to capture our deepest longings, our deepest despair, our deepest truth, the rent in the fabric of our daily lives that can lead to transformation and transcendence if we follow the frayed thread and not give up too soon?

It was a blessing for me to be in the circle, a circle that becomes sacred time and space as we articulate in our fumbling words, in our genius words, who we are and what has happened to us. The shortest bridge between two people is a story and I listen to yours and hold it close to me.

Venus in pink

…………skies, flutter of
a silk dress on the line, the last
drops pooling on the tile for a second
before disappearing, scorched.

You wonder how it can be so hot
this early, the washing hung before the sun
can bleach it. Later, you watch the girls
on the beach saunter by

(That’s a bikini? you think, trying
not be envious of their smooth
curves, the strut, the tan
that you once upon a time

never needed. You were blond, unplucked,
a ripening strawberry hidden among the
green, a rose blooming on the stem.
The bold canter of your heart, wild dances in

moonlight.) Today, in silence, hands raw from
wringing, you follow the flight of the heron
sailing up the river at sunrise. You still
wear pink, but silk and with a slip.

Union

Union brings us home
to the one we have loved
in the reverence of our heart

Union is where love looks
through the reflection in my eyes
to see the within
as crystalline purity
and absolute wonder

Oh my brother my lover my friend
your love awakens my angelhood
is it God I am seeing
or God’s vision of me I am becoming?

(hush, He is so close now
as near as my heartbeat
pressed against yours)

Union give us the possibility
of eternity
all in an instant
the yearning depends
the searching is completed
the fulfillment finds meaning
and the Book of Life falls open
to the page which we have written.

Lovers

I want to touch you like tender rain
I want to run my fingers through your hair
like a breeze, like a whisper
and melt you with heated kisses
I want to pick the cherries from your boughs
and lay them in my fine woven basket
I want to bury myself in your golden nectar
the way bees enter flowers, come out sticky and drunk with pollen
I want to entwine around you like a morning glory
brilliantly awake to the world
I want to dance together as butterflies do
intricately measuring the air
I want to be covered by you the way
dandelions take over the lawn