Wednesday morning - how an email exchange becomes a poem

I've been in a great writing mode lately, which is like having a fever that won't stay down because I have not had the time to write that I need in order to cool it off. Sometimes the creative juices will drive a person crazy when it gets all bottled up. A few recent poems came so easily that I had to stop myself and say, they cannot possibly be any good.

So I took them to my critique group and, with a few tweaks, they're done and I'm quite proud of them. Turned out they really are pretty good.

This morning, I got up very early to view the Blood Moon, the total eclipse of the setting full moon in the pre-dawn hours. Boy, was that worth the alarm clock calling me out of a deep, restful sleep! Even in the city here, the stars were brilliant, the enormous Big Dipper hanging handle down in the north sky, Orion in his glory, the Pleiades sparkling.

Yes, a light touch... that sears

David Whyte, whose poetry I much love, posted this poem on his Facebook page today, and I have kindly received permission to paste it in here. I have the book and have only begun to plumb all its wonders.

THE LIGHTEST TOUCH

Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,

Turning 65

As most of us know, we live in a culture that no longer reveres aging, or so it seems. Elders were once reverenced among their tribes and villages, but we tend to put ours away. We do this because the culture says we are not supposed to be burdened by them, and many of our elders have internalized this message.

"I don't want to be a burden on my children." Have you heard that one before?

Aging didn't always present "burden." It used to present the possibility of wisdom passed down.

We need new stories...

Last night I was sitting on the cushion at my sangha meditating there for the first time since the beginning of August. In the past few weeks, life put in front of me a rich platter overfull with travels to the East, with insights, experiences, input, output (i.e., work) relationships (some new, some decades old), reunions, homecomings, and the raw vulnerability of accompanying a family member intensely dear to me through a profound medical challenge.

In the background was Gaza, and ISIS, and the Ukraine, and Ebola, and climate change tipping points, and Ferguson, and visceral racism, and on and on. When I came home, it was back into this nasty political culture that is my poor State of Wisconsin in an election year with huge stakes and money corrupting the whole process.

Whew! And I think I appreciate more than ever that the work of culture

Art is Not Optional

By Carolyn Raffensperger

The first time I realized the impact of the arts on my life as an activist was after a big loss in the Illinois legislature over public lands on Lake Michigan. At the time I was the State Field Representative for the Sierra Club. I had worked hard lobbying to oppose the sale of 26+ acres of Lake bed and shoreline to Loyola University. The legislature sold it out from under the public. I, along with others, had done everything we could to save that land for future generations and prevent the University from building a sports stadium on a landfill in the Lake. We lost big time. That night I went to hear Tom Paxton at the Old Town School of Folk Music. His beautiful familiar music washed over me, taking the anger and sorrow enough so I could get up the next day and go on. During an intermission he wandered among us and I told him what that night of music meant to me. I told him that I knew I was not alone in the struggle. He hugged me.