Category: Whole Life of the Poet (Page 8 of 18)

This week autumn came….like Thursday. It was hot and then it was not. We had a hard freeze last night. The trees are confused. I have new sunflowers coming up! I traveled up to Colorado last weekend to continue researching the Goodnight Loving Trail for Cowboy Meditation Primer. It rained for hours on Friday, was incredibly windy on Saturday and sunny all day Sunday and Monday. Put up Halloween this week in anticipation of October guests! It smells good out.

The Prompt: Lessons

This week's prompt:

"Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know."
        – Pema Chödrön

First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.

The Drawing

My Haiku

…inspired by my drawing (it's a vinyl record, but it looks more like a boob to me):

Like a haunted sound
that plays over and over
skipping at midnight

The Reflection

Not much to say about this one. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts when I've figured out what it is I need to know!

🙂

Now you.

This week was pretty mellow. Taking a class. Getting reading done. Did some weeding. Just came back from lunch with old work friends. Nothing spectacular and yet spectacular things all around.

The Prompt: Being Judgey

This week's prompt:

"Wise men don't judge–they seek to understand."
        – Wei Wu Wei

First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.

The Drawing

My Haiku

…inspired by my drawing (which I have to admit I copied from another design online):

The song of the depths
are echoing the shallows
Of bullfrogs and birds

The Reflection

Another challenging prompt. You have to judge something: like murderers and the Holocaust. But do we need singing, cooking and camping competitions?

My drawing this week was a cryptic homage to The Voice which is far less judgey than some things out there. But it's whole existence is to pass judgement. I can be very judgey. I learned how to do it from a friend of mine and then years and years of practice. It's addictive because it gives you the space to pontificate, which is, let's face it, kinda fun. I even used to love judgey zines, whose whole point of being was to judge (hence the transgression joy of them), like Beer Frame, a zine which wrote judgey letters to junk food companies. Another one I loved was The Curmudgeon' Home Companion, a small two page newsletter of grumpiness with recipes. Food and judgey seem to always go together. 

Anyway, like anything else, it's good to practice this stuff in moderation.

Judge away.

I loved this week! So happy to be back to my day-to-day job and I got so much done! It was lovely. Pot of Gold. Check.    

The Prompt: Pot of Gold

This week's prompt:

"When you realize nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you."
        – Lao Tzu

First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.

The Drawing

My Haiku

…inspired by my drawing (which I have to admit I copied from another design online):

Through the fog of want:
the turret and golden leaves.
You're already there

The Reflection

I love the Kool Aid guy…enough to inspire my pop of gold face. And it's almost egregious that when they say "don't drink the kool aid," they're really talking about the sinister poison of propaganda disguised within the innocent sugary drink. Arms akimbo, he's really a sassy little pitcher.

Now your turn.

So much insanity this week and last. I've made it through two weeks of boss-gone coverage. Did some stress eating. Went to see the movie It.  I am looking forward to getting away soon, getting back into the routine. 

The Prompt: Letting Go

This week's prompt:

"Let go or be dragged."
        – Zen Proverb

First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.

The Drawing

My Haiku

…inspired by my drawing (which I have to admit I copied from another design online):

Sitting and waiting:
Is it holding on or
Is it letting go?

The Reflection

This is great advice and I love this quote. So true. Tough love. And yet…am I the only one who has trouble getting to 100% on this? It's hard to know when is the time to give up before quitting too soon. If you someone who has a tendency to quit too soon, you know what I mean. Where is the line between an endurance run and futility?

There's plenty for me to let go of (mistakes I've made, stupid things I've said, fussy judgments I have)…but what about the good stuff about being dragged: on a sled, when you're being rescued, in a tickle fight…

Half the time I'm just winging it. And I worry about it; but maybe I need to let go of that?

Now your turn.

This week my boss is on vacation and I've been the boss. It has not been fun. Lots of wheels coming off this wagon. Well, not really but…it's been intense. This week's reflection was really helpful…everything is a brief flash of what it is and that's all (except actual tragedy, which this week falls way short of). I am not, however, a horse bred for intensity. I'm a meadow horse. I'm a lazy horse. 

The Prompt: Bubble in a Stream

Again this week's prompt is the last one from the Zen by the Brush book by Myoshi Nancy O'Hara. Thank you book for inspiring this project and getting us this far.

"Think in this way of all this fleeting world:
As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A dewdrop, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."
        – The Diamond Sutra

First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.

The Drawing

My Haiku

…inspired by my drawing(s):

All the coupling ands
A chain of exuberance
Shining, lighting out.

The Reflection

So it turns out, untutored a dew drop is damn hard for me to draw. I give you two of three pages of my attempts. I was struck by the ands in this Diamond Sutra: all the things AND a dream. How wonderful. 

What do you make of it?

So I feel better this week. There's rumblings that the art brawl group might get busy again. We'll feel productive anyway. I've had a whirlwind week at work prepping me for some vacation coverage. So being in the moment has been what it's been. Post move, I've organized a lot, done some home improvement and am ready to dive back into creative projects. That should help.

The Prompt: In the Moment

Again this week's prompt comes from the Zen by the Brush book by Myoshi Nancy O'Hara. 

"Live in the moment.
The starry sky is just there–
Where else can you be?"
        – Myochi

First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.

The Drawing

My Haiku

…inspired by my drawing:

What you are given:
Wind, and the wind and the wind
And all the seeds…

The Reflection

🙂

Do it!

We're at the halfway mark! Hard to believe. This year has gone by so fast. And this is an interesting halfway mark for me. This is the first quote prompt that felt somehow wrong, or something felt off about it.

The prompt is about letting go of outcomes and a leaf being part of a whole ecosystem, which sounds like connection on the surface. But this week I started to feel a dread that we can get so far into the idea of the big oneness that we can't see the small disconnections this might cause on the ground, so to speak.

To be honest, my gloom is in no small part disconnected from my reading the book Selfie by Will Storr. That combined with reading two women's fashion magazines that have gone very serious and dark. Very dark. What a day it is when women's fashion magazines find themselves doing undercover investigative journalism about sex predators and incels? And yet here we are.

This month's Instyle did a full issue on "bad-ass women" and one piece stuck out, an interview with two journalists, one who broke the Jeffrey Epstein story. The other Cosmopolitan  feature was about a woman tracking incels. Can I restate that these are women's magazines? I should be filling out the latest sex quiz, mocking perfume ads and reading reviews about the latest mascara technology. Not that I'm complaining.

We're not talking about hundreds of incels, either, but tens of thousands who are discussing the legalization of rape and disqualifying women from voting rights. And these aren't older men either. They're increasingly Millennials. And about a thousand of them might be militarized as well. This kind of puts microaggressions and glass ceilings in a frightening retro-perspective. 

So… I'm alarmed and thinking about my haiku and also struggling with the enormity of the threat and how to behave as a citizen of a country turning very dark. A lot of the advice we've been trading, politically speaking,  has either been ineffective or is solid but will need a generation to play out and bear fruit; which means a positive upturn in civil rights, science and economic fairness may not happen until after I'm dead. That didn't make me feel any better.

But it did make me more resolved to care much more where this little leaf falls. 

The Prompt: Disconnection

Again this week's prompt comes from the Zen by the Brush book by Myoshi Nancy O'Hara. 

"It couldn't care less
whose soil it may become:
Falling leaf."
        – Zen Poem

First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.

The Drawing

My Haiku

…inspired by my drawing (and week):

In the letting go
a leaf has consequences
for the whole forest

The Reflection

I am not a leaf! A leaf doesn't have arms and legs or a voice or a blog.

Now it's your turn.

I was exhausted this week. Threw my yearly big birthday party for my friends in Albuquerque (we're all May through August) and we played PlayDoh Pictionary and ChickenFoot. The day of the party my dog Franz had a tragic dingle-berry accident which took out 8 feet of the living room carpet temporarily. As a result, he had his first grooming of his life yesterday and he looks totally adorable! And so tiny!

Anyway, every new day is a new challenge and a new surprise. Those two things seem to come together.

The Prompt: Space to Rest Before Challenge

Again this week's prompt comes from the Zen by the Brush book by Myoshi Nancy O'Hara. 

"We ought to listen to music
or sit and practice breathing
at the beginning of every meeting or discussion."
        – Thich Nhat Hanh

First task is to sit for a meditation on that for 5-10 minutes or however long you feel is good to you.

The Drawing

My Haiku

…inspired by my drawing:

Pitch and treble clef
The tone of terrible words
Echoing angry

The Reflection

I heard the common parable this week: time heals all wounds. And thinking about that today it seems space is a great healer afterwards. Maybe we should practice more space prior to. The problem is, these challenging discussions (often fraught with tensions and animosities) or these dingle-berry tragedies…they always surprise you and leave very little time for space, unless you stop the action and go breathe somewhere. Probably that should be a few yards away from the shitty situation, literally. 

Now you're turn.