Monthly Archives: August 2013

Postcards and Poetry, Part 1

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The dreaded inner editor.

It is something that a writer must learn to tame, to ignore, to kick out the door. So when a friend alerted me to the annual Postcard Poetry Fest run by Paul Nelson, I jumped right in. It is an exercise in excising that viscous voice whispering to, no, screaming at the writer that her writing sucks.

The goal is to write a poem on the back of the postcard, one a day during the month of August. Your name is put on a list and you send your cards to the thirty people listed below your name. You are not to edit your writing at all. This is difficult for writers. We want perfection, listening to that inner voice coaxing us not to let anyone see anything until it is “good.”

Luckily, I began a little early in late July at the suggestion of the those running the fest. I was able to write and mail about twelve unedited, truly spontaneous poems, before an illness in my family forced my attention elsewhere. We promised not to post our poems until thirty days after we mailed them.

Well, here we are at the end of the month and I will be sharing the postcards and poems that I completed. Keep in mind that these are spontaneous poems that have not been edited, at all. I did make a mistake writing on one of them and “whited-out” the error, but I stayed true to the project.

I purchased special postcards at Amazon titled 52 Weeks of Peace by Patricia Saxon and used her wonderful artwork and/or the quote on the card as a prompt for the poems. The postcards are lovely and fun and I have framed many of them and hung them in my first grade classroom this year for inspiration.

As for my words, and this is my inner editor speaking, I like a few. Some I feel I want to work on. Others are just to be forgotten. Over the next few days I will post them all.

Post Card #1

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Post Card #2

 

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Post Card #3

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I Danced

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I danced, almost forty years ago it was,
but in this eve I danced once more

I closed my door, opened my window
invited rain fresh air to partner

Toby’s piano led, crickets crooned
I danced with abandon, not foolishly

wary of sleepy legs balancing precariously
Arched foot, one leg lift into the air

one hand conspirator with a chair
the other gliding through the room

I dance with no one watching

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Thank you, Christine Claire Reed, of the Girl On fire Dance Studio, for offering women a chance to take a chance and dance. We did it on-line during the in/FLAME 11 Dany Dance Sadhana.

My heart is overflowing.

I only danced one day. My previous blog explains. But I will return.

Life

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Life has a way of grabbing you by the shoulders and giving you a good shake once in a while. It did it’s work with me at the beginning of August. But I will start with the blessing first. I am blessed to have started this month at a weekend retreat with the lovely people from the Blue Mountain Center for Meditation in Tomales, California.

I spent the first weekend of August at the Colorado School of Mines with seventy-five like minded people deepening our passage mediation practice developed by Eknath Easwaran. I started this meditation practice a year ago and it has changed my life. Being able to spend an entire weekend with these kind and caring folk, wise and gentle, loving and challenging, I was able to greet what met me the following Monday morning with grace and peace.

As I was driving to Panera’s to meet up with our writing group, my husband called me on the cell phone advising me to get back home quickly. It turns out my dad, who is ninety-two and lives with us, had to spend the week in the hospital with news that he has pancreatic cancer. He has chosen not to undergo any procedures other than those that will keep him comfortable. I recently heard a dear friend who has been through this describe it as the “long good-bye.”

If it not for the weekend retreat and strengthening my resolve to continue my practice in passage meditation, I don’t believe the time spent in the hospital with doctors saying one thing – it’s only a gall stone and so unique that they are going to write his case up in a medical journal – and then turning around one hundred and eighty degrees, I would not have handled the craziness with the calm and reserve I maintained the entire time.

Dad is fine spirits and not too sick. There is no pain, yet. He now has accepted that he needs to use the spiffy walker with a handy seat to get around. As a matter of fact I am calling him Speedy. He has given the okay for us to purchase a recliner so he can raise his feet to keep the swelling down and nap in the afternoon. It is on its way. And at ninety-two, he has never napped.

We have learned how to work with the Hospice people. My father adores his nurse, Tricia. She is an angel.

So what other craziness did I decide to partake in the month school starts when I will be going back into a classroom and teaching a grade I haven’t in five years? Well, let me tell you. I decided to do the Poetry Postcard Fest. Luckily they suggested an early start and a I got about 14 mailed until I needed to stop. Check it out. It is such fun. I will be posting the ones I sent out in the next few days.

Then I decided I wanted to dance and joined  the In/FLAME 11 Day Dance Sadhana, of which I only was able to do day one, August 1st.

Even though I did not get to finish these two artistic endeavors, I feel that the teeny bit I was able to experience left me with a joy that helped me through these last weeks. I will also be posting a poem I wrote about my first dance.

Life is like that, too. Good things, though small, delight and fill the soul with joy.