Moldavite and powerful women in the periphery

I just ordered a small chunk of moldavite. Moldavite is (according to Wikipedia) “a forest green, olive green or blue greenish vitreous silica projectile rock formed by a meteorite impact probably in southern Germany (Nördlinger Ries Crater) that occurred about 15 million years ago. It is a type of tektite.” Geology.com describes it a bit more poetically as “a unique extraterrestrial gem. It formed in the heat of an asteroid impact about 15 million years ago.”

I’m not “into” crystals and have very little understanding of them, but I adore Alea Lovely, host of the podcast Spiritual Shit, and she expounds on the myriad potential positive qualities of this rare tektite. I’ll honestly try just about anything at this point in my journey, but since limited funds insist on fiscal conservancy, I just ordered a little sliver chunk. I figure a little sliver chunk should be sufficient, given its inherent concentrated power.

I know a few people like this. Due to normal life circumstances, they are more acquaintances than friends, but the limited time I’ve been exposed to them affects me powerfully. One such person (I’ll call her “Dana” since that’s her name) has had way more impact on me than makes sense. Her concise response to a desperate text I sent several months ago provided immediate insight and relief and still comforts me. A simple comment to a facebook post has done the same. “She’s next level,” says our mutual friend Ryan. And anyone who knows her would understand this statement. I want to fight for justice and stand up for the oppressed and enjoy life as big as possible when I’m around her. She inspires that in a person.

Another person I’m fortunate enough to have in the periphery is Ciona. Being in her presence is like being in a lush glen or a grove of young trees. I feel calmed down and peaceful. I want to be a kind, thoughtful person when I’m around her. She inspires that in a person. Naturally, she’s a poet. And the poem I want to share today is hers. It was recently published in The Nashville Scene with a lovely illustration by Rachel Briggs. It gave me goosebumps and made my eyes water. Not only is it rhythmically brilliant, it also speaks beautifully to the common societal issue of body-acceptance that I am (and most of my friends are) still confronting. It makes me want to overcome.

 

“Eat” by Ciona Rouse

I eat an apple and

           each crunch treats my ear 

 

to a beat, like the bellydance drum solos 

           I become, feathers and coins on my hips

 

to create a space in my body

           for honoring my folds and pleats. 

 

In high school I could never feather

           as a cheerleader, always the base beneath

 

flying some great tiny gal to heaven.

           Your job is threatening your uniform

 

my coach bleated at me because I worked

           at a bakery, and, yes, I’d cheat myself

 

some chocolate pleasures. I hid in sweatshirts

           consumed salads for lunch, hold the meat

 

and I woke at 5 am to sweat.

           Repeat.

 

I hid in the back of the theater alone

           like a heathen on Sunday repenting in the last pew

 

fingers buttered with popcorn and defeat.

           But now the drum permeates my skin

 

becomes my blood and breath,

           my body defies lineation

 

swirling, turning like electric weather

           bumping my heat against the air

 

my arms, snake-like creatures

           beckon rhythm, hips wreathing.

 

The downbeat teaches me to drop

           into this body, my cellular caveat: stop

 

the dieting. With each breath 

           already one sigh closer to death,

 

why cling to a word so sheathed in 

           die? Emancipate from skinny ideations

 

and eat.          

 

 

small dash of Mary Oliver for the evening....

"The world is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery." - Mary Oliver

Renunciation, Longing and Leonard Cohen

"Leaving Mt. Baldy"
by Leonard Cohen
I come down from the mountain
after many years of study
and rigorous practice.
I left my robes hanging on a peg
in the old cabin
where I had sat so long
and slept so little.
I finally understood
I had no gift
for Spiritual Matters.
"Thank you Beloved,"
I heard a heart cry out
as I entered the stream of cars
on the Santa Monica Freeway,
westbound for L.A.
A number of people
(some of them practitioners)
have begun to ask me angry questions
about the Ultimate Reality.
I suppose they don't like to see
Old Jikan smoking.

At least once a week, some line from a Leonard Cohen song will rise up to mirror whatever sorrow, desire, epiphany is on the horizon of my consciousness. The lyrics well up and show my conscious mind whatever angel or demon my subconscious has been wrestling.
I saw Cohen perform a three-hour concert in Memphis a few years ago. It mattered not that he was nearly 80; he was one of the sexiest men I'd ever seen, and when he went down on one knee (out of passion, not aged joints), while reading "1,000 Kisses Deep," everything in me moved. Everything.
In Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again & Again, Roger Housden gives us a Cohen poem to contemplate, and explains that "besides (Cohen's) evident love of women and beauty, one of the themes that has pervaded all of his work from the very beginning is what he calls, in his novel Beautiful Losers, the theme of Tibetan Desire, 'the unholy union between renunciation and longing and the difficulty in divorcing one from the other'....
Housden tells us how Cohen, after five years in a monastery "putting on twenty pounds of robes every morning at 2:30 a.m....he realizes it is time to call it a day..." and that "nothing is more real than everyday experience, which constantly invites us to let go of any spiritual persona we may have carefully developed and cherished over the years and to join everyone else in the chaos and the light and the dark of this imperfect world. . . . In Beautiful Losers, (Cohen) suggests that 'contact with this energy (love) results in the exercise of a kind of balance the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. . . Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid blood landscape. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of the heart.'"
The last line of the poem shows that Cohen's smoking habit is "a problem for someone who has definite ideas about what it means to be spiritual. . . . Underlying our false notion (that there are some thing that are innately against the love of an examined life) is an implicit schism between body and spirit. . . . When we no longer distance ourselves from anything or anyone, when we give equal value to this messy world and the world of spirit, we may catch the scent of what Rumi refers to when he says
Out beyond ideas
Of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field. I'll meet you there."

Moon Language

You have GOT to be kidding me. Has it really been FOUR years since I’ve written in this blog? Well…. It’s mostly for my benefit: something to keep me reading and writing and thinking. I need all these lately, so I offer up a poem I read this past summer in Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again:

“With That Moon Language” by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud; otherwise, someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying,

with that sweet moon language,

what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

Yeah. I don’t even have commentary. Well, that’s a lie; of course I do, but it is short: I want to have a full moon in each eye. I want every other eye to hear me.

Gift from Tatiana: Nikiforos Vrettakos

Tatiana, a new friend from Greece, recently introduced me to Greek poet Nikiforos Vrettakos. I LOVE finding a new poet to love, and this one's spectacular. He reminds me a bit of Pablo Neruda, and when I peeked at Wikipedia, there were several similarities. Both published their first collections of poetry around 17-18 years of age. Both were involved in military/government and were dissidents in some way. And the poems of both are thoughtful, sensual, spiritual, yet earthy. 

The local public library does not have his books, so I just ordered a book of his selected poetry, Thirty Years in the Rain, used from Amazon.com. Thank you Tatiana!

A smaller world (from Diary, translated by Rick M. Newton)

I seek a shore where I can fence in

a patch of the horizon with

trees or reeds. Where, gathering infinity,

I can have the sense that: there are no machines

or very few; there are no soldiers

or very few; there are no weapons

or very few, and those few aimed at the exit

of the forests with wolves; or that there are no merchants

or very few at remote

points on the earth where

paved roads have not yet been laid.

God hopes that

at least in the poets' sobs paradise will never cease to exist.

The field of words (translated by Marjorie Chambers)

Like the bee round a wild

flower, so am I. I prowl

continuously around the word.

I thank the long lines

of ancestors who moulded the voice.

Cutting it into links, they made

meanings. Like smelters they

forged it into gold and it became

Homer, Aeschylus, the Gospels

and other jewels.

With the thread

of words, this gold

from gold, which comes from the depths

of my heart, I am linked, I take part in

the world.

Consider:

I said and wrote, "I love."

Gwendolyn Brooks

I was introduced to Gwendolyn Brooks via Bedford’s Introduction to Literature. I liked her rhythm, easy rhyme, the simplicity then reveal. But it was just that. Simple. And I like simple. A lot. But this poem alone is not a proper introduction:

“We Real Cool”

The Pool Players.

Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Okay, fast forward just a few years and I was introduced to Gwendolyn Brooks in real life while working as a peon at Poetry magazine. She was sweet and delightful and we chatted and I told her I came across a flyer from when had been the Poetry Day poet years ago and she said she’d love to have one of those flyers, so I sent her one and she sent me a sweet thank-you note. And that is one of my stories you will probably hear again should I ever have the chance to tell it.

Of course, when I chatted with her, I only had in mind the “We Real Cool” poem. I wish, upon first introduction to Gwendolyn Brooks, Bedford had given me a sampling of her poetic diversity, cause HERE she is again:

“gay chaps at the bar”

We knew how to order. Just the dash

Necessary. The length of gaiety in good taste.

Whether the raillery should be slightly iced

And given green, or served up hot and lush,

And we knew beautifully how to give to women

The summer spread, the tropics, of our love,

When to persist, or hold a hunger off.

Knew white speech. How to make a look an omen.

But nothing ever taught us to be islands.

And smart, athletic language for this hour

Was not in the curriculum. No stout

Lesson showed how to chat with death. We brought

No brass fortissimo, among our talents,

To holler down the lions in this air.

Sigh. The “We Real Cool” poem for which she is so well known was published in 1960. Poetry magazine published “gay chaps at the bar” in 1944. No excuse, Bedford. You had them both at your disposal.

I’m not knocking “We Real Cool,” it’s just that it would be beneficial for students of all races to hear something more “sophisticated” from the pen of this incredibly talented African-American woman. To at least know the scope and diversity of her talent. "To holler down the lions in this air"...wow.