Poem - The Low Road - Marge Piercy

What can they do to you?
Whatever they want..

They can set you up, bust you,
they can break your fingers,
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember.
they can take away your children,
wall up your lover;
they can do anything you can’t stop them doing.

How can you stop them?
Alone you can fight, you can refuse.
You can take whatever revenge you can
But they roll right over you.
But two people fighting back to back
can cut through a mob
a snake-dancing fire
can break a cordon,
termites can bring down a mansion

Two people can keep each other sane
can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation
a cell, a wedge.
With four you can play games
and start a collective.
With six you can rent a whole house
have pie for dinner with no seconds
and make your own music.

Thirteen makes a circle,
a hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity
and your own newsletter;
ten thousand community
and your own papers;
a hundred thousand,
a network of communities;
a million our own world.

It goes one at a time.
It starts when you care to act.
It starts when you do it again
after they say no.
It starts when you say we
and know who you mean;
and each day you mean
one more.

Poem - To have without holding - Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

What will you become? Meditation for a new year

Snowflake burning to steam on a long poker

Soft wood carved to gentle curve fitting a smaller space

Raindrop crying down a window, magnifying the spaces I pass

I do not contain multitudes

Even my voice echoes in here

There is no top and no bottom

No up

All down

Falling

Shedding

Listening

Reaching

Trying for stillness

Centeredness

Branching

Rooting

Connecting earth to sky

Hand to hand

Intent to impact

One to all

Myself to the better parts of my nature

Invitation to Brave Space - Micky ScottBey Jones

Together we will create brave space

Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”
We exist in the real world
We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
In this space
We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,
We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.
We will not be perfect.
This space will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be
But
It will be our brave space together,
and
We will work on it side by side.

 My parents met at the University of New Mexico. My mom was studying anthropology, and my dad studied history (I think). They met singing in a choir, which seems strange for both of them, honestly.

Both talked at some point about the phenomenon of wanting to buy a particular car and suddenly seeing that car everywhere. They had a fancy name for it, which I remember hearing but not what it was.

Over the years, I've asked them for the term, but neither now remembers knowing it!

And then, just recently, I've heard the term EVERYWHERE. Replicating the very phenomenon that it was coined to describe.

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the phenomenon where something you recently learned suddenly appears 'everywhere'. Also called Frequency Bias (or Illusion), the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the seeming appearance of a newly-learned (or paid attention to) concept in unexpected places.

Song - I Am Light - Indie Arie