Mary Reynolds Thompson's Blog, page 8

From a Country Overlooked

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are no creatures you cannot love.

A frog calling at God

From the moon-filled ditch

As you stand on the country road in the June night.

The sound is enough to make the stars weep

With happiness.

In the morning the landscape green

Is lifted off the ground by the scent of grass.

The day is carried across its hours

Without any effort by the shining insects

That are living their secret lives.

The space between the prairie horizons

Makes us ache with its beauty.

Cottonwood leaves click in an ancient tongue

To the farthest cold dark in the universe.

The cottonwood also talks to you

Of breeze and speckled sunlight.

You are at home

in these great empty places

along with red-wing blackbirds and sloughs.

You are comfortable in this spot

so full of grace and being

that it sparkles like jewels

spilled on water.

(c) Tom Hennen

What places are you comfortable in? What places make you ache with their beauty? Are they the same places? If so why? If not, why not?
Begin a poem with the line, “There are no creatures I cannot love…”

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The Miracle of Wildness

The ravens and jays are particularly raucous today, I notice, as I make my way up a steep trail by my home. I wonder if it is due to the recent rains, some kind of noisy celebration at the return of worms and green grass. But the cries sound more urgent than that. And no surprise.

I lift my gaze and stare into the bright amber eyes of a coyote.

The coyote is at most fifty feet away. The birds in the bay trees keep up their squawking, but the coyote and I remain still, staring at each other. His ears, the only thing moving, cock one way and then another, as though straining to hear me above the noise of the chattering corvids. Sunlight leaps through the tree branches lighting the rim of his golden fur and making of it a halo.

If the holiday season begs a miracle, this is it for me.

What more is there to praise or to pray to? What more is there to want? In this moment, I am sung alive by the energy between this wolf-like dog and me: his loping gait, his long snout, his bushy tail– even the way the birds react to our encounter, speaking of it in loud and insistent cries. Nature is my manger, the place where I am reborn, again and again.

Tonight, if I am fortunate, I will hear him caroling outside my window with the rest of the choir. He will raise his voice in a wild song that for millennia has reminded us of the marvel of this flesh and blood world.

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William Henry Searle’s Wild Soul Story

William Henry Searle, PhD., born in Dorset, UK, is a writer, poet, and environmental philosopher. He grew up in Barton-on-Sea, where his abiding love and fascination for the natural world took root. His first book, Lungs of My Earth: A Personal Ecology, is published by Hiraeth Press. In his Wild Soul Story, William shares his joy of growing up in Barton-on-Sea, exploring by himself, and feeling as at home by the sea and cliffs and streams as he did around the kitchen table at home. Becton Bunny, his particular favorite beach, is still to him a “little heaven.” Discover more about William on his website.

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Thanks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
(c) W.S. Merwin

What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving? Make a gratitude list and share it with your family (and with our Wild Soul Community, by posting it below).
Write a list of all the losses and terrors you are feeling. Write a list of all that you are grateful for. Now create a poem that holds them both.

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Giving Thanks for Poetry

I began my studies as a facilitator of poetry therapy in the early 2000s, having previously earned my living as a copywriter and editor. In poetry I found a language that was rooted in the soul, and that could, as the poet Adrienne Rich puts it, “open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”

Today, more than ever, as we face so much terror and devastation in the world, we need a language that can give voice to the immensity of what is going on––one that can “open locked chambers of possibility.”

Says mythologist Michael Meade, we are not living through a war of civilizations but a battle for the soul of the world. A world that has been made flat by its devotion to the fast-paced horizontal path of progress at all cost. A world that has no room for the soul’s deep dive into the vertical realm. Poetry can help us take that vertical dive.  And for this, I give thanks.

Information isn’t sufficient to make a difference. If it was, would we be in the state that we’re in today?  Instead, we bear witness to increasing polarization between peoples, nations, ideologies. So perhaps, given all this, we need a language that can contain nuance, paradox, that, in the words of the poet Rumi, can create a field out beyond ideas of wrong doing and rightdoing.

The language of poetry weaves us together. Writes Jane Hirshfield: There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror. Given this, even ISIS is a reflection of some part of the collective unconscious, in which, as it rises to confront us, we all share a responsibility for healing.

This is enough to make us gasp and turn our backs, but the power of poetry is that it can hold us in the tension. Writes Rumi:

don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Great poetry invites us to swim against the tide by holding the tension of opposites rather than forcing us into polarized and rigid perspectives. It demands more of us– no easy answers or soundbites here. But rather a pulsing richness, in which juxtaposition thrives.

So this Thanksgiving let’s celebrate the poets, for they give voice to the depths of the human experience. Let’s read our favorite poems out loud or take the time to write our own (even bad poetry is good for the soul). Or share a poem below. For through poetry we enter a realm not of simplistic, short-term solutions, but of a profound soulfulness out of which real change can come.

I’ll meet you there.

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Look Back in Wonder

Sheep still graze in Harnham’s historic floating water meadow just south of Salisbury in Wiltshire, England, where my husband and I have been staying for the past two months.

For centuries, water has been diverted from a stream at the top of the meadow into a series of ditches, where it flows back into the river.  The constantly moving water feeds nutrients to the soil and warms the grasses over winter months to prevent freeze, allowing the sheep to feed year-round. It has been this way for over 400 years.

An impeccably preserved medieval city, Salisbury is part of an historic region of England that has done wonders in conserving the past. Throughout Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset and other regions of the southwest, there are places, like the floating meadows, where time unravels. Everywhere are thatched roofs, Tudor beams, Norman churches, towering spires, Georgian closes, ancient oak trees, standing stones, and bucolic fields grazed by herds of cows and sheep whose pedigrees go back centuries.

And yet, it’s true to say that I left England in the early 80s precisely because it felt old, unchanging.  The wide open spaces of the American West, so much more alive and forward thinking, drew me irresistibly. The restless energy in me, met its match in California. Even the land, rattled by constant earthquakes, felt more dynamic. England’s soil rests on steadier bedrock.

But now I’m older, and have learned a thing or two about “progress.” We are compelled by it, especially in California, where I make my home.. We are constantly looking to the next new thing, the next technology, breakthrough, idea, movement to come along and save us from ourselves.  This optimism is exciting, born of country still remarkably unformed and, to its European immigrants, still unfolding and new.

Today, as Bruce and I begin to pack up in order to head back to the States, my feelings are less certain. Seeing the beauty in tradition, I know there is much that I will miss when I return home. It’s not that I want to preserve the past at all cost, as though set in amber. To live in such a place would be live in a museum, to be among the walking dead. But I don’t want to live only for the new either. For to do so is to lose the thread of our own story, the very ground on which we stand.

Nature, as always, does it best. We have intact DNA going back millions of years. Nature holds and honors the past, but not at the expense of evolution and change. The spire of Salisbury Cathedral dates back to the 13th century, but it is bolstered by newer buttresses. In the same way, old and new support each other, as an integral whole.

Surely then, even as we evolve, we must honor and treasure what is best of the past.  Cars now crawl through the center of Salisbury, but the sheep still graze unperturbed in Harnham meadows.

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Leaving

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On these mornings you can hear the trees themselves

speaking, not the birds that have lifted into currents

and gone on two miraculous wings. There is grief

in their voices, and relief. You know what this feels

like, if you have lived. Leaving: letting go of what no

longer serves the body and soul, often the heart. I can

standby, beside and underneath, and give some sense

of comfort by telling them how beautiful this process

is, how I admire the way they do it with the bold

prospect of witnesses.

I think that relating to the leaf is harder than relating

to the tree, unless you consider that the bird left

the tree for some grand adventure, and then you go

on to realize that we are all leaving each other, constantly.

Our old selves, too.

It was a tree, on one of these delicate barren mornings,

that said to me:

“I love to watch you change and grow.”

© 2015/Jamie K. Reaser

 

What no longer serves your body and soul? Are you ready to let go of it?
Approach a tree that you are drawn to. Spend some time with her. Then begin a dialog with the tree, beginning, “How can I change and grow?”
Begin a poem with the words, “It was a tree….”

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I Am a Tree

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My life is a tree,

Yoke-fellow of the earth;

Pledged,By roots too deep for remembrance,

To stand hard against the storm,

To fill my Place.

(But high in the branches of my green tree there is a wild bird singing:

Wind-free are the wings of my bird: she hath built no mortal nest.)

© Karle Wilson Baker

 

Begin a list poem with the words, “My life is a tree…”
The poet speaks to the rootedness of life, but also to the “wind-free” wings of the bird. Do you feel yourself more as a rooted being or a wind-free being? What might be the gifts and challenges of each?
If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? Write a description of your “tree self.” What have you learned about yourself?

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I Am a TreeSister– Will You Stand with Me?

TreeSisters is a women’s organization dedicated to radically accelerating rates of tropical reforestation through the committed actions and crowdfunding of a global network of women. They see feminine energy and capacities as a major missing link in the creation of systems that can bring us back into balance with nature and they work to address that.

If you would like to feel a wave of inspiration today, then take a couple of minutes and watch this short video: www.GrowTreeSisters.com

This month (from Sept 22nd – Oct 29th) they are calling for the global sisterhood to help them raise the funds needed to build the high functioning website and community platform needed to take their movement to scale. I’m helping them and I would love you to join me and do the same.

Here are some super simple steps to support them:

Watch the short film and share it on facebook with a call to your friends
Please donate – every single donation will add to the momentum
Invite your friends to the 1000 Goddesses facebook event
Post on facebook, tweet, pin or email e-mail – take some time to imagine what a global network of mobilized women could achieve and then invite everyone that you know to step in – link to www.GrowTreeSisters.com and use #GrowTreeSisters
If you have a network or mailing list that you would like to share this with then e-mail Sophie.m@treesisters.org and she’ll send you the media pack with all social media content
Share this blog yourself or send it to bloggers who might resonate

This is such an important initiative and I want to see it become a household name and change the way we relate to forests and our role as caretakers of nature. Please do what you can to help this month – with our gratitude.

Together, we really could reforest the face of this world – let’s gather together and make this a reality.

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L.R. Heartsong’s Wild Soul Story

River





L.R. Heartsong, author of The Bones and Breath, tells of entering Taos, New Mexico, as a young man on a cold and stormy weekend. Though he’s never been to Taos before, the land feels strangely familiar. It’s as if they share history together. Running from demons, unsure of himself and where his future lies, River is drawn to rent a place in a remote wilderness area. There, despite struggles with loneliness and  personal challenges, he discovers a sense of inner aliveness like never before. In this beautifully told Wild Soul Story we learn how relationship to place can restore relationship to self. To find out more about River Heartsong, his book, and his work, please visit him here.

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