“Spirits” by Birago Diop

Xavier Jean Kiemde, September 13, 2012

The following poem is deeply moving to me. I first heard it in the hospital room on the evening of my son's birth and subsequent passing. My husband and another dear friend from West Africa were reciting it in French. The words ring true to my heart and help me celebrate Xavi's brief, precious life here on earth and his presence still in the spirit realm. I love thinking of him "in the trembling of the trees, in the water that runs..in the bush that is singing, in the voice of the fire" -- as Diop suggests. Amen.

Spirits

by Birago Diop

Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the sighs of the bush;
This is the ancestors breathing.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the darkness that grows lighter
And in the darkness that grows darker.
The dead are not down in the earth;
They are in the trembling of the trees
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs,
In the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd:
The dead are not dead.

Listen to things
More often than beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sighing:
This is the breathing of ancestors,
Who have not gone away
Who are not under earth
Who are not really dead.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in a woman’s breast,
In the wailing of a child,
And the burning of a log,
In the moaning rock,
In the weeping grasses,
In the forest and the home.
The dead are not dead.

Listen more often
To Things than to Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind to
The bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors breathing.

Each day they renew ancient bonds,
Ancient bonds that hold fast
Binding our lot to their law,
To the will of the spirits stronger than we
To the spell of our dead who are not really dead,
Whose covenant binds us to life,
Whose authority binds to their will,
The will of the spirits that stir
In the bed of the river, on the banks of the river,
The breathing of spirits
Who moan in the rocks and weep in the grasses.

Spirits inhabit
The darkness that lightens, the darkness that darkens,
The quivering tree, the murmuring wood,
The water that runs and the water that sleeps:
Spirits much stronger than we,
The breathing of the dead who are not really dead,
Of the dead who are not really gone,
Of the dead now no more in the earth.

Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors, breathing.

 
Source: The Negritude Poets, ed. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989.
 

On Sanctuary: A Poem by Nikki Giovanni

by Melissa Borgmann-Kiemde, Visitation Companion

Art Sanctuary
by Nikki Giovanni

I would always choose to be the person running
rather than the mob chasing
I would prefer to be the person laughed at
rather than the teenagers laughing
I always admired the men and women who sat down
for their rights
And held in disdain the men and women who spat
on them
Everyone deserves Sanctuary a place to go where you are
safe
Art offers Sanctuary to everyone willing
to open their hearts as well as their eyes

“Art Sanctuary” by Nikki Giovanni, from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. © Harper Perennial, 2002. (buy now)

Today’s poem from The Writer’s Almanac speaks to me as prayer. In critical response fashion, I take note of lines, phrases, images that stand out:

person running
mob
laughing teenagers
sitting down for rights
spit
art
sanctuary
open hearts and eyes

I am reminded of the summer night I saw a man running out from behind the neighbor’s across from St. Jane House in north Minneapolis followed by another person carrying a gun. The poem takes me to stories of pre-1964 southern lunch counters where people with brown skin were not allowed to eat. Simultaneously, reading this, I recall being an awkward thirteen-year old in the seventh grade and feeling the jeers of 8th grade elders (Lisa, Mary, Steph, Jamie?). I can see movie stills in my mind’s eye of Harvey Milk being assassinated as San Francisco’s first openly gay city official. I sit and imagine a beleaguered and weary Christ on Good Friday. (He was spat upon, right?) I note the way the poem provides a through-line of text for these anachronistic memories, moments.

I appreciate Ms. Giovanni’s words. I am thankful for the pride, sorrow, fear, anger and elation that her piece evokes.

I wonder how the author’s compassion was born? (It is compassion she shows in the poem, yes?) What did she see in her life or experience that inspired an alignment with the victim, the tortured, the other? What particular cruelties does she know first hand? I want to ask her how she makes sense of suffering. I want to know what art in particular has provided safety, sanctuary for her. Could she have been sitting in front of a painting that calmed her breathing, opened her heart? (Or listening to song?) I wonder if she’d let me sit alongside her? I want to know if she’s ever seen Brother Mickey’s “Windsock Visitation“? Has she ever contemplated the respite extended by Mary and Elizabeth?

I want to know a lot reading this poem. I am grateful for the places Nikki Giovanni takes me with her words. It is my prayer, today. This poem is a sanctuary.

Amen.

Blessingway Poem by Becca Barniskis

On Sunday, May 16th, sixteen women and one small boy gathered in my St. Paul living room to extend blessings over me and this child that I am about to birth. Lead by doula Alisa Blackwood, these women shared prayers, good thoughts, and poems aloud. The following is one poetic piece that arrived via email that afternoon. I share it now as a source of inspiration for not only me, but all expectant moms. I am grateful to the author, Becca Barniskis. Love!

Dear Melissa:

It is spring and your baby is coming.

As holy as God.

But more accessible than he.

Smoother, cuter, able to fit into your arms.

I wish for you a mind of prayer

when your baby decides he is ready.

I wish for you deep strength

and patience for yourself and your body.

I wish for you courage

to not doubt what your body is capable of doing.

And when Baby arrives

may you be awake and enlarged

by the experience.

May your love give you the energy

to figure out who Baby is

and what he needs.

May the journey be joy-filled.

You are a mother.

You are made to mother.

You will mother this child in the best way.

Love,

Becca

****

Becca Barniskis lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she works as a poet, teaching artist and free-lance writer and consultant in arts education. She edits the Resource Roundup section of the Teaching Artist Journal and is a founding member of Artist to Artist.

She is the mother of Earl and Lulu. And someone I claim as dear friend.

Transcending Cynicism: A Bit on Rumi before Marriage

I spent the better part of yesterday on a date with Rumi. You all know the Sufi Mystic, yes? Poet. Scholar. Teacher. Big souled, larger-than-any-one-faith gent who lived in the 13 century. The Beloved of Sham's. ---Shoot! I claim him as My beloved, after all of our dancing and screaming and giggling together! If you read his poetry, then you know what I'm speaking of. This fellow, Mr. Jelaluddin Rumi, has a capacity to engage. To nail a point on the head, to expand your breathing with a question, and invite your imagination into the realm of the truly inconceivable, impossible. Rumi's voice and words, (in my apartment: translated by Coleman Barks) make me think anything is possible. And when I fight what Rumi is saying, the way his words resonate deeply within me, still: he fights back. He sort of kicks back, in the gentlest of ways -- with each line of poetry or prose simply saying, "surrender."

I went looking for a simple poem to include in my wedding program. I ended up with fifteen. I of course whittled it down, but goodness, what a process!

The one I'm choosing to post here, and share with you all today, wasn't really a finalist for the wedding program, but rather: one I put a bookmark on as I thought of you. As I imagined the "other" in my own body, the visitor who shows up to read my thoughts, the contemplative friend who holds similar queries about the world and faith and poetry with me: I thought of you. I thought this poem fitting to extend to you.

In this poem, Rumi draws on Old Testament figures, while combining them with the mundane and contemporary. He speaks to the smallest being within each of us, and holds our fears and insecurities up before our critical, fleeing minds, and then asks us to hold still. He invites us to see our brokenness, but accept it humbly, and then courageously step forward. He identifies our darkest, cynical selves, and seemingly slaps us silly with a simple consideration: to have faith -- or to at least fake it. He invites us to consider our fullest sense of being, living, loving, honoring. Whew. I love him.

Read on! Enjoy! Let me know what you think!

The wilderness way Moses took

was pure need and desolation.

Remember how you cried when you were a child?

Joseph's path to the throne room of Egypt

where he distributed grain to his brothers

led through the pit his brothers left him in.

Don't look for new ways

to flee across the chessboard.

Listen to hear the checkmate

spoken directly to you.

Mice nibble. That's what they need

to be doing. What do you need?

How will you impress the one

who gave you life?

If all you can do is crawl,

start crawling.

You have a hundred cynical fantasies

about God. Make them ninety-nine!

If you can't pray a real prayer, pray

hypocritically, full of doubt

and dry-mouthed.

God accepts

counterfeit

money

as though

it were real!

- Rumi

Translated by Coleman Barks in "The Illuminated Rumi"

Happy Contemplating!

Love,

Melissa

On "An Invitation to be Heard": Tuning into the Truth of Poetry. Story. Experience.

What does it mean to share stories? To read them aloud to one another? To record them, write them down in the first place? What does it mean to speak a personal narrative into the air? Why do people share tales? What experiences inspire reflection and acts of private and public disclosure? Love, heartache, loss, betrayal, birth, death, faith, miracles, desire? What happens when we share our tales, and really hear ourselves and one another speak?

In the coming weeks, I will have the privilege of helping facilitate "Listening Sessions" at the Church of St. Philip in North Minneapolis. As part of our Social Justice committee work, we have discerned a call to hold two evening sessions inviting people who have left the church to return and share their stories. We are creating space for former parishioners to gather and reflect. We are asking those who choose to come to respond to three simple questions:

• What called you to the St. Philip Community initially?
• Where are you now and what do you like about it?
• What would you like to share with us about the circumstances that have caused you to change churches or stay away?

As I prepare for these evenings, I'm tuning my heart, mind, spirit to these questions. I'm meditating on this action of being deeply attentive, validating, and acknowledging of all that I hear. I'm listening to my own inner voice, and how I react to circumstances and people throughout the day. I'm practicing the hard work it is to defer judgment, and simply receive information. I'm reading poetry.

Our goal in having these sessions is to do the work of story-telling: of truth-telling, sharing, hearing, acknowledging, and reconciling. Our goal is to tune in, not unlike the poet, to the heart of matters, to details, to the Divine at work and in our midst. As I ready myself, I'm re-reading poems. I'm struck time and again by Mary Oliver, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Stafford. Today, I tune to an old favorite by William Stafford, and realize that his poem holds lessons around why I am called to do any of this work of listening, sharing stories, responding. I invite each and everyone of you into this poem - into reading it as an act of prayer and meditation. And I ask that you please keep these "Listening Sessions" in your heart.

Thank you.
Enjoy!
Happy Contemplating!
Melissa

****

A Ritual to Read to Each Other
by William Stafford (1960)

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park.
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give --yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

On "Particle Physics" - Posting a Poem for Quantum Love?

From Today's Writer's Almanac, a poem that perplexes and pleases me. A Quantum physics poem, to be sure. Or is it a baseball poem? Or lost love poem? Hmmmm.....
Critical response questions follow. Read on.

Particle Physics
by Julie Kane

They say two photons fired through a slit
stay paired together to the end of time;
if one is polarized to change its spin,
the other does a U-turn on a dime,
although they fly apart at speeds of light
and never cross each other's paths again,
like us, a couple in the seventies,
divorced for almost thirty years since then.
Tonight a Red Sox batter homered twice
to beat the Yankees in their playoff match,
and, sure as I was born in Boston, when
that second ball deflected off the bat,
I knew your thoughts were flying back to me,
though your location was a mystery.

"Particle Physics" by Julie Kane from Jazzy Funeral. © Story Line Press, 2009. Reprinted with permission. Information about the WCU Poetry Center.
(buy now)

Questions:
What would it mean to be fired through a slit together?
You and me?
Have you ever wondered what makes one polarized?
What gives you a charge?
Know anyone to turn on a dime?
Can you fathom the speed of light?
How would it feel to never lay eyes on her again? Or him?
Would you ache?
How are baseball and physics and love all connected?
(Have you seen "Bull Durham"? I wonder if Susan Sarandon reads such poems or blogs?) What is your location?
Who do you love?
What have you lost?
How can we win home runs in love?
What do particles do when they divorce?
What do particles do when they love?
What are you and I made up of?
What does our matter say to these queries?
To this poem?
Can we ever put our finger on mystery?


Happy Questions and Contemplation!
Love,
Melissa

In Blackwater Woods - by Mary Oliver

Thank you Writer's Almanac.

In Blackwater Woods

by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

"In Blackwater Woods" by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Letter of Resignation - A Poem by William Baer

Can you imagine sending a letter of resignation to a lover?

This poem, from today's "Writer's Almanac," made me laugh, sigh, and say, "Thank you." I am thankful for knowing love, and thankful for trusting in its unceasing presence in all of our lives.

Oh! And I say, "thank you" to William Baer for writing this; and "thank you" Minnesota Public Radio for sharing it!

Smiles, Peace,

Melissa

Letter of Resignation

by William Baer

Dear [blank]: After much deliberation,
without qualm, scruple, or further delay,
I hereby tender my formal resignation
as your lover and future fiancé.
The job provides too little satisfaction:
too many hours of unneeded duress,
a paucity of productive interaction,
uncertain working conditions, and endless stress.
Pay-wise, I'm undervalued and disenchanted:
advancement's slow, the bonus is routine,
my "on-call" overtime is taken for granted,
and benefits are few and far between.
This document, I'm hopeful, underscores
my deep regret. I'm very truly yours....

"Letter of Resignation" by William Baer from Bocage and Other Sonnets. © Texas Review Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission.(buy now)

Easter: Prayer as Poetry

This is what I do, right? Contemplate conditions, write in response. Today, in light of Easter, I find myself meditating on Christ's crucifixion. I write. I laugh. I weep. I wonder. I entertain myself in the prayer that is my poetry.

Peace. Love,
Melissa

Trade Offs
by Melissa Borgmann

What if we stepped into that space?
Recognized our nearness to death:
Thorny piercing of skin
Nails through the wrists
(because the palms would not have worked, right?)

See this:
Sharply hammered iron pins that are driven through epidermis, veins,
move over bone.
Yes.
Affixed.
[Can you imagine the craftsman who forged that spike?]

Lungs collapsing from the tug of ribs
Pulled down by the weight of legs
Chest cavity crushing spirit.

And we try to breath.
We try.
He tries. We try.

Something like blood or sweat trickles down from the temples.
Do you get a headache? Appropriate, or not?

Yes, “This crucifixion gives me a headache.”
[“Me, too.”]

Pain is so inconvenient.
Suffering so easily remedied by, say, a cocktail?
A glass of wine appears.
The bitter irony of drink.

This is my body, given up for you.
This is my blood, shed for you and for all, so that sins may be forgiven.
Do this in remembrance of me.

Have the meal, it is much easier.

Amen.

****

Meditation on Nail Man
by Melissa Borgmann

My name is Ike and
I make the spikes
That drive through flesh and bone
Of one called Christ.

It’s hot and sweaty labor
To forge steel in fire
But the point is to honor God
With these gifts that never tire.

On Anniversaries: Getting to the Fine Day of Walter McDonald's Poem

My recent writing about "swooning" ("Weak-in-the-Knees-at-Walgreens") triggered a whole series of responses from you. Included in these, were my own family's musings about the way many members made their way toward marriage. Our Borgmann-Family Blog was lit up with tales loosely given the title, "Melissa's Knees: Our Love Stories" by my Aunt Marian. It was great fun to read these narratives, and to glean other such moments of "swooning" and first encounters. It took me personally into the larger space of our individual and collective journeys toward commitment, and how messy and fun and hard and exciting that all is. Today's Writer's Almanac poem speaks to these journeys, from one poet's sweet, love-heartache-reflection perspective.

Enjoy!

Anniversary: One Fine Day
by Walter McDonald

Who would sit through a plot as preposterous as ours,
married after years apart? Chance meetings may work
early in stories, but at operas, darling, in Texas?
A bachelor pilot, I fled Laredo for the weekend,
stopping at the opera from boredom, music I least expected.
Of all the zoos and honky-tonks south of Dallas,
who would believe I would find you there on the stairs,

Madame Butterfly about to start? When you moved
four years before, I lost all hope of dying happy,
dogfighting my way through pilot training, reckless,
in terror only when I saw the man beside you.
I had pictured him rich and splendid in my mind
a thousand times, thinking you married with babies
somewhere in Tahiti, Spain, the south of France.

When I saw the lucky devil I hated—only your date,
but I didn't know—he stopped gloating, watching you wave,
turned old and bitter like the crone in Shangri La.
Destiny happens only in plays and cheap movies—
but here, here on my desk is your photo, decades later,
and I hear sounds from another room of our house,
and when I rise amazed and follow, you are there.

"Anniversary: One Fine Day" by Walt McDonald, from Blessings the Body Gave. © Ohio State University Press, 1998. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

"Wild Geese": Mary Oliver's Lent?

Today marks the beginning of Lent* in the Catholic church. This period of forty days, evoking Christ's time in the desert, is one we are all invited into. As a Christian, I think of it as a period of intentional contemplation - in the name of recognizing our utter humanity, and utter connectedness. I think of the many lenses a Catholic, or someone in another faith tradition, might perceive this period, and it gives me pause.

What is a forty day period of reflection about?

What gifts might we glean?

How many faith traditions practice such reflective periods - that include fasting? What do I encounter in the desert of my soul?

What if I encounter rage? Or demons? Where is love within?

I wonder what this Jesus fellow experienced in His time? How are He and I related?

I wonder about Mary Oliver and her Lenten dance? Did she ever walk through a desert? What does she know about being "Good" or being labeled as "Bad"?

I wonder how her poem "Wild Geese" was born?

What does she know of repentance? Of love? I wonder how the natural world might have spoken to Christ during his lifetime?

Could this be similar to you and me?

I wonder a lot of things. I offer Ms. Oliver's poem as another way into this season of reflection, love, forgiveness, transformation. Amen.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

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.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver

published by Atlantic Monthly Press

© Mary Oliver

*The Teutonic word Lent, which we employ to denote the forty days' fast preceding Easter, originally meant no more than the spring season.

A "Welcome Home from Africa" - Rising Poem....

"There is no disorientation quite like sleep depravataion combined with the jet lag." -Colette DeHarpporte

***

I am home from Africa, having arrived yesterday around noon, from the glorious Accra, Ghana. My heart does a funny leap writing this line, now at 3:47am in my St. Paul, Minnesota apartment, where a Winter draft greets my still-in-Africa-skin, and my body struggles to re-acclimate to the cold, this time zone. Yes.

Today's Writer's Almanac Poem*, by Robert Bly, arrives in my in box, next to my friend Colette's email, like sweet, warm, sort of "Welcome home!" words.

Disoriented, rising at this hour of dark, when my head expects light, I recognize Bly's words alive and at work inside my being: "Navies are setting forth in my veins." Yes. Little ships are moving, porting packages from my heart toward other destinations in the body. African gifts of story, memory, warmth, are being toted through my blood stream as I wake and wonder where I am, and what this air is that moves from outside, through the cracks in my windows, over my exposed South-African-Zanzibarian-Kenyan-Ugandan-Ghanaian-sun-tanned limbs....

I am happy thinking of the Indian Ocean. I am ecstatic seeing Saddam Dzikunun-Bansah's face in my mind's eye, or hearing Dumisani Ntombelas's voice the other side of a line, sending me off with South African parting words. I giggle thinking of Nomi Nkomo's sweet, silly text messages standing in line at customs. I marvel at the Dorothy Amenuke-Art-house-Arthaus dreams still alive and being constructed in real life time in Kumasi -- as well as in my own imagination. I wonder about Ishaka Mawanda and Emily Morris and if they are carrying Africa with them in their now on-safari-in-Minnesota-blood streams...? (Surely, they must understand this poem and the way waking so early in the cold affects the heart, mind, spirit.) I hold the questions of Patrick Kilonzo and Kenyan-Paper-making-collaborations in my rising body -- along with a happy desire to return to the Eastern Cape and squeeze a beloved Auntie Mo Dabula by her 70th birthday....

I read "Welcome Home" emails from State Side family and friends with requests for my American address and imagine the Holiday greeting cards that will arrive at 2338 Marshall Avenue in St. Paul. (Where will these cards arrive next year, or years to come? What is my address? Where do I live?) Hmmmmm......Where does any of us really reside?

A woman named Nozi, who is not my South African Community Development friend from Nquthu, drops me a line wondering how she got onto my Africa-emails-list-serve. I wonder this, too. My head filled with poems and dizzy dawn dreams and so much desire to locate my body in a proper time, place, aligning all of me with what my heart knows. Where does Ms. Motloung live? What is her email address? Where am I? Where are you?

Happy Morning. Happy Rising and Return Journeys to all who read this.

Yes!

Love,

Melissa

*Waking from Sleep

by Robert Bly

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,

Tiny explosions at the waterlines,

And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.

Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full

Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!

Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,

Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.

Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;

We know that our master has left us for the day.

"Waking from Sleep" by Robert Bly, from Silence in the Snowy Fields. © Wesleyan University Press, 1962. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

On the Healing Power of Story: Fr. Michael Lapsley

"I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact."

-William Stafford in the poem, "Ritual to Read to Each Other."

On Tuesday morning, I had the awesome and amazing privilege of hearing Fr. Michael Lapsley speak at Bethel College. (Pictures follow.) Sponsored by the Reconciliation Studies Department, Fr. Lapsley came from Cape Town, South Africa, to address the students and faculty on this topic of "Forgiveness and Healing."

He had a story to tell.

As the Bethel write-up conveyed:

"Fr. Michael Lapsley was exiled by the South African Government in 1976, he joined the African National Congress (ANC) and became one of their chaplains. While living in Zimbabwe he discovered he was on the South African Government hit list. In April 1990 he received a letter bomb in the mail losing both hands, one eye and had his eardrums shattered. He now runs the Institute for Healing Memories in Cape Town."

I went to learn. I went to listen. I went to witness first hand this man who works facilitating people's stories and healing. I went in preparation for my own journey back to South Africa, eleven days from now. I went to align myself with this kind of artful teaching and transformational leadership work. I went and I was blown away.

The resonance of all that Fr. Michael shared was powerful. The convergence of his life story, what he overcame, his working philosophy about story telling and forgiveness -- I found powerfully aligned with my own as teacher, writer, traveler, contemplative.

"Every one has a story to tell" he said. " To have your own story reverenced, recognized, acknowledged, given a moral containment," is at the heart of reconciliation and transformation. In Fr. Lapsley's words, I heard the essential roles we play as teachers, healers, as priests, as nuns, as leaders, who are working to see the thriving of all individuals.

Father underscored the difference between having knowledge of circumstances and acknowledging what occurs or has occurred. Like the poet William Stafford conveys in his poem "Ritual to Read to each Other" - there is a cruelty-- or a kind of perpetuation of the sorrow, the horror, a crime --when something isn't fully recognized. The distinction between knowing and acknowledging is an active listening one, an active reverence, an acknowledgement of what someone has lived through, and survived.

In that room at Bethel, I could hear my North High students when Fr. Lapsley was talking. I could hear their stories. I could hear the spoken word poets I have had the privilege of knowing and coaching and learning from. I could hear my colleagues in urban education. I could hear friends who try to reconcile poverty and privilege. I felt the truth, the weight, the power of what he was saying.

To simply acknowledge what occurs is to powerfully honor and reverence another's journey, an overcoming, a movement toward healing. It's a step toward transforming and healing a nation.

Can you imagine this in your own life? Can you imagine what it would be to be fully seen? Fully heard? Can you imagine your family? Can you imagine this in your work? Can you envision the implications in your community? In your nation? What about the world? Who are we when we acknowledge fully what occurs? What would mean to first and foremost simply see, name what is taking place?

Just some thoughts, as I make way for Africa, continue working on this book, and reflect on transformational models of teaching, learning, leadership in our world today.

Peace,

Melissa

South African Reconciliation Studies Grad Student, Program and Projects Director,
Seth Naicker

Fr. Lapsley was always to check our listening, by listening to us....
Thulani Xaba, Healing of Memories Facilitator,
Durban, South Africa

While I document, Thulani slips me his contact info.

Thulani talks about "making safe space" so that "all stories can be told, heard."

Happy Birthday Thich Nhat Hanh!

Thank you Writer's Almanac for this information! I love this fellow who lives half way around the world and speaks so directly to my heart. What follows are the biographical info from Garrison Keillor's broadcast on NPR, a You Tube Video link, and a Thich Nhat Hanh poem. Enjoy! Happy Birthday to this Peaceful Man!

It's the birthday of Vietnamese monk, writer, and activist Thich Nhat Hanh, (books by this author) born in 1926 in Tha Tien, Vietnam. He became a Buddhist monk when he was 16 years old. During the Vietnam War, he decided that monks shouldn't just stay in monasteries and meditate all day long while a war was going on. So he founded an organization that helped rebuild bombed villages, set up schools and medical centers, and organize agricultural cooperatives. He traveled to the United States to urge the American government to withdraw its troops, and he persuaded Martin Luther King Jr. to publicly oppose the Vietnam War. But both the non-Communist and Communist governments banned him from Vietnam in 1966, and it was just a few years ago, in 2005, that he was finally allowed to return for a visit. Since he was banned from Vietnam, he set up a monastic community in southern France, called Plum Village.

Thich Nhat Hanh has published more than 100 books, books of poetry and Buddhist thought. About 40 of them are in English, and many of those have been best-sellers, including Peace Is Every Step (1991), Call Me by My True Names (1993), and Living Buddha, Living Christ (1995).

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A You Tube Video Link on "Surrendering to the Now."

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Interrelationship

You are me, and I am you.
Isn't it obvious that we "inter-are"?
You cultivate the flower in yourself,
so that I will be beautiful.
I transform the garbage in myself,
so that you will not have to suffer.

I support you;
you support me.
I am in this world to offer you peace;
you are in this world to bring me joy.


1989. Written during a retreat for psychotherapists held in Colorado
in response to Fritz Perls' statement, "You are you, and I am me, and 
if by chance we meet, that's wonderful.  If not, it couldn't be helped."

~Thich Nhat Hanh

"Now" - A Poem by Greg Watson that I like....

Now
by Greg Watson

I told you once when we were young that
we would someday meet again.
Now, the years flown past, the letters
unwritten, I am not so certain.

It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden
in this wind, there are those determined
to bring forth winter at any cost.
I am resigned to dark blonde shadows

at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves
which point in every direction at once.
But I am wearing the shirt you stitched
two separate lifetimes ago. It is old

and falling to ash, yet every button blooms
the flowers of your design. I think of this
and I am happy, to have kissed
your mouth with the force of language,

to have spoken your name at all.

"Now" by Greg Watson from The Distance Between Two Hands. © March Street Press, 2008. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Gift of a Poem: "Things to Think" by Robert Bly

This poem arrived today from my friend Ellen Debe. I love her. It came with this sweet and simple introduction:

I always think of this time of year as 'new' because of school starting. So...........here is a New Year's gift for you:

Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before.

If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message

Larger than anything you've ever heard,

Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,

Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose

Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers

A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,

Think that he's about

To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,

Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,

Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

~ Robert Bly ~

(Morning Poems)

Critical Response:

I notice....

the direction by the poet, to "think in new ways."

the phone ringing

a large message

Yeats

The image of a wounded animal

A bear and antlered moose emerging,

a child being carried.

The child is one of my own.

a door knock.

News of being forgiven.

"If you lie down no one will die."

It reminds me of....

The last poem Ellen ever gave me, entitled, "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver.

Oliver's lines, "you do not have to be good....You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

My friend Marianna, who lives up in the woods by the Snake River with her dogs and cats and horses and knows the intimacy of such creatures in wild landscapes.

Native beliefs around parenting, around family, around our interconnectedness.

The Franciscan, Fr. Richard Rohr, and how he talks about "the great chain of being."

Being wide-awake and encountering my own unborn son.

Leaving teaching.

I feel...

excited about the call.

hungry for Yeats.

scared of blood and the natural and supernatural.

at peace with the possibility of forgiveness.

calm with the largeness of letting go.

achy with the desire for this message.

I wonder....

What Bly knew of Yeats?

If either ever had children?

What part do bears and moose play in his thinking? travels?

What does work look like for most people? What does it look like for you? me? My dad? Barack Obama? McCain? teachers in Afghanistan? teachers and healers and factory workers here?

Who do we think we are keeping alive?

Who do you feel responsible for?

How heavy is carrying a life in our heart or body or spirit or psyche?

What does "lying down" mean for you?

What does forgiveness do to the brain?

What would happen if we all took these instructions on how to think?

Could this poem save someone's life?

I speculate....

That Robert Bly was a teacher who loved nature and knew death and the weight of life and the capacity to work constantly in the name of sustaining something that was already being sustained by something like water and sun and animals and earth.

What do you speculate?

Happy contemplating!

Melissa

"Song" Today's Poem, by Edwin Denby

Song

by Edwin Denby

I don't know any more what it used to be
Before I saw you at table sitting across from me
All I can remember is I saw you look at me
And I couldn't breathe and I hurt so bad I couldn't see.

I couldn't see but just your looking eyes
And my ears was buzzing with a thumping noise
And I was scared the way everything went rushing around
Like I was all alone, like I was going to drown.

There wasn't nothing left except the light of your face,
There might have been no people, there might have been no place,
Like as if a dream were to be stronger than thought
And could walk into the sun and be stronger than aught.

Then someone says something and then you spoke
And I couldn't hardly answer up, but it sounded like a croak
So I just sat still and nobody knew
That since that happened all of everything is you.

"Song" by Edwin Denby from The Complete Poems. © Random House, New York, 1986. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

"First Marriage" by Liam Rector, Courtesy of The Writer's Almanac

First Marriage
by Liam Rector

I made it cross country
In a little under three days.
The engine blew out

About a hundred miles north
Of San Francisco, where I'd
Hoped to start living again

With a woman I'd abandoned
Only a few months before.
The reasons I'd left her were

Wincingly obvious
Soon as I got back
To her, and it didn't take long

Before I again left her.
In a few weeks I'd meet
The woman who became

My first wife, the one
With whom I spent
Almost the entirety

Of my twenties. It took
About twenty years
Getting over her, after

We divorced at thirty.
Broke then, I took
A bus cross-country

And was back in the East
By Christmas, thinking it
Would take three years maybe

To put this one behind me.
But getting over her
Happened as we were

Both in our third marriages,
Both then with children,
Heading for our fifties.

She came cross-country
To tend to me when I had
Cancer, with a 20% chance

Of recovery. The recovery
From all she had been to me,
Me abiding with her as long

As I did, took place finally
When we, her sitting on my bed
And me lying in it, held hands

And watched ourselves watching
TV, something we'd never quite
Been able to do comfortably

All those years ago. So many
Things turn this way over time,
So much tenderness and memory,

Problems not to be solved
But lived, and I resolved
Right then to start living

Only in this kind of time.
Cancer gave this to me: being
Able to sit, comfortably, to get

Over her finally, and to
Get on with the fight to live while
Staying ready to die daily.

"First Marriage" by Liam Rector, from The Executive Director of The Fallen World. © The University of Chicago Press, 2006. (buy now.)

I notice...

Traveling across country. An engine blowing out. Things wincingly obvious. Cancer. Divorcing and remarrying. Taking years to "get over." Occurrences in the speaker's twenties. Cancer in their fifties. 20% chance of recovering.
The lines, "Problems not to be solved/But lived" and " Cancer gave this to me: being/Able to sit, comfortably, to get/
Over her finally, and to/Get on with the fight to live while/Staying ready to die daily."

I wonder...

How those cross-country trips inspired or informed partnership?

How many times do we need to travel across continents to learn about ourselves and our hearts?

When engines blow, who repairs them?

Where does cancer come from?

Can a car have cancer? How about a heart?

What happens if we can't fix things?

What does dying teach us?

Can we learn these lessons in any simpler way?

Happy contemplating! Happy road trips!

Melissa