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The Unicorn Poem - Tony Mares

On Seeing a Detailed Map
of Old Town, Albuquerque

I notice the empty space
where there is no map,
only theater of man and myth,

where there is no path
to the wild mesas,
the shimmering fields of the unicorn,

a great land of dream and memory,
where less lovely beasts pursue
and try to corral him.

El unicornio
malherido por la cadena que rompió
y el coral puntiagudo
que saltó, corre por los campos
rumbo a . . .
los sueños y el recuerdo.
Ya vienen los perros.
El unicornio sangra, sangra.
Se vuelve pura espuma del sufrir,
un leve humo blanco.
Se vuelve pura esperanza.

The unicorn,
badly wounded
by the chain he broke
and the sharp-tipped picket fence he jumped,
runs through the fields
toward . . .
dreams and memories.
The unicorn bleeds, bleeds.
He becomes the lather of suffering,
a thin white smoke.
He becomes a pure hope.

To the east are the Sandia Mountains
where Apaches hidden by time
look down on the great city
stretching far to the west
and all along the Rio Grande valley.
They are beyond the old pain now,
the shrinking land and the suffocating sky.
Once in a while they recall
the good times and as a jest
they send a bear
scampering down into Albuquerque
to test the state of the laughter
there on the asphalt streets,
the surface of the smoothed-over rift.

Enormous caterpillars called "Eucs"
have cut a swath
across the Sandias
gouging deeper than any book
has ever made a furrow
through my mind.

Tourists speed by
perhaps not sensing the scar tissue,
the plowed-up land,
not likely to see the aspen,
cedar, deer and wild goat
above the limestone ledge.

It is not where logic and tools
conspire to simplify the land
that a poem
snares the fish of light
in a shadowed stand of pine.

I choose the forest
and the peaks behind my eyes
above the road cut,
where a hobbled unicorn cries
and a white whale breeches
through El Greco's tumbling skies.

From those heights
the city down below forms a bowl
whose center is Old Town;
not the make-believe Old Town,
the Hollywood Old Town,
but rather as it was then called,
Alburquerque,
where it all began
in the unhurried nights and days
a long time ago,
where the small ranches
spread out along the river
and slowly the plaza formed
a diminutive stage,
the center of my universe.

Boxes on the map
are meant to be houses made of words.
Discrete squares,
loops and rectangles
form this world of ink.
It would become cluttered, messy,
to try to show the details
inside the make-believe worlds
these lines on paper represent.
Straight lines suddenly veer
or curve to follow some unknown contour
of the mind or of the land.

They are roads made of words
obscure as the kingdom
from which they come.

En el reinado de la palabra
todo puede ser.
El rey absurdo ni apenas
se vista de tinta.
Los vasallos andan por allá
entre las sílabas.
Y los demás,
es decir el pueblo,
como es ahora
y siempre ha sido,
forma el fondo escuro
del reinado de la palabra.

In the kingdom of the word
everything is possible.
The absurd king is not even barely
dressed in ink.
His vassals scurry around
through the syllables.
And the rest,
that is to say, the people,
as it is now and always has been,
form the obscure backdrop
for the kingdom of the word.

Roads are words
leading to

silence

where the map falters,
becomes the screechy note on the violin,
the musician blinded by the desert sun,

where the map stumbles
into a whiteness
as total as death.

He cruzado caminos
en los sueños.
Caminos que dan a la muerte.
El letrero de un camino dice "Roma,"
pero a Roma llegan
muy pocos caminos de aquí.

Son caminos
que se parecen mucho
a los caminos despiertos.

Son caminos
donde hay poca gente.
Caminos que dan a un parque
o a una vega placentera
en medianoche
con un jardín que pronto se hace
camposanto
con cruces
bajo luz blanca,
y todo esto
envuelto en la niebla que lleva
el barco del sueño.

Todo mar y camino
llegan al margen
de la nada
donde no hay ni huella que seguir.
Aquí el poeta con su pluma
dibuja imágenes
de su porvenir.

In dreams

I have come upon roads

leading to death.

A road sign says "Roma,"

but few roads here

lead to Rome.

These dream roads

are very much like wide awake

roads.

These are roads

with few people,

roads leading to a park,

the pleasant meadow

at midnight

and there is a garden

that changes into a cemetery

with crosses

bathed in white light.

And all this happens

wrapped in the fog carrying

the ghost ship of dreams along.

All roads and seas

lead to the edge of nothingness

where not even a clue 

is left to follow.

Here the poet with his pen

sketches out images

for his future.

Inside the boxes 

there is an incessant whirl.

People and their possessions

seek form,

the ultimate solidity of words.

Long before there were words,

the curious tracks they leave

across an empty space,

the only map

was in the eye of the eagle

gliding along the canyon walls,

or in the fine particles of sand

forming an undulating S,

the wake of the serpent 

sidewinding its way south

beneath the sun.

Once people formed by the light

became Aztecs wandering this land.

Their lips uttered words

and the words became gods. 

Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl,

Lord and Lady of Our Sustenance. 

Quetzalcoatl,

God of Life,

Creator of the People,

Lord of the House of Dawn.

Tezcatlipoca,

omnipotent God of Darkness,

God of Sorcerers and Highwaymen,

Lord of the House of Night.

We are not the Aztecs

who left ghost trails here.

We remember them.

We are the victims

of all the Aztecs--

Mexican Aztecs

Spanish Aztecs

Anglo Aztecs

Pick Your Own Favorite Aztecs.

We are the sacrificed

in this land

where the Lord of the House of Night

grows fat

at the Feast of the Flying of Men.

Reluctantly, we leave home and wander.

Sometimes our barrios

recall the family names of founders--

los Barelas, Martineztown,

los Candelarias--or the saints--

San José, San Felipe--

and we remember them 

on our travels

for we constantly move about

and we are far from Aztlán.

Words become seeds of maize
the healing herbs of the medicine man.
Words become mud villages
named with the flint edge
of cliff, wind, and star.
Tiguex, Alcanform, Isleta, Sandia.

Spaniards brought their words
for the shapes of horses, sheep,
metal plows, swords and crosses,
wheat, apples, peaches.
Franciscans offered up
their sales pitch--
sin, forgiveness, salvation,
the trade-in offer for the old
native gods.

Clouds of ivory

tinge the Spanish sky,

burst and fall in Mozarabic light,

a fountain spray

beneath al Andaluz sun

caught in some Alhambran

garden of my mind.

Evening toward Africa

and a dark muezzin

calls down the Moorish night

to the narrow streets of Granada.

Golden Age ballads

and a song

in praise of wine

by Samuel Ha-Nagid

drift through the olive trees

toward the sea.

Here an occasional Morrano

paused on the journey north,

seeing the Sandias,

seeing Granada in his mind,

and continued on up in the valley.

Spanish tongues

fleshed out the bare bones

of love and hate.

Indio

Mestizo

Española

Mexicano

Americano

whispered

the ritual words,

then parted the blessed thighs

In the name of the Father

and of the Son

who will be born of this union . . .

and of the Holy Ghost,

him, the spooky one,

the inscrutable tongue of fire

who threatened to burn me as a child.

Him, the ghost who may have been

the howling birth of strong men and women

who built

la Plaza de Alburquerque,

the Church of San Felipe Neri,

ad majorem gloriam dei.

Words of ancestors

spoke of fabulous islands and beasts,

fountains of youth,

cities of gold and heavenly utopias

where the saints would wait

for the second coming of Christ.

Words of ancestors

spoke of Hummingbird-on-the-Left,

an eagle devouring the hearts of men,

the sun who did battle with darkness

and arose every morning

from the pool of night,

human blood and tears.

Words of ancestors

spoke of Jesucristo and his mother,

la Virgen María, who intercedes

with God the Father

to have mercy on sinners.

Sephardic laments

of a lost tribe

carried the words of ancestors

who longed for Zion.

Words of ancestors

sprouted from the lips of the dying,

gathered and hovered

over the rites of extreme unction

and the return of the camposanto.

From where it no longer is,

a star takes aim like a sharpshooter

right at my eyes.

Light scatters in all directions,

a pack of wolves on fire

running to the past and the future.

Bones walk through my shadow

and my body explodes

into a longing for wings.

Coyotes gather in the dark place

circling my path with cold fire.

I cannot answer their hungry jaws.

A bird, a hawk, is a shadow 

circling my future,

is carved into stone I cannot see.

Camposanto of words

uncoupling from flesh,

camposanto of words

seeking the lips of a lover,

camposanto of words

unmoved by time

scattering the tombstones,

camposanto of words

crystalline for the moon

fleeting and hard

as an obsidian butterfly,

camposanto of words

you yearn for a song.

The land is stark in New Mexico.

The sky comes right down to the ground

and stamps hard on the earth

insistent as a Jemez dancer

or the staff of a matachín.

It is a land of hunters

where men and animals

stand naked in a forest of light,

always taking aim,

always the target.

Between San Ysidro and Cuba

I come across a hunter,

a coyote killed by a truck in the night,

a spot of gore on the road.

His great head stands alone,

sculpture mounted on the desolate asphalt,

the jaws thrown open like the land,

the fangs bare to the immense sky.

This is his last and fitting comment

on the world of coyote,

the vast wilderness of death

he did not know 

would fix forever in my heart

this final, silent, and classic howl.

Capulín rises, a perfect volcanic cone,

near Folsom, at the edge of the plains to the east.

We drive round the base in a pickup truck

hunting for deer, our tracks crisscrossing

the ghosts of cowboys on the Goodnight Trail,

Kiowas on their fast ponies, and earlier men

who hunted the mammoth and the great bison.

Capulín rises, a white marker

in a green and cloudy sea

while we, like cavemen, repeat the pattern below

before we, too, complete the circle

into memory, into silence, and into stone.

Looking down from Johnson mesa,

Ratón is a scattering of cold seeds of light,

mirror to the stars in the black sky.

I remember I am a fawn on this sheer ledge,

an early man wandered over from Folsom,

or from the cool caves at Altamira.

There is a cold wind sweeping around the rocks

as at Stonehenge, and through my bones.

Before my feet, a sharp drop falls

to the deer below nesting down for the night.

I remember that I am a tired hunter

and that time has caught me on this cliff.

There is nothing can be done for it 

except let hunter and hunted sleep for a while.

Tomorrow we take up the chase again with the sun

here where the world breaks off,

snapped like a twig or a rifle shot

into the silence of the valley below. 

Here the earth, too, is a hunter

restless on its trail through the void.

Driving on Highway 90 

east from Silver City

crow crosses my path above San Lorenzo.

Gray squirrel does the same thing

in Gila Wilderness.

Halfway through Hillsboro

a whirl of cottonwood leaves

dances across the highway 

following Percha Kreek

down to Caballo Lake.

The Caballo Mountains to the east

rear up from the desert floor

shimmering in the afternoon heat,

horses trapped in stone;

much like unicorns,

they stretch their necks upward,

the great blue heads

neighing into the sky.

Rhythms of the hunt

demanding as the staff of the matachines

return to la plaza vieja de Alburquerque,

the boxes made of ink on paper. 

Ya vienen los indios

de Guarecimé,

son los matachines

de Guarecimé

Son los matachines

de Guarecimé.

Son los matachines

de Guarecimé.

Words of ancestors

remembered a castle in County Cork,

a leprechaun hiding in the glen,

the clean taste of whiskey,

a beloved violin in the evening breeze.

A Victrola of the heart

plays in each box on the map

letting fly voices and words

which sing of another time.

A box on a map

is a whirling dust devil,

a ghost dance in ink.

Each box forms

a history of the flame word,

a cry from the past.

Ghosts walk arm in arm

around the Old Town plaza.

A pale tourist yawns.

Mr. Devine plays

a waltz on his violin.

Carried by the wind,

the music rising

from the bandstand in the square.

He dreams his children.

The old photograph

shows dark Irish eyes and hair.

He sees his grandson.

When she was young,

Rebecca Gutierrez sang

and danced in these streets.

Grandmother looks subdued.

Not at all like when she prayed 

the endless rosary.

Another photograph,

family portrait, dated 1898.

Cristobal Mares,

patriarch of the family,

prosperous ranchero,

his eyes are the shade of history.

He remembers his grandfather's stories

about the long cattle drive

north from Guadalajara,

the throat-searing crossing

of la jornada del muerto

(the dead man's journey)

to arrive in the rio arriba country,

green mountains north of Santa Fe

then Taos and home.

Trinidad Pacheco de Mares

endures the eternal Taos winter,

the struggle etched in the set jaw,

the pursed lips.

She is the matriarch who bears

for her husband Cristobal six children:

Laureano, Porfiria, Isabel,

Fernando, Lupita, Eduardo--

my grandfather who is about fifteen

in this photograph, stubborn enough

to survive the loss of land,

the Great Depression,

slaving in the sweatshops

for the Santa Fe Railroad.

He will live long enough

to wrestle me as a child,

that strength of his still there

for me to draw from until now.

These Mares and Martinez stare

from the cold eye of winter 

into the eye of the camera,

into the eye of death,

that bony-faced woman,

la huesuda, who smiles

and points her arrows at them

from my century,

from my eyes starting into theirs.

I turn away toward the future,

also found deep in the eyes

of David, as Goliath discovered

in a painting by Jaro Dedina.

David, confident as a man

delivered from the jaw of the lion

and from the paw of the bear,

ruddy and handsome,

his face the color of the earth,

takes up the foreground.

A visage as of a mighty power

to the right and above David's head

looks down from the sky

over the valley of Elah.

There seems to be no place

large enough on this canvas

for a Goliath to stand

against the steady gaze

of David's eyes.

Goliath, 

seen only in the eyes of David,

sees a graceful motion not his own,

a dance he fears he cannot do.

For forty days

the Philistine came forward

large and clumsy as a doomed empire.

Morning and evening

he shouted defiance of the spirit.

Trapped now by these eyes,

his great bulk

reduced to pitiable smallness,

Goliath can do no thing

but murmur the ritual slogans

and lurch forward to the battle.

David's eyes will not let go.

Goliath, held fast to is footnote in history

by the eyes in this painting,

does not see the onrushing future,

the small stone

cast from the whirling sling of David.

A third photograph shows my grandparents and their red brick house

on First Street in New Town.

It was the harsh thirties

and the photo tells

the old story of the Crash,

the land blowing away to Texas.

Grandpa is dressed in a cheap suit,

Grandma in what finery she could salvage.

Grandpa was bound

as my father was then bound,

hand and foot

by iron and steel and debt,

by the railroad "shops" 

where men were sliced in half

by the indifferent tools.

The "shops," layered with grime

so dark and gloomy

a worker could lean over a stairwell,

piss on the foreman below

and never get caught.

A train whistle

cuts from east to west

through a child's memory

that first flew and circled

high above some Andalusian plain,

or took flight on a fluted note

in the court of Texcoco.

Far away across the lake

and the floating gardens,

the ram's horn 

called to yet another sacrifice.

The child cannot remember

what he remembers now

here in Old Town,

here with this map,

right here in the Rio Grande valley

where extinct volcanos

guard the west approach

and the Sandia Mountains to the east

sculpt the memories of stone age men.

Another camera has caught 

the ghost in the KiMo Theatre.

Early 1930s, clean

New Mexico sky,

small town downtown Albuquerque

KiMo Theatre marquee:

Glen Tryon in Hot Heels,

Five Acts of Vaudeville.

Years later, Uncle Elfego

took me to see Roy Rogers,

Gene Autry, the Cisco Kid,

and all their epigones

who fought the good fight

against the ubiquitous bad guys.

Now, Uncle Elfego

sings in his grave.

Hot air balloons

float above Albuquerque,

balloons for his funeral

to rise with his spirit

and carry his memory into song.

Frozen, these figures

face the camera

to be caught in pure form.

The university student

dressed like a thirties dandy

raises his hand and salutes me

from his time to my own.

Another man, then in his 20s,

stares at me dumbfounded

from the west corner just north

of the old Fords and Chevies

on Fifth Street

more than half a century away.

The American afternoon crowd

in front of the KiMo

caught then by the camera lens

is now what it must be,

the frozen images within

the reduced and still life

dimensions of a photograph.

Three young businessmen

who try to sell arid mesa

and blue sky

greet each other.

The shadows of the distant future

cast by the camera

are too thin for them in this brilliant sun.

Too  thin, also, for the heavy-set optimist

wearing the good suit

and smiling into the end of his era.

He stares like the last 

black-and-white buffalo

into the dispassionate camera,

the last of his God-fearing kind.

He stands on the hood

of the Pierce Arrow.

Beside the Pierce Arrow

stands the happy baker from Lola's Cafe.

A woman and her daughter pause

to smile at me before they, too, exit

to their own half century.

Another Pierce Arrow continues east on Central,

black arrow crossing the bright day,

black arrow in black-and-white photograph,

black arrow crossing before my eyes.

It is New Mexico, late '20s or early '30s,

black-and-white photograph of the KiMo Theatre

appealing to the history minded

except for him, the ghost, the one who didn't pause

for the camera!

He's the fast-moving blur

him the clown,

sideshow barker,

seller of popcorn and cotton candy,

well dressed, it is plain to see

from the cloud puffs of form

which caught his hands

and sport coat sleeves,

also the pant legs and spats.

It is for him I sing--

him, the ghost

walking smartly along Central

to the El Fidel Hotel

or perhaps on to Old Town,

him, the ghost,

too slick to be caught by the camera,

too much to do

to be trapped by his own time.

Bones pass through his shadow

every day in Albuquerque.

Him, the ghost who stares at Uncle Elfego and me

in the KiMo Theatre

watching Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies,

a shadow on an old photograph,

a hope solid but shapeless,

fleeting as faith.

Him, the ghost in the KiMo Theatre.

A train whistle echoes again

and is gone.

The train sits on a siding.

The rails turn into rust.

Weeds numerous as headstones

grow inside the roundhouse

crying like an old woman to herself,

longing for her dead children.

I am reminded of the whistle's

shrill lament,

the purpose-bound engine

coming down the tracks,

remorseless as memory.

To the west on the map,

Mr. McCarty's house

is the thick rectangle.

The square behind it

is the tin-roofed garage

where Donny McCarty showed me

how to parachute out of the attic.

It was our airplane

and it was our fortress

deep behind enemy lines,

our secret cave in a cliff

where our small bodies

became immortal shapes

of comic book and movie heroes.

Across the street

is the Manzano Day School

with its playground

open to the children

of the country club set.

We invaded that forbidden wonderland.

Once the watchman caught us,

Donny and me, talked of jail,

tossed us out of paradise

and warned us not to be caught here again,

warned us never to return.

I became an enemy of the state. 

Nearby is the large square

meant to be Old Town Plaza.

The little domino on the north side

is the San Felipe Neri Church.

The other large square is the stone castle

Bernalillo County Court House of the 1880s

that became San Felipe School.

Every gloomy room held for a child

the ghost of an outlaw,

a cattle rustler, a hanged man.

The short leg of the L-shaped building

on San Felipe Street

is where I lied for one year

with good songs and a woman I dearly loved.

That thin rectangle on Lomas Boulevard,

New York Avenue, as it was called then,

stand for the word which is my center.

The bird of memory comes winging back

strong as my child lungs

gasping for air in an oxygen tent,

strong as the coal and cedar

in the wood-burning stove,

strong as the fresh-based wild pheasant

my father hunted and killed,

strong as the July sun

across the worn linoleum floor,

strong as the outhouse stench

even in freezing December,

strong as the wind-and-rain-polished

adobe walls in the back yard

that stood broken and gaping,

strong as the horsehair and straw

mixed in those mud bricks,

strong as the vanished voices

that held together the singing vision.

On such wings

the bird of memory flies

and then falls back to earth,

to silence, to velorios,

to all the weeping women.

Where the map leaves off

there is a great white empty space,

the rest of the world.

Beyond Old Town, la Plaza Vieja,

the old women in black shawls,

the old fires turning to white ash,

there is only terra incognita.

I populate these boxes and lines

made of ink on paper

as best I can inside my head.

Then I turn away

to my own place and my own time.

El unicornio

malherido por estos tiempos

corre al margen del mapa.

Bajo la luna llena

las blancas abejas

labran panal de luz

en una noche serena.

He visot pasar el unicornio.

Hechizado, lo he seguido

a la margen del ancho mar.

No sé si me quedo

para simpre dormido

o al punto de despertar.

Pero ya veo cristalizar

los granitos de sal

en el panal de las abejas.

The unicorn,

badly wounded by these times,

gallops along the margin of the map.

With the full moon above,

the white bees 

build a honeycomb of light

in the calm evening.

I have seen the unicorn pass by.

Spellbound, I have followed him 

to the edge of the sea

where I know not if I sleep forever

or if I am about to wake.

Still, I see

the salt grains crystallize

in the honeycomb of the bees. 

Song - Love Yourself - Linda Myers

Love Transcends

Love Transports

Love Transforms

Love Translates

Poem - The Vulture & the Body - Ada Limón

On my way to the fertility clinic,

I pass five dead animals.

First a raccoon with all four paws to the sky
    like he’s going to catch whatever bullshit load falls on him next.

Then, a grown coyote, his furred golden body soft against the white

cement lip of the traffic barrier. Trickster no longer,

an eye closed to what’s coming.

Close to the water tower that says, “Florence, Y’all,” which means I’m near Cincinnati,

but still in the bluegrass state, and close to my exit, I see

three dead deer, all staggered but together, and I realize as I speed past in my
death machine that they are a family. I say something

to myself that’s in between a prayer and curse—how dare we live

on this Earth.

I want to tell my doctor about how we all hold a duality

in our minds: futures entirely different. Footloose or forged.

I want to tell him how lately, it’s enough to be reminded that my body

is not just my body, but that I’m made of old stars and so’s he, and that last Tuesday,

I sat alone in the car by the post office and just was for a whole hour, no one
knowing how to find me, until I got out, the sound of the car door shutting like a gun,

and mailed letters, all of them saying, Thank you.

But in the clinic, the sonogram wand showing my follicles, he asks if I have any questions,

and says, Things are getting exciting.

I want to say, But what about all the dead animals? The Earth? Our trapped bodies?
But he goes quicksilver, and I’m left to pull my panties up like a big girl.

Somedays there is a violent sister inside of me, and a red ladder
that wants to go elsewhere.

I drive home on the other side of the road, going south now. The white coat has said

I’m ready, and I watch as a vulture crosses over me, heading toward

the carcasses I haven’t properly mourned or even forgiven. What if, instead of carrying

a child, I am supposed to carry grief? The great black scavenger flies parallel now,

each of us speeding, intently and driven, toward what we’ve been taught to do with death.

Instructions on Not Giving Up (poem) by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

THERE DOESN'T NEED TO BE A POEM by Tess Taylor

for sadness. Simply to breathe
next to a stream that slips to the gutter
near your house

would be enough. To see,
next door, in the graveyard,
the brown-and-yellow millipede

bury itself below one granite stone,
joining in the work of making soil,
just as now the faithful oxygen

still turns the copper headstone green,
oxidizing to patina despite all.
By luck, your own feathered alveoli

still redden your blood, your fine cell walls
trade oxygen for carbon,
and sift the windy mix we call the air:

This happens, going on invisibly,
even if no one remembers how
& even if it seems that pain

is a volatile molecule, grief
bonding unpredictably to things.
Now the late sun rims a cloud.

You, who watch that cloud:
Inhale. Exhale.

Poem - Perceptive Prayer - Grace Bauer

The beauty of summer nights
is how they go on –
light lingering so long we can
imagine ourselves immortal.
For moments at a time.

And winter days –
their own kind of beauty.
Any swatch of color:
hint of leaf bud, sway
of dried brown grass, even litter –

a bright yellow bag
light enough for the breeze
to lift and carry,
can render itself as pleasure
to an eye immersed in gray.

May we learn to love
what is both
ordinary and extra.
May our attention be
a kind of praise.
A worship of the all
there really is.

Meditation - Hillary L. McBride

You are good
You have always been good
Right from the beginning
I’m sorry that anyone told you otherwise
This breath
This head,
These hands
This love
Those feet
That smile
Your ears
This heart
This breath
This breath
This breath
Good, all good. So, so, so good.
You are loved
You are so loved
You are lovable
You have been working so hard
I don’t have to know how, to know that it’s true
You are precious
You are not a mistake, you are so on purpose
You are not broken
You never were
I’m sorry that you might have thought that
I’m sorry anyone might have made you think that
You are enough
You are so so enough
You do not have to earn your enough-ness
You do not have to grovel for value, for love, for goodness
You already have it
You already are it
You are loved
You are loved
You are love
You are love
You are love

Quote - adrienne maree brown

We learn to love by loving. We practice with each other, on ourselves, in all kinds of relationships. And right now we need to be in a rigorous practice, because we can no longer afford to love people the way we have been loving them…What we need right now is a radical, global love that grows from deep within us to encompass all life.

For My Daughter (poem) by Kim Moore

And later, when she asks I’ll say 

some parts of it were beautiful-

how in their brightness
and sudden opening
the faces of the neighbors
began to look like flowers.
I’ll tell her how we began
to look back at photos
of our younger selves
with our arm around a stranger
or leaning on the shoulders of friends,
and saw that touch
had always been a kind of holiness,
a type of worship we were promised.
I’ll tell her that in some ways
our days shrunk to nothing,
being both as long as a year
and as quick as the turning of a page.
I’ll tell her how she learned to crawl
in those days, in those times
when we could not leave,
when bodies were carried
from homes and were not counted,
that she began to say her first word
while death waited in the streets,
that though I was afraid,
I never saw fear in her eyes.

(Poem about COVID lockdown, Commissioned by Ledbury Poetry Festival)

Poem of the One World - Mary Oliver

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.

Another question

 What else can I help grow around me?

Something to meditate on...

 What's the line between escape and a joy practice?

(What is numbing and what is resting?)

Sermon - March 27, 2022 - The Rev. Angela Herrera - "When Life Stinks"

"the logic of justice" 

Why is it that I agree that it's a myth that there is a logic of justice for any individual (i.e. you don't "deserve" the bad things that befall you through no fault of your own), but I also believe the arc of the universe bends toward justice. Maybe that's only true because we all are leaning on that curve. 

 

Quote - James Clear - Atomic Habits - January 2, 2020

"You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems."

Poem - Regret - Barbara Crooker

Regret 

nothing. Not those years 

when you were a single mother, 

bologna casserole, and not enough 

money for heat. Or the years before, 

the ones spent trying to please a man 

who couldn’t be happy, no matter how 

hard you tried to replicate his mother’s recipes— 

the marinara wasn’t sweet enough, the lasagna 

didn’t have enough layers. 

Don’t regret the years that went up 

in smoke, the glamour of the lit match, 

the first drag, the curls that rose 

to decorate the ceiling. Or the years 

as a waitress, the customers who stiffed 

you on tips, which were quarters 

and nickels back then, every thin dime 

counting. Instead, remember your friends, 

those hours on the telephone, the artery 

of the long black cord, a river of voice. 

Don’t tell me that broken places 

make you stronger, and I won’t mention 

silver linings. Sometimes, there are scars. 

 Sometimes, it rains. Stop looking for the friends 

who aren’t here, the ones whose faces you sometimes 

glimpse in a crowd. The past is the grass growing under 

our feet; the dirt beneath it, what feeds it. Remember 

that nothing is ever lost.

Meditation Mantra

 I will hold myself open.

Where I am closed, I am false.

When I am open, I can lead in love.

Vacillations

I am swinging from an almost euphoric feeling of well-being and rightness and gratitude to overwhelm and exhaustion and resentment at all that there is to do - ALWAYS - so much to do that never ends. But of course it doesn't. So why be mad at what IS and not change how I react to what is? That is, I realize, what I can actually control.

And sometimes, I can. And I breathe. And I settle my shoulders. And I let a smile creep back onto my face. And I let myself feel the well being that is here for me when I settle myself long enough to hear it. 

And then I blink and move and check off another task. And feel good for a moment until I remember that there's another one. And another one. And then the cycle starts again.

Is this middle life? Trying to be okay with who you are, your failings, your shortcomings, what you will never get better at? 

Brene Brown says so. (And here let me pause to say how much I want a guru, a teacher, a wise one whose lap I can crawl into and ask for a story - one with a moral that will help me make my next choice and make it a good one.)

And generally, I do like myself, when I see myself more holistically and less through judgment, which tends to only be slivers and facets, shadows and fractions of me. Me in moments and not me over the course of multiple rooms, multiple days, multiple contexts. 

I wish I were more calm. More generous. I feel sometimes that my homebody hunkering down means I don't have much to share with others. Maybe I should find more ways to be there for people I love. To be open to connection. That feels hard. I'm reminded of the image of Ernie hammering planks from the pirate ship to the shore. How tenuous that felt. The miracle of leverage that held until his friend was safe. I'm not sure I trust that for myself. 

And I don't know what I am becoming. I forget that there is no arriving. That where I am, I cannot stay, even if I do learn to love myself and where I am. 

I had a dream the other night of a long-lost love. In the dream, I had another chance to fall into his arms, into the black hole that was our connection and our love. I felt myself want to trap him, keep him, fall into us and lose myself. Awake, I think it felt easier than walking my own path. Continually looking for and finding and then looking for myself. 

My search for poets I can love and poems I can learn from feels like that, too. Like I'm looking for a shortcut, an easier way to wisdom. Like I'm running from my voice, because what if I don't like what I have to say? Or what if I have nothing to say? 

Intentions (not plans) for January

 What are my intentions for myself in 2022?

Intention = to stretch toward

• To feel connected to the church as it stretches
• To seek out opportunities to feel playful
• To feel strong and healthy
• To be mindful around food, particularly sweets
• To find rest in ways that are not mostly about numbing

How do you want to show up in 2022?

(What kind of person do you want to be?)

God of Janus - beginnings and endings. Doorways. 

• Compassionate
• Mindful
• Open / present
• Flexible
• Generous
• Curious
• Playful

White Privilege - Editorial by Kyle Korver of the Utah Jazz basketball team

 April 2019

Poem - In Winter - Michael Ryan

At four o’clock it’s dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
their steps left and right and back
like some quick folk dance of kindness,
I remembered the winter we spent
crying in each other’s laps.
What could you be thinking at this moment?
How lovely and strange the gangly spines
of trees against a thickening sky
as you drive from the library
humming off-key? Or are you smiling
at an idea met in a book
the way you smiled with your whole body
the first night we talked?
I was so sure my love of you was perfect,
and the light today
reminded me of the winter you drove home
each day in the dark at four o’clock
and would come into my study to kiss me
despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

Quote - from a poem by Jane Kenyon

"If it's darkness
we're having, let it be extravagant."

from "Taking Down the Tree"

Poem - Your Luck Is About To Change - Susan Elizabeth Howe

(A fortune cookie)

Ominous inscrutable Chinese news
to get just before Christmas,
considering my reasonable health,
marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan,
career running like a not-too-old Chevrolet.
Not bad, considering what can go wrong:
the bony finger of Uncle Sam
might point out my husband,
my own national guard,
and set him in Afghanistan;
my boss could take a personal interest;
the pain in my left knee could spread to my right.
Still, as the old year tips into the new,
I insist on the infant hope, gooing and kicking
his legs in the air. I won't give in
to the dark, the sub-zero weather, the fog,
or even the neighbors' Nativity.
Their four-year-old has arranged
his whole legion of dinosaurs
so they, too, worship the child,
joining the cow and sheep. Or else,
ultimate mortals, they've come to eat
ox and camel, Mary and Joseph,
then savor the newborn babe.

Poem - Lines for Winter - Mark Strand

for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

Video: Reading by Mary Louise-Parker

Read the day after Christmas while listening to "May I Suggest" - a song with words and music by Susan Werner

"May I suggest that this is the best part of your life."

Sermon on joy - Rev. Katie Templin Culbert

 

12/12/20021

Be with yourself in your feelings. Empathy for yourself. Mindful feeling. Experience the moment. Be here with now. If we are here. Being awake to the present is a conduit for joy. Cultivate and express joy.

Sympathetic joy. Delight in others' joy. 

Elephant and 3 men. Not wrong. Perspective is right. But incomplete. 

Thinking of Ross Gay's quote...

Rini Death Self paintings

The more perspectives we have, the more it all makes sense - the wide view. Interdependence. Not despair and independence

Vimeo video

Opening to joy...

 Sermon by the Rev. Angela Herrera on 12/5/2021

• The man and the tigers and the strawberries
• The study in 2020 of happiness among different ages
• Woman seeing Jupiter

Vimeo video

Me: 

• Joe vs. Volcano: "some things take care of themselves. They're not your job; maybe they're not even your business."
• Kristen in college, after taking anti-depressants, noticing the breeze for the first time, de-centering herself and her pain, able to experience the world, open for the first time to joy
• Me in college, feeling depressed and suicidal but noticing the sunset one evening and realizing my feelings are beside the point. My job is to be here to witness and worship the world. 
• Alice Walker, pisses god off when you walk by the color purple and don't notice.
• Mary Oliver quote - standing still, noticing the world, and being astonished.

Tocaya = name twin

“Eres mi tocayo“

 Michaela/Mikayla/Michayla/Mikaela/Mikayla

Michelle

The space between what happens and you respond

Brene Brown Dare to Lead podcast with Dr. Susan David on the Danger of Toxic Positivity, Part 2

Between what's happened and my response is a space. Emotions rush in to fill the gap, but you can stay present, use your emotions as a signpost for your values, and choose how you show up here in your values.

How do I want to show up here in my values?

“The Stubborn Gifts of Breath and Life” by the Rev. Maureen Killoran

"You must praise the mutilated world...."
—Adam Zagajewski, trans. Clare Cavanagh

    It felt like being on the moon, walking on Mount St. Helens. Just a few years previous, that mountain had blown her top, destroying human and animal life, flattening vegetation and buildings for miles, and sharing its ash with the world. As we stepped from our car, we felt that ash drift like talcum around our ankles, rise in the air, enter with our breath. Other than occasional blacked memories of trees, all was grey, grey as far you could see.
    Silence seized us for the longest time as we stood there, two irrelevant humans and this huge, mutilated world. Only gradually did our eyes slow and our hearts focus. Only gradually did we begin to see what was really before us.
    How had we overlooked the fireweed, that perennial volunteer, its brilliant buds proclaiming, “Hey, world, we’re back!” What blocked us from celebrating the eager insect conversations around us? It was right there before us, and we nearly walked away. Overwhelmed by the devastation, we almost missed the tiny pond, its surface literally dancing with more tadpoles than I had ever seen.
    We do this, you see – we ensnare ourselves with the magnitude of what the poet called the mutilated world. We get busy, and troubled, and frightened, and then, incongruously, it’s time for Thanksgiving. I, at least, need this season to remind myself to be grateful for intermittent beauty and the stubborn gifts of breath and life. I—maybe you too? —need this season, even if just quietly to say, “praise be.”

Indecision

 What am I good at? What do I want to do? What don't I want to do?

I'm at the juncture where I could do multiple things, but in some ways, the possibilities start to narrow as you get more years of experience doing something. 

I'm nervous about being used, being manipulated, being taken advantage of. And for all those things, I think I can be saavy and ultimately can be ready to walk away. 

I'm nervous about being the last man standing on a crumbling hill. But there's also the possibility to build something good, if I can fill in the holes that -- admittedly -- are yawning chasms right now.

But I believe in this work. And I love it. And I'm well suited to it. And I'm the heart and soul of it, and if I walk away, it most assuredly WILL crumble, even if rebuilt with a different vision -- maybe better -- later.

The politics is ugly and getting worse. But my team is getting better. I'm getting better. And it's an endlessly interesting puzzle. 

And did I mention that my work and my heart and soul have fused? For better and worse. 

So when do you walk away? And into what? And is it just my fear of what I don't know and haven't experienced that is overpowering my instinct that I'm being misused? Perhaps.

Or maybe there's nothing better that suits me. 

This space is so uncomfortable, full of fear and uncertainty and mistrust of myself. It's hard to see myself right now. I don't feel grounded, and I don't trust anything I know. Everything I think I'm good at doesn't seem to serve me fully when I need it most. But isn't that always true? Some challenges are bigger than your skills. 

And talk about first world problems! Wah, I got offered the promotion I wanted, but not quite in the way I wanted. And maybe my work situation isn't exactly what I want it to be! Poor me! I've gotten lots of good validation from people around me who I do respect and trust when I made the decision to walk away. Will they respect me less when I stay?

Or ... I Keep Trying

 Just when you think you're out... they pull you back in.

They offered me the promotion I wanted and assured me I had support. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. But in the meantime, I get paid what I'm worth and have a chance to continue building what I was trying to build. 

And if I stay for 3 more years, that's the next step in the retirement plan, which would be fantastic. 

I'm excited to try to staff up and shape what we do and how we do it, carve out a place of support in a bigger bureaucracy that can be toxic and political. But also leaves freedom to fill voids left when people get busy and focus mostly on appearances.

Changes

 After 10 years, I decided tonight to change jobs. 

What I do is a big part - perhaps too big a part - of who I am. So this change is monumental. And I'm sad and angry and grieving. But it's also like getting out of a bad relationship. You can't want it more than you're wanted. Your love does not make up for them not loving you. 

And I will miss my team. And the plans I tried to put in place. I can't quite see how any of it will come to fruition now. Not that I'm all important. Just that I was the last strand of glue holding it all together. And now that I can see that I cannot keep holding on, I see how futile my holding on was. One person is not a system, much less a system that's workable, effective, or sustainable. 

There will be other big efforts and things to build and grow and nurture and contribute to. 

And I'm excited to have a partner at work again. The new job - if it pans out like it's shaping up to look - will still be a little bit of everything I love. The difference will be that I'm valued. And not asked to do it all with no tools or resources or leadership or backing. 

And part of me is wanting it all to crumble when I leave so that maybe they'll see and regret how they treated me. But that's not going to happen, since none of what I built was what they wanted. 

I feel the worst about leaving good people behind without cover or leadership or a plan. They'll be put to work, doing something, and I hope it's what they like doing or that they find other things. Everyone is hiring right now. It's bonkers. So many good jobs out there. 

And to the public who thought I only wanted the worst? Good luck with the next one in my shoes. I hope you go more gently on them. 

My hope is that I can take time between now and Christmas to just be home, focus on myself, exercise and listen to Brene Brown and do an inventory of what I want, what I'm good at, what I'd like to work on, what I need. And next. And enjoy my family. And rest. And grieve. And nurture a new seed of hope to plant in my next opportunity. May I grow stronger roots and broader branches. May I catch more sunlight and breathe more deeply. 

Leadership

I've been consuming Brene Brown podcasts, my new favorite source for soul searching epiphanies, but also just daily life hacks about how to be a better person, live my story, set boundaries, and lead others by showing up in the ways that reinforce the culture of vulnerability, trust, and accountability. 

In the past few days, I've listened to the Dare to Lead interviews with Jim Collins, Charles Duhigg, and Doug Conant. They all talk about habits as the discipline to live your values every day and hold yourself accountable. Jim Collins seems to go overboard with this by tracking his time into 3 buckets -- creativity/curiosity/learning, teaching, and other things that need to get done -- and setting the goal to spend 1,000 hours in each rolling 365 day period on creativity/curiosity/learning. Charles Duhigg says that habits = discipline and commitment but also that they are a short-cut to flow. Our brains rely on heuristics to be able to focus on what's novel and important. The more we can develop practices around what's meaningful, the easier it is to access deeper thinking and focus. I feel that's true, even if I'm not sure I've experienced that much, at least recently. 

It's been true of writing for me. I know the times in my life when I was writing more every day, I wrote better more easily and wrote better -- deeper thoughts, easier process. It's the difference between when you're learning a new sport and have to think about every move versus when you're good enough that you stop thinking about HOW to play and just play. Much more enjoyable, easier, and definitely more successful.  

One thing that has bothered me about these conversations is that race has only glancingly been mentioned. I feel like race is a big part of the conversation when people of color are being interviewed, but when white people are interviewed -- even when concepts seem so ripe and like such opportunities for applying them to racial equity moments -- Brene doesn't go there. I'm not sure if she just isn't seeing it, thinking about it, or ... It feels colorblind racist to me. Like she's primed to think about race with POC, but clearly white people are just talking to everyone, and it's universally applicable! Frustrating. I think it would be fun for Brene to have a Leslie Jones version of the podcast, where she can just Mystery Science Theater 3000 the conversation and translate everything they're saying from a race lens. 

Charles Duhigg went there a little, and seemed to say that he can see his white privilege because he grew up in Albuquerque's South Valley (!) and that his wish is that everyone can experience that same sense of limitless potential. Hmmm. Little cringy. I wonder how that would land for POC listeners. 

Doug Conant talked about firing 300 of the top 350 leaders at Campbell Soup when he took over as CEO, and Brene didn't press him on why that was needed. They couldn't be trained? And now this guy is a leadership trainer? And it never came up that maybe there was a missed opportunity there? Or at least .. some irony given what he does (for free) now?

I wish Brene would debrief the conversations a little, like Dax Shepherd and Monica Padman do on Armchair Expert. I feel like she might see some of these holes / opportunities when she has a bit more distance, and I'd love to hear what she THINKS after and about these interviews. Maybe with her sister Barrett and Tarana Burke? YES.

All the ones I've listened to lately have definitely been really good back-and-forth conversations, and they've inspired me to think about who I want to be as a leader, how I want to show up, how I spend my days compared to what I say I value.

"Everybody's written on habits. Well, that's part of the process. Life is not epiphany-driven. We're all looking for the epiphany... 'I just need an epiphany a big idea, and I'm going to break through.' Life is a grind, and we've got to find a way to thrive in the grind of it all. It's all about progressive improvement, continuous improvement, doing a little better today than we did yesterday with a little more intentionality. And I have found that you can actually build your leadership muscle and get unstuck in small ways over time in a way that can be immediately more fulfilling." - Doug Conant

I don't really know how I show up as a leader. My team only seems barely functioning, and my senior leaders left, so ... maybe not good. But I think one of my strengths is mentoring people to keep developing in their careers, which means, people outgrow their positions and look for bigger opportunities elsewhere.

I don't feel I have the power to protect my folks or shield them from the unrelenting pressures and political monkeying that has us jerked around and buried under too many urgent have-tos. Maybe that's more of why people leave. 

Do I spend my time on what I value? Days ago I was questioning my weekly check-ins with each of my direct reports. It's 30 minutes weekly that's in my calendar in case they want/need my time, and it's up to them whether we meet or skip it so they can "keep rolling." More often than not, we meet. And sometimes it's for an hour. We talk about tasks, I have time to give more context or answer questions, and often we focus on professional development goals and opportunities. But it does mean that 1/2 my day every week is given over to others' priorities. But it's an investment in my people, and I do value that! Maybe I should ask everyone.

And this promotion! The not knowing is so hard. I feel like I'm interviewing every day. And how to do you say no to things or admit you're over your head and drowning when they're deciding whether to give you more responsibilities???

Impossible situation. 

And part of me is DARING them to not promote me. See how fast I'm out the door and let all these plates fall. And maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe even the best thing. Let someone else take ownership. Maybe they will have solutions that I can't see and wouldn't be open to even if I did. That's hard. Because I still feel like I'm the best at what I do. 

But what should I be better at?

 

Facesoul - Grow (song)

 Haunting...

Fear - quote

 Boots Cooper (as told by Molly Ivans): 

"There are some things that will scare you so bad, you'll hurt yourself."

The Rev. Angela Herrera asks us: 

"What might be possible if fear wasn't in the driver's seat?"

Poem - Sweeping Up Dust - Philip Hughes-Luing

Everything becomes dust eventually
blows away, even our own, constantly
adrift, traveling over continents
rendering sunsets with colors to inspire
others to feel awe, others who
may or may not talk about us, much
if at all, but who will watch sunset
will feel our fading fire, and connect

Video - Weapon of Choice by Fatboy Slim - Spike Jonze & Christopher Walken

 This is possibly the best thing ever. Why did I not see this before????

Poem - Fannie Lou Hamer by Kamilah Aisha Moon

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired!” 

She sat across the desk from me, squirming. 

It was stifling. My suite runs hot 

but most days it is bearable. 

This student has turned in nothing, 

rarely comes to class. When she does, 

her eyes bore into me with a disdain 

born long before either of us. 

 She doesn’t trust anything I say. 

She can’t respect my station, 

the words coming out of these lips, 

this face. My breathing 

is an affront. It’s me, she says. 

I never was this student’s professor— 

her immediate reaction 

seeing me at the smart board. 

But I have a calling to complete 

& she has to finish college, 

return to a town where 

she doesn’t have to look at, 

listen to or respect anyone 

like me—forever tall, large 

& brown in her dagger eyes, 

though it’s clear she looks down 

on me. She can return— 

if not to her hometown, another 

enclave, so many others, where 

she can brush a dog’s golden coat, 

be vegan & call herself 

a good person. 

Are you having difficulty with your other classes? 

No. 

 Go, I say, tenderly. 

Loaded as a cop’s gun, 

she blurts point-blank 

that she’s afraid of me. Twice. 

My soft syllables rattle something 

planted deep, 

so I tell her to go where 

she'd feel more comfortable 

as if she were my niece or 

godchild, even wish her 

a good day. 

If she stays, the ways 

this could backfire! 

 Where is my Kevlar shield 

from her shame? 

There’s no way to tell 

when these breasts will evoke 

solace or terror. I hate 

that she surprises me, that I lull 

myself to think her ilk 

is gone despite knowing 

so much more, and better. 

I can’t proselytize my worth 

all semester, exhaust us 

for the greater good. 

I can’t let her make me 

a monster to myself— 

I’m running out of time & pity 

the extent of her impoverished 

heart. She’s from New 

England, 

I’m from the Mid-South. 

Far from elderly, someone 

just raised her like this 

with love. 

I have essays to grade 

but words warp 

on the white page, dart 

just out of reach. I blink 

two hours away, find it hard 

to lift my legs, my voice, 

my head precious to my parents 

now being held 

in my own hands. 

How did they survive 

so much worse, the millions 

with all of their scars! 

What would these rivers be 

without their weeping, 

these streets without 

their faith & sweat? 

Fannie Lou Hamer 

thundered what they felt, 

we feel, into DNC microphones 

on black and white TV 

years before I was a notion. 

She doesn’t know who 

Fannie Lou Hamer is, 

and never has to.

Wagogo - ABQ songs

• South
• East, reprise
• Water Birds (from album All the Time)

In the Company of Women - January Gill O'Neil (poem)

Make me laugh over coffee, 

make it a double, make it frothy 

so it seethes in our delight. 

Make my cup overflow 

with your small happiness. 

I want to hoot and snort and cackle and chuckle. 

Let your laughter fill me like a bell. 

Let me listen to your ringing and singing 

as Billie Holiday croons above our heads. 

Sorry, the blues are nowhere to be found. 

Not tonight. Not here. 

No makeup. No tears. 

Only contours. Only curves. 

Each sip takes back a pound, 

each dry-roasted swirl takes our soul. 

Can I have a refill, just one more? 

Let the bitterness sink to the bottom of our lives.
Let us take this joy to go.

Sermon - The. Rev Bob LaVallee

 What do I need to let go to have more room for love?

Poem - Pluto Shits on the Universe - Fatimah Asghar

On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun.

Naw.

I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free.

Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system.
Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t
shit but a day to me. I could spend your
whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking
about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy
on up and marry me by now. Your day?

That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day
is barely the start of my sunset.

My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold
you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker.
And you tried to order me. Called me ninth.
Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass
you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your
rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun
I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.

It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more
copper than any sky will ever be. More metal.
Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview,
and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine.

Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.
I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids
in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks:
wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do.
They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other
planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like
a motherfucker.

It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold:
the freedom of possibility.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.

Intent vs. Impact

I've done enough racial equity trainings now that I've fully embraced the difference between intent and impact and accepted the responsibility for my impact on others.

I was recently in a meeting where these came up, and someone pushed back on the idea of owning your impact, saying, essentially, not my fault if you're a snowflake and got your little baby feelings hurt. 

In the moment, I was floored and didn't even know where to begin explaining a whole paradigm of power dynamics in a system of oppression that argues for accountability for intent and impact and how you analyze/react to others' behaviors. It's only when all actors take responsibility for their parts in a situation that you can break the cycle of oppression, victimhood, and complicity. (Arguably the three parts in Karpman's co-dependent triangle of conflict.) As with most things, "yes, and" is the answer here. Yes, a person must take responsibility for their response and their feelings, AND when you hurt someone, even unintentionally, you say sorry. 

Robin DiAngelo (?) described this dynamic with the analogy that if you step on someone's foot and they say ouch, you don't say: "But I didn't mean to." You say, "I'm sorry I hurt you." (My kids are learning this one... slowly!)

I'll take this analogy a bit further, which is to say, all things being equal, the person who is stepped on should speak up to say "ouch." But if the person stepping on your foot is your boss, or a policeman, or the president of the United States, or you're a person from a non-dominant group and they're in the dominant group, there are reasons you might not feel free to speak up. There are power dynamics in play. 

The other person should be compassionate enough that if someone winces when they pass by, they might ask, "Did something just happen?" or "Are you ok?" opening the door for the other person to say, "Yes, you just stepped on me" and giving the other person the opportunity to say, "I'm so sorry I stepped on you!"  

Courage, Compassion, Connection - rinse and repeat.

So what are some resources that can help explain?

• Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility
• Transcript of talk: "Think Impact, Not Intent" 
• Intent vs. Impact: A Formula for Better Communication
• But I didn't mean it! Why it's so hard to prioritize impacts over intents - Scientific American
• "If you say something and you make someone feel seriously uncomfortable, it’s now on you to give serious consideration to why that person might feel that way. That’s how empathy and being a nice human being works."

Chinese proverb - "Might be good, might be bad; we'll see!"

 The Rev. Christine Robinson has shared the story with our congregation on multiple occasions of a Chinese farmer who experiences a series of events that seemed like bad luck when they happened but turned out to be fortuitous when the next "bad thing" happened. 

• Sai Weng Lost His Horse

I like this article that describes both the personal lesson about mindfulness and curiosity and also the leadership lesson of not wasting energy worrying about what's not within your circle of influence. 

• Leadership lessons from a Chinese farmer

Sermon - The Rev. Angela Herrera - 9/19/2021

 Spiritual values that are the antidote of perfectionism:

• Courage
• Compassion
• Connection

A Gift (poem) by Denise Levertov

Just when you seem to yourself 

nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

Transition - Sermon on 7/18/2021

 Sermon on transition from the Rev. Angela Herrera on 7/18/2021:

PDF

Image of the process:

Universalist Unitarians Today

From question box sermon on 8/28/2021:

What would UUs be called if we chose a new name to reflect our beliefs now?

"We choose" (rhymes with UUs, rhymes with Jews, rhymes with we/yous)

Resilience - The Rev. Christine Robinson sermon 8/22/2021

 

PDF

Video:

Poem - For the New Year, 1981 - Denise Levertov

I have a small grain of hope—
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.

I need more.

I break off a fragment
to send you.

Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.

Poet recommendations

 How the Word Is Passed - Clint Smith

pg. 28

• Robert Hayden - ballads to remember the Middle Passage
• Gwendolyn Brooks - children on the South Side of Chicago
• Audre Lourde
• Sonia Sanchez

Your thoughts are not facts.

" Sometimes it's good; sometimes it's bad. We'll see." - The Rev. Christine Robinson

Poem - At Blackwater - Mary Oliver

 

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live

your life.

Tapping medicine meditation

Instructions:

1. Rub hands to move the energy.
2. Take diaphragmatic breath.
3. Shake out hands to release pooled energy.
4. Close eyes. Soft smile. 
5. Tap the following areas in order, cycling through twice with the mantra and a breath at each place.

• Top of the head

• First time: I release my inner critic.
• Second time: I release guilt and embarrassment.

• Inside eyebrow

• First time: I allow myself to feel connected to my intuition.
• Second time: I allow myself to feel accepted.

• Outside of the eye – close to eye socket on the bone.

• First time: I release sadness and frustration.
• Second time: I release any uncertainty and confusion.

• Under the eye on cheekbone (stomach meridian)

• First time: I allow myself to feel inner peace and healing.
• Second time: I allow myself to feel confidence.

• Under nose. (One hand)

• a. First time: I release anger and resentment.
• b. Second time: I release stress and any feeling of being stuck.

• Under mouth. (One hand)

• First time: I allow myself to feel compassion for myself.
• Second time: I allow myself to feel calm and at ease.

• Below collarbone – kidney

• First time: I release worry and anxiety.
• Second time: I release any insecurity and hopelessness.

• Side of chest (by bra straps, using hands like flippers)

• First time: I allow myself to feel safe now.
• Second time: I allow myself to feel compassion for others.

1. Hands at heart.
2. Release tongue to floor of mouth. Invites other parts to release, too.
3. Diaphragm breathing.
4. Smile.

To have without holding (Poem) by 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.

Marge Piercy, "To have without holding" from The Moon is Always Female. Copyright © 1980 by Marge Piercy. 

From Poetry Foundation Collection: It’s Complicated: Love poems that offer a realistic take on relationships today.

In the Middle (Poem) by Barbara Crooker

In the Middle
of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

Learning Lots about Confidence - Podcast with Amy Poehler

 On Confidence

- Learning Lots with Brie Larson and Jessie Ennis

Amy Poehler:

• Remember it's about habit, not character. Gives you space to try again, make a different choice, have a different outcome. Unlearning is the word. If you treat it like habit and not character, then you don't also get to beat yourself up when you didn't hit a bullseye. If you have a moment when you didn't advocate for yourself or sold yourself short, so what? You didn't spend the whole day saying, I'm such a piece of shit. It's a habit. Practice it. I did it again! Huh. Oh well. Try it again.
• What serves you?
• We can always call cut, take a break, do a second take. It's not all or nothing. 
• Be as gentle with yourself as you are to other people.
• The most talented people are the easiest to work with because they're not coming from a fear-based place.
• Don't cry, sexy.
• "I really like failing and succeeding with people. Look what we created or destroyed together."
• It always come back to, I just didn't commit - to the person, to the project...
• Improving and just dying on stage... If you are dying and someone stays with you, you love them forever. We're in this together. If they leave you, desert you, you'll never forget it. The way they act when the ship goes down tells you everything about them.
• You can tell people how they should see you. Whether or not you feel it is its own journey. Watch the words you say about yourself, and then the ones in your head. People are waiting for you to tell them who you are. So just tell them you're good at it. 
• This happens to us women all the time - we're asked a question that's a little too personal - I ask, "What made you ask that?" It buys you a little time and makes them think about why they are wanting to spend that precious time with you asking that.
• A little managing your adrenaline, a little manifestation, a little I deserve to be here, which is always half the battle in all things.
• You can shine your brightest around real people, they bask in the glow of it, they don't ask you to turn it down. Real friends do that. They don't think your fireworks are too close. They love it and watch them and support you.

Brie Larson:

• "It lifts everyone up, it's infectious. If you are embodied in yourself, that type of leadership actually just makes everyone else feel it."
• Confidence is infectious. When you are living with joy, with freedom to know what your yeses and your no's are, that's that pure confidence that's not oppressive at all. It only brings about more. It might be that someone watches you at work, or watches you on tv and says, oh wow, that's how that works. I want to be more like that. Or there might be that there's a direct work environment, that by you being calm, steady, and in yourself, it leaves the room for someone else to be in the I don't know space or I do know space. After talking to Amy, an expert in confidence, I can see that there isn't an upside to dimming my light. 

Jessie Ennis:

• You use laughter as a form of support. You're so funny that you make everyone else feel like they want to find what's funny about this, too.
• I watched you in interviews reject questions that didn't serve you. When did you learn to set those boundaries?
• Amy said, we can't dim our lights for anyone . If your brightness is blinding to someone else, you shouldn't be dimming the light to make them more comfortable, you just need to shine the light on them bright enough so they feel the confidence, too.
• I value her voice, the way she uses her voice, the way she directs her talent.

Kids corner:

• Calvin, age 4 - confidence means brave. You need to be superhero. They have special powers. I have all of their super powers. 
• Story, age 11 - If you're yourself, you're saying all the right things. 
• Oona, age 4 3/4 - Confidence means you're really brave about something. [My stuffed animal] makes me calm and comfortable. [What about using a big grown up knife?] Only if my hand was on mommy or daddy's hand, if mommy or daddy was confident about me doing it. - I feel confident with their help. Super Oona comes out when someone needs help. Super Oona and Oona have the same scaredness and not scaredness. [What would you say when someone's not feeling confident?] Just be kind and loving and they'll want to play with you.