Dogfish by Mary Oliver

 

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

Gratitude: October 30, 2022

1. _____

My _____ still flutters at the sight of you. 

Substantially more than all my parts combined ever did before. 

Your buoyant kisses are a blessing.

2. Reframing mistakes in the context of blackouts doesn't work without sobriety. 

"I don't like the way it makes me feel" helped more than you know.

3. Everybody needs eye candy from time to time. I took mine for granted for far too long and now I see my shortsightedness so clearly. Reboot. 

4. Boxing rocks.

5. So does Indian food. 

Gratitude: October 26, 2022

 1. Yesterday, I tasted the best fries I've eaten in years at Fatso's Last Stand. A little smattering of celery salt was a really pleasant addition too.

2. An unexpected dose of sweetness in the love department via twitter. 

3. The last few weeks have been brutal and the tiniest bit of kindness and encouragement can go a really long way.  

 

4. Pumpkin by Juju. :) 

5. A reminder to remain committed to Inciting Joy in every aspect of my life. :)

Lover by Ada Limon

 

Easy light storms in through the window, soft 
            edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s  

            nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone  
to pick with whomever is in charge. All year,  

I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then, 
            Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh 

            in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend 
writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely 

excited for the word lover to come back. Come back 
            lover, come back to the five and dime. I could  

            squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover, 
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me, 

a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky. 
            I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape 

            of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after 
us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt 

and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back. 
            Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned  

            for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam, 
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

Gratitude: October 24, 2022

1. Drove along LSD this morning with a cotton candy colored sky and bright pink sunrise as my backdrop.    

2. Any day I wake up and have the will to go to yoga or do anything that makes me inhabit my body in a healthy way is a very good day. 

3. S. Pellegrino Essenza. My fave effervescent water of late. :)

4. Ada Limon's Intimacy brought light.

I remember watching my mother 
with the horses, the cool, fluid 
way she’d guide those enormous 
bodies around the long field, 
the way she’d shoulder one aside
if it got too close or greedy 
with the alfalfa or apple.
I was never like that. Never 
felt confident around those 
four-legged giants that could 
kill with one kick or harm
with one toss of their strong heads. 
To me, it didn’t make sense 
to trust a thing that could 
destroy you so quickly, to reach
out your hand and stroke 
the deep separateness 
of a beast, that long gap 
of silence between you
knowing it doesn’t love you, 
knowing it would eat the apples 
with as much pleasure from
any flattened palm. Is that why 
she moved with them so easily?
There is a truth in that smooth
indifference, a clean honesty 
about our otherness that feels 
not like the moral but the story.

5. Ran across The Crack Up this afternoon. Much needed reread. 

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

6. Tyrion Lannister 

Gratitude: October 23, 2022

1. Sunday Morning reading:  The Art of Dying 

2. Anselm Kiefer at Palazzo Ducale

 Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce 

 (These writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light), 2022

3. Inspiration via Jorie Graham.

"There was, in such a time, in addition,

an obligation to what we called telling

the truth. We

liked

the feeling

of it — truth — whatever we meant by it —"

4. MUSICmood: 

The Quiet by Jorie Graham

 

before the storm is
the storm. Our waiting tunnelling outward, chewing at the as-yet-not-here, wild,
& in it the
not-yet,
that phantom, hovering, scribbling hints in the dusty airshafts where we
await rain which
once again will not come, though something we think of as the storm
will. Steeped in no-colour colour. Smothering hopes with false
promises, as wind comes up and we feel our soul turn frantic
in us, craning this way and that, yes the soul can twist, can winch itself into knots,
why not, there is light but no warmth, we are alone yet
not, no trace but the feeling of
trace, who wouldn’t be a child again,
teach me how to work, how to be kind, teach me ignorance, sweet ignorance,
the roads lie down in us, all the roads taken, they knot up,
they went nowhere, cld that be true,
they made a shapeless burden we carried around calling it lived-
experience. Did you live. Did it feel like life to
you. At the water’s edge you feel
you should ask for
instruction. Go ahead. Right there where the waves shatter over the rocks and the plumes
rise, the vast silky roads of ocean arrive as spray, spume, droplets, foam.
Is that shattering what was meant by ripeness.
We were told to aim for ripeness,
to be broken into
wisdom. You look at the rocks again, the sleeping planet at your back, under yr
feet, nothing coming back, nothing coming round, you close yr eyes
for clues, u peer, inhale, listen madly for clues. What is hell. The
imagination of what is
coming is hell. The light of my monitor
blinks. What will the readout
tell us. Who is us. How will us change
when the readout
arrives, the ice-core update, the new temps for the
arctic depth-sounds, bone scans, outposts on
stars, on cells. I look for the stars on
my body, I look all over. The spray off the rock
rinses my face. My
eyes take the brine. What
is coming, will you be there. In this quiet now is
all of
yr life says the monitor, should I say my
life, should I say
ours, I can’t tell tenses & pronouns
apart, I can feel
my veins, I shake in my dreams, I think I am cold, the wind picks up,
like a tooth on a stone, the tooth of something small
which was slaughtered,
its screaming
below the threshold of our
hearing, just below. Then maybe I’m not born yet. Maybe I am waiting in
the canal. Can you
hear me I say again. They are putting a drug in.
They want me to join the
human
race. They know we are out of time.
Hurry they say. A different kind of hurry than the one you
are used to
they say.
They are trying to tame us.
Outside I hear laughter but it could be veins rushing when
guns are pointed. They are pointed at the outside of
this. At the belly of
this poem. They can’t help
it. They are in cities under
siege. Their hands on the triggers are
hopeless. They have run out of
ideas. Dogs run through the streets till they
turn to meat.
The things that live in the ground
have to surface.
The heat outside sounds like air sucking up
light. They are calling my name. I am not born yet & still I am trying
to say yes, yes,
here I am,
is there a bloodied envelope for me,
one of us needs to be delivered. Now a beam is shining over all the rubble
picking for clues.
Is this all the life left before the gate to
the next-on thing?
They tell me the gate to the next-on thing is bloody but warm.
That they mean well.
To remember that they
meant well.
A seedpod floats down, swirling light on & off.
The shadows want to show us
wind. Even the invisible
say the shadows
is here. Are you
here?
Was that a butterfly or its shadow just now. The lake
dried up. The earth is
on standby. No, the earth is going off
standby. The mode is shifting. A switch is
being thrown. The passengers
are stranded. Will there be enough. Of
anything. Look,
the girl is sitting on her small suitcase
weeping. She is alone now.
Look, she is no longer weeping. She is
staring. The earth says
it is time. Everyone checks their watch.
Your destination is in sight. Be
ready. Brace. The traincars shake. They rattle.
Our test is still blinking.
Is this the ending rattling. The outcome. The verified
result. No
it is something else that rattles.
How I wish there were an intermission.
The sweets would arrive on their little wooden trays.
The curtain’s velvet would descend.
To let the story cool off
for a while.
So we could catch up,
compare our favourite parts,
wonder who would be saved,
who would pay the price in full,
for their folly, their trespass, their refusal, their
love. No, I remember learning,
back in the prior era,
there is no love. It’s all
desire. Hurry up. Your destination’s
in sight. Brace for
arrival. The traincars
shake. They rattle.
No it’s something else that rattles.
I shake you gently. This would be a good time to
rouse. Do you wish
to rouse.
Are we there yet you ask. I do not know. I am
the poem. I am just shaking you
gently to remind you.
Of what? Of time? That this is time? That there is
time. Do you want
the results. No. I don’t want to know.
The lake went by so quickly.
It was teeming, as they used to say, then it was
sand. Then even the sand blew away.
And now look. It is
bone. How it shines.
The people in the committee meeting don’t see the lake, they are
still talking. Actually
they are not talking.
They are
screaming.
They do this by looking
down. The lakebed goes by in a flash
on their overhead.
Whose turn is it now.
Have you stood your turn in line.
Have you voted.
For what says the young eagle
diving over the lake looking for the lake
as the train rattles by, for what.

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Gratitude : October 21, 2022

1. Walking along the lakefront at sunrise :)

2. Lighter: Chapter One

"The understanding of self-­love that makes the most sense to me is much more internal. It is the way you relate to yourself with compassion, honesty, and openness. It is meeting every part of yourself with unconditional acceptance, from the parts that you find easy to love, to the rough and imperfect parts that you try to hide from. Self-­love begins with acceptance, but it does not stop there. Real self-­love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of. Real self-­love is a tricky concept that requires a sense of balance to be able to use its transformative power—­it is nourishing yourself deeply without becoming self-­centered or egotistical. It is no longer seeing yourself as less than others, but at the same time maintaining the humility not to see yourself as better than others. The greatest benefits of self-­love come from the positive interactions between you and yourself. Self-­love is not only a mindset but a set of actions."

3. Radical Honesty

Radical honesty, a form of authenticity that begins inside you, is a warm recognition that you gently apply to your conscious life. This view of radical honesty is not about telling everyone what you think. Instead, it is the root from which self-­awareness grows. Thoughts and emotions that were once discarded or ignored are now embraced. Where you once felt the urge to run away, you now challenge yourself to face whatever is there. More than anything, any lie that you formerly told yourself is examined so that the truth may come forward. The key to radical honesty is that this is not about you and other people, but about how you relate to yourself in all situations, whether you are alone or with others.

Radical honesty is not about punishing yourself or harsh self-­talk. Rather, it is about calmly being in constant contact with your truth. Practicing this balance is critical. In the beginning, radical honesty may feel hard to manage, but it is truly a long-­term project. If you want to see great results, you need to wholeheartedly commit to the process, especially when it gets difficult, so you can reject the temptation to fall back into unconsciously motivated behavior.

If you continue to tread down the path of lies, fear and its two primary manifestations—­anxiety and anger—­will continue to grow. First, you fear truth and then you lie to be rid of your fear, unwittingly falling into a loop where you actually continue empowering your fear because every lie breeds further anxiety. The only way to put an end to the burning fire of fear is by thoroughly extinguishing it with truth. Dishonesty is the fear of truth.

Dishonesty with yourself creates distance. The more lies you build up over time, the more you become a stranger to yourself. When you cannot accept your own truth, you are moving in the opposite direction of self-­awareness. When lies suffuse your mind, life becomes opaque and the right actions you need to take to ease your inner tension become difficult to decipher. The lies you tell yourself will also manifest as a lack of depth in your relationships. A deep connection with another being is not possible if you are deeply disconnected from yourself.

As you practice radical honesty, this distance decreases and your mind starts to become calmer. Telling yourself the truth is the beginning of inner harmony. This harmony immediately makes your relationships more vibrant. In examining your past and uncovering the truth that you previously refused to own, you actually make the power of your honesty stronger. This higher degree of presence allows your self-­awareness to flourish. Eventually, your radical honesty matures to the point where it becomes non-­negotiable—­you carry it wherever you go and in every situation it becomes an asset that informs your decisions.

Where you once coaxed yourself into thinking nothing was wrong, you now admit to yourself that turbulence or hurt was actually there. Where you once forced yourself into thinking you liked something, you admit that you did find it disagreeable. Where you once denied old pain, you admit that there is a wound within you that needs tending. 

4. Wisdom from Maya Angelou and Juju

“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” 

The Thing Is by Ellen Bass

#readalittlepoetry 

On/My//Aging by Carolyn Marie Rodgers

 The spirit is so hurt

          it don’t know the

                                       body.

                                   It

                                       looks in

                                                       the mirror

                                    and asks, who is it?

Finds at Linda's @ BG and beyond #shehasimpeccabletaste

Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I've tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, "to keep the filth of life away," yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

"Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho' She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too.—Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.—I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds."—Mrs. Thrale.

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

omm: Decision to Leave

The Benefits of Not Being a Jerk to Yourself | Dan Harris | TED

“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me… 

There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try 

and make into a spiritualising of the soul.” Oscar Wilde

The Disappeared

I heard it said,
“Evil was invented
to give us something
to talk about”

But how to speak
if each syllable
falls into the sea

The m of mother
drifting away
other, other
where have you gone?

The f of father
sinking further down
ather, ather
where have you gone?

They didn’t fall
They were thrown

to leave us
without speech
to drown our words.

Cecilia Vicuna

Sending My Love

Nothing Twice by Wislawa Szymborska

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice. 

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once. 

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses. 

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent. 

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock? 

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow. 

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

Gratitude: October 6, 2022

1. Omm: Compassion

“We are so quick to judge one another. And just as we are hard on others we are even harder on ourselves. With mindfulness, our natural compassion grows. We can see that we are all carrying our own burden of tears. You and everyone you meet are sharing in some measure of the pain present on the planet. You are called upon to witness this pain—in yourself and others—with compassion. But how can we do this when we live in a time where it seems we have lost contact with the power of mercy and compassion, when we have closed off to the suffering of ourselves and others?

We have to begin to sense the tears for ourselves before we can cry for others. These tears are actually a great gift. They are the same moisture that brings new life out of the dry earth every spring. For the Lakota Sioux, grief is considered a great gift because they believe the gods are closest to us when we are suffering. When a Lakota Sioux has suffered a great loss and is grieving, he or she is considered wacan, or “most holy.” Their prayers are believed to be especially powerful, and others will often ask one who grieves to pray on their behalf.

This doesn’t mean that compassion will be easy, especially when you’ve been betrayed or you’ve suffered some irreplaceable loss. As the Sufis pray, “Overcome any bitterness that may have come because I am not up to the magnitude of the pain that has been entrusted to me.”

You may want to heal, but still find yourself slipping back into old habits of anger and resentment. This can be the most frustrating. After struggling for half a century with the British Empire, Mahatma Gandhi said that his most formidable opponent was not the British Empire or the Indian people, but a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. “With him I seem to have very little influence.”

But it is necessary to learn that you are worthy of being loved. Buddha put it quite simply: “You can search the whole tenfold universe and not find a single being more worthy of love and compassion than the one seated here—yourself.” Self-compassion and self-forgiveness are not weaknesses, but the roots of our courage and magnanimity. Sometimes compassion for ourselves and others seems hard to find. But even if you lose touch with these feelings during your most intense suffering, compassion is an essential part of our true nature. In fact, it is in this self-compassion and self-love that you find the strength to carry a lamp through your darkest nights. And it is by first practicing self-compassion that you find not only a way to hold your own struggles and sorrows in your heart—but through them you learn how to connect with the sufferings and sorrows of all those around.

This self-compassion helps us all survive. It causes us to jump out of the way of an unexpected fast car as we enter the street. We treasure our life. Self-compassion struggles to keep us alive even in situations of complete abandonment and abuse.

As you go through your difficulties, you can learn to bring a quality of loving care to everything you touch. You will find that love and care have an extraordinary capacity to transform the sorrows of your life into a great stream of compassion.

Be gentle with yourself—it should not be a struggle. Know your limitations. Extend your compassion only as far as you feel your heart opening naturally. Plant your seed of trust. It will grow in its season.

As you face loss, frustration, hurt, and conflict, invite a sense of your own dignity. Sit up, stand up tall. Have respect for yourself, and patience and compassion. With these, you can handle anything.”

#jackkornfield

2. Excerpt by Diane Ackerman 

“Something in a rose

knows to spread its roots

into a stable base,

how to shimmy up a trellis,

graft onto reliable stock,

open up rich with scent,

and slowly unfold another

flush of tawny bloom.

While you’re away,

I miss the parts of me

that regrow with you:

the mischief elf, the sensual self,

the sonneteering ghost

who rides the flanks of night,

breathing time, sweating stars,

while memories swim

like constellations overhead."

3. Podcasts

Gratitude : October 4, 2022

1. Perspective 

 

#ThankGodforsensiblereminders

2. Sometimes I forget what I bring to the table 

Indian Summer 

In youth, it was a way I had
To do my best to please,
And change, with every passing lad
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know,
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!

Dorothy Parker

3. More Than This