Tag Archives: body

a child pointing to vulnerable flesh that thought it was invincible

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Primula

I have not dreamed this flower.
It just is.
In the midst of pandemic compliance
we are still part of spring in the north,
or autumn in the south.

As I near grandmotherhood for a second time, I continue exploring my legacy.
My father used to say there were a lot of people walking around Toronto
with the ass out of their pants because they didn’t get the trump out.

One day, aged, he woke from a nap in a wistful state and spoke of his dream:
a little sow in heat that he is leading on a string.
He walks it to the market downtown but just can’t do it, can’t enter that space.

He is speaking in an Irish accent with a softness and a fondness I have never seen.
I research the original occupant of our old house:
a butcher from County Tyrone, once the town’s mayor.
I find old pictures of the downtown Square
where there used to be a market on the grounds,
long before my father’s days here.
Carriages, fences, long dresses.

My hurry up legacy is the message that violence is so expensive.

Right now the sundering at birth is not so much moving from breathing water to air
as entering a world where one is made to chose between the mother and the father.
Moment one, and even before, the beliefs of our ancestors and their ancestors fill us.
Ancient systems made people things.
Boy children were made things that would own things.
Children and women were made things to be owned.
Men as things were made to trade people as things, made to corral allies,
made to make families tribes of deals made and broken,
empires of loyalty and enslavement.

The first breaths are of the air filled with the idea of people as things.
The first breaths are filled with the fallacy that one must chose love for the mother
or love for the father,
fallacy because it is not love in either case when people are treated as things.
This is the sundering, the system of the false bottom choice.

We are all born in the middle of the story of things.
This story keeps us blind to the story.
The heart of the child knows there is a false bottom story,
but needs others who will get to the bottom
to be freed from the empire of things.
The emperor has no clothes,
and the energy of the people goes either into trying so hard
to believe his clothes are as fine as he says,
or into trying to find others who, like the child,
will say he is naked and foolish.

A house of cards.
The world turned into a game of cards.
Getting the trump out is only playing the game.
Taking the little sow to market is part of waking up in the middle of a story
and not recognizing the ancestors’ voices.
The stories fill the air of birthing rooms.
To heal the wound from belief that we are things,
we need to see we are the ancestors telling stories.
The new story needs to serve the child, not the empire.

The first flower flowers in the north or south at its season.
It just is being itself.
This writing is more than a trump card.
It is a quiet trumpet like the opening of a primula in tune with the coming of a child.
It is a child pointing to vulnerable flesh that thought it was invincible,
that thought it was separate from nature and was a thing,
but is a being.

Hear them with our bodies

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On a bench overlooking the river
longing brings me to the desired sensation
of a hand on my back,
a grandmother’s hand giving comfort and reassurance.

Looking at the sky
I imagine a grandfather and a grandmother in conversation.
They are consulting about what to do.
They are equal in presence and attitude and respect.
They are from a time and place where there is no difference
in value between them.
This I have never seen.
It is the kind of communion I need and feel the world needs.
They are communing over the river valley,
above the early spring tops of trees below me,
this valley’s blanket of dark grey lace over wool.
There is hope in the tips of some of the branches,
red, green, beginning.
River threads
and tree branch webs are communing
with the lungs of the world and all the people,
everything breathing in its element.

The grandmother and grandfather murmur in the sky,
on the banks of the river,
over the town.
As we breathe we can hear them with our bodies.

Skating in the Morning

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Love.
Integrate the research.
Dream the bright shadow man who asks a question,
gets an answer
and continues on his way
not needing to be nice
and polite
and stalled
at the intersection.

The top of my coffee is a micro-climate,
a biome of steam trails on the brown sheen.
Hot skaters cut across the dark, circled in ceramic.
I blow them into swirls and then tip them into my mouth.
I can be a morning monster, too.
I can smile and chuckle and swallow.
No one, to my knowledge, is injured.
I walk away,
the powerful mouth of destiny.
I am a humble monster and say a prayer
of thanks and request:
May there always be more skaters and coffee and heat.

This is the other side of love,
the consuming, the ingesting, digesting,
letting fall away the unnecessary,
discerning what the hell that is.
So many looking for meaning
and I say from my detached brain:
We make our own meaning.
Then I’m stung,
the dream of the Buddhist yellow jacket wasp
teaching outside the church.
My dreammaker called that in,
a balance to this meaning making:
a lover’s opening to the facts
and a happy monster’s spitting out bones of the past.
All these monsters and lovers inside the source,
the Great Mystery.

I want to feel it in my skater body
and stop grieving for the bones.

When we channel the souls of the incoming
it is a sacred thing.
We need to be clean.
We need to let them choose the best landing pad.
We need to surrender
to our own strength,
commit to serve the path of possible.
The shadow of our human world is resisting the wise
monster mouth and eating all the wrong things,
never full.
Spit out the bones and let them return
to the constellations,
or mountains,
or reefs
of possibility.

Feel this heart yearning.

Preparing,
asking directions,
walking.

Photon Street

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DSCN4856.JPGStart at the beginning of now
to deal with the beginning
of the long ago
that got stuck
DNA fear
no refuge found.

And the playing.
The children have truly arrived in the new land,
playing again.

I can ask for help.
I can pray
like this:
Dear divine place and thing and possibility and holder
and dear dear
Dear magnificence
Dear big

Dear microscopic knower of the handbag of the photon
What you got in there?
What you got?
Potential.

Potential in a little photon’s handbag.
Standing there at the little photon bus stop –
looking up at the sun above the little photon buildings
and trees,
little photon birds flying past
like a sweet whistle of a memory.
On photon street, here comes the bus,
here comes the photon bus driver.
Here is the photon bus pass displayed,
that little photon photo ID.

Dear divine speck,
May I feel you,
may I experience the wondrous sensation of your movement,
tiny universal packet of power shooting through me
en route through my little city of wonders,
my gathering of souls of patience
and humour and play.

All movement is right

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Retrospective from 2013

A series of dreams ends with this:

2013_03_05

I am carrying a baby in my arms.
I am aware of how pleasant it feels
to be carrying the baby,
the weight of the child in my arms, 
the grace in the movement.
I feel that when one is carrying a child
and focusing the attention on it
all movement is right,
is meaningful.

These dreams precede the above
(titles and brief synopses/segments):

2013_02_28
young male band may be lip synching, creative woman makes playful ritual work, climb fences, vintage dresses

The young woman artist seems to have made the ritual art
to help me get unstuck and/or to celebrate something –
to remind me about beauty, creativity,
ritual, gifting, unattachment,
trickster energy, young energy,
not worrying about being cool.

2013_03_01
messy apartment, municipal construction, bouncing with men, two cute little children, ride wants me to fix little quilt

Cleansing.
Children and men allies.
Mending a special quilt.

2013_03_02
intervention blocks, dad with blue and gold globe, parties frustrated, hero woman saga

Teen boys could benefit from my father but too risky.
An intervention from my brother contributes
to teen girls not getting active.
It is unnerving to go down a shaft
in iffy buckets with party girls.
Men honour the father who has the blue and gold
supernatural light in a jar.
I’d like to suggest a solution for the damage
that the unaware, entitled friends are causing the host.
I’d like the sad warrior hero woman to let someone
uncover the heritage beauty of her estate
while she is away.
I’d like to convince her that it would be okay
to have a baby in the space.

This one begins the series
(full dream):

2013_02_26
pregnant, First Nations hug, sleeping and breathing underwater

I am pregnant. So is another woman.
I feel young – not wrong that I should be pregnant.
But I am surprised I am as big as I am.
But someone says I’m 40 weeks – or something like that –
but I can’t believe I am – I don’t think I am that big.
Also – some quick flashes of anxiety –
to be about to have a baby and not be ready
– have no foundation set up – a sudden situation.
There are other people around
but they are not necessarily focused on me
or there to help – not there to hinder.
They are aware I am pregnant.
Maybe they are the ones
who reaffirm that I am when I don’t understand.

Walking around a building that is part house,
part gathering place.
Has a grey tone.
Dusk but also the colours of battlements –
and where single guys hang out
Not about colour.
Maybe First Nations guys hanging out.
Single men, various ages.
Events and energy that are not clear
Like they are preparing for an event or altercation.
Patrolling or strolling or pacing along the upper floor outside
– has a view of courtyard and other side of property.
Not about me – I don’t understand.
I see a First Nations man – he reaches out to hug me in a happy way.
Good.

I am below the walkway – in a place like a moat
or a thing that has turned into a moat –
between the outside and inside walls,
really just the main area with water.
I am floating, sort of sleeping underwater.
My feet touch the bottom – soil bottom.
I don’t want to touch it.
I can see through the water.
It is not dirty but I can see things floating in it
as though water is just over the ground –
not a water course – or a body of water or a swimming pool.
But not appetizing or appealing water.
I want to keep sleeping and floating.
I am breathing.
I am wondering about what it means
that I am breathing underwater
Like in utero.
I wonder what that means.

I feel like I might be avoiding something.

 

I feel that when one is carrying a child
and focusing the attention on it
all movement is right,
is meaningful.

Hello Shark

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Hello Shark
This is me calling. I see I thought you were gone,
that the past is not also here, that you are not eternal.
(You are, as long as people have imagination.)

Hello Shark
You have never been cute, not even when you were born with teeth and cutting fin.
Your streamline is with purpose; you cut through much description.

Hello Shark
When I was fighting you, I was afraid. How does one take care of one’s shark?
You say:
Swim anyway, but do not expect the water to be safe,
do not bleed senselessly, senseless, needlessly.
Be a shark as well. Sharks do not fear and are capable of ecstasy.
Honour your sensitive receptors – electrical stimulation of the finest gauge, sense blood at a distance.
A caress is overwhelming, causing a swoon and a sinking further into the depth.

Hello Shark
I heard you were about justice, about deserved vengeance – seeking – rightly seeking vengeance.
That is quite a nature! Rather Godly, sayeth The Lord.
But how else may we perceive the teeth of God’s justice except as decisive, incisive.

Hello Shark
I’m not sure where to keep you.
Recently the mermaid was occupying the swimming pool, but maybe you get along; I haven’t visited that chapter.
I keep my shark in the ocean and remember:
The rivers that meet salt water can accommodate such a predator – predating, and pre-dating other forms of hunter by a long shot.
Salt rivers are blood in the body coursing; current events happen here.

Hello Shark
I welcome you o-fish-all-y to my wakening and expect that you expect my tremors.
So, I shan’t apologize for my fear and thrill.
Let me know when it’s time.

Shark