fire

calligraphy by Jeanne

from Caroline Myss

We have embraced the idea of self-empowerment, but loved it when it just applied to us in our individual lives. Weaving ourselves back into the whole, and using the empowerment of ourselves collectively and realizing the power we have to co-create is a profound mystical truth. It’s not a small time mental acuity we use to get stuff – it’s not an ego-driven concept.

When we look at what’s happening, one way to approach it is through that truth that these predicaments, these crises we are in are somehow going to require all of us to navigate through, one way or another. Everything that is facing us requires all of us to transform within us. To see the world differently, to approach the world differently, individually within our lives, within ourselves, as an incredible act of personal and thus global transformation. This is what we’re going through.

It is a challenge – make no mistake about it. Especially as we see the world on fire – whether it’s on the streets or in the forests. Everything is engaging with that one message – we cannot not see it. We cannot avoid the messages around us any more that we are intimately connected to everyone, that we are each other’s caretakers.

Orator tames the savage beast

illustrator: J Byron Schachner

 

The Story
By Fred Chappell
Once upon a time the farmer’s wife
told it to her children while she scrubbed potatoes.
There were wise ravens in it, and a witch
who flew into such a rage she turned to brass.
The story wandered about the countryside until
adopted by the palace waiting maids
who endowed it with three magic golden rings
and a handsome prince named Felix.
Now it had both strength and style and visited
the household of the jolly merchant
where it was seated by the fire and given
a fat gray goose and a comic chambermaid.
One day alas the story got drunk and fell
in with a crowd of dissolute poets.
They drenched it with moonlight and fever and fed it
words from which it never quite recovered.
Then it was old and haggard and disreputable,
carousing late at night with defrocked scholars
and the swaggering sailors in Rattlebone Alley.
That’s where the novelists found it.
 
“The Story” by Fred Chappell from The Yellow Shoe Poets: Selected Poems 1964-1999. © Louisiana State University Press, 1999

 

It was on this day in 1940 that Winston Churchill delivered a speech to the House of Commons with the famous line: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The Battle of Britain was raging, and he was referring to the small group of the Royal Air Force who had successfully held off the much larger Luftwaffe, the German air force.
Churchill wrote all of his own speeches, and he was a gifted orator, but people thought that his vocabulary and style of speaking were old-fashioned. But after the beginning of World War II, Churchill’s dramatic rhetoric fit the mood of the country.
His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, served in the Parliament and was a talented debater, famous for making spontaneous speeches. Winston, on the other hand, labored over every speech. He brainstormed, researched, planned out the speech in his head, then dictated it aloud to his secretary. From there, he revised it several times and typed it up in what he called “psalm form.” His speeches looked like blank verse poetry on the page, so that the rhythm and pauses were laid out just how he wanted them. Before Churchill delivered a speech, he would practice over and over, sometimes in the bathtub.

The Five Sacred Rings

the ring of fire

the ring of earth

the ring of air

the ring of water

the ring of crystals

the path to electromagnetic energy and healing with  medical intuition.

(for a lecture by Dr Norm Shealy, go to U-Tube and search for the 24 minute video)

Deeper

illustrator Neil Waldman

History

by Andrew Gent

Every poem has been written before
at least fifteen times.
Every song
sung better.

The Neanderthals discovered caves
already painted with the story of their lives.
They invented fire
over and over again.

And you & I
whisper the same sweet nothings
we were born with.

“History” by Andrew Gent from Explicit Lyrics. © The University of Arkansas Press, 2016.

Definition #184 Ars Poetica

An Ars Poetica poem

talks about the art of writing poetry,

presents the poet’s views on what a poem is

and how it should be written.

Tea in Maine

A poem is sound:       Ruth Grierson plays  violin.

A poem is memory:      Scottish jigs & ballads;

A poem is taste:            all kinds of music but rap!!!!!!

A poem is smell:            while we sip English Tea

A poem is a stage:        at the library;

A poem is a story:         hear about:

the ceremonial burning

                                        of old buildings that need replacement
the Fire of 1947;

                                      that stopped when the fireball hit the sea!
the flames brought forth

                                              the aspen, birch and new seeds that burst in the heat!

Leaving the Motherland

bee comes along…picks up the pollen…

bee alights
pollen sticks
seed blows
roots
buds

you’ve left mother:
found soil.

air, water, fire, earth:
elementary.

Children Without TV #11 Perspective

Up the page hides the background

Down the page comes the foreground

gentle creatures watch…
their thirst, their guts call near-far
share air, earth, fire, gaze.

First

First
I thirst
For air
Then fire.
Sea and rain come soon.
Last
stones beneath the moon.

Tongue Twister #24 Heat

Photo by Laura Salas

Ice
descends
to core;
cools
fire’s
dragon breath.

Breath of dragon
fires
core;
condensation on
ice!
Jeanne Poland

COMPASSION

COME PASSION!

COME! Passion!
Fire me to heat the souls and seeds!
Glow, grow me to light their way
Spread me to embrace their needs.

Fire me to heat the souls and seeds;
Inspire, conspire, inquire
With compassion.

Glow, grow me to light their way
A beacon, torch and lighthouse
Of compassion.

Spread me to embrace their needs
Rip me open ’til I spill
With compassion.