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El Lugar y El Tiempo/ Time and Place (series of Prints)

2/21/2019

El Lugar y El Tiempo/ Time and Place (Series of Prints) Juan Genoves

If I say a murder of crows
I’m not talking about an actual murder.
You’re not talking about actual crows.
Just ragged black shapes on a white ground
And one shape that will be murdered in six seconds.

Why does it matter what the protest is about
Look at the faces, look at the skin color, hear them shout
La gente, unido, jamas sera vencido.
But I can’t see their faces
Just ragged feet on a white ground
Moving in the same direction, marching, flying
Like crows without wings.

Ruth Andrews

1 Comment

Wisdom and Voice

2/13/2019

2 Comments

Response from Apple Farm Writer Mary Theis. Mary guides the Apple Farm Writing Group and lives near Chicago.

Of course, the loudest voice declares: “I am getting old. My body is changing – and I don’t like it.  I don’t like how it looks and how it feels.”

And I hear my poor body responding: “Don’t you love me?  After all I have done for you? I have served you well.”  (This is one oracle – wisdom source, the body itself).

Then another voice – my soul crying: “I have so much to do – so much unlived life. Why am I awakening so late?  There won’t be enough time.”

And the Spirit says: “I am ageless and I do not see death on the horizon.”  And it reassures me that: “What I can do is enough. I only have to continue to listen and respond as best I can.  I will never finish, and do not need to finish.”
I am listening for/to the voice that lies deep within. Sometimes, when I am able to clear the “dross” I can actually hear it, but mostly I feel it as an impulse to do a certain thing, or refrain from doing what I feel an urgency to do, or move in a certain direction. And I don’t understand why I am being guided in this way, but am at my best when I trust those impulses/voices.

There is an image that reflects how this trusting comes about in me. It is an image of large, black talons releasing my heart.  I interpret the talons as representing the lifelong effort of something in me to control everything in order to protect me. Finally, as old age approaches, I can envision those talons releasing my heart so it can sing.

The response needed changes from day to day. Sometimes I feel called to express what I am learning as an image. I can allow it to unfold in this manner and understand it in a new way.

Sometimes it is a poem that shows the truth.

And sometimes, perhaps the most difficult, is by showing who I am; by trusting and acting on those impulses that I know are true. In this way, I may use my new-found understanding to deepen my work and relationships.  Sometimes, for all of us, as we are true to ourselves in this way, those we touch are helped to discover their own Wisdom and Voice.

2 Comments

Divining

2/8/2019

4 Comments

Response from Apple Farm Writer Jo Marie Thompson from Kevala retreat in Wisconsin

I.
The pronouncement of an oracle is sought -
and on her terms – perhaps on the
seventh day of every lunar month,
and only by those who have
sacrificed plenty and well.

The ravings of a prophet
are stringently avoided
though revered on arrival –
issuing from the throat
of a roundly disturbed man to
his unsettled audience, cringing
down the funnel of history.

Now a seer is another matter,
with a livelihood to earn and clients
to satisfy, but riding hard
after God’s hound nonetheless.

An omen is tender and close -
arriving in a cloak of silence
near the edge of vision
in one unchosen moment -
the leading edge of
the eclipse of what was
by the white heat
of knowing.

The Muse is closer still
and more dear.
What poet hasn’t felt
the whisper of a poem
arriving, left a list undone,
dishes stacked in a sink while
she leans in hard for an
hour or a week, straining to hear?

The augury of The Dream is famous
in my family, and perhaps in yours,
and also among anxious mothers
everywhere with children abroad.
I once dreamed of an acquaintance
on a bus in Russia, my dreaming self
knew that because we were in Russia
I would later marry him. And I did.
And my waking self still confounds
at the meaning of Russia in the
meaning of Marriage. [...]

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...it is in part by our response to the great stories of the world that we too can begin to find, each of us this individual story expressing the symbolic meaning behind the facts of our fate and behind the motives that determine the day-to-day choices of our lives. -Helen Luke, The Inner Story

​El Lugar y El Tiempo/ Time and Place (series of Prints)

Wisdom and Voice

Divining

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El Lugar y El Tiempo/ Time and Place (series of Prints)