Month: November 2008

A CONUNDRUM

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

I loaned a friend a book a few years back, and it got returned to me this week.

So, this morning I opened it again. It had been a book I sought when confused,
and I wondered what it might say to me. I was pretty casual about it, not looking
for anything in particular. Here’s a line that stopped me and I want to share with
you:

“your planet was formed with love
to honor the forgetting of who you are,
so that love might experience itself
where love seems not to be.
The pain in your world is
the voice of forgetting.”

As I typed those lines, I began immediately think I had read it wrong!
…..’formed with love to honor the forgetting’?
How could that align with the last lines that said the pain of our world
is the voice of forgetting?

Let me go to something I’ve heard people say about difficult people
in their lives: “that person was my teacher”.

Ugh! No way! I could hear myself saying to myself.
I do not want to embrace what had been a real travail. I want the
teaching to come from inspiration. Yet, earlier this year I had found a
difficult situation to be the opening for a freedom I had not even
known I sought.

So, for me today, the line in that original quote above that sticks
with me is “where love seems not to be”.

I have no wise words about that, I just mention it in passing, something
to think about.

(The quote was from Emmanuel’s Book Two, The Choice for Love,
channelled by Pat Rodegast , and compiled in book form by PAT
RODEGAST and JUDITH STANTON.)

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

Gallery Event: The Intuitive Art of Antoinette

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

Nov 22 to Dec 4th.
The Intuitive Art
of Antoinette
Visions Toward Wellness Gallery
116 Thimble Islands Road
Stony Creek, CT 06405

“The live influence of art is about opening our eyes to really see more than is evident at first glance. I invite you to look at the art exhibited here as if it were a story about someone you know. Is there something in it that resonates with you? If so, look at it as if you’ve discovered something about your neighbor. You have. Because these are stories about real people, our neighbors, where they have had the courage to ask, how am I seen?”
— Antoinette

INCREDIBLY IMPERFECT

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

I am thinking of my great-grandson Sal.
He is in a position to leap in his life. What can I say to him that I want him to remember?
I could start with this:

“How did this happen?

This incredible feeling/thinking/sensing/moving/joyous/painful/

doubting/wondering life —- what keeps it upright even now,

right now in this unrepeatable moment

that is already going, gone? No answer to that,

merely the gasp of the breath as it moves in and out,

and the pleasure of knowing

that we are here and not elsewhere.

Better to taste it now, then, this life

that we have,

than to defer it to some future that may never come —–

however imperfect it may seem to us in passing. For,

as Leonard Cohen says in one of his songs,

— there is a crack, a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in.”

…………..ROGER HOUSDEN, from his book, “Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again & Again’. 

I have seen that light in Sal, and the cracks through which seep Sal’s unique perception and way of expressing what he sees.

from my heart to yours,

Mimi/Mom/Toni/Antoinette

 

FOR ANYONE AGE SIX

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

This is going to be a fairly long quote, so,you may want to settle in with a cuppa, whatever’s warm and delicious.

“These day , I own five
sets of encyclopedias from various
eras. None of them ever breathed
a word about the fact that this humming, aromatic, acid flashback, pungent, tingly fingered world is acted out differently for each one of us by the puppet theatre of our senses.

Encyclopedias contain no helpful entries on conducting life’s business while the ruckus in your skull keeps competing for your attention; or on the tyranny of the word NORMAL — its merciless sway over those of us bedeviled and obsessed, hopeless at school dances, repelled by mothers’ suffocating hugs, yet entranced by foul-smelling chemistry experiments, or eager to pass sleepless nights seeking rhymes for ‘misspent’ and ‘grimace’.

Complaints about you are already filtering in. You’re not big on eye contact or smiling.
You prefer to play by yourself. You pitch fits.
Last week you refused to cut out and paste paper shapes with the rest of the kids.

You told the kindergarten teacher you were going to howl like a wolf instead, which you did til they hauled you off to the principal’s office. Ah, the undomesticated smell of open rebellion! Your troublesome legacy, and maybe part of your charm, is to shine too hotly and brightly at times, to be lost in the maze of your sensations, to have trouble switching gears, to be socially clueless, to love books as living things, and therefor to be much alone.

Martin Luther
believed we human beings contain the “inpoured grace of god,” as though grace were lemonade, and we are tumblers full of it. Is grace what we hold in without spilling a drop, or is it an outflooding, a gush of messy befuddling loves?

Grievances and disagreements:
can they lead the way to grace? If our thoughts and feelings were soup or stew, would they taste of bile when we’re defeated and be flavored faintly with grace on better days ? I await the time and place when you can tell me, little butter pear, screeching monkey mind, wolf cub, curious furrow browed mammal what you think of all this.

Til then, your bookish old aunt sends you this missive, a fumbling word of encouragement, a cockeyed letter of welcome to the hallowed ranks of the nerds, nailed up nowhere, and never sent, this written kiss.”
………………………………………………………………
………….

This poem was titled:” For My Niece Sidney, Age Six.”
by AMY GERSTLER., from American Poetry Review, 2006.

I have a priceless small book stand from the 1950’s right next to my computer desk. A few of my children and grandchildren were here over the weekend, creating wonderful order in my apartment and they left that book, “The Best American Poetry, 2006” right on top of the book stand.

Things will find their way to the surface! Accidents? Who knows.

with love, Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

SCHEDULES

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

Here’s part of a quote:

“… Moments are hints that tell us

there is something inside

that doesn’t live on a schedule,

doesn’t entirely define itself by accomplishing

or by keeping things going!

This part of us trusts another dimension,

the central fact of being.

It already knows that simple presence is

where our hearts come to peace.

How strange that it takes so long

to be in touch with this ….

the most obvious fact of our lives.

Can we catch our softening eyes

when we watch our children at play,

when our pets are up to their antics,

when we hold the aging hands of our parents?”

……………GUNILLA NORRIS, from her book,
Inviting Silence.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to let go
of a schedule? Scheduled tasks have made it
easy to compartmentalize convenient spaces in
which stuff gets accomplished.

That time shows up, it passes and we’ve done something!
Kinda mindless, if you think about it! Or, as Mary Poppins
says, ‘helps the medicine go down’!

I am aiming at creating pockets of mindful non-accomplishing.
Let some sunshine slip through a gray November.

There, do you see what i just did? I compartmentalized November!
This has in actuality been one of the most brilliant, beautiful
Autumns in recent memory. And one rainy day on I-95 (yesterday)
became a convenient way to put November in its place.

Cancel that. The sun comes up somewhere every morning.
Let it happen in me.
with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

PERCEIVING OUR WORLD

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

Just in time for tomorrow’s election, something happened this weekend, something important for me. Unexpectedly, I attended a workshop, ‘What I Know To Be True’, lead by Caroline Temple and Lisa Jacoby in Norwalk, CT.

This is not a promo for the Workshop, although I highly recommend it if is offered in your area in the future.

No affiliation, no spiritual, political, social belief system was required for this Workshop which consisted of following the dots, your own selective ever- deepening inquiry into what you know to be true, as you see it. The curious part is that as I followed the dots, I had no idea if it might lead me anywhere at all.

However, within the space of three hours, I found a way to be present to the election results, without my usual intense despair if my candidate of choice did not get into the White House.
In the 69 years I’ve been a voter, that drama has played out many times for me. I have not taken this campaign lightly and I suspect that this election will make or break the future of this nation, here and abroad. I believe this with all my heart.

The very last process of the Workshop was a short quiet time, very welcome after the sometimes emotional steps I’d taken, which I admit had begun with me being mostly ‘on it’. I closed my eyes and found myself going quite easily to a place of peace, a peace without words and no experience of time. I had no idea how I’d gone there.

Another breath, and I opened m eyes to find a shift in my perception of the others in the room, of my own emotional climate, even of the issue of seeing the election in life-or-death terms. Startling!

I believe that I stopped feeling separate and protective of my choice. Instead, I feel I am becoming one more citizen of this country, in this world, who could reach out to my neighbor even if their vote differed from mine. I had let go of hostility and embraced a willingness to include in my heart that freedom means accepting that difference.

Offered with love,

Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

WHAT’S USEFUL

Posted on by Antoinette Martignoni

I am spending this extra hour ( time change) with you. It’s nice to know
I can then go back to bed, and rest again!

Here’s what I’ve been reading:

“Our practical selves only know how to perfect,

produce and perform.

This, at least, we can see as useful. This has results.

We want to believe in this way of perceiving.

For a little while it seems to give us

some sort of self-image.

But the longing doesn’t let us alone. It won’t go away.

We become even busier perhaps

to “take care of it.”

We numb ourselves with distractions — things to do,

consume, and maintain —

things to collect, experience, and entertain.

We can always think of more miles to run.

Still the little yearning continues …….

Could we sense that this longing is not lack

or something worse

—–some kind of fundamental fault in us?

Could we receive it as an invitation instead,

a calling, a small voice inviting us home,

back to our truer self?

This shift in thought can move mountains.

It can let us begin to begin.”
………………………………………..GUNILLA NORRIS,
from her book, Inviting Silence.

This book is actually a compendium of notes on
meditation, notes on both what gets in the way and
what works. Written with poetic gracefulness, it also
cuts to the quick and this quality resulted in a dream
I had two nights ago after reading some pages.

I cannot recall the dream, nor is it necessary. What happened
is I awoke with a sense of utter rest, anticipating my day with
zest. Yes, really. It’s been a while.

In a very definite way, I can begin to begin.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette