sing it out
The urge to sing is
what heals us.
Find it in silence.
Let it burst up
wordless and broken.
Our music comes
from the wound.
🎶
Fred LaMotte
life: acoustic & amplified
poetry, quotes & thoughts about life
Archive for the month “November, 2017”
for one more night
The lion still roars
I walk in grief
On the purple beach
the grey-green water
meeting the sky
Into infinity
the world unending
I sit on driftwood
Fascinatingly carved by water
Into pieces of art
and shapes that look like
cattle skulls in the desert
I cry as I pick up rocks
Why do i grieve such simple things
Those precious shells
I spent hours snorkeling for
In 1985
You polished them
til they were smooth as silk
So beautiful
I loved everything about them
and that memory they held
Back When the world was still
A mystery
And I knew nothing about hardship
Loss or pain
I thought love and life were simple
That you wanted me to be happy
That you loved me
That we would build a family together
I kept those shells in a special jar
Would let the kids play with them
For a special treat
I loved their delight in them
As they played for hours
sorting the colors and shapes
Loving the story of us at the start
I Kept them close to me
Through all the losses
Then they were gone
lost to me forever
way after my innocence
but somehow they took
some shred I was holding on to
Some secret part of me and you
that was still beautiful
I picked up small beautiful rocks
today at the beach
They reminded me
and it all returned
all the losses
all the pain
What you chose
The choices I was forced to make
The price of gaining my soul
The cost of winning my freedom
I cry so deeply
Right to the core
such intense love
for the wounded heart
carried in small pieces
of the world
connecting all the pain
and love together
Bittersweet grief
Bittersweet love
Exquisite pain
Exquisite joy
Will I ever find love that understands this?
Will I ever share this same heart as one?
Will I ever make it home?
Will I ever make it?
Will I ever?
Will I?
Will?
đź’”
Amy Lloyd
Have you sat with grief?
Have you let it wring you dry?
Leave you swollen and exhausted
in it’s wake?
Allowed the pain from the inner depths of hell,
deeper than you knew existed,
to ooze out,
bubble up into your heart,
so that your tears could begin
to wash you clean?
Have you asked yourself
the questions with no answers?
then allow them to just co-exist with you,
allowing that life is good,
finding space for gratitude
even in the unanswerable?
Have you walked, and talked,
with death and your losses?
The innocence murdered
by anger and hate?
Precious time stolen
by monsters and ogres?
Hearts trampled
by words of violence and sarcasm?
Are you familiar with vulnerability?
With allowing your deepest feelings,
painful feelings,
raw feeling,
real feelings,
to come out of the grave
where you try to hide them?
Exposing your wounds,
old and new?
I know how hard it is,
I know.
I try to avoid it too.
I also know the truth.
It must be done.
It is the broken road to healing.
To life!
The more we feel,
the more we can feel.
Go deep, my friend
Open up wide.
Sit a spell and let it bubble.
Feel it all.
It will feel rotten for a while,
then comes the morning
you wake up good as new!
New and improved.
I promise you won’t regret it.
Just trust me on this one.
I am intimately familiar
with this process.
đź’”
Amy Lloyd
EVERYTHING is not a gift. There may be valued transformation that arises from many experiences, but that doesn’t mean that EVERY experience is a gift. If we lean too far in that direction, we will deny trauma and victimhood all together, something we have already been doing for centuries. No, everything is not a gift. Some experiences are horrors, and it is all we can do to heal from them. To suggest that someone MUST find the gift in them, is to add insult to injury. It is also to create a culture that welcomes all horrors, because, after all- “everything is a gift.” Let’s keep it grounded- sometimes, it’s a gift. Sometimes it’s a horror. And the only who can decide that is the person who had the experience.
– Jeff Brown
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion….
For there our captors asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” …
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! …
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
—from Psalm 137
This Psalm, a lament by exiles from Jerusalem after its destruction, can be one of the most wrenching to live with. It takes us deep into the grief and rage of the abused and exploited, the refugee, the prisoner. It won’t let us off the hook. It forbids us ever to say to the suffering, “There, there.” It invites us to sit with them by the river of their sorrow— to sit for a long time with them, and bear their anguish.
And then it turns dark, into that murderous vengefulness that makes us so uncomfortable—it does me, anyway. How do we keep up with it, this mood swing from poignant sorrow to child-killing rage? When we are taught to love our enemies, how do we deal with all those enemies in the Psalms that we despise and want to destroy? Four things come to mind.
1. My real enemies are not other people; they are my self-centeredness, my fear, all those desires and attachments that separate me from the “Jerusalem” of true life. Those enemies and their offspring I really do want to destroy. I read this Psalm as an expression of my deep sadness, longing for the depth of life I have abandoned, and a prayer for the transformation of my consciousness, a change in my heart.
2. I read this prayer as a confession: sometimes I am that angry. And in my religious heritage we have been that murderous. I pray this psalm as a confession of the violence in my heart and in my community.
3. This is not a comfortable, white, middle class person’s prayer. It is the cry of the oppressed. I have no business dialing down their rage, “demanding of them mirth.” I read this Psalm as a way to be in solidarity with those who are in this deep anguish, who feel exactly this anger, without sugar-coating it.
4. This Psalm is also a cry for justice, which is not revenge but it is change. There is such a thing as the wrath of God. God cries out that oppressors be stopped, that violence end. The cry here is not literally to kill babies, but to utterly destroy the offspring of greed and exploitation, to end the line of succession of violence and abuse, to chop off the family tree of hate and fear and selfishness. The change is built on love of the oppressors— but God’s merciful justice requires that some things get destroyed. As Revelation 11.18 says, “Your wrath has come, and the time… for destroying those who destroy the earth.”
Look up Psalm 137 and read the whole thing. Confront your sorrow and your inner enemies. Confess your violence. Sit with those who are in anguish. And cry out with them for the end to oppression, the destruction of unjust systems, and the coming of God’s reign of mercy and justice that will not merely make this world better, but replace it.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
dessert first
I only have one chakra:
a rose apple pie.
The other seven were all in my head.
They came from reading books
and hearing esoteric rumors.
They vanished when I
tasted myself
and gave up seeking.
I’m too caramelized
and sticky to have
a subtle body.
Sweet and sour cinnamon flesh
is all I am.
Meditate on my flavor, friend.
Let’s taste each other and forget
the higher dimensions.
Who knows how
the heart blossoms?
I’m just sure it’s made
with real butter.
On the tip of
a honey-gold stamen,
this world is just a pollen speck
in the flowering of Now.
🌼
Fred LaMotte
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LaMotte on Facebook)
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be life is made up of that
melt-in-your-mouth lamb chop…
that amazing carrot cake…
the one made with apricots
and candied ginger…
loaded and dense with goodness
the one Im glad we shared…
(though I’d wished we each had a slice of our own
after my first bite of that goodness…)
living our highest life is definitely made with real butter
I’ve found my answers and balance
come from out of the blue…
oceans and sky…
the circle of the labyrinth
leading me safely in and out
even when I get confused on which way Im going
trusting the path leads me to where I need to go
to what I need to know
dolphins come to each of us,
though in different forms
trinity is a universality repeated pattern
our adventures connect us in real time
while we stand on opposite coasts, full smiling,
listening to the blue
eating all kinds of sweet things by the ocean
đź’™
Amy Lloyd
Thanksgiving is sweeter than bounty itself.
One who cherishes gratitude does not cling to the gift!
Thanksgiving is the true meat of God’s bounty;
the bounty is its shell,
For thanksgiving carries you to the hearth of the Beloved.
Abundance alone brings heedlessness, thanksgiving gives
birth to alertness.
The bounty of thanksgiving will satisfy and elevate you,
and you will bestow a hundred bounties in return.
Eat your fill of God’s delicacies,
and you will be freed from hunger and begging.
đź’›
Untitled [“Thanksgiving is sweeter than bounty itself”], attributed to Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
đź’™
any ordinary October
Hawk 8
I
The hawk watches over me
through a thousand miles
of sky and songs
always there
every time I glance upward
Ii
Wings spread against blue
awareness of all this
beauty, grace and goodness
following me all the days of my life
just as the promise was sung 27 years ago
Iii
Flower chaise with black and white stripe cushions
red-tile rooftop
blue water
tug boat pushes mammoth freighter
hawk circles in deep sky
Iiii
misty mountains
white veiled mysteries
shadowed hawk
colors of God hang like ragged curtains
trees crowned with falling beauty
made even more spectacular
through weathered waters
everything in life is grace
grace is everything
V
Not a big deal
Just a noticing of the guardian
flying above me
watching over
keeping my path
making my heart sing
making my burdens a little bit lighter
I am known
I am held
I am protected
Vi
11•1•8/11
the world is made
of numbers
of music
of spirals
of design
of beauty
of above
of below
of circles
of flow
of breath
of words
of love
Vii
What about the burning questions?
Who am I?
Where am I?
Why am I here?
What do I intend to do about it?
I watch you fly in silence
knowing you have more answers than I’ll ever know
I listen for your guidance
in the space between us
I sit and wait for you to open me to
everything I need to know
8
you –
being all you were born to be
named
wild
free
feathered
fearless
high
flying
comfortable
beautiful
honored
respected
protector
spirit
totem
guardian
soul
teacher
strong
🙏🏻
Amy Lloyd 2017
8 small monuments: hawk in my October journeying
The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already. Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years. There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk. Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling. When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling. It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty. How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future. The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words. I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins. In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river. The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year. How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved. Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it. The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance, I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river. Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush.
🚪
10 Things I Need to Know by Richard Jackson
life: acoustic & amplified 