Category: Art

Time is the place where we place our dreams and forget that
our sense of timing is linear, and not open to the unexpected grace.
Even the June weather has busted all usual use of Spring into
Summer, and we moan and wonder when the clear skies will
stay with us for a while.

So, I’ve turned to the eternal timing of the poet Rumi, and offer this:

“B I R D W I N G S

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
………………………………………………….. and expanding,

the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.”

(from “the Essential Rumi”, translations by
COLEMAN BARKS.)

The courage to look at what’s so, again and again,
is the space and timing where you can find that all your
brave work is ‘miraculously ‘ producing results or breaks
totally beyond your imagined goal.
As in the flight of birdwings,
bringing change with ease and moving on.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

Yes, that’s what I see from my window: no breath of air
stirring the leaves of the trees.
How still can early morning be, these cloudy days!

The stillness is broken by a distant bird song, the sound
of I-95 muted even, by the stillness.

Let’s shake it up.

“A wise man said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s like the penny saved or the nine dropped
stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road the blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.”

…………BILLY COLLINS,
(from his book of poems, ‘Ballistics’, part of
the poem titled ADAGE.)

Well, smiling at that did not bring on the sunshine which
keeps getting delayed these days.

I guess this calls for a fresh pot of coffee.
with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

As I write this, it’s not yet summer.
In a few hours, it will be officially.
What, in all this rain and cold and damp, summer?

So I turn to my old favorite, while there’s still time: the book , “A Mystic Garden”.

For the day before summer, here’s what is said:

“We need living water for our thirst. We need to be fed
and tended by the generous life force that is at the heart of
all things. Only then can our potential come to greening.
The greatest longing is to leaf out, to become what we
have been given to be.”

………GUNILLA NORRIS

I pause from this train of thought to liken it to what’s happening
at the Bethpage, NY, PGA Golf Open. Thursday’s start was rained out,
Friday’s start was at the unheard of hour of 7:30 a.m. to catch whatever
sun and clear skies could be found. Today, earlier, much the same.

What I have noticed is this is not like any other tournament. All formal
lines have been ignored, and all, including the players, the volunteers who
have helped the greensmen clear the links, the crowd who poured out to
cheer the players on, all are there to see it through, including the broadcast
of the plays which went on with the same crazy, wonderful intention to do it all.

These people, all of them, were there and were “becoming what they
had been given to do”.

HOW ABOUT THAT !

Now, summer, come on, and we’re ready for whatever you bring !

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

It’s been 8 weeks of patient and dedicated recovery, amptly supported by
your notes, calls and gifts of dinner. Thank you from my heart.

It feels so good to be poring through poetry again, to sit here and remember
you and start a conversation again. I picked up “River Flow” by David Whyte,
and this is a gentle opening for a new season:

THE HOUSE OF BELONGING

“I awoke
this morning
to the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight that filled my room,
……………….

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.”

…DAVID WHYTE

These lines truly express the change that has opened my heart
through the vulnerability of being out of control for a while, during
the surgery.

This contains the many days and nights of consciously enduring
the very slow return of mind and body to health.

This contains my welcome to you to be friends again, to laugh
at our vulnerability and enjoy the freedom to see our paths cross.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

I finally opened a Christmas gift book a day or two ago, a new
expanded edition of THE ESSENTIAL RUMI, translation by
Coleman Barks.

I’ve been reading translations of Bark’s Rumi poems for years.
I had never listened to the words of how this translator fell in love
with the heart,mind, soul and works of that 13th century poet.

LIsten to this, the dedication of that edition:

“for the compassionate heart within the mind,
the light within the body,
for the sun, Shams of Tabriz, and Bawa Muharyaddeen”

In the introduction to the new edition, Coleman Barks writes:

“I have wondered why, on first looking into Arberry’s Rumi, I felt
such an opening of my heart, a sense of reckless longing, an
expansion of my sense of what’s possible in a poem, and in
life.

Whatever the attraction was in 1976, it was not scholarly
curiosity. Rumi’s poems hve never been for me, as for most
readers, museum curios.
They are food and drink, nourishment for the part that is
hungry for what they give. Call it soul.

…Consider emptiness.
Emptiness is what we hear in an old blues singer or a
jazz soloist. Heartbroken, wandering, wordless, lost,
and ecstatic for no reason. It’s the psychic space his
poems inhabit.

My most grandiose project is to free his text into
its essence. Take as much as you want.
It will go around.”
……………………………

Yes ! I have fallen in love with Coleman Barks.

Only to discover I am one of many ! Lizzie guided me
to a site on the internet where I could actually hear Barks
speak the poems of Rumi.

So, now a touch of translated Rumi:

“Real value comes with madness,
matzub below, scientist above.

Whoever finds love
beneath hurt and grief

disappears into emptiness
with a thousand new disguises.

***

Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.”
……………………………………………………………………..
with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette