Remember to come back on Monday for our next Poetry Party! (Leaves discovered on the ground outside my hermitage this morning.) May your weekend bring you the still gifts of winter’s release and rest. -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts
Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water looking out in different directions back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you in a culture up to its chin in shame living in
11 a.m. late November shadows (photos from a late autumn walk through my Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle) -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts
(taken from the cottage at the retreat center where we taught our intensive last week) -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts
Dear darkening ground, you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built, perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour and grant the churches and cloisters two, And those that labor—maybe you’ll let their work grip them another five hours, or seven before you become forest again, and widening wilderness in that hour of inconceivable terror when you take back your name from all things. Just give me a little more time! I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them, until they’re real and ripe and worthy of you. I want only seven days, seven
The Road Here is the road: the light comes and goes then returns again. Be gentle with your fellow travelers as they move through the world of stone and stars whirling with you yet every one alone. The road waits. Do not ask questions but when it invites you to dance at daybreak, say yes. Each step is the journey; a single note the song. -Arlene Gay Levine from Bless the Day, ed. by June Cotner I have returned from an amazing week. For the last six days my teaching partner Betsey Beckman and I have been immersed in our Awakening
***Make sure you go visit this week’s Poetry Party*** Your poems this week about hidden rooms are as evocative and amazing as ever. Click the link above and continue to submit them and I’ll keep adding them! Early this past summer I had another dream about a hidden room: My husband and I move into a new apartment which is much smaller than the one we live in now. We are having dinner guests over and I’m not sure where they will sit. I open a door I hadn’t tried before and behind it I find this large room decorated with antique furniture and
This is Poetry Party No. 7! These are posted every other Monday. I select an image and suggest a title and invite you to respond with your poems, words, reflections, quotes, song lyrics, etc. Leave them in the comments and I’ll add them to the body of the post as they come in along with a link back to your blog if you have one (not required to participate!) Feel free to post the poem along with my image below on your blog with a link back to this post. Please invite your readers to come join the party too! This
