-- Joanne SunshowerMay the turning of the Earth save us.
May the turning of the seasons & the turning of the leaves save us.
May we be saved by the worms, the beetles & the microbes turning the soil.
May we be saved by the turning of vegetation into compost
& the turning of compost into rich soil.
May the turning of seeds into plants & the turning of flowers
into fruits save us.
May the grasses & weeds, the vines & mosses all conspire to save us.
May we be saved by the turning of sprouts into saplings, of saplings into trees,
& the trees into forests.
May the scurrying, foraging, pouncing & lumbering of the animals save us.
May the breath of heaven in the breezes & the stormy winds save us.
May the dance of the butterflies, & the musical flight & return
of the birds save us.
May we be saved by vapors turning into clouds & by the turning of
the ever-changing clouds into rain.
May the waters flowing from springs into the lakes save us.
May the streams flowing into rivers, the rivers into seas,
& the great heaving of the oceans save us.
May we be saved by the patient turning of the rocks, the hills,
the mountains, & the volcanoes.
May the metabolism of the climates of the Earth save us.
May the turnings of all Beings great & small move us to find wisdom in our own turnings.
May we be saved by our waking & sleeping, by the rhythms of our blood
& our appetites, by the cycles of birthing & nurturing, injury & healing,
mating & nesting, loss & discovery, joy & mourning.
May we find in time the grace to turn to one another, & may this turning
also become our salvation.
May we learn to benefit the life of Earth with peace, humble in our needs,
& generous in our giving.
May we learn to celebrate the abundance of life with gratitude, & to embrace
the Earth with our bodies in return.
Bref Double en Avion1 Reasons to follow the heart
are many and various: my heart's fist
is fragile and demanding, full of longing
to find the center, like any artist.
The throbbing organ forgets about needing
the good and daily, and jumping up and down
flaps its chambers to a haunting song--
the loveliest song, it swears, it has ever known.
Its pure joy is the most seductive of all
as, dressed in luminous clothes, it heads to town.
My heart wakes up my mind, whose spacious hall
is empty except for just one glittering word--
the perfect word to describe that glorious fall:
love plunging through space. Verses overheard
play in the drum-organ's ear and its pulse of a smile
grows wide dancing to the absurd.
2 Reasons not to follow the heart
are many and various: my heart is fragile
and demanding, full of longing still
and quick to bruise or find everything futile
It leaves the good and daily out on the sill
and cracks the brittle window of what is dear,
blinding itself through stubborn force of will
to what might stay and what might disappear.
This heart's a whiner, moaner, carry-on-er,
wandering through storms like a weary Lear;
it steals peace of mind and thumbs its nose at honor
and when it's called on its unreliable ways
it wails and falls about like a prima donna.
Seductive it's true, my heart can sometimes amaze
with its acrobatic leaps and its silver tongue,
but beware the stroboscope of its flashy gaze.
In dreams I fly between great chunks of brick--
office buildings with thousands of windows that glint
as my jumbo jet looks for a way to go,
wingtips just missing drainpipe and window washer.
Sometimes, though, it's a narrow forest road.
On each side hemlock and spruce stands tall and thick;
the plane drops low, then revs and lifts its nose,
rattling between the trees like a young kingfisher.
No dream, I'm wide awake at San Diego--
coming in to land en route to Baja.
I've eaten the pretzels, am sucking on a mint
when I glance out the window. Heart drops. Vertigo.
Skyscrapers far too close--a magic trick?
I see people working. I dreamed them two days ago.
http://www.mezzocammin.com/iambic.php?vol=2014&iss=1&cat=poetry&page=barringtonJudith Barrington has published three poetry collections, most recently Horses and the Human Soul and two chapbooks: Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). She was the winner of the 2012 Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize (Cork International Poetry Festival), and her memoir, Lifesaving won the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She has been on the faculty of the MFA program at the University of Alaska, and teaches classes and workshops in the USA, England and The Almassera, Spain: www.judithbarrington.com
In the Heart Sutra of the Prajna Paramita tradition, one of Buddhism’s most renowned teachings, the great bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara says to Shariputra:
Jennifer WelwoodForm is emptiness;
Emptiness itself is form;
Emptiness is no other than form;
Form is no other than emptiness.
Jennifer Welwood, MA, MFT, has been a spiritual practitioner since 1970, and a psychotherapist since 1987 (currently inactive). She received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Stanford University, and her graduate degree from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Jennifer’s first spiritual tradition was Kriya Yoga, a path of nondual tantric Shaivism in the lineage of Babaji Nagaraj and the 18 Tamil Yoga Siddhas. Her primary tradition since 1986 has been Vajrayana, or tantric Buddhism, and her teachers include Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Lama Tharchin Rinpoche, and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. She also feels a deep affinity with the evolutionary perspective of Sri Aurobindo, and with the esoteric heart of all traditions.
Jennifer was propelled onto the spiritual path at the age of 15 by the sudden and unexpected death of a close friend, which catalyzed a profound recognition of impermanence and a yearning for that which cannot be lost. She became a psychotherapist after repeatedly experiencing, in both teachers and students, a lack of integration that often seemed to accompany even genuine spiritual development, and the harm that such lack of integration could cause.
Her life purpose since then has been to bring together psychological and spiritual work in the service of realizing and embodying our essential nature––finding our intrinsic nature while unwinding our conditioned patterning––and she has been leading retreats, seminars, and ongoing groups dedicated to this work since 1988.
Opening to my loss,
Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
I gain the embrace of the universe;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.
Each condition I flee from pursues me,
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed
Into its radiant jewel-like essence.
I bow to the one who has made it so,
Who has crafted this Master Game;
To play it is purest delight;
To honor it’s form – true devotion.
Tonight, Pluto, with the crescent moon as my witness,
I welcome you as my lover.
If you have come to break down my door,
See, I have opened it,
And wait here for you at its threshold.
If you have come to tear off my clothes,
I have flung them aside already,
And stand naked, shivering gladly.
If you have come to hurl me into the abyss,
Watch now, as I release all false supports, one by one,
And fall toward you in ecstasy.
Hear this, Pluto, lord of transformative fire:
What you have come to take from me, I offer you.
Jennifer WelwoodThere is a great fire that longs to burn you —
Don’t let fear imagine a separation.
It is only yourself, burning for the truth,
The truth burning for itself.
Knowing this, give yourself, without reservation:
In ecstasy the fire burns.
"When a woman feels alone, the room
is full of daemons,” the Nootka tribe
Tells us, ‘The Old Woman will be there.”
She has come to me over three thousand miles
And what does she have to tell me, troubled
“by phantoms in the night”?
Is she really here?
What is the saving word from so deep in the past.
From as deep as the ancient root of the redwood,
From as deep as the primal bed of the ocean,
From as deep as a woman’s heart sprung open
Again through a hard birth or a hard death?
Here under the shock of love, I am open
To you, Primal spirit, one with rock and wave,
One with survivors of flood and fire,
Who have rebuilt their homes a million times,
Who have lost their children and borne them again.
The words I hear are strength, laughter, endurance.
Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself.
There in the rootbed of fertility,
World without end, as the legend tells it.
Under the words you are my silence.
On the ashes of this nest
Love wove with deathly fire
The phoenix takes its rest
Forgetting all desire.
After the flame, a pause,
After the pain, rebirth.
Obeying nature’s laws
The phoenix goes to earth.
You cannot call it old
You cannot call it young.
No phoenix can be told,
This is the end of the song.
It struggles now alone
Against death and self-doubt,
But underneath the bone
The wings are pushing out.
And one cold starry night
Whatever your belief
The phoenix will take flight
Over the seas of grief
To sing her thrilling song
To stars and waves and sky
For neither old nor young
The phoenix does not die.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/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!
 |
| Photo Credit: Lotte Javobi |
Smt. Thimmakka from the state of Karnataka, India, is noted for her work in planting and tending to 284 banyan trees along a four-kilometre stretch of highway.
She received no formal education and worked as a casual labourer in a nearby quarry. Her husband was a cattle herder.
The couple used to carry four pails of water for a distance of four kilometres to water the saplings. They were also protected from grazing cattle by fencing them with thorny shrubs.
She has been given the name "Saalumarada" which means Line of trees in Kannada language.
Her work has been honoured with many awards including the National Citizen's Award of India.
I read this on Google Plus earlier today. As I read and learn more and more of the ongoing cruelty and horror in this world, I am both heartened and gratified to know about this gentle woman and what she has accomplished.A U.S. environmental organisation based in Los Angeles and Oakland, California called Thimmakka's Resources for Environmental Education is named after her.
What were the conditions in which women lived [during the Elizabethan era], I asked myself; for fiction [...] is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. (3.2)
“Virginia Woolf was a writer’s writer. For as many moments of artistic despair as there are, one also finds glimmers of hope, of faith in the process. In 1933, she wrote, “I must not let myself believe that I’m simply a ladylike prattler: […] No, I must say to myself, this is a mere wisp, a veil of water; and so create, hardly, fiercely, as I feel now more able to do than ever before.” In 1934, she spoke directly to those of us who would come after her: “A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down – and Lord knows the truth.””
from On Reading Virginia Woolf’s Diary by Dana Staves (via bookriot)
Read Zadie Smith’s new story “Big Week,” available, for free, through the summer.“The shadow life. He saw it everywhere—it was a kind of second sight—but what use was it? He looked back at his passenger, her face anxious, turned away. Her window misted, a single cloud. What could she possibly see?”
Fatimatou Djara is one of over 100,000 people who have arrived in Cameroon this year, fleeing the vicious bloodletting in the Central African Republic. She and her three children receive food from WFP every month. In this interview, she explains some of the changes that life as a refugee brings.
* * *
What would you say to anyone reading about you? We all used to live together in CAR, Muslims and Christians. There was no problem. Now we’re all fighting each other. It’s stupid. Now people like us have had to leave everything behind. And come here, where we have to start all over again. War is bad. People should be able to live together.
FEMNET @FemnetProg
Three months and counting since our sisters were stolen.
Now! No more excuses.
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/29/lesbian_marriage_in_early_america/Vermont became the first state to vote for same-sex marriage in 2009, almost exactly 202 years after Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake moved into a rented room together in the village of Weybridge. At 30, Charity was Sylvia’s senior by seven years, and she had had a rocky early adulthood. Her intense relationships with a series of young women had provoked nasty gossip in several New England towns, forcing her to move around the region, bouncing from household to household as a guest of friends and relatives. Yet once Charity and Sylvia set up housekeeping — and a tailoring business — together, they would not be separated for a single night over the next 44 years. When they were much older, the poet William Cullen Bryant, Charity’s nephew, wrote a celebrated account of their partnership, describing their bond as “no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage,” and another local memoirist of the period noted that he had always heard “it mentioned that Miss Bryant and Miss Drake were married to each other."
Stephanie DotyIt is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. – Georgia O’Keeffe
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/sebelius-v-hobby-lobby-stores-inc/I can't count the times I've tried to explain that to someone, and they just keep reverting to the "no one is preventing them from going out and buying birth control.", " You don't deserve pills just because you think you're entitled ESPECIALLY if somebody else is paying for them for you." (actual quotes from someone) and "FREE birth control is not a right" arguments.
Meanwhile, women no longer have "equal protection under the constitution based on [their] gender", because "a corporation could decide to ignore medical science and make decisions about the healthcare of employees based on falsehoods"...
Among the criticisms of the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby is that it is “anti-science.” Specifically, many charge that the majority’s decision in favor of two companies that objected to paying for a handful of contraceptive methods lacked any scientific basis.
Although this charge is nowhere to be found in Justice Ginsburg’s forceful dissent, it has made the rounds among pundits. The Daily Beast‘s Sally Kohn decried the Court’s reliance on “bunk science” and The Nation‘s Reed Richardson claimed the Hobby Lobby majority’s opinion rested on “specious scientific claims.” “Alito and the four other conservative justices on the court were essentially overruling not just an Obamacare regulation, but science,” reported Mother Jones, while another MoJo story ranked Hobby Lobby to be among the Supreme Court’s four “biggest science blunders.” And over at The Incidental Economist, Austin Frakt simply declared “The majority of the Supreme Court doesn’t get science.”
These critics are mistaken. There are reasonable arguments to be made against the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, but the charge that the decision is based on science fiction is not among them. The scientific soundness of a religious objector’s beliefs is not at issue in religious liberty cases and, even if it were, there was a reasonable (if not uncontroversial) basis for the specific factual claims upon which Hobby Lobby’s claim was based.
Among the criticisms of the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby is that it is “anti-science.” Specifically, many charge that the majority’s decision in favor of two companies that objected to paying for a handful of contraceptive methods lacked any scientific basis.
Although this charge is nowhere to be found in Justice Ginsburg’s forceful dissent, it has made the rounds among pundits. The Daily Beast‘s Sally Kohn decried the Court’s reliance on “bunk science” and The Nation‘s Reed Richardson claimed the Hobby Lobby majority’s opinion rested on “specious scientific claims.” “Alito and the four other conservative justices on the court were essentially overruling not just an Obamacare regulation, but science,” reported Mother Jones, while another MoJo story ranked Hobby Lobby to be among the Supreme Court’s four “biggest science blunders.” And over at The Incidental Economist, Austin Frakt simply declared “The majority of the Supreme Court doesn’t get science.”Stephanie Doty
These critics are mistaken. There are reasonable arguments to be made against the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, but the charge that the decision is based on science fiction is not among them. The scientific soundness of a religious objector’s beliefs is not at issue in religious liberty cases and, even if it were, there was a reasonable (if not uncontroversial) basis for the specific factual claims upon which Hobby Lobby’s claim was based.
Stephanie Doty
Women’s Issues Matter
July 23, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/