The Story Midwife

Spring Giddiness

Spring GiddinessToday, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.

	-- Jalaluddin Rumi

Ah, welcome spring!!
It's been over a year since my words have splashed out here. Today, on this first day of spring 2008, it feels like the blessedly ripe time to stop in for a visit again. These days of solstice and equinox are, after all, some of my favorites in the year. 

Rumi's Spring Giddiness has been my mantra in the last few weeks.  A little over two years ago I wrote a song from these words. Called Don't Go Back to Sleep, once I made a rough scratch recording it seemed to fade back in my mind. I was perusing the contents of my little hand-held digital recorder which I use to capture my song ideas or works-in-process. When I stumbled upon the very first strains of this song  my breath caught.  It was just what I needed to hear that day.  And apparently every day since.  Over and over the refrain comes to me: "The door is round and open, the door is round and open." The song has begun to sing me.

This is a different phenomenon than getting a song annoyingly stuck in the groove of my brain. Roseanne Cash has been quoted as saying, "I've always found that songs can be postcards from your future."  When I first heard this quote about a decade ago I totally got that haunting quality to art of any medium.  To me, as with Roseanne, it comes in the form of song and I find it everywhere in my works. Even considering the new rush of energy and enjoyment of a fresh baby song, in some ways it's more fun to look back at a song when I can feel it through the seasons of my life. Rumi and his poem and my ensuing song have embodied this haunting future-past quality.  Something in me wrote the song two years ago, but it's real impact hasn't been noticeable until now.  Perhaps some mysterious future self sent this song back to me a couple of years ago so that I could partake of it in this season by simply enjoying my earlier fruits.  Or maybe my subconscious was just way ahead of my conscious.  Either way, it's a cool thing.

Being the equinox, we Bruxvoort-Colligan's will be celebrating with our traditional Equinox Pizza.  I'll be sitting in some quiet space with a candle and my journal for some reflection and looking forward.  And my beloved and I will find space together on our couch (Viola - who will be making an appearance in the sheep pasture on our upcoming duet CD), sipping red wine and sharing the holinesses-made-manifest from our own lives this Holy Week.

And you: have a happy equinox and may you drink in the loveliness of this grand day,
Trish

Calling All Poets

I learned about the challenge below on This Mom's blog. I've already got poetic lines curling around my ears and heart. Consider yourself invited to spin lines of poetry, too.

I find this especially meaningful in light of today's report from the Iraq Study Group, about which I just heard on NPR. While listening, I also listened in on this story on Here and Now about Dr. Abdul Sattar Jawad, a former newspaper editor in Iraq and a dean at a Baghdad university. He's now teaching at Duke as part of the Scholars at Risk program, where he is researching T.S. Eliot and translating Shakesperean sonnets into Arabic.

Dr. Jawad speaks of how poerty is very close to him now and quotes a line of Eliot's The Wasteland, and brings it home to the Tigris river, which, he says, "is no more singing. It is, you see, sweating oil and tar, and you see the bodies of the tortured and murdered people floating in the river.

"I'm longing - living in nostalgia - to see my country, my Baghdad rising up again... We have to terminate this cycle of violence and hate."

Take a listen.

Sigh.

And if you choose to write a poem for the Iraqi people (whether or not you choose to submit), I'd love to know.  And perhaps we can share our works on the Story Midwife gallery.

__________________________________________

The Challenge: Write a poem for the Iraqi People, something that you want to express to their citizens.

Deadline:  Extended to May 2007

Who: Anyone, any age can write a poem and submit it to be included into The Gift of Words: Poetry for the Iraqi People

Fruition: Poems will be translated in Arabic, put into a booklet and sent to Iraq.

Gift of Words, c/o Cynthia Bryant- Poet Laureate of Pleasanton, PO Box 520, Pleasanton, CA 94566 or [email protected]  if you do have email. Be sure to include your contact information and age (if you like).

Week in Review: Layers - Strange and Wonderful

I've been traveling this week. Richard and I were the music and worship duo for a United Methodist conference in Ohio. Good farming folks out there in that neck of the woods. I'm a wee bit (read: outrageously) wild and colorful for most of them, but they haven't fired me yet. This was gathering number four of five over a two year time period.

The BEST part of the whole trip was meeting Bette!  Wahoo! We first encountered each other on Christine's blog last week Saturday, then met up in Lima, Ohio on Monday! One of the strangest and most wonderful ways I've met a new friend! Bette came to our concert, then she and I shared stories as we strolled through the cemetery by the church. Simply lovely. Bette's a woodcut artist (really, you MUST check out her Flickr site); she makes luscious art and often weaves it together with luscious words. I know that we'll see each other again. This makes me very happy.

Our week's travels aren't over yet. Tomorrow morning we head to the Twin Cities to help a church in the Twin Cities celebrate their new Healing and Wholeness Center. It's a kick-ass Presbyterian Church (Presbyterian Church of the Apostles in Burnsville, MN) that prides itself in being the Twin Cities' most liberal mainline church South of the Mississippi. We get to lead worship, facilitate some workshops in spiritual practice and music, and perform a concert. It will be a grand trip. Especially since my best friend Heather and her wonder-partner Jess will be joining us at the hotel. Hello pizza! Hello hot tub! Hello silly and deep and compassionate conversations. Yes, this will be very, very good.

Speaking of Heather, I have her permission to share this story of her life. Last week Heather learned that her former partner, G, has cancer. G is an exuberant, spunky, 33-year old woman. And she is dying. She's receiving palliative care to ease her pain and assist her in having some good, final days. Palliative in this case means brain surgery yesterday to insert a port through which chemotherapy may travel to bathe her brain in medicine -- for comfort. In the nearly two years since they ended their relationship, Heather and G had not been in touch, so receiving The News via email was stunning for Heather - and for those of us who know, love, and walked with Heather and G. These incredible women are coming together now to be in conversation, catch up on each others' lives, and say goodbye. 

I cannot imagine the layers upon layers that are intermingled for G -- and for Heather: life, death, question, wonder, hope, saddness, beauty, ache, Spirit, goodbye. Today as we spoke on the phone, I read this poem by Stanley Kunitz to Heather:

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

It seems to me that this is the journey of Life. Every person on the planet gets to walk this journey.  And I think death, particularly the death of one close to us, or more, one's own death, crystallizes it in myriad ways. In ways the fullness of my heart can imagine, but cannot truly understand.

Dear Heather and Dear G,
Know that I am lighting candles and singing songs. Your songs. The songs of the universe. The songs of healing and release and deep rest.

You are ever in my heart.

Deep bows to you both,
Trishy