life: acoustic & amplified

Pale Picasso Blue

I didn’t know I was blue,

until I heard her sing.

I was never aware so much

had been lost

even before I was born.

There was so much to lose

even before I knew

what it meant to choose.

Born blue,

living blue unconfessed, blue

in concealment, I’ve lived all my life

at the plinth

of greater things than me.

Morning is greater

with its firstborn light and birdsong.

Noon is taller, though a moment’s realm.

Evening is ancient and immense, and

night’s storied house more huge.

But I had no idea.

And would have died without a clue,

except she began to sing. And I understood

my soul is a bride enthralled by an unmet groom,

or else the groom wholly spoken for, blue

in ardor, happy in eternal waiting.

I heard her sing and knew

I would never hear the true

name of each thing

until I realized the abysmal

ground of all things. Her singing

touched that ground in me.

Now, dying of my life, everything is made new.

Now, my life is not my life. I have no life

apart from all of life.

And my death is not my death,

but a pillow beneath my head, a rock

propping the window open

to admit the jasmine.

I heard her sing,

and I’m no longer afraid.

Now that I know what she knows, I hope

never to forget

how giant the gone

and immaculate the going.

How much I’ve already lost.

How much I go on losing.

How much I’ve lived

all one blue. O, how much

I go on living.

Spoken For by Li-Young Lee

Is it

the season?

the sky?

the sea?

or simply new shades of blue

writing love poems across across sky?

💙

Amy Lloyd

Our pool is still blue but a few leaves

have fallen, floating on the surface

of summer. The other swimmers

went home last week, tossed

their faded bathing suits aside,

so my daughter and I are alone

in the water which has grown colder

like a man’s hand at the end of

a romance. The lifeguard is under

her umbrella but her bags are packed

for college. We are swimming against

change, remembering the endless

shores of June: the light like lemonade,

fireflies inside our cupped hands,

watermelon night. We are swimming

towards the darkness of what

is next, walking away from the sounds

of laughter and splashing, towels

wrapped around the dampness of our loss.

💙

The Last Swim of Summer by Faith Shearin

Colors swirl around in you,

blues and greens, mostly,

like rivers, like flames, or a planet,

thick and vibrant.

To you they are beautiful.

To someone they are survival.

Outside a child walks by, crying.

Not your child.

You don’t have to respond.

The colors need framing.

Crying, and walking.

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light

www.unfoldinglight.net

is there a hatchet in my forehead?

I have a sore

My throat

I have an ache

My head

I have a strain

My eye

I have a chill

My body

I, resist

And sang with them

I am heading to

My brain

As I think

Purple

It smells like

Orange

But melts like

Rain

Feels cold like

Blue ice

My lips are pale

Ay-yay-yay

Wild like honey

On a caramelized

Pie-yay-yay

Sweet red pepper, I

Disguised like roses

In the garden

You pricked me

A-ray!

Flavored pain

As I feel

I have warmth

My forehead

I have flu

To bed

Flu by Nanette Villanueva

reality is the way to healing

Seventy-seven betrayers will stand by the road,

And those who love you will be few but stronger.

Seventy-seven betrayers, skilful and various,

But do not fear them: they are unimportant.

You must learn soon, soon, that despite Judas

The great betrayals are impersonal

(Though many would be Judas, having the will

And the capacity, but few the courage).

You must learn soon, soon, that even love

Can be no shield against the abstract demons:

Time, cold and fire, and the law of pain,

The law of things falling, and the law of forgetting.

The messengers, of faces and names known

Or of forms familiar, are innocent.

❤️

To My Daughter by Hyam Plutzik

through the window of a cheap camper

complete with age old paneling and dirty screens

I see new angles of life for the first time

this young innocent

holding her breath

hoping to be found beautiful

hoping she was good

my warm flesh pressed against

rough sheets and cold plastic

I learned that what is named love is not always tender

that sometimes winter mornings in Florida are colder than we expected

that if you keep breathing you can make it through deep water

sometimes you only see the poop happening after the pictures get developed months later

sometimes it takes years to understand and even more years to speak about the truth of what you lived through

sometimes it’s just a short flashback that opens up a doorway into those moments…

that girl in a pink and black striped shirt

trying to smile just a little

as she struggles inside to come to terms with the abuse

trying to figure out the pain

already living in two places

sitting on the plastic covered floral print sofa

while the little girl hides under a table

hoping to stay safe

in this brutal place

in this wicked world

she’s coming to know too well

30 years later my fingerprints are still there on that grimy splintering wood

the soft pieces of my heart I left on that top bunk

still call out for me to understand

how this world can break you

and how you can surely find the way to heal again

❤️

Amy Lloyd

It must be troubling for the god who loves you

To ponder how much happier you’d be today

Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.

It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings

Driving home from the office, content with your week—

Three fine houses sold to deserving families—

Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened

Had you gone to your second choice for college,

Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted

Whose ardent opinions on painting and music

Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.

A life thirty points above the life you’re living

On any scale of satisfaction. And every point

A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.

You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you

Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments

So she can save her empathy for the children.

And would you want this god to compare your wife

With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?

It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation

You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight

Than the conversation you’re used to.

And think how this loving god would feel

Knowing that the man next in line for your wife

Would have pleased her more than you ever will

Even on your best days, when you really try.

Can you sleep at night believing a god like that

Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives

You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is

And what could have been will remain alive for him

Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill

Running out in the snow for the morning paper,

Losing eleven years that the god who loves you

Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene

Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him

No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend

No closer than the actual friend you made at college,

The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight

And write him about the life you can talk about

With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,

Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

💞

The God Who Loves You by Carl Dennis

ON ABUSE AND “SPIRITUALITY”

“You attracted it because you desired it”.

“If you think there’s a problem with another’s words or actions,

YOU are the one who’s confused”.

“Everything is just your projection. Everything is in your mind”.

“Clear up your vibration and you’ll stop attracting bad things to yourself”.

“You are too attached to the body. Go beyond the body. It’s not who you are.”

“If you have doubts, fears, resistance, pain, anger, then you must be in your ego and totally unenlightened”.

“The past is an illusion. Let it go right now!”.

Ugh. I’m so tired of all this New Age spiritual bullshit.

I’m tired of ANY spirituality that doesn’t fully honour

our messy, unresolvable, first-hand, real-time, embodied human experience.

That doesn’t bow deeply to the struggle of our raw and tender hearts.

That guilt-trips us for our imperfections and shames our limitations.

No, it’s not always your projection.

Yes, sometimes other people really ARE abusive and need to be stopped.

No, everything isn’t always “in your mind”.

Yes, your body matters. Your feelings too.

No, your doubts and fears are not ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ or ‘unevolved’.

No, you do not ‘attract’ abuse through a faulty ‘vibrational frequency’.

No, you do not deserve to be violated in any way, in the name of Truth, in the name of God, in the name of Love, or IN ANY OTHER NAME.

Yes, your boundaries deserve to be respected, your ‘yes’ AND your ‘no’ too.

No, it’s not okay for spiritual teachers to abuse people “for their own good”

– to shock them into awakening, to enlighten them, to help them drop their “ego”.

Teachers that use abuse as a tool are simply abusers, not teachers.

I reject any spirituality that dismisses our tender, vulnerable, fragile humanity.

I reject any spirituality that shames us for our precious human thoughts and feelings.

I reject any spirituality that begins any sentence with “If you were enlightened…”

I reject any spirituality that divides self from no self, divine from human, sacred from profane, absolute from relative, heaven from earth, duality from nonduality, material from spiritual.

I once saw a popular spiritual teacher addressing a recently bereaved woman.

He said, “Your heartbreak is illusory and only the activity of the separate self.

One day the separate self will vanish, along with all suffering”.

And in that moment, I saw a deep, deep sickness and inhumanity at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The invalidation of trauma, the false promises, the power games, the suppression of the feminine.

And I vowed to bow to that fucking broken heart as if it were God Herself.

Until the end of time.

– Jeff Foster

carnal knowledge

A man can’t die where there is no earth

because there will be no place

to bury him. His body is the sky

and understands the language of birds.

His body says the earth is made of everything

that has fallen from Heaven

while no one was looking. He promises

to defy gravity and then return home.

A man can’t reach for the sky and not feel

he is falling. It goes on forever and the birds

talk about the awesomeness of flight

while the oxen labor in the fields,

while the cows eat grass and dream

of slaughter. A man can’t talk about flight

because one day, there will be no sky,

just the body covered in earth.

And now the sky is empty of birds.

And now the earth is covered in flowers

🌹

Where the Sky Meets the Earth by W. Todd Kaneko

<<<<<

THE LONGEST NIGHT

Now listen to your broken heart.

Fall into the wound and bathe

in the balm of midnight.

Don’t follow a star.

Let your root find sap

in the blackest loam.

What are countless golden petals

or the fragrance of myrrh

compared to the yearning

of the shadow for its cause?

Birthless seeds are singing

beneath all that rises and falls.

When you are truly silent

you will hear them bursting

through the long good night,

until you are healed

by loss.

COMMENT

In the North we enter the darkest days, the longest nights. For many these holidays are not bright with Christall radiance of newborn Solstice sun, but truly dark with inward midnight.

Yet the mystics of all great religions have a message for us about such depths. If we have the courage to fully embrace our darkest places, they deepen into boundlessness, soften and glow. Grace gongs from their hollows. And Darkness herself becomes the path.

Hindu devotees called Krishna “the dark Lord.” His beloved Radha only found him after her long night of yearning. The mystical path in Islam is patterned after Mohammad’s “night journey” (Isra) which leads to his mystical ascent (Miraj).

The Christian Gnostic Valentinus wrote: “Who is the real Virgin Mother? The mystical eternal silence.” Medieval Christian mystics spoke of the deepest union as “divine darkness.” Dionysius the Areopagite wrote that the mysteries of God “are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness.” Jan Ruysbroeck said, “The unfathomable waylessness of God is so dark and wayless that it encompasses within itself all divine ways.”

Hebrew Psalm 139 declares, “Even the darkness is not dark to Thee… the light and the darkness are one.” Thus I dedicate this poem to those who are in darkness, whether it be night or day…

Fred LaMotte

<<<<

Apple, plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please.

A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use.

🍰

Tender Buttons [Apple] by Gertrude Stein

between the lines of the labyrinth is a secondary path

there are so many ways to get from here to there

so many ways to find your way home

enter the arena from whatever spot you find yourself

remove your armor

speak your truth

kneel and kiss this holy ground

the lions will behave…

or not…

at least you will live and die on your own terms

and that, my dear friend, may be enough to change the world

🌍

Amy Lloyd

FCC on a snowy night – Photo by Kathleen Bidney-Singewald

lighting us

LIGHT THE WAY FOR LOVE

They say beauty comes from a spirit that has weathered many hardships in life and somehow continues with resilience. Grace can be found in a soul who ages softly, even amid the tempest.

I think the loveliest by far is the one whose gentle heart bears

a hundred scars from caring, yet still finds a way to pick up the lamp, one more time, to light the way for love.

(~an excerpt from Susan Frybort’s remarkably reassuring and life-affirming new book, ‘Open Passages: Doors and Windows to the Soul’, available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Open-Passages-Doors-Windows-Soul/dp/0994784376/

and at any bookstore, through Ingram Distribution)

the full red moon, more

than breathtaking,

moves the waters

to and from the shore

perfectly timed waves kissing

sand and toes

like tongues exploring

moving deeper and deeper

building into crescendo

pounding wave after wave

riding us into passionate ecstasy

rhythms naturally moving within

circles swirling higher and higher

until we fly into the rainbow

of pure beauty

as close to God as we can come

on this sphere of terrestrial grace

walking for these moments into sheer timelessness

within the milky way

borning new stars with the heat of our sacred connection

light lighting light

forgetting the questions

we arrive at the truest goal of our living

in the fires of the first universal truth:

we are all one

🔥

Amy Lloyd

God,

I wait for so much more than Christmas,

more than the miraculous birth:

I await my own birth.

As you poured yourself into this world,

and it was never the same again,

pour yourself into me,

and change me forever.

Birth your light in me,

your Word made flesh in me,

Set me to your purposes

and sustain me in your way.

Make me a living sign of your coming,

a vessel of your presence,

an instrument of your delight.

I open my heart to you.

Come, and make me your holy one.

_________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light

we are one

The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.

– Frederick Buechner

at some point in our lives

we all are handed bones to carry –

death is an integral part of the gift of living

hold on to your bones

no matter how the wind blows

hold fast to the bones

that are yours to carry out of Egypt

until you find the place of proper burial

when you reach home at last

lay them gently into the clay from which they sprang

water them with the tears you have carried so gently inside yourself

all the years they have been sloshing within you

waiting patiently for this moment of kindness

kneel in the holy gratitude of your own precious breath

showing up as holy smoke in the frigid air of this winter morning

connecting you to the intimate oneness of the world you walk in

then dry your eyes

warm your hands on the hearth of this very moment of life

and take your place among the hugs of your lovely children

you’ve waited a lifetime to kiss on Christmas morning

the lights shining on the green tree

everything merry and bright

laughing all the way

as you lay all that down

forevermore

🎄

Amy Lloyd

<<
e brook is not the light

but it reflects the coming dawn.

The geese are not the winter,

but it falls from their wings.

The wave is not the sea;

the note is not the song;

I am not the light

but I am made of nothing else.

Bear witness.

If not to the light within,

bear witness to the dawn.

To the song.

The candle isn't the sun,

but sings its song.

I don't have to believe this,

just sing the song.

_________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light< em>/p><<
p>

it is enough

The lack of problem-solving skills definitely dazzles me just a little

This mountain from a molehill made larger than life

It makes me wonder about the state of this ordinary world

How would we survive a zombie apocalypse?

Not very well, it would seem

Old men rely on fixed routine to the exclusion of common sense

Thank goodness God adores us as we are

Weak and foolish, as we may be

Thank goodness I wallow in this deep puddle of grace

The long shadow of this swirling forgiveness

The abundance of this day’s beauty

The glimpsed knowledge of the irony of freewill

The glory of the sunlight after the greyest day

🌝

Amy Lloyd

<<<<<<<<<<<<

How arresting

that God intends to upend the empires of men,

promises cosmic upheaval,

and to bring it about sends

lonely prophets out in the wilderness,

who themselves will soon be arrested.

God touches a loner praying in the desert.

Kneels and says to a peasant girl,

“Your willingness is enough.”

Appears in a small, helpless child.

Holds the sagging flesh of one crucified.

Amazing, how for God so little is enough.

The voice of one crying in the wilderness

is enough.

Your voice is enough

if you lift it up.

It is not alone.

It is not empty.

Your voice,

and its millions,

is the Way of God.

_________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light<

<<

💞

It is noted somewhere in the book of eternity, that human beings who risk it all and step forward day in and day out…are indeed creating, the most beautiful days of their lives…I know, as it happened again today…falling madly in love with the world.

Beauty,

Rev. Donna Knutson

losing control

Is it hope or denial, surrender or giving up, the discipline of good self-care based on experience or rigid adherence to principles that may not apply? This being human is messy, and discernment often clearer in hindsight than at the start of the day. When to get moving, when to be still? How to care for another without abandoning the self? How to find necessary solitude without disconnecting from life-sustaining community? Yep, I am a bundle of questions this morning- and that’s okay. I will sit with the questions, accept how little I know, and appreciate how infrequently I am “in charge.” 🙂

~Oriah

In this molting age of Aquarius

with water pouring from aged and busted pipes

the tin man sits heartlessly rusted in the laundry room

well beyond any repair

I see your fragile heart spread out for miles and miles

love returning from around the bend again and again

layer after layer of imbedded pain releasing with each soft, round circle and sharp-edged square

we are always tenderly held

pulled from the wreckage of our own spinning brains

working through nights of barking dogs and wild hares

seasons coming and going taking their fine time to bring us out of poverty’s grasp

husks of skin and bone carry the eerie, ethereal beauty of life and death within us – our own and all others

unmapped blue skied tomorrow’s are crossroads paralleling well worn pathways on roads less traveled

everything is connected by this web of grace weaving through our crazy-quilt patterned ancestral charts

our grave stones marking us brothers and sisters- pushing up daises as one, my friend, as well as, my foe

come to me now, save me from destroying myself in my chosen isolation

talk to me in this fine moment of cabbages and kings

take me to the river and wash me clean

feed me with roasted chicken, grapes and sugarplums

sing to me the lullabies of my mother I have loved since childhood

laugh with me in the face of my worry-stone worn smooth by endless hardened time

love me like the rock of ages

and never let me go

❤️

Amy Lloyd

all of that

yesterday I was born a leaf a small fragile tender wisp trembling as I hung on the vine

yesterday I hung as mist above the marsh grasses softly whispering to the birds soaring above me as they taught me to sing songs of freedom into each new morning

yesterday I was a gust of air short lived, but not insignificant full of bone rattling cold and hat disturbing bravado

yesterday I was a large, slow, snow flake plopping down like a wet goose feather making the world a magical place

yesterday I was a world made of glass lying shattered on the floor hoping to be recycled into a new and useful planet

yesterday I was various people – a student, a host, a friend, a lover feeling my way into the next moment hoping to find a way home

yesterday I was a tall tree proud yet with humble confidence accepting the grief that winter brings, gently weeping, waiting for spring

yesterday I was a large, dependable mountain made of sheer delights to behold and explore all along the way. The greens of my valleys the grandeur of my peaks leaving me breathless and in awe at every step of my life’s grand adventure.

❤️

Amy Lloyd

<<<<<

everything you thought you had,

everything you expected it was,

everything they appeared to be

seemed to transform unexpectedly

into a silent vapor memory.

And all that loss

found its way

inside your chest

and throbbed against

the pulse of living.

You learned Mourning does not

rely upon an efficient and selective process…

It took a season,

and another season,

and another,

to walk through each

tract of land set before you.

You learned grief itself

is an unmapped journey

you would inevitably experience,

and might become lost

among the non-sequential

complex layers.

You learned we all carry

the death of someone,

something, or someplace

around inside,

and for that,

we need not ever feel ashamed.

A marriage,

a child, a friend

a calling, a mission,

a beloved companion,

a way of being…

Try to stifle the Soul's crying.

Try to bundle up and hide

the monumental Why's.

Only to learn

that to surrender

and fully plumb

the depths of sorrow

can Grief be free

to move and breathe

through the runnels

of your heart.

Even while you own

the newer moments—

even as you go through

the motions of an active

and unfolding life.

.

~ Susan Frybort

at the end of the year

As this year draws to its end,

We give thanks for the gifts it brought

And how they become inlaid within

Where neither time nor tide can touch them.

Days when beloved faces shone brighter

With light from beyond themselves;

And from the granite of some secret sorrow

A stream of buried tears loosened.

We bless this year for all we learned,

For all we loved and lost

And for the quiet way it brought us

Nearer to our invisible destination.

John O’Donohue

Excerpt from, ‘At the End of the Year’

Mark Nepo tells us to,

‘put down what doesn’t work –

so that we can find what is sacred’.

🎄

What worked so well yesterday,

may not work today.

We wear out our structures of known truth,

the frameworks of what we use for living,

for healing.

Let them go,

trust in the new architecture –

modern,

with our personal, classic twist.

We are always becoming.

Watch for the signs of structural failure,

build the new bridge,

delight in this magnificent design,

those amazing cranes hanging in the water,

strong, foundational columns

rising from deep within the waters,

creating the new skyline of your life,

welcome this new place of crossing.

It can handle rush hour,

or heavy foot-traffic.

Continue the build,

always creating with the future in mind,

before the old fully implodes underneath our feet.

🏗

AL

Let mystery have its place in you;

do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination,

but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring,

and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird;

keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God.

Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it.

If you are conscious of something new—thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being—

do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it;

let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten,

hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness.

Henri Frederic Amiel