This is what I read a moment ago:

“For me, there is not just this world,
there’s also a layering of others.
Time is not divided by minutes and hours,
and everything has presence and meaning
within the landscape of timelessness.”

……JOY HARJO

I am so aware of time and the time it takes
to do tasks, to prepare for the day, to wait
for others to show up, to get ready to go
outside and walk.

I am also aware that time shifts, sometimes
for only ten minutes. That’s the day-dreaming time,
and it comes upon me no matter where I am.

I’m standing, looking at the cereals in a grocery store,
and suddenly, alerted by a quiet “excuse me” as
someone passes, I realize I’ve gone again. So, when
I read those few line above, that’s how I read it, as if
the writer spoke from a very intimate association
with time and beyond that, a mini-vacation from time,
from which I could come back, quite refreshed.

The actuality is that here’s how the first line REALLY
read:
“For US , there is not just this world,” etc.

That change of only one word shifts it into a cosmic
approach, it becomes a prelude to something more,
I guess as it was intended. Very deep.

How curious that I should have read it incorrectly!
Just commenting.
Have you times like that? As if you’ve grasped the whole
thought before you’ve even begun the initial sentence
…and in so doing, discovered a part of yourself?

Hmmmmm, weird.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

First of all, if I’d seen a title like this one, I would have dropped
anything to explore what came next!

In this world of daily extraordinary events, people & possibility,
it is rare to encounter the simple idea of goodness. Stripped
naked, standing on my own feet just as I am, all that’s left is
what is in me of goodness. You, too.
Here’s where I found that phrase, ” unexpected goodness”:

“The healing of our present woundedness may lie in

recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we all have to

heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of

human relationships, the strength of touch, the blessing

of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you

as you are,

and finding in you an unexpected goodness.”

……………Dr. RACHEL REMEN
(from John Fox’s book, ‘Poetic Medicine’)
……………………………………………………………………………….

I suspect that goodness is something we find mirrored
in each other, and that recognizing it in others, we find,
in our own claim to that simplicity, a reason to trust.

with love …

Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

Those three words, ‘the great unseen’, have become important to me.

I was driving home from a doctor’s visit, it was a beautiful day, the trees
aflame with deep oranges, crimson and purples. Out of nowhere,
not any reflection of the purpose of the visit (bronchitis), I found myself
seeing an image of something I had experienced earlier in this week.
It was the reflection of my almost naked body in the dressing room
of a store, while clothes shopping.

It’s one thing to look down on what I can see of me and think, I should
lose some weight.” It’s one thing to have no full length mirror at home,
to see only parts of myself in the mirrors over the various sinks, to thus
have only bits and pieces of what I actually look like.

In the middle of the early morning after that shopping trip, I awoke with
a tight chest, coughing, and runny eyes and nose. I was in for it! Cripes.

During this week of limited physical activity, I have fallen into moments
of contemplation, of revery. Out of the blue, I felt in my deepest tissues
of my body, how much I actually hated what my body ‘has become’,
what I have allowed my body to become. That was so shocking to me,
that realization of what’s so, that, in between coughs and sniffling, I
awoke to another strange place within me, one of absolute peace.

Can you imagine that? It knocked me over. I had been housing that
hatred, all unseen, for years. To finally come to grips with such an
awareness had plunged me into a new awareness for which I had
absolute, unbelievable compassion and love.

No struggle, no judgement, just the ability to
notice what’s so. I am in amazement.
Sometimes thats what bottoming out feels like.

Well, that’s where I am now. No story of pounds lost, no history of
accomplishment, instead a quiet place inside that includes all of me,
mind, body and spirit. What I can report is that I am no longer feeling
food hungers; rather I find myself choosing foods from quite another
place. It’s a start.
……………………………………

Maybe a prayer I have said for many years finally took root and is
growing as a mantra, as a reminder:
“I ask the great unseen healing force to remove all obstructions
from my mind and body, to restore me to perfect health.
And I will do my part.
I ask the great unseen healing force to help both present and
absent ones who are in need of help , to restore them to perfect
health. I put my trust in the love and power of God.”
( a prayer I found in an Interfaith book)

Any part of that, take what you like and leave the rest.
with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

I decided to revisit Billy Collins this morning. His new poetry is
both edgy and soft, but then, when has it not? Sounds like the
winds of change have barreled through his life.

VERMONT, EARLY NOVEMBER

It was in between seasons,
after the twitter of late autumn
but before the icy authority of winter

and I took in the scene from a porch,
a tableau of silo and weathervane
and a crowd of ferns on the edge of the woods —

nothing worth writing about really,
but it is too late to stop now
that the ferns and the silo have been mentioned.

I drank my warm coffee
and took note of the disused tractor
and the lopsided sign to the cheese factory.

Not one of those mornings
that makes you want to seize the day,
not even enough glory in it to make you want

to grasp every other day,
yet after staring for a while
at the plowed-under fields and the sky

I turned back to the order of the kitchen
determined to seize firmly
the second Wednesday of every month that lay ahead.”

……BILLY COLLINS, from his book of poems, “Ballistics”.

What happens on any second Wednesday?
I love my appointment book because it contains two views
of the months, each month: one spread of all the weeks plus
pages of daily hours in which to schedule my precious life.

It doubles as a diary. I mark the entries in different colors
in order to find patterns quickly when I look to see what
is running my life. Well, I do that often.

And this poem reminded me of the lavender days I
used to schedule ahead for the month, random mornings
or afternoons where I stripped in ahead little lavender
post-its, spaces for rest or adventure to show up.

When did I stop doing that? Seems to me it might be a
good idea to start that again and add some unexpected
opportunity to shake up any old habit from creeping in.

So glad Billy Collins looks for glory. ( don’t know him well
enough to call him ‘Billy’, yet love him enough for ‘Collins’
not to be good either)
GLORY !
That would make any Wednesday something to be seized,
grasped, held onto, and be surprised by.

I think I have some old lavender post-its hanging around
somewhere to make room for that.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

I shared a poem at a celebration last night of the end of summer and the start
of Autumn, when daylight and nighttime are equal, the Equinox. I quoted only
a portion of the poem, for the sake of brevity, so here it is now in its entirely:

MOCKINGNBIRDS

“This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing

better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.

In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door

to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,

but gods.
It is my favorite story —
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give

but their willingness
to be attentive —
but for this alone
the gods loved them,

and blessed them —
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water

from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,

and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down —
but still they asked for nothing

but the difficult life
which they had already,
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.
Wherever it was
I was supposed to be
this morning —
whatever it was I said

I would be doing —
I was standing
at the edge of a field —
I was hurrying

through my own soul,
opening its dark doors —
I was listening. “
……………………..MARY OLIVER
………………………………………….

’seriously’, ‘hurrying’, ‘I was listening’, all these important
words. In my recovery, these four months since surgery,
I have made huge strides back to health.

However, ( serious pause here) I have always to re-learn
to allow space for listening to my body and taking note of
what it needs next to give us both the means of carrying on.

I do not always have the patience for that.
Well, that’s one script I may just have to drop away,
because here I am, listening.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

This is just to say a few words that let you know I’m still around.

Actually, as I wrote that my mind did that playful thing of a rhyming
word, popping up and taking over like, around, and the word that
came on its heels was ABOUND, shortened immediately to >>> BOUND!

AND (in my mind) I’M OFF, OUT OF MY CHAIR, very much like A.A. Milne’s
lines in his children’s book, When We Were Six. Such desire to move with
ease and speed, to soar across the lawn, or jump into the water as the tide
comes in.

The facts are that I’m working ferociously at strengthening my body
and learning to walk with balance again. Do you know that the exercises
I do for that leave me dripping with sweat in just a half-hour?

So, just a line from an interview with the poet, Donald Hall:

“Curiously, or frustratingly, the greatest happiness is not to know
you are happy, is not to know what time it is, is to be lost in the hour.”

I’ll be back more regularly, very shortly.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

Gosh, do I love that word! RECKLESSLY .

It stirs up my blood, I am no age I can recall, just spirit, flying free.
Well, that said, you know I would not have lasted this long if I had
allowed that to dominate my choices.

So, let’s look at a poet’s message to us:

“Submit to love

without thinking,

as the sun

this morning

rose recklessly

extinguishing our

star-candle minds.”

….JELALUDDIN RUMI, 13th Century poet,
translation by ColemanBarks.

What a cool breeze for a Monday afternoon.
The whole week ahead can now reflect a release of
all usual caution and permission to entertain
some sense of summer, still, when we can glimpse
clouds of galleons, sailing seas in the sky.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

Did you know there are poetry workshops, not to celebrate
a development as a poet, but to work through personal issues
to find a “way” ? John Fox teaches poetry therapy in California.
His book, POETIC MEDICINE, is 303 pages of stories.

Recently,
over last weekend, the life and death of Don Hewitt, creator of
‘60 Minutes’ on CBS, was celebrated and his message to the
evening news: “Tell me a story.”

I’ll buy that!

Here are the words in Poetic Medicine of Mary K. Turner, M.D., a surgeon
on a trauma unit at a hospital in Indianapolis:

T H E W E L L ………………………

I am a well
ancient, enduring
even in the stark
and arid times
I have never gone
completely dry
Send your bucket down
my deep recesses
have much to give
Send the rain down
my mouth is open
to the gift from the wide sky
Send the storm down
though my weathered mortar
cracks, and the stones shift
I remain standing still
………………………………………………

That poem is a metaphor for herself. Her summary of how it
shaped up came from her inner voice, reminding her that she is
more than what she does.

Writing that was her way of coming back to her inward self, saying,
it’s vital if I am to do the work I do and be the woman I am.

… standing … still, as in trust me, I am here.

Yeah, man, I got that.
with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

I have recently returned to doing the Inner Portraits, and it’s been
a stretch to wander from my focus on my physical therapy to the
personal journeys that accompany each one of you.

Fascinating and wonderful, and at the same time I reach for the
old familiar places, embraces that survive the passage of time.
In the latest edition of POETRY magazine, I found this commentary
that warmed my heart:

” … Poetry isn’t just a way of writing, it’s a way of thinking

and I’ve been thinking that way since at least sixth grade.

At Alexander School IV in Macon,Georgia, MIss Lois Birch,

who seemed as old as God, made us memorize poems.
The two I remember spring to mind as often as the faces of

old friends. I keep them in my head the way you might keep

worry beads in your pocket, reaching reflexively in times of

stress for their meaning, rhythm, sound.

One is by John Masefield: ” I must go down to the sea again,

the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a

star to steer her by.” The other is by William Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils.

Since sixth grade I’ve memorized poem fragments that range

from the wisdom of A.A. Milne (“Where am I going? I don’t

quite know / What does it matter where people go?”) to the

wisdom of Wallace Stevens ( “She says ‘But in contentment

I still feel / The need of some imperishable bliss’”).

………..MARY SCHMICH, Columnist at the Chicago Tribune.

In any one of those lines there could be a quickening of your
heart in sudden recall of all that line once meant to you. It doesn’t
take much to make that time leap, does it.

Pretty cool for the last days of August. I hold on to them, reluctant
to let go of summer. Reluctant to let go of the happiness of recall.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

Sometimes, current words fall short of that arrow straight to the heart.
Current poetry is still in the process of becoming, whereas ancient poetry
has stood the process of time and all that remains is its simplicity.

Sometimes, I am simply looking for permission for joy! Yes … I’ll take
that one! Here’s one for us today:

“STOP CALLING ME A
PREGNANT WOMAN

My Master once entered a phase
That whenever I would see him
He would say,

“Hafiz,
How did you ever become a pregnant woman?”

And I would reply,

“Dear Attar,
You must be speaking the truth,
But all of what you say is a mystery to me.”

Many months passed by in his blessed company,
But one day I lost my patience
Upon hearing that old refrain
And blurted out,

“Stop calling me a pregnant woman!”

And Attar replied,
“Someday, my sweet Hafiz,
All the nonsense in your brain will dry up
Like a stagnant pool of water
Beneath the sun,

Though if you want to know the Truth
I can clearly see that God has made love with you
And the whole universe is germinating
Inside your belly
And wonderful words,
Such enlightening words,
Will take birth from you

And be cradled against thousands
of hearts.”

…………….HAFIZ
from the book: The Gift, Poems by
Hafiz, The Great Sufi Master.
Translation by Daniel Ladinsky

Hafiz has strung those words together so perfectly that I
cannot presume to add comment or explanation.

I just love that generosity of spirit that includes you and me
in those thousands of hearts.

with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette