Purdah

(a poem for all mothers stuck inside the house this winter)

a woman kept in a house
is like a cuckoo in a clock
her breasts sing with milk
in the middle of the night

all night the house blows
in the wind, a cradle
on top of a tall tree
or a ship lost at sea

a man thinks he owns his wife
if she stays in the house
but once she shuts the door behind her
shuts the door on her children behind her
if she shuts the door of her mind
she can fly , no longer under lock & key

a mother alone in the house
is like a cat in a cage
with two birds, alone
in the house with two children
in the house without wings

her two breasts, two small partridges
rustle in their nest, escape
like two cups overturned,
two loose dice on the floor,
two blind mice running to get the knife.

at night the house does not rock
like a boat at sea
it is rooted, stands still
like a woman chained to a rock
awaiting rescue, like a cage
rocking on its pole

the dangerous woman in the veil
sings to the woman in the moon
she sings to the old woman
in the shoe, she sings to a woman
in anything else, but a house.

from Little Mother, Hochelaga Press, 1997
Jennifer Boire

home for the holidays

postcard to my Self (Travelling Wilbury)

Dear Home-girl,
you are at home, now. Welcome Home.

Hey girl, welcome to here. Home. This house is not your home. This city is not your home. But you are living at this unique address. Remember, you flew into this address on the first in-breath, Wahh! You will fly out one day.

Right now, this is the address of Home. Come, sit beside me and I’ll tell you a mighty secret that may surprise you – the breath inside the breath is calling you home. Hear that? I know, speedy Gonzales, you love to travel. Right now your eyes are traveling, your ears are moving, your touch excites you to discover what is everywhere, elsewhere, not here. What is bright, new, annoying, popular, loud, quiet, hungry – there – a Great Blue Heron, he’s reminding you to dive deep into the stream of home.

Stop running away, baby. Stop salivating for a New taste, a new sugar, a bite of Crispy Crème donut, sushi with wasabi, pecan pie….

Stop awhile by this sweet river, and sip. Slow your jets and shiver with delight at this new, inner sanctum, this in-site. This new sight. Old fright sloughed off. This old as humanity inner sight. Oh, laugh with delight. “You make me feel like dancin’” (spinning diva.)

Welcome back, home-girl.

Jenn

The place I am longing for

Confusion wades in, disturbs my present peace. Yoga dispels it. I feel too spacey, vadic, anxious. So lie on earth, grounded in breath; an article suggests humming -- ‘lung’ --breathe in cat and dog pose to bring it down into the body…

Too much stress – car and air travel, cell phones, busyness spaces me out. Plan to spend more time honouring this physical work in the body. It feels so healing, so right, less intellectual than talking, reading and writing. That ‘white room’ by the ocean or open sky in the desert calls me. Ocean shore, driftwood, house by the sea, pictures come to mind of the retreat space I crave. Does it mean I have to move there? I cannot uproot family, but must take a break myself.

Our creative needs are not being met. We need music and words to work together, space, time, energy, less activity to accomplish it – spend a weekend envisioning it? First, healing, rest. Clarity will come when we are less stressed and harassed by the daily struggle. Kids also being pushed to the max by school, activities.

How can we down-size our life? Where can we go, where boredom won’t lead to dope and alcohol abuse? Is there somewhere more ‘perfect’ than here?

The place I am longing for is not in this world maybe, but a healing respite from ‘surface reality’ while I undergo the descent, to reclaim the feminine or ground of my being. I have entered the doorway at the bottom of the tree, gone back to the core, (Kore, ripped away from reality, entered dream time and was gone for 3 days) need to cut off the ‘busyness” of duties, household, and focus on this quest. It is real. Stop resisting. Follow the inner pull.

My fear of inactivity, passivity, entering the dark room where mother is passed out all day. I have visited the curtains but never entered there, since childhood. Am being pulled down due to extreme nervous overload. It feels like chaos…to visit the Underworld – but it is freeing to be creative, to explore the underneath side….maybe by concentrating on the breath in each moment like during labour pains, like in a kind of birth, to avoid panic, hyperventilating, suck ice chips and stay in present, focus on work at hand.

(written in 2005, in crux of peri-menopause descent)
nameste
musemother

A woman’s Way from the Tao of Menopause

Epilogue:

The woman’s journey is to realize her power is within her. As a woman.
Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

Some of us are becoming the man we wanted to marry. Gloria Steinem

How to Marry myself:
the worldly, practical, doer and the spiritually hungry be-ing want to marry inside the breath. Bathe in stillness as in a clear stream of breath running up and down the center of being. Feel cleansed and whole upon arising. Return to the list of things to do, calls to make.

Keep it simple, silly.

Prologue:

How to get closer to me, to my singular truth, or way, (a woman’s way) like Joan, hearing voices in the light, and Mira, dancing to her own music, or Teresa, despairing of being judged a heretic but heeding an experience so intimate, so her own, that even punishment or excommunication from her religious faith could not dissuade her. Although self-doubt was present, she surrendered to the piercing of her heart –

And so, not to put myself in that league of illustrious company, still, I invoke these ‘mothers of spirit’ if you will, and say, I am ready to hear my own rhythm – at least, I want to be open to hearing it, to follow that narrow path within, where the going is by feeling, letting go of maps, books, guides, all those who say go here, do this, and wish to give me explanations, for I have been lead far astray, until I doubt my every step. Or run so quickly over the path, my feet barely touch the ground.

All I ask or will, is that my two feet remain on the ground, connected and even if losing my reason is the thing I fear most in this world, I am willing to listen deeply and find the inner strength necessary to take each step from a new perspective, one from inner conviction.

A voice coaxes-- says, I have always been here; you have always listened to your parent’s wisdom, your teacher’s insights, your friend’s admonitions, your children’s voices. Now, before you go any further down the wrong road – wait – what do you mean by wrong? If I do not know what is right? So skip right and wrong. Feeling.

I have been told to start finding out how I feel – what I feel. This numbing busy-ness stresses me – carries me out on a wave too far from shore, there is risk of drowning. All right then, now - I am listening. Guide me. I say to my self – if you are the One I have run from all this time and now, you are so close and in fact, inside my right ear whispering to me, then guide me. I have lost my trust in politicians, in self-help books, in science and religion, in philosophy, tragedy and comedy – where else is there to turn?

So if there be guides awake in the night, angels lighting my path, let me listen to you. And then, listen to my beating heart, my ragged breath, and carefully attend, and tend to, the tiny tendrils of inner thought, of being before thinking – If there be a place to find wisdom, here it is. It prefers a sideways glance --stops when looked at directly. No glaring eyes.

-----------
“Suffering is part of the feminine…a sense of loss of all, even capacity for action, a loss so deep nothing matters.” Inanna, Descent to the Goddess

There are those sleeping who are awake,
and others awake who are sound asleep.

Some of those bathing in sacred pools
will never get clean.

And there are others
doing household chores
who are free of any action.

Lalla, 14th century Kashmir


to be continued
musemother