Session 9 Resources & Recording
For an Occupant
Adrienne Rich
Did the fox speak to you?
Did the small brush-fire on the hillside
smoke her out?
Were you standing on the porch
not the kitchen porch the front
one of poured concrete full in the rising moon
and did she appear wholly on her own
asking no quarter wandering by
on impulse up the drive and on
into the pine-woods
but were you standing there
at the moment of moon and burnished light
leading your own life till she caught you eye
asking no charity
but did she speak to you?
Session 8 Resources & Recordings
The Sudden Appearance of A Monster At The Window
Lawrence Raab
Yes, his face really is so terrible
you cannot turn away. And only
that thin sheet of glass between you,
clouding with his breath.
Behind him: the dark scribbles of trees
in the orchard, where you walked alone
just an hour ago, after the storm had passed,
watching water drip from the gnarled branches,
stepping carefully over the sodden fruit.
At any moment he could put his fist
right through that window. And on your side:
you could grab hold of this
letter opener, or even now try
very slowly to slide the revolver
out of the drawer of the desk in front of you.
But none of this will happen. And not because
you feel sorry for him, or detect
in his scarred face some helplessness
that shows in your own as compassion.
You will never know what he wanted,
what he might have done, since
this thing, of its own accord, turns away.
And because yours is a life in which
such a monster cannot figure for long,
you compose yourself, and return
to your letter about the storm, how it bent
the apple trees so low they dragged
on the ground, ruining the harvest.
*******
Session 7 Resources & Recordings
Our List of Possible Roots of Rupture/Conflict:
- Difference in ability/desire to tolerate or navigate conflict
The conflict is that I don’t get to have a problem; problems are a problem
- Our unique Trauma/attachment wounds & shapes that will often load up in specific reactive ways in certain situations
- Not enough container to hold conflict (not enough groundwork, language creation and tool sharing to make it safe enough to venture in)
- Unclear or unrealistic Expectations – not enough of a conversation up front and all along to create a shared reality and ground
- Unexplored power dynamics, relationships with and to power
- A set-up to test the container (so the issue is not the issue and can derail us if we’re not open to this possibility)
- Family of Origin roles and shapes that we will unconsciously play out and step into unless we bring these patterns into the group/community
- Unattended past ruptures that will build and pressurize until a thing (that is not really the thing) will cause an explosion or rupture
Our Readings:
Rilke:
"She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration."
Rumi:
Shadow and Light Source Both
How does a part of the world leave the world?
How does wetness leave water?
Don’t try to put out fire by throwing on
more fire! Don't wash a wound with blood.
No matter how fast you run, your shadow
keeps up. Sometimes it's in front!
Only full overhead sun diminishes your shadow.
But that shadow has been serving you.
What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is
your candle. Your boundaries are your quest.
I could explain this, but it will break the
glass cover on your heart, and there's no
fixing that.
You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.
When from that tree feathers and wings sprout on you,
be quieter than a dove. Don't even open your mouth for
even a coo.
*******
Session 6 Resources & Recordings
“Because we know ourselves to be made from this earth. See these grasses. The patches of silver and brown. Worn by the wind. The grasses reflecting all that lives in the soil. The light. The grasses needing the soil. With roots deep in the earth. And patches of silver. Like the patches of silver in our hair. Worn by time. This bird flying low over the grass. Over the tules. The cattails, sedges, rushes, reeds, over the marsh. Because we know ourselves to be made from this earth. Temporary as this grass. Wet as mud. Our cells filled with water. Like the mud of this swamp. Heather growing here because of the damp. Sphagnum moss floating on the surface, on the water standing in the pools. Places where the river washes out. Where the earth was shaped by the flow of lava. Or by the slow movements of glaciers. Because we know ourselves to be made from this earth, and shaped like the earth, by what has gone before. The lives of our mothers.”
Excerpted from Susan Griffin, Women and Nature
*******
Session 5 Resources & Recordings
Nothing’s A Gift
Wistawa Szymborska
Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.
I’m drowning in debts up to my ears.
I’ll have to pay for myself
with my self,
Give up my life for my life.
Here’s how it’s arranged:
The heart can be repossessed,
the liver, too,
and each single finger and toe.
Too late to tear up the terms,
my debts will be repaid,
and I’ll be fleeced,
or, more precisely, flayed.
I move about the planet
In a crush of other debtors.
Some are saddled with the burden
of paying off their wings.
Others must, willy-nilly,
account for every leaf.
Every tissue in us lies
on the debit side.
Not a tentacle or tendril
is for keeps.
The inventory, infinitely detailed,
implies we’ll be left
not just empty-handed
but handless, too.
I can’t remember
Where, when, and why
I let someone open
this account in my name.
We call the protest against this
the soul.
And it’s the only item
not included on this list.
Frances Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow, a beautiful book offered to help guide us back to the grief rituals necessary for a well culture.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ We Are Made For These Times, mentioned by Ali
Martin Prechtel’s Grief & Praise Part I, Part II, Part III and the book
The Five Invitations, Frank Ostaseski
A Hole In The World, Amanda Held Opelt
Session 4 Resources & Recordings
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks, and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
Mary Oliver
*****
Session 3 Resources & Recordings
from Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“The manta ray, unlike other stingrays, doesn’t actually have anything to stin you with. Unlike other sharksor their shell-breaking ray cousins, close cartilage relatives, they don’t have sharp teeth. they are filter feeders. they are breathing plankton. Sometimes cooperatively. What they are practicing is a time-compressed version of “partner,” as we would call it in Jamaica, or as our other Caribbean and West African cousins might say “susu.” They gather in a circle and fla their watery winfs to collevt as much plankton as possible and take turns eating hile the rest of the circle holds the space.
I recognie you, not of sharpened teeth or stinging tail, yet wide of wing, embracing salt, shaping nutrition with your mouth at the center of your chest. I would love it if I could be so coordinated as to keep my mouth closed while dancing resources towards you, your open heart. It might also help if I could filter what I need from everything else floating around me.
So yes. I can commit to open arms, vulnerable face, to staying in the circle with you, patient in the practice. And what had been my sharp becomes my specificity, and what had been my barbs become my wings.”
*****
Session 2 Resources & Recordings
Our reading came from Pattiann Rogers, Suppositions
Suppose the molecular changes taking place
In the mind during an act of praise
Resulted in an emanation rising into space.
Suppose that emanation went forth
In the configuration of its occasion:
For instance, the design of rain pocks
On the lake’s surface or the blue depths
Of the canyon with its horizontal cedars stunted.
Suppose praise had physical properties
And actually endured? What if the pattern
Of its disturbances rose beyond the atmosphere,
Becoming a permanent outline implanted in the
cosmos––
The sound of the celebratory banjo or horn
Lodging near the third star of Orion’s Belt;
Or to the east of the Pleiades, an atomic
Disarrangement of the words,
“How particular the pod-eyed hermit crab
And his prickly orange legs”?
Suppose benevolent praise,
Coming into being by our will,
Had a separate existence, its purple or azure light
Gathering in the upper reaches, affecting
The aura of morning haze over autumn fields,
Or causing a perturbation in the mode of an asteroid.
What if praise and its emanations
Were necessary catalysts to the harmonious
Expansion of the void? Suppose, for the prosperous
Welfare of the universe, there were an element
Of need involved.
*****
*****
Session 1 Resources & Recordings
Our reading came from Sylvia V Lindsteadt’s Our Lady of the Dark Country
“There are floor looms whose warps are weighted with smooth stones strung through their water-worn holes, where you will soon weave the robes of your sisters, the tablecloths and sheets. On the floor looms, in the spring and the summer, you will weave the bolts of fabric traded for in deer meat and rabbit-hide shoe, in the polished beams of wood from the Robin-Bands who rove the oak and bay forests up the ridge… You will build the cloths from nettle-thread, the cloths that have built again the sovereignty of women, string by string, in the way of women…Weaving is building.”