In the End
by Tara Sophia Mohr
*originally posted Feb 2, 2010

In the end
you won’t be known
for the things you did,
or what you built,
or what you said.

You won’t even be known
for the love given
or the hearts saved,

because in the end you won’t be known.

You won’t be asked, by a vast creator full of light:
What did you do to be known?

You will be asked: Did you know it,
this place, this journey?

What there is to know can’t be written.
Something between the crispness of air
and the glint in her eye
and the texture of the orange peel.

What you’ll want a thousand years from now is this:
a memory that beats like a heart–
a travel memory, of what it was to walk here,
alive and warm and textured within.

Sweet brightness, aliveness, take-me-now-ness that is life.

You are here to pay attention. That is enough.

***

Did that feed your soul? Tara Sophia Mohr’s poetry does that– it opens up a little window and lets the light shine in.

Give the gift of poetic fresh air to yourself or someone you love this holiday season, and nourish yourself one tasty morsel at a time.

For more information about the poetry and photography in this book, click here.

***

Curated Care (formerly known as Tools of The Trade) features carefully selected courses, books, and other treasure that will feed your beautiful soul. I take pride in only reviewing only trustworthy, totally-worth-it products and services. To see some evergreen products and service providers I enjoy, click here. To read all my review posts, click here. Thanks for being here today Magpie!

Make, Dismantle

Do not heed the words of Charlie Darwin.
Or of Pastor Bob.
Or even of your own sainted mother.

Survival of the fittest does not equate to thriving.
Saints don’t win the race to heaven.
No one always knows best.

Do not heed the words of Charlie Darwin.

Dismantle them.

Put the pieces on the heap
send them back into the soil
to be born anew

Gather up the shards that still hold beauty
turn them, flashing in the light
curious to the eye
glinting with indistinct possibility.

Hang them with bits of wire
off the eaves of your landing place
until they catch your neighbor’s eye.

And they will pull
from their own long pockets
their shiny pieces.

Bits and bobs
tools that hold.
Anchor.
Function.

Spread out these pieces,
jointly held,
on the front-lawn picnic blanket –

the dull and the dingy,
the iridescent
the copper-bright.

Make
all things new.

***

Relig-ish is a new series at Magpie Girl dedicated to exploring a new kind of faith. Come along with us as we help each other find a spirituality that fits. Click here to read all the Relig-ish posts, and join the mailing list for additional musings on this (re)construction project. Thanks for being here today. Much Warmth, Rachelle

At the merchandise table, between the typical concert T-shirts and CDs, Paul found this–a cigar music box with a hand-cut paper tape that plays an arrangement of their song “Charlie Darwin”. I’ve been endlessly inspired by this charming and ingenious music, and wanted to share it with you today.

Empty Out Your Boxes
By Rachelle Mee-Chapman

You there,
with flotsam scattered around you.

You there,
with the strip of metal you pulled
from underneath your finger nail,
stretching ever longer until at last it broke free.

You there,
with the empty box
that once held your paradigm,
smelling of pressed leaves
and old earth
and everything good about your grandfather.

You there,
with a collection
of nothing but incongruencies.

Take now your polished stones,
your expired bus tokens,
your tickets stubs and your skeleton keys.

Build anew.

You can create
from the fragments of your faith
a thing of beauty

Rough and wobbly.
Decidedly cobbled.

But when you turn the handle
of that which you craft yourself,
unexpectedly,

Music.

***

Relig-ish is a new series at Magpie Girl dedicated to exploring a new kind of faith. Come along with us as we help each other find a spirituality that fits. Click here to read all the Relig-ish posts, and join the mailing list for additional musings on this (re)construction project. Thanks for being here today. Much Warmth, Rachelle

Poetry as a Spiritual Text
by Jessica Schafer

For a long time I thought poetry was pretty much only useful to high school English teachers and those ultra-deep artsy types who wrote poetry so abstract my eyes just wouldn’t stop rolling. Then I discovered Rilke. And Rumi. And Mary Oliver and John O’Donohue and Hafiz. And now? Now poetry is the lifeblood of my spirituality. Its all about finding a poem or poet that fits.

The poems that fit for me are the ones that make me pause and savour the phrases and metaphors that stand out a beat longer than the rest. Poems where the symbols and images in the words are like open doors into new ways of knowing and being. Poems that remind me that in the grand scheme of things, I’m not alone in my questions, my dreams, my desires, my suffering and my joy. I’m praying the poem, because someone else prayed it first.

One of my chief frustrations with prayer as I grew up knowing it was the apparent one-sidedness. I knew it was supposed to be “dialogue” and that God would “answer” if I listened, but no ever talked about how to listen or that maybe “listening” could take different forms. Like, reading poetry or listening to poetry spoken out loud. Some of the poems I turn to over and over again are the ones written in the voice of the Divine:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
You need to keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself be separated from me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Poems like this are an anchor, a cornerstone for my faith. I pray them as a means of dialogue, of hearing God remind me of who I am, who God is and what life is all about. Here’s what that dialogue looks like on paper:

When I sit with a poem like this, it forces me to slow down and become truly present, to really chew on the words and find where they resonate in my heart, not just my head. It asks me to shift my mindset away from the day-to-day and into my emotions and intuition, the sliver of divinity in me.

“. . . the head is not a very good place for prayer. It is not a bad place for starting your prayer. But if your prayer stays there too long and doesn’t move into the heart, it will gradually dry up and prove tiresome and frustrating. You must learn to move out of the area of thinking and talking and move into the area of feeling, sensing, loving, and intuiting. That is the area where contemplation is born and prayer becomes a transforming power and a source of never-ending delight and peace.” ~Anthony de Mello

Poetry has also changed the way I pray for others. Phrases borrowed from my favourite poets let me express my empathy and their need in a much more profound way than all the overused and overtired phrases I started to tune out in church. Praying for others with poetry reminds me that I am just a channel for grace, that the source of any wisdom or comfort I offer is the deep well of our collective human experience. Take a moment and imagine me praying these words over you:

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

~John O’Donohue, “Beannacht”

Can you feel the cloak?

***
Jessica Schafer is a spiritual director and lover of poetry. You can read about her soulcare work here, or find her at a new poetry blog, Poem Postcards. She also blogs about s-e-x, at Conversations About Sex and Faith.

***

What about you? How do you relate to poetry? What poems, poets or quotations have become your sacred text? How has a poem shaped part of your life?

***

Relig-ish is a new series at Magpie Girl dedicated to exploring a new kind of faith. Come along with us as we help each other find a spirituality that fits. Click here to read all the Relig-ish posts, and join the mailing list for additional musings on this (re)construction project. Thanks for being here today. Much Warmth, Rachelle

You carry
All the ingredients
To turn your life into a nightmare-
Don’t mix them!

You have all the genius
To build a swing in your backyard
For God.

That sounds
Like a hell of a lot more fun.
Let’s start laughing, drawing blueprints,
Gathering our talented friends.

I will help you
With my divine lyre and drum.

Hafiz
Will sing a thousand words
You can take into your hands,
Like golden saws,
Sliver hammers,

Polished teakwood,
Strong silk rope.

You carry all the ingredients
To turn our existence into joy,

Mix them, mix
Them!

In this Monday’s guest post I’m happy to introduce to you poet Jessica Schafer of In Between Words.Jessica was the brave soul who joined us on the Soulsisters 09 retreat even though she did not know a single other person! (Hurrah for bravado!) While there she gifted us everyday with poetic blessings at our mealtimes, and with beautiful words for our evening readings. Now she’s here to share some of the poems that have best supported her spiritual journey. May you find a new withmate in the words offered here.

Poetry for Spiritual Sustenance

with Jessica Schafer

Poetry is often considered difficult, vague, pretentious or a nuisance we have to study for school. In a scientific, modern culture we’ve lost the feel of words, the magic of listening to carefully crafted phrases and rhythms. The truth is poetry is part of the human soul, the part that responds best to metaphors and mysteries. The part that seeks desperately to voice a beauty or an emotion almost too much for us. It’s the part of ourselves that knows just getting from point A  to B isn’t the goal, that we have to stop and linger in the unknowns. I need poetry to keep my soul alive.

Here are bits and pieces of poems that have nurtured my spirituality. Before you read, take a moment to close your eyes and breathe deeply. When you open them again, read slowly, even out loud. Try not to think in literal images, but to feel what is being said:

. . .

But when I lean over the chasm of myself—

it seems

my God is dark

and like a web: a hundred roots

silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don’t know, because my branches

rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, I, 3

. . .

If there were no grace and no kindness,

conversation would be useless, and

nothing we do would matter. Listen

to the new stories that begin every

day. If light were not beginning

again in the east, I would not now

wake and walk out inside this dawn.

~Rumi, The Soul of Rumi, “Wake and Walk Out”

…

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

… 

Sometimes, no matter how wonderful other poets are, your own experiences can only be described by you. What does your soul want to say? Here’s one that came to me a year ago.

Playing

God came over to play one day
we raced outside yelling “last one
through the door is a slowpoke!”
and trying not to trip over our badly
tied shoelaces
I won (but God didn’t mind)

“lets build a fort”
old bricks and the loose bars
off the little wooden gate
dense bushes and a few buckets
to sit on became a medieval castle
God wanted to be the jester
so I got to be Queen

and when we got tired
of ruling our kingdom
we rolled down the hill
at the end of the garden
careful to avoid the stream
screaming with laughter
when one of us came too close

I made daisy chains
and God blew dandelion seeds
into the wind
sneezing every once in awhile
when one tickled his nose

and then it was time
for God to go home
but I didn’t mind
because I was going
to play at her house tomorrow.

Poetry is soul food. What poets do you go to for divine nourishment?

You write all the way to the fence,
then there’s nothing
left to do but tear it down and
expand the border. To stretch
your life by trading Safe and Secure.
To stare the beast, It’s Not Enough, in the
face and let it off its leash….

-from You Write to the Fence, by Jen Lee

This week’s Magpie Girl favorite is a lovely palm-sized book  by Jen Lee, she of the soul-felt stories.

Fortunes is a beautiful collection of etheral toy camera images and prose-like poems chronicling the liminal space that is our 30′s and 40′s. When I cracked it open it was like finding an instant companion for all my issues. Finding your art; dealing with mothers and daughters; tapping into a midlife sexual revolution —- it’s all in here in pitch-perfected prose. It is a rare writer who creates work which is both rich with image and yet spare and accessible. Jen Lee achieves it here with aplomb. There’s not a superfelous word on the plate,  and still such a rich meal!

You can purchase Fortunes  here, either alone or as a duo (one for you, one for a friend.) If you are making the handmade pledge this season, Fortunes would be a lovely envelope-sized gift to slip in with the holiday card you’re sending to an artful friend. And if you are a writer, or think maybe perhaps you sort-of-want-to-be, then take a look at Jen’s new journal for writers, Take me with You.

May these small treasures bring big joy and beauty to your world today. 
Magpie Girl’s Promise: I adore my readers, so I only review productsI truly believe in. I never review a product — even one I’ve received for free — unless I truly love it. My complimentary copy of Fortunes perfectly fits the bill. Click the link to find  all my Favorite Things, and maybe one of yours! Thank you for being here.

silent park
amid city noise
passers walk by, and i

i sit in the centers of centers
x marks the spot

grey walls and stone tower
surround me
ring me with I Am’s

branches overhead cross with 
aged cracks
hail rains down

i sit alone
knowing that i am
what i am
created to do
rightwhereibelong

i circle out
dancing
 

In this photo post: What’s left of the Elys-style labyrinth at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle. It was just me and the bagpiper that day. Often it’s just me and the giant pipe organ. Poem written at a labyrinth in Victoria, B.C. 2001. Would you like to Unravel? Sign up for Susannah Conway’s photography and journaling ecourse.

I am coming to the realization that I have two functional weeks a month. Otherwise the pain level is too severe. I can’t write well when I’m this foggy.

For awhile there, for a beautiful hopeful season, I was in better remission and I had most of the month free and clear. But now, it’s back to just two weeks. If it gets worse, if it gets to be more than this, I’ll have to fly home and see my super special Dr. Woo-Woo and get back on top of this. You all have to hold me accountable to this okay? If I’m out of it more than two weeks a month you have to say, “Rachelle, it’s worth the money. Fly home. Spend a week or two on Dr. Lewis’ treatment table.”

Chronic pain is such a complex creature. It is a large part of your life, but it is not your life. It is a big part of you, but it is not who you are. Living within those paradoxical realities is challenging, perhaps as challenging as figuring out the physical bits and pieces of it–the medicines and the food allergies and the exercise and sleep needs and all the more attainable nuts and bolt-ness of it all.

I’ve wanted to write something about this for while. Something like Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament of a Son which not a self-help book, but the author’s story about the death of his son. The telling itself though, is helpful. The telling itself is the companionship for the journey.

In the beautiful children’s book Frida, the author says “she turned her pain into something beautiful.” I’d like to do that. I’d like to tell true things – stories that are also helpful.

I don’t know why I always leap to the idea of a book, when clearly articles and essays are my most natural length. (I just get so distracted by sparkly things, and without a real deadline I skip from project to project. This is not a boon to my agent.) At any rate, maybe an article would be more reasonable here….maybe something for The Sun. I have a couple little bits that might turn into something. This one for instance, or this artsy bit here, or here. Or maybe these more practical stories. And then there is what I wrote this morning, based on an image that came to me while I was doing Shavasana on the living room floor:

I offer this pain to you on a gilt platter.
No, held aloft in a silver bowl.
I give it to you coiled, or swirling and boiling.
A dark depth. An oily surface.

I give it to you as an offering because it is a part of me.
Because some days, it is all of me.
I give it to you as a gift, you who the wise ones says want all of me. (Though perhaps they are not so wise.)
I give it to you as a gift to see what you will make of it.

Will you touch it with a long-nailed finger and turn its surface to silver? Sprinkle it with some earthy magic? Feed it drops of Lucy’s cordial? Will you blow on it and part the waters; wave a hand and vanish it all; speak and make it to run clear; drink it down within yourself?

What will you do then,
with this pain that drains from the trinity of my eyes and the bridge of my nose?
What will you make of this dark offering?

Play us out Sister Alanis.

in just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and
the

goat-footed

baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

-e.e. cummings

…….

Leaving Souren has been a little bit like a death. I hate to be so melodramatic, given that there are so many things going on in the world that are ever-so-much harder and more devastating. Leaving your semi-adopted teenager in the States in order to go gallivanting around Europe with your two adorable blood children and a handsome husband—this barely makes a mark on the ‘hardships’ meter. Still, it’s hard, to take a child into your heart and then to say goodbye.

I know, of course, that there is the telephone and internet, and even old fashioned snail mail. But if you’ve ever known, or met, or even grazed shoulders with a teenage boy, you should realize that communication is not, generally speaking, their strong suite.

I knew, when we left, that most communication with Souren would be over. And I’m trying to not put my happiness under his text messaging thumbs. You simply cannot let a teenager take the wheel of your happiness. That’s even more daft than letting them drive your car on prom night.

But at night, when those nasty little buggers come to get me, I am mournful, and I re-think the wisdom of being so nonchalant about grafting a child who is not my own, so firmly onto my family tree. In those dark moments, I write maudlin poetry on the pages of my notebook. (The emotions of my days and nights are so different, sometimes I am left wondering, which is more me?) Though the pain in these overwrought words are real, I have to ask myself, would I hesitate to love this way again…to love this way still? When we are paying attention to the true and the questions, these are the things that come up. These are the ponderings that make up the reality of whom we are and who we are to be. So of course, the answer must always be, ‘amen.’

——

loss is a wolf at the throat,
there, at the front of the neck
where all you cannot swallow
lies exposed and unprotected

the ache and the tear of it,
the way you bleed unchecked

this is what it is
to take another’s child,
graft him deep into your veins.

i cannot recommend it,
this unchecked rushing of the blood
when the graft does not take,
when the bloodline is severed.

even birthing blood ceases with the hours,
after the placenta tears.

but what of that wound
of which nature has no counterpart?
does this blood then run without clot,
without ebbing,
leaving in its wake
more than the womb as hollow?

is it enough
this story,
this ideal,
this wistful thing—

the teacher speaking soft in the garden,
mouthing my name,
warm-blooded and real.

when I grow tired of picking,
sorting fact from fiction,
lies like stones among the lentils,
truths as yellow bulbs among the rocks,

when I tire of this painstaking plucking

i hold instead,
one smooth egg
one round stone
one child, with chocolate on her mouth and songs on her tongue.

he is wisen, comes the lisp
he is wisen indeed!

tell me true things, i whisper,
my face held close,
warm against her neck.

she sings to me
an edict, a lullaby,
ubi caritas, maman,
ubi caritas et amor
ubi caritas, deus ibi est.

where there is charity, there is love
where there is love
there god is.

enough, i think,
to hold this egg
this stone
this child
enough, to say ‘amen.’

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning;

and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain–not a single
answer has been found–
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

Mary Oliver
New and Selected Poems: Volume One
New and Selected Poems, Volume Two

“Lie back, daughter, let your head be tipped back
in the cup of my hand.
Gently, I will hold you.
Spread your arms wide, lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls.

Phillip Booth, Words of Mouth

__________________________________________________________

This is a place for melancholy songs

The sea stretches
long and grey and even
the seabirds alone on their rocks,
each an island unto themselves.

I feel I am trying
to memorize the landscape,
embed it rebar-deep within the ground of my knowing
until it feels familiar, like home
or at least,
until it makes firm the quicksand of foreign soil
so my children won’t feel the shifting
so they can land firm off the horse.

At home, our wisteria is two years young.
She stretches her thin tips
to finger the bare edges of her over-long trellis.

Here, the wisteria is old
like wisdom, she climbs easily up
two, three, four stories
protecting those who dwell inside
from the wearing winds of age
and change

Only one house stands out
amongst the others,
not for its beauty but
but for its size,
its inappropriate smoothness,
the monstrous heave of its bulk.

Echoing its neighbors, yet
the unbroken stucco,
the brazen two car garage
the freestanding ball hoop lying tipped behind the automatic gate
screams of young money.

The Land Rover drives by,
far to wide for these cobbled streets,
enters the third door I had not seen
which opens by unseen hand
with a whir and a click.
This, too much of the future
on a shore inhabited for five thousand years.