This week, I keep coming back to this quote (Toni Morrison, 2004, after Bush re-elected): “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”
I tidied my workspace. I rage-cleaned my bathroom. Many texts, emails, calls and walks with friends; and we are determined to get back to our creative work, and to find an action (local or otherwise) to engage in going forward. That network of connections is important in sustaining us…
Thank you for these reminders, Jen. I'm working on finding an action and building those connections, too. It's good to know that you are doing the same. Back to my creative work now ;)
tidying our workspace and cleaning house. Very therapeutic. Caring for my space when I am sorrowful has always been helpful. So good. you focus on the creative
Wang Wei, Chinese poet/painter, lived in the 700’s. I was recently introduced to this poet via learning about David Hinton who translated Wang Wei’s poems into English. Lately, slowly, I have been exploring the Japanese Shakuhachi bamboo flute. One way of working with this flute is to take a poem that interests me, compose a simple music piece that resonates with the poem. Thus daily as I learn to play this flute I get to recite the poem, then play and listen to the flute sounds that “translate” the poem; the poem once written in Chinese, then translated into English, and now “translated” into flute sounds. What truly fascinates me, and keeps calling me into this poem is this line from the poem:
“A blossom’s heart is grief-torn? In all this
spring color, who could fathom the heart?”
My mind struggles to understand this first part. Can a flower feel such emotions? Given the recent elections in the US, given our shared climate challenges, my heart quietly weeps with this blossom. Who am I to believe or disbelieve the blossom’s capacity to be grief-torn? What I can do is stand next to the blossom and be still, and weep. Together, we thrive.🏮
David, thank you!!! There is something so powerful in those words…stand together, be still, weep and together we thrive. In that real compassionate collective there is the capacity to thrive at such a deep level that nothing can destroy or take ithat collective healing energy to thrive from us.
Somehow, the fact that there is a person in this world who is learning to play the Japanese Shakuhachi bamboo flute while attempting to compose music around a poem they struggle to interpret, allows hopefulness to rise.
What a beautiful practice! I got chills when I read the lines of poetry in your post and imagined what those words might sound like. A happy conundrum I will carry through today. Thank you. ❤️
Writers writing, knitters knitting, gardeners growing, cooks cooking, mosaic artists placing, faithful and those with little faith praying - all hands together for better.
“Art and Coalition” … post election, my daughter and her friends tore out pictures and phrases from magazines and brochures and whatever else to create three collages. They made art out of fragments of frayed, ostensibly disjointed pieces of paper. Bit by bit, the wrinkled patchwork of phrases and images came together into something new, something whole. My daughter shared how, in the process, she lost herself. I would add that in the mystery of art and coalition, she reclaimed herself…she reclaimed “SOUL”fulness…despite her and their dismay and confusion.
As for me, I have been holding onto my banjo. In the process of training my sixty-year plus hands to inhabit an A-minor chord as I learn Christmas carols for the upcoming season, I, too, have lost myself in a coalition with metal strings and banjo tabluture . The surprise has been to recognize familiar songs arising from my slow, yet freer plucking. That in the midst of grief and disbelief for how this past year and recent week have unfolded, I have been able to turn my “fret”ful-ness into music is a testament to the potential of “art and coalition”
I meet monthly with women transitioning from prison to their communities. I am always surprised at their wisdom and understanding about life because they have experienced life as I never have. Our discussions begin with scripture and we easily veer off to creative and heart-felt moments when life is raw, difficult, sad, joyful and beautiful. Even though I am the discussion leader, I become the student with these voices of pain and restoration, learning from each other about resilience and hope.
I really like your line "because they have experienced life as I never have." This compassion and curiosity about "the other" is so healthy to understandings bridge to finding kinship even with those who are different. Bless you and your work.
That's where it's at. I can remember group sessions at a domestic violence shelter where I worked being phenomenal for those "raw, difficult, sad, joyful, and beautiful" transformations that you could see happening in real time. Nothing else has come close since.
In the early 1980s I briefly joined the women's peace camp in Greenham Common, UK. I only spent a very cold week there but have carried this spirit of gathering, community and peaceful assembly with me throughout my life, as a mother, now a grandmother, as administrator and facilitator, a feminist, a long time campaigner and always, I found my spirits were lifted, my hope reaffirmed by the knowledge that working together with others, directly or at a distance, is when I am most creative.
For me I think it would be the constancy of creativity. That from our earliest beginnings people painted on cave walls even when food was scarce and animals a threat and they scripted a mythology of the Gods even when the world they lived in was turbulent with Greeks battling Spartans and they wrote poems even when shells exploded near their WW1 trenches.
I’d like to think that art, song, words have been present every day since man began. They are our way of both narrating and relating to the World’s condition of beauty-horror. It’s a creativity born in the deep tunnels of humanity and I cannot imagine a world without this vital way of communicating. We must pick up our pens and paintbrushes, remember the great tradition we are part of, and make music from what we see and hear even when our bones are full of despair.
And….things might be better if every politician was required to sit for thirty minutes each day with a painting, song, story or poem…..
Having just reviewed The Knowledge Gene by Dr Lynne Kelly, and surprised that it quickly left molecular biology and a theory about a supergene linked to creation but distinct to humans (also linked to a serious rare illness variant ) to explore primary evidence - various prehistorical and ancient anthropological creative constructions -particularly the monumental collective kind- from diverse artistic disciplines. I started to think about collaboration in art and the sense I had when my son was involved as an actor among a dozen or more actors and design creatives developing plays for a local theatre committed to only original stories. As distinct from my workplaces, civic groups and organisations I marvelled how these developers with the bones of a script only… each compromised for weeks to assemble something so monumental (though impermanent) …without exploitation or discord or power inequity. Art and its many languages separates us from other large mammals and maybe when we neglect truly creative collaboration we revert to survival-of-the-fittest, where so many of us are not comfortable anymore.
Protest art. In the summer of 2013, my family and I were on a trip to Washington DC, and we saw the art installation of a million human bone replicas laid out in the grass of the National Mall to protest and bring awareness to genocide. It was incredibly powerful, and I have never forgotten it, nor have my children.
Oh yes D.C. art will rip your heart out. But in a necessary way. I've been three times (5th grade, 12th grade and 2017) and terrified to go back. I always leave there haunted and shaking like I just stepped down the stairs of a very rickety time machine. My 10-year-old classmate had a boom box and he played Phil Collins "Take, take me home..." on our bus ride back and no one stopped him.
Giving blood in the UK is not paid, it is voluntary. When I last visited, I was overwhelmed by this simple but practical demonstration of community and humanity. People of all ages inconvenienced themselves (aside from the free biscuits) for the benefit of other human beings they will probably never meet. Maybe not strictly a demonstration of individual creativity, but the system that these individual acts enables is pure creation.
How dark and dry, this winter season, so that the fires rage through the trees; burning through our ugly apathy. I wish to hold the simplicity of beauty, in us, and all around us. The flow and shimmer of a skirt along a body, the joy of a boy playing with new friends, a leaf handed to me by a child as a gift to a friend, a hug, a kiss, a smile. These needn’t be in short supply.
In fact, we should be arming ourselves with all our shared humanity, our collective power as citizens, our desire- a desire that should be shouted in protest to narrow, outdated ways of thinking- to live amongst our fellow humans rather than push each other away for petty reasons. Kamala might not have won, but her message will continue to shine through the darkness. ❤️
They are our greatest armor. This is an awakening—this moment is the challenge that brings on the change. This is where we remember how to live and love.
I can relate to how the dryness of everything adds to the ugliness; in Arizona we have had almost no monsoon season and though the weather cooled, the dying plants and burned acres of desert were heartbreaking to me today on top of it all, I felt sick. I couldn't get past it. I found joy in a soft molasses cookie. It glued me back together for a minute.
Surprisingly, or not, this week I have been living on the fringes of death and dying: singing bedside for people who are transitions as part of the Threshold Choir; attending funerals; visiting the local natural burial cemetery where my partner and I chose our grave sites -- all this before and after Tuesday/Wednesday US elections. What I realize, reading your post, Padraig, is the other death-related work I am undertaking -- building a local coalition in my community to pass "Right to Die" legislation in our state -- arises from the same, live-giving force. I am not, myself, seeking to die this way (though sometime in the future, I may want this choice for myself). I am in my 70s and as I contemplate the end, my end, I am offer my community work that seems centered on death as my own way to live most fully, most creatively into my remaining years. I trust that my writing, my singing, and my working with others towards the freedom to die with dignity must will continue to surprise and inspire me.
When I wrote poems at the Mayo Clinic with patients who were in palliative care they were so fully alive with stories and epiphanies. Thank you for this reminder not to be afraid or shy away from listening to people who really want to talk about the end of their lives and what they may want and need from us.
Ever since Tragic Tuesday I have been arguing and raging inside my head. Meditation almost became a form of raging monkey mind. I mentioned to a friend that I don't want to live angry, bitter and frustrated all the time. I'm going to need others to help me be a good, just and loving person in the midst of it all. And if I need others in this way, others need me to help them be good, just and loving. "I need you to help me be good and loving?", and "how may I help you to be good and loving?" will be the mantras guiding me. Sometimes I will actually ask this questions of people out loud, more often they'll be humming in the background. I know I will backslide and i will need to come back to this north star, to help me protect the vulnerable. This feels very freeing. Wish me well. As I do you. May our tears and rage be turned into dancing as we work for the beloved community.
I hold onto motherhood…and the gifts of my five children; all they have been teaching me about beauty, wonder, innocence, and healthy dependence and the subsequent independence it leads to. I hold onto home…what we have here and the home that awaits. Sanctuary.
This week, I keep coming back to this quote (Toni Morrison, 2004, after Bush re-elected): “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”
I tidied my workspace. I rage-cleaned my bathroom. Many texts, emails, calls and walks with friends; and we are determined to get back to our creative work, and to find an action (local or otherwise) to engage in going forward. That network of connections is important in sustaining us…
Beautiful, Jen! You are doing the important things - creating and building community, as well. Don't stop! XO
Everything about your post speaks to me! Thank you for these succinct words. Makes me want to write a poem based on them!
Thank you for these reminders, Jen. I'm working on finding an action and building those connections, too. It's good to know that you are doing the same. Back to my creative work now ;)
tidying our workspace and cleaning house. Very therapeutic. Caring for my space when I am sorrowful has always been helpful. So good. you focus on the creative
Wang Wei, Chinese poet/painter, lived in the 700’s. I was recently introduced to this poet via learning about David Hinton who translated Wang Wei’s poems into English. Lately, slowly, I have been exploring the Japanese Shakuhachi bamboo flute. One way of working with this flute is to take a poem that interests me, compose a simple music piece that resonates with the poem. Thus daily as I learn to play this flute I get to recite the poem, then play and listen to the flute sounds that “translate” the poem; the poem once written in Chinese, then translated into English, and now “translated” into flute sounds. What truly fascinates me, and keeps calling me into this poem is this line from the poem:
“A blossom’s heart is grief-torn? In all this
spring color, who could fathom the heart?”
My mind struggles to understand this first part. Can a flower feel such emotions? Given the recent elections in the US, given our shared climate challenges, my heart quietly weeps with this blossom. Who am I to believe or disbelieve the blossom’s capacity to be grief-torn? What I can do is stand next to the blossom and be still, and weep. Together, we thrive.🏮
David, thank you!!! There is something so powerful in those words…stand together, be still, weep and together we thrive. In that real compassionate collective there is the capacity to thrive at such a deep level that nothing can destroy or take ithat collective healing energy to thrive from us.
Lovely. Thank you. Sitting with ourselves and each other in grief is a powerful medicine.
NB with my early morning eyes I read "transluted." An apt description for your musical poetry process.
Somehow, the fact that there is a person in this world who is learning to play the Japanese Shakuhachi bamboo flute while attempting to compose music around a poem they struggle to interpret, allows hopefulness to rise.
What a beautiful practice! I got chills when I read the lines of poetry in your post and imagined what those words might sound like. A happy conundrum I will carry through today. Thank you. ❤️
I hold onto the paradox that
the more I empty myself,
the more I am filled.
I love this, Nancy! It is so true!! The more you give, the more you have to give, you become abundance yourself. Thanks for sharing. XO
I hold on to words, like I will hold on to yours.
Writers writing, knitters knitting, gardeners growing, cooks cooking, mosaic artists placing, faithful and those with little faith praying - all hands together for better.
Ah, yes, the making of what we are called to make - portals of peacefulness, I think.
“Art and Coalition” … post election, my daughter and her friends tore out pictures and phrases from magazines and brochures and whatever else to create three collages. They made art out of fragments of frayed, ostensibly disjointed pieces of paper. Bit by bit, the wrinkled patchwork of phrases and images came together into something new, something whole. My daughter shared how, in the process, she lost herself. I would add that in the mystery of art and coalition, she reclaimed herself…she reclaimed “SOUL”fulness…despite her and their dismay and confusion.
As for me, I have been holding onto my banjo. In the process of training my sixty-year plus hands to inhabit an A-minor chord as I learn Christmas carols for the upcoming season, I, too, have lost myself in a coalition with metal strings and banjo tabluture . The surprise has been to recognize familiar songs arising from my slow, yet freer plucking. That in the midst of grief and disbelief for how this past year and recent week have unfolded, I have been able to turn my “fret”ful-ness into music is a testament to the potential of “art and coalition”
Beautiful, charis!
I meet monthly with women transitioning from prison to their communities. I am always surprised at their wisdom and understanding about life because they have experienced life as I never have. Our discussions begin with scripture and we easily veer off to creative and heart-felt moments when life is raw, difficult, sad, joyful and beautiful. Even though I am the discussion leader, I become the student with these voices of pain and restoration, learning from each other about resilience and hope.
I really like your line "because they have experienced life as I never have." This compassion and curiosity about "the other" is so healthy to understandings bridge to finding kinship even with those who are different. Bless you and your work.
Thank you, Mary
That's where it's at. I can remember group sessions at a domestic violence shelter where I worked being phenomenal for those "raw, difficult, sad, joyful, and beautiful" transformations that you could see happening in real time. Nothing else has come close since.
Thank you, Christina.
In the early 1980s I briefly joined the women's peace camp in Greenham Common, UK. I only spent a very cold week there but have carried this spirit of gathering, community and peaceful assembly with me throughout my life, as a mother, now a grandmother, as administrator and facilitator, a feminist, a long time campaigner and always, I found my spirits were lifted, my hope reaffirmed by the knowledge that working together with others, directly or at a distance, is when I am most creative.
Hey me too, embrace the base. It was such a touchstone moment.
For me I think it would be the constancy of creativity. That from our earliest beginnings people painted on cave walls even when food was scarce and animals a threat and they scripted a mythology of the Gods even when the world they lived in was turbulent with Greeks battling Spartans and they wrote poems even when shells exploded near their WW1 trenches.
I’d like to think that art, song, words have been present every day since man began. They are our way of both narrating and relating to the World’s condition of beauty-horror. It’s a creativity born in the deep tunnels of humanity and I cannot imagine a world without this vital way of communicating. We must pick up our pens and paintbrushes, remember the great tradition we are part of, and make music from what we see and hear even when our bones are full of despair.
And….things might be better if every politician was required to sit for thirty minutes each day with a painting, song, story or poem…..
Having just reviewed The Knowledge Gene by Dr Lynne Kelly, and surprised that it quickly left molecular biology and a theory about a supergene linked to creation but distinct to humans (also linked to a serious rare illness variant ) to explore primary evidence - various prehistorical and ancient anthropological creative constructions -particularly the monumental collective kind- from diverse artistic disciplines. I started to think about collaboration in art and the sense I had when my son was involved as an actor among a dozen or more actors and design creatives developing plays for a local theatre committed to only original stories. As distinct from my workplaces, civic groups and organisations I marvelled how these developers with the bones of a script only… each compromised for weeks to assemble something so monumental (though impermanent) …without exploitation or discord or power inequity. Art and its many languages separates us from other large mammals and maybe when we neglect truly creative collaboration we revert to survival-of-the-fittest, where so many of us are not comfortable anymore.
Protest art. In the summer of 2013, my family and I were on a trip to Washington DC, and we saw the art installation of a million human bone replicas laid out in the grass of the National Mall to protest and bring awareness to genocide. It was incredibly powerful, and I have never forgotten it, nor have my children.
Oh yes D.C. art will rip your heart out. But in a necessary way. I've been three times (5th grade, 12th grade and 2017) and terrified to go back. I always leave there haunted and shaking like I just stepped down the stairs of a very rickety time machine. My 10-year-old classmate had a boom box and he played Phil Collins "Take, take me home..." on our bus ride back and no one stopped him.
I love how I can read through these comments and visit all these places people go in their stories. I am imagining the bus ride home.......
My pen and notebook
yes, yes, yes. always a place of safety and exploration. I am supposing you carry those two items with you everywhere. Like a blankie. Me too.
They are never far, always within reach. And my camera too, the other door
Giving blood in the UK is not paid, it is voluntary. When I last visited, I was overwhelmed by this simple but practical demonstration of community and humanity. People of all ages inconvenienced themselves (aside from the free biscuits) for the benefit of other human beings they will probably never meet. Maybe not strictly a demonstration of individual creativity, but the system that these individual acts enables is pure creation.
🩸 Oh, I love this! Thank you, Martin.
How dark and dry, this winter season, so that the fires rage through the trees; burning through our ugly apathy. I wish to hold the simplicity of beauty, in us, and all around us. The flow and shimmer of a skirt along a body, the joy of a boy playing with new friends, a leaf handed to me by a child as a gift to a friend, a hug, a kiss, a smile. These needn’t be in short supply.
“These needn’t be in short supply”
In fact, we should be arming ourselves with all our shared humanity, our collective power as citizens, our desire- a desire that should be shouted in protest to narrow, outdated ways of thinking- to live amongst our fellow humans rather than push each other away for petty reasons. Kamala might not have won, but her message will continue to shine through the darkness. ❤️
They are our greatest armor. This is an awakening—this moment is the challenge that brings on the change. This is where we remember how to live and love.
that made me smile, which these last few days hasn't happened easily.
I’m glad. There is an agony in the air, but it is tinged with hope.
I can relate to how the dryness of everything adds to the ugliness; in Arizona we have had almost no monsoon season and though the weather cooled, the dying plants and burned acres of desert were heartbreaking to me today on top of it all, I felt sick. I couldn't get past it. I found joy in a soft molasses cookie. It glued me back together for a minute.
Surprisingly, or not, this week I have been living on the fringes of death and dying: singing bedside for people who are transitions as part of the Threshold Choir; attending funerals; visiting the local natural burial cemetery where my partner and I chose our grave sites -- all this before and after Tuesday/Wednesday US elections. What I realize, reading your post, Padraig, is the other death-related work I am undertaking -- building a local coalition in my community to pass "Right to Die" legislation in our state -- arises from the same, live-giving force. I am not, myself, seeking to die this way (though sometime in the future, I may want this choice for myself). I am in my 70s and as I contemplate the end, my end, I am offer my community work that seems centered on death as my own way to live most fully, most creatively into my remaining years. I trust that my writing, my singing, and my working with others towards the freedom to die with dignity must will continue to surprise and inspire me.
When I wrote poems at the Mayo Clinic with patients who were in palliative care they were so fully alive with stories and epiphanies. Thank you for this reminder not to be afraid or shy away from listening to people who really want to talk about the end of their lives and what they may want and need from us.
... FULLY ALIVE with stories and epiphanies .... thank you, Christina
Yeah I agree
That will be
The poetical response
To the great post
If there
Counting poems to rest
For the next step
Of the never easy
Surprises
Ever since Tragic Tuesday I have been arguing and raging inside my head. Meditation almost became a form of raging monkey mind. I mentioned to a friend that I don't want to live angry, bitter and frustrated all the time. I'm going to need others to help me be a good, just and loving person in the midst of it all. And if I need others in this way, others need me to help them be good, just and loving. "I need you to help me be good and loving?", and "how may I help you to be good and loving?" will be the mantras guiding me. Sometimes I will actually ask this questions of people out loud, more often they'll be humming in the background. I know I will backslide and i will need to come back to this north star, to help me protect the vulnerable. This feels very freeing. Wish me well. As I do you. May our tears and rage be turned into dancing as we work for the beloved community.
Your comment really hit home for me. I will be asking these questions of others, too, in the background and out loud.
Well stated, my friend!
I hold onto motherhood…and the gifts of my five children; all they have been teaching me about beauty, wonder, innocence, and healthy dependence and the subsequent independence it leads to. I hold onto home…what we have here and the home that awaits. Sanctuary.