I hope you’ll join me in declining the mad hatter’s invitation and gift yourself instead with a little time for some real thoughts & prayers, accompanied by some real music & poetry … take some time to give attention to those muscles & bones that keep trying to carry more than their share of the load … to hug yourself and nourish your soul.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I love it when I hear that the pen is still mightier than the sword. Sometimes it’s the cliches and the Serenity Prayer that get us through the tough times. Ask anyone who’s ever been to a 12-Step Meeting.
So … if you’re willing to gift yourself a few minutes … here are some poems & quotes, a prayer or two, a little music, and an easy soup recipe to fill your home with the fragrance of comfort. (note: the recipe makes enough to share with friends). There are links to click if you want to know more … or not.
Let’s start with this.
… and a simple prayer, borrowed from Rev Sean of Civic Grace
Let me rest in being but one thread
in this shimmering web, no need to fail
at being the whole damn loom.
Let me work my corner with love and ferocity,
trusting interdependence over performance,
grace over guilt, the knowledge that I don’t have
to be everywhere to be faithful anywhere at all.
COMMUNITY
Somewhere, there are people
to whom we can speak with passion
without having the words catch in our throats.
Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us,
eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us
whenever we come into our own power.
Community means strength that joins our strength
to do the work that needs to be done.
Arms to hold us when we falter.
A circle of healing. A circle of friends.
Someplace where
we can be free.
Starhawk
In an Open Letter to Speaker Johnson on October 18th, People Power United said:
Whether you stand with us or against us, we will rise.
We will rise for our children, our communities, and our future.
We will rise for America — because this is what love of country truly looks like.
poem where no one is deported
by José Olivareznow i like to imagine la migra running
into the sock factory where my mom
& her friends worked. it was all womenwho worked there. women who braided
each other’s hair during breaks.
women who wore rosaries, & neverhad a hair out of place. women who were ready
for cameras or for God, who ended all their sentences
with si dios quiere. as in: the day beforethe immigration raid when the rumor
of a raid was passed around like bread
& the women made plans, si dios quiere.so when the immigration officers arrived
they found boxes of socks & all the women absent.
safe at home. those officers thoughtno one was working. they were wrong.
the women would say it was god working.
& it was god, but the godmy mom taught us to fear
was vengeful. he might have wet his thumb
& wiped la migra out of this world like a smudgeon a mirror. this god was the god that woke me up
at 7am every day for school to let me know
there was food in the fridge for me & my brothers.i never asked my mom where the food came from,
but she told me anyway: gracias a dios.
gracias a dios del chisme, who heardall la migra’s plans & whispered them
into the right ears
to keep our families safe.
Note: If you’d like to know more about “la migra”, you can click here.
We have danced and sung and loved our way to the end of October and now the splendiferous days of Autumn are stepping back to welcome the season of cold & dark. We are in those weeks I tend to think of as the ‘time between’. Here’s a poem from my book, All In The Soup Together … Four Seasons of Recipes & Reflections, that I wrote to honor those precious days and introduce the recipes for ‘Autumn”.
| And Now the Time Between
So it has arrived at last. Some lessons we have to learn Not everything planted gets to bloom. |
 |
Ah yes, the season of harvest with its apples & pumpkins & hot soup … here’s the recipe I promised earlier. It’s the ultimate celebration of Autumn – colorful, aromatic, and filling. Its name is Curried Pumpkin Onion Apple Soup. EnJOY!! And BTW, if you or someone you love happens to appreciate soup & poetry on the same menu, All In The Soup Together might be the holiday gift you didn’t know you were looking for. However, if you want it with the classic cook’s ‘spiral bind’, you should order directly from my publisher, Lingua Ink, rather than Amazon. Use coupon “lightwaves” for Free Shipping, please & thank you.
And now that we’re thinking about food and remembering that SNAP benefits are going away as of November 1st for thousands of low-income, hard-working families, maybe I can convince you to take another minute to check out my favorite Community Food Project. Here in the Portland suburb of Tigard, Oregon, you don’t have to prove you’re poor or even a resident to shop for nourishing food. The Tigard Grange Community Food Project is an amazing collective of volunteers that functions a little differently than most other sites. Maybe you’ve got extra canned goods, beans, rice, or pasta that you’d like to donate. Or maybe, like me, you have a fondness for feeding people, and a few hours a week to pitch in. Truly, we are all in the soup together, are we not? I’m suddenly recalling one of my favorite Rumi poems … the one where he says: Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Also, speaking of the upcoming season of cold & long … if you happen to be a Storytelling fan living in the Portland area, you might want to click on my invitation to the November 23rd Company We Keep Living Room Concert featuring Will Hornyak: “Tending the Mythic Fire: Myths, Poems, and Songs for the Blessed Dark of the Year”.
And finally, as one of my favorite aging rascals, Carol Burnett, used to say … I’m so glad we had this time together. See you next time. And in between, do Honor the Dark. May we be delivered from Fear until only Love remains. Thank you for this musical gift, Dear Lea.
Buying me a an occasional coffee helps me keep these stories coming … and gives me one less reason to cross my fingers when my Social Security payment is due!
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