Sacred Space

I seek the solace of my own soul's company.

I seek the low-down quiet space inside, where I do not need to travel on pilgrimage, to a holy well, to a grotto or sacred spot with ancient memories of saints and goddesses.

I make my soul journey the passage from outside to within, in silence.

Curtains closed, I contemplate the life force moving, breathing me, allowing me breath.

Lao Tzu says this:

Without going out of my door
I know what the countryside is like.
Without glancing out of my window
I know the colour of the sky.
The farther you travel,
the less you know.
If you are wise,
you can arrive without going,
see without looking,
do everything while you are doing
nothing.

Susan Albert, after Lao Tzu

I found this place within with the help of my teacher.
hear more about his teaching at www.wordsofpeace.ca

nameste,
jenn

death and friends

We prescribe a friend

We are wisdom and healing, roasted
meat and the star Canopus. We’re

ground and spilled wine soaking
in. When illness comes, we cure

it. For sadness we prescribe a
friend. For death, a friend. Run

to meet us on the road. We stay
modest and we bless. We look like

this, but this is a tree, and we
are morning wind in the leaves that

makes the branches move. Silence
turning now into this, now that.

Rumi

I found out today my cousin died of lung cancer, after 9 months of fighting it with various treatments. Rumi has such a perspective on things, on life, on death. I think the human warmth of friends is the greatest comfort, and silence. And morning sun on the lake.

Jennifer

The physics of cloudiness

Apparently, when there is too much orderly tought, we are rigid, not creative, yet the opposite, scattered energy too haphazard, is not useful either - nothing sticks or persists. But where order and disorder meet and interlace, in the liminal space of ambiguity, creativity lives, just on the edge of chaos.

One more request to the mountain (Taos)

my hunger for mountains could be a hunger for mother love
the Ma of existence, the One mother
shadow play of leaves on the stucco wall
reaching, touching, rubbing against
each other's shadow
the way twenty-five women in a room see themselves
in each other's shadows
and cannot easily see their own
without a mirror
but when one opens her heart and speaks,
it brings tears to 25 pairs of eyes

We have all considered not sharing
our visions, our goals, affirmations and dreams
but when one of us does, it feeds all of our souls
like leaf shadows playing on the wall
feeds a need for beauty, art, music in my soul
that gentle play.

there are other shadows, dark clouds leaving the mountain
in darkness, that feel more like waking in the pitch black
of 4 am after a bad dream, aware that monsters
and demons exist, and although in theory
I know it is merely a shadow, I still shiver
a little.

note to self: embrace the physics of cloudiness
stop rearranging the furniture

jennifer

women's journey and circles

Two summers ago, I ventured to Taos New Mexico for a Writer's Spa, a writing retreat with twenty women, which included yoga, yummy food and daily exercises and inspiration from Jennifer Louden and Suzanne Falter-Barnes. (http://www.comfortqueen.com/) and (http://www.howmuchjoy.com/)

It started me on a path of discovery, and change, as I left trying to publish more poetry books and explored what was next for me. One of the things I am learning on the journey is how fruitful and supportive it is to travel in the company of other women, especially those who are like-minded and thirsty for a deeper meaning.

Jennifer Louden's book "The Woman's Retreat Book - A guide to restoring, rediscovering and reawakening your true self- in a moment, an hour or a weekend", has been instrumental in helping me unblock my creativity, find a truly restful way of holding mini-retreats in my own room, and find ways reach out to share these ideas with others.

Another favourite author is Judith Duerk, author of Circle of Stones, and I Sit Listening to the Wind. The importance of sharing our deepest moments with other women is evoked in this passage from Circle of Stones:

"How might your life have been different, if long ago when you were still a tiny child, long before you began to come to the Women’s Lodge as the normal cycle of your life, you had been brought here especially by your mother and aunts…and you and your girl cousin entered shyly into this place you had overheard so much about?

And after the fires were lighted, and the drumming, and the silence, you heard, for the very first time, what the women called the Naming…each woman speaking slowly into the stillness, sharing her feeling of how she saw her life and what she wished to say of it…sharing it with the women around her…weaving the threads of her life into a fabric to be given and named.

And as the shadows of the day lengthened into dusk and you leaned your head against your mother's shoulder, you pondered in your heart a different sense of a woman's life..."

From Circle of Stones, Judith Duerk

The Honey Tree

And so at last I climbed

the honey tree, ate

chunks of pure light, ate

the bodies of bees that could not

get out of my way, ate

the dark hair of the leaves,

the rippling bark,

the heartwood. Such

frenzy! But joy does that,

I'm told, in the beginning.

Later, maybe,

I'll come here only

sometimes and with a

middling hunger. But now

I climb like snake,

I clamber like a bear to

the nuzzling place, to the light

salvaged by the thighs

of bees and racked up

in the body of the tree.

Oh, anyone can see

how I love myself at last!

how I love the world! climbing

by day or night

in the wind, in the leaves, kneeling

at the secret rip, the cords

of my body stretching

and singing in the

heaven of appetite.

Mary Oliver

Choosing to Stay at Home with kids, poem

A Woman's Choice

It's the small details:
rat's nest in his hair,
holes in her tights,
who is whose friend today at school,
making sure the right combo of green & orange
gets into their mouths, being there at 3:45
to greet the loudmouth bus driver &
rescue my five year old from bumpy sleep.

No pay, long hours, no public recognition
yet in my heart a small voice says
cancel all job interviews
hold that resume in a file waiting,
like my high heels and work suits in the cupboard,
let my degrees gather dust on the wall.

I want to be there when the first tooth falls,
a quiet rite of passage & mine to revel in.
It means postponing ego strokes.
It means no time just for me, but also
not being split down the middle working double shifts.
I can wait for the glory of a pat on the back & a salaried job.

Right now there's some small things I must attend to:
this three-year-old in pigtails, this fragile boy in the schoolyard.

published in Mothering Magazine

menopause poems

Medusa 1878 Arnold Bocklin

Medusa

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved, - a bell hung ready to strike.
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
and the hissing hair,
held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this.
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
and the tipped bell make no soun.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day.
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

Louise Bogan (1897-1970) American poet,
found in Women Poets from Antiquity to Now