Poetry drop! Gwen, Ada & David
Gwen with her shruti box
Hey loves,
I recently listened to a wonderful conversation between Krista Tippet and Ada Limón, the US poet laureate. I fell in love with her words and decided it was high time I did a poetry drop for you guys. Many of you know that I am a big fan of Gwendolyn Ren and she leads a module on the Samāveśa 250hr called Deep Rest and Poetry as Meditation. I often share excerpts from her epic narrative poem, Motherlands and, as I have recently shared the full poem with some of my Portuguese retreat family, I thought I would also share some Gwen with you today. Here is an excerpt ...
This presence is a portal, and I place attention equally to everything and to nothing at all. True to this moment and the act of listening - I crack it open, step into the spaciousness of what happens in between.
And in their own way, earth and web find their language, too, find their song on the wings of tiny insects,
Every little thing,
A voice
Of nature.
They tell me:
Only that which can be received
Can be nourishing
And only that which can be integrated
Bestows wisdom
And I go about the process of figuring out the practice of tucking things away and then retrieving them again.
I take a vow of my humanhood and
I find myself on a pilgrimage to feel deeply in love with being alive. Deeply in love with being human. I want to believe that it’s possible, and I become a keeper of remarkable dreams.
I tend to myself moment to moment -
Keep starting there.
The art of altars
Gwen is a Reiki healer, an artist, a poet, a muse, a placer of sacred objects, a curator of space, an open channel for and a distant close friend. She has free meditations and you can find the full audio version of Motherlands linked through her website.
And here is 'Dead Stars' from the incisive and witty Ada Limón
Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.
And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
Yorkshire lad, David Whyte
And finally, one of my favourite poems of all time (besides anything written by Rilke), Everything is Waiting For You by David Whyte.
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.