Stuff goes into the writer, a whole lot of stuff, not notes in a notebook but everything seen and heard and felt all day every day, a lot of garbage, leftovers, dead leaves, eyes of potatoes, artichoke stems, forests, streets, rooms in slums, mountain ranges, voices, screams, dreams, whispers, smells, blows, eyes, gaits, gestures, the touch of a hand, a whistle in the night, the slant of light in the wall of a child’s room, a fin in a waste of waters. All this stuff goes down into the [writer’s] personal composte bin, where it combines, recombines, changes; gets dark, mulchy, fertile, turns into ground. A seed falls into it, the ground nourishes the seed with the richness that went into it, and something grows. But what grows isn’t an artichoke stem and a potato eye and a gesture. It’s a new thing, a new whole. It’s made up. Ursula K LeGuin
1.
Early in the morning and I couldn’t sleep. The heat was exquisite, my body bathed in desert sun. The birds were refuge, their songs reaching into some deep part of me, calling me here, welcoming me home. Telling me I am a singer just like them. My voice necessary.
2.
My poems are written for my own arc of loving, their rhythmic plotlines are power journeys toward healing. Understanding how we are all in this together. So much we offer each other in the telling and retelling.
In the journal, there is lots of room to make it up. To tell it this way and that. Carvings from the stone of our stories, beliefs and limited vision. Learning to not take it all personally, nor permanently written. Opening to uncertainty of outcome. All our words are transformation.
3.
Language is powerful. Telling our lives with creative and compassionate awareness. Compassion comes when we realize that we are living as best we can inside the stories that are always unfolding, always incomplete, always imperfect.
We are so much more than what we know or see, so much more than these bodies, these clothes, these sold-to-us definitions of woman man beauty guru. We are so much more and these words remind us that…
4.
A client who is no longer a client, is now a friend. A process of transition, separation, reconnection. I help them until they don’t need me. Like the birds found on the deck or in the grass, recovered and held in loving attention until they are ready to fly again.
5.
There is music here, in a poem that places its fingers on aha and says this is where I see you in myself, where reflection reflects and whistling wrens raise awareness. In the unperturbable presence of love.
6.
I am here on the page to love, like Helene Cixous who wrote the words of the title to this blogpost. That’s the truth. As I keep telling the next story, the new story, another story, I see that they are all interminable and impermanennt and interdependent. Moving forward with devotion to the moment and what is arising. Leaning into compassion and reverence for what is as it is changing. Transformation happens, at the tip of this pen.
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