I went biking around Greenlake with my daughter this afternoon so I decided to make my bricolage there with whatever I found. The graffiti was already on the table and I love it. Love the color and the form. My rule was that everything had to come from the ground. You will see that the date is made up from the objects in the piece. I loved doing this. It took a long time to get it just right and I found it very meditative. As we biked home at twilight after biking for about ten miles, I felt so renewed.
Today’s word(s) “waking-life”, comes from Michael Meade‘s book Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul. This book is so good. So devourable. If you’ve never seen Meade speak or been to one of his workshops, I highly recommend it. You will come away altered. I count him as one of my most beloved and revered teachers. Today’s quote comes from the book I mentioned:
photographic evidence of me doing the word choosing
When we ignore the limits of fate and thehints of destiny we tighten the unconscious web of our lives. Eventually, we make our lives fixed, settled, and intractable. Thus, we seal our own fate and ignore our hidden destinies…Shifting fate and finding the destiny within is part of the art of truly living and of living truly.
I heard it’s National Poetry Day today so I’ll share one of my very favorite poems:
I Ask for Silence, Pablo Neruda (trans. Alastair Reid)
Now they can leave me in peace.
Now they grow used to my absence.
I am going to close my eyes.
I want only five things,
five chosen roots.
One is an endless love.
Two is to see the autumn.
I cannot exist without leaves
flying and falling to the earth.
The third is the solemn winter,
the rain I loved, the caress
of fire in the rough cold.
Fourth, the summer,
plump as a watermelon.
And fifthly, your eyes,
Matilde, my dear love,
I won’t sleep without your eyes,
I won’t exist without your gaze,
I adjust the spring
for you to follow me with your eyes.
That, friends, is all I want.
Next to nothing, close to everything.
Now they can go if they wish.
I have lived so much that some day
they will have to forget me forcibly,
rubbing me off the blackboard.
My heart was inexhaustible.
But because I ask for silence,
don’t think I’m going to die.
The opposite is true;
it happens I am going to live.
To be, and to go on being.
I will not be, however, if inside me,
the crop does not keep sprouting,
the shoots first, breaking through the earth
to reach the light;
but the mothering earth is dark,
and, deep inside me, I am dark.
I am a well in the water of which
the night leaves behind stars
and goes on alone across fields.
It’s a question of having lived so much
that I want to live a bit more.
I never felt my voice so clear,
never have been so rich in kisses.
Now, as always, it is early.
The light is a swarm of bees.
Let me alone with the day.
I ask leave to be born.
I’m doing a week of reading deprivation (including e-mail!) as part of the Artist’s Way process. It’s been amazingly good for my creativity and I am learning A LOT about how I spend my time and why. I’ve been doing more of the following life-affirming things: resting playing dancing dreaming writing painting walking creating Here’s…
A shadow on my friend, Julia’s, wall that was cast by a little dragonfly hanging in the window. I drew the Dragonfly card in the Animal Medicine tarot deck by Jamie Sams so I appreciated the synchronicity of seeing this yesterday. Here’s a bit about Dragonfly medicine: “Dragonfly medicine is of the dreamtime and the…
Imagine what it would feel like to live in a culture where there wasn’t so much self-loathing? What is that even like? I am incredibly weary of so much of this: “bah humbug” “we suck” “we’re destroying the planet” “life sucks” “fuck the man” “the world is going to shit” “the holidays have turned into…
me today I could have written the following song: It makes me cry to read it. I’m going to my first ACA meeting tonight. Reading this is how I discovered how much I need to. I think I feel more courageous and more scared than I ever have in my life today. I also feel…
do you see me through the smoke and mirrors of your projected mind? do i see you? is there a me to see or am i just a fractal of a greater reality? when you say you love me do you mean me or a fragment from your former reality? is there a love beyond…
In the past couple of months, I have had numerous people tell me that they are having an affair on the internet. They are living in some kind of liminal place with someone that is either married or lives really far away while meanwhile their life falls to shit and they wait for the day–the…
