{Soulfood Friday}

Sometimes poetry is medicine. This is one of my favorite medicine poems.
  
 Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
     purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye
  



 Every Friday I'll be pausing to notice something from the week that has nourished my soul. 
* 
A special, sacred-everyday moment captured on camera, or perhaps a snippet from a book, a recipe still warm from the kitchen or something whimsical that simply made me smile.
 * 
Here are a few simple things that have fed my soul this week. 

What has inspired/fed/nourished your soul this week friends? 
*  
 Feel free to link up to your own soulful spaces either at the bottom of this post or in the comments.

   

    An InLinkz Link-up

   

The Last Time {post it notes to self}

Every. single. moment. is. infinitely. precious.

Just had one crazy week of kids up all through the night with one of these horrid viruses going around and vast swathes of laundry piled high in my room and dishes to do and late night out of hours doctor visits and then I read this poem.

It really does go by that fast.

The Last Time

From the moment you hold your baby in your arms,
you will never be the same.
You might long for the person you were before,
When you have freedom and time,
And nothing in particular to worry about.

You will know tiredness like you never knew it before,
And days will run into days that are exactly the same,
Full of feedings and burping,
Nappy changes and crying,
Whining and fighting,
Naps or a lack of naps,
It might seem like a never-ending cycle.

But don’t forget …
There is a last time for everything.
There will come a time when you will feed
your baby for the very last time.
They will fall asleep on you after a long day
And it will be the last time you ever hold your sleeping child.

One day you will carry them on your hip then set them down,
And never pick them up that way again.
You will scrub their hair in the bath one night
And from that day on they will want to bathe alone.
They will hold your hand to cross the road,
Then never reach for it again.
They will creep into your room at midnight for cuddles,
And it will be the last night you ever wake to this.

One afternoon you will sing “the wheels on the bus”
and do all the actions,
Then never sing them that song again.
They will kiss you goodbye at the school gate,
The next day they will ask to walk to the gate alone.
You will read a final bedtime story and wipe your last dirty face.
They will run to you with arms raised for the very last time.

The thing is, you won’t even know it’s the last time
Until there are no more times.
And even then, it will take you a while to realize.

So while you are living in these times,
remember there are only so many of them

and when they are gone, you will yearn for just one more day of them.
For one last time.

-Author Unknown-

 

Nola's "forest sandwiches"

{Soulfood Friday}

 It has been a busy and blustery week so today I have some quiet and gentle finds for you from around the inter-webs that have fed my soul over the last few days.

"waldeinsamkeit [vald-ahy-n-zam-kahyt]" 

(noun) A feeling of solitude, being alone in the woods and a connectedness to nature.

 Waldeinsamkeit consists of two words: “Wald” meaning forest, and “Einsamkeit” meaning loneliness or solitude. 

It is the feeling of being alone in the woods, but it also hints at a connectedness to nature.

  

A beautiful semblance of words I stumbled upon today over at the magical blog Myth and Moor:

Veritas sequitur ...

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!

Their eyes

Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

"Psalm" by George Oppen

  
The spellbinding photography of Folkloric blog.


And finally a starkly simple and beautiful rendition of a favourite song of mine.

  Every Friday I'll be pausing to notice something from the week that has nourished my soul. 
* 
A special, sacred-everyday moment captured on camera, or perhaps a snippet from a book, a recipe still warm from the kitchen or something whimsical that simply made me smile.
 * 
Here are a few simple things that have fed my soul this week. 

What has inspired/fed/nourished your soul this week friends? 
*
 Feel free to link up to your own soulful spaces either at the bottom of this post or in the comments


   

    An InLinkz Link-up

   

Soulfood Friday

We all came down with stomach flu this past week. One, by one, despite  a friend's so called full proof  immunity building carrot juice smoothies, and my own thick as tar, homemade elderberry syrup, we succumbed.
Today, is the first day we have all been well. I spent the morning, carefully stripping beds, airing rooms, taking down glasses and mugs and clearing away the debris of books, papers and pieces of lego that have banked up in drifts around the bedrooms over past days.
When I went to the kitchen it seemed like a ghost town, chilly and uninhabited.
Rolling up my sleeves I turned the heater on for the first time this year.
I ran a hot bath, filling it with fragrant salts and a peel of aloe soap. Then I sunk down into it's soothing depth, steeping like a brew, and let the week evaporate from my skin with the steam.

Today is meant to be national poetry day. If you've noticed my sidebar, it is quite clear, I dearly love poetry. I wanted to share a poem as any excuse is a good one, and something I had read earlier this week from the travel writer Piers Moore Ede in  his book "All Kinds of Magic" {A Quest for Meaning in a Materiel World} seemed especially pertinent.




Soul drunk, body ruined, these two
Sit helpless in a wrecked wagon
Neither knows how to fix it

And my heart, I'd say it was more
Like a donkey sunk in the mudhole
Struggling and miring deeper

But listen to me: for one moment
Quit being sad. Hear blessings
Dropping their blossoms
Around you. God


In the chapter "Amongst the Sufis"  the writer describes his quest to find the elusive Sufi sects of Rumi's hometown of Konya, Turkey.
The Sufi orders have all been driven underground, their practises criminalised since the redevelopment of Ataturk's hard-line, right wing, government.

By stealth, luck and maybe even the hand of God he finally sets up a meeting with an old, reclusive Sufi teacher (pir) in a backstreet courtyard, (haveli). Over the next couple of paragraphs, he movingly describes how simply being in the presence of this man clarified his mind and gave him a profound sense of peace.

The Sufi's believe this sense of presence and clarity can be transmitted through words, music, dance, art and of course the bodies of those who hold it within themselves such as this gentle, aged, teacher.
An orthodox saying comes close to conveying the same message of transmission: 

"The one who has found the peace of God within himself can heal a thousand around him without knowing."
 
There is much in this world that creates static, white noise within us. Life can be a little like turning the dial through 10 radio stations. To tune our selves into a peaceful, focused frequency takes a discipline, habit and stillness that can be hard to obtain.

Places ( or people) of sanctuary, where there is no ego, pride, trade or judgement are rare and holy but we may recognize them by their quietude.
And although they may be elusive they are as necessary to a human soul as the pause between lines is necessary to a poem.

Every Friday I'll be pausing to notice something from the week that has nourished my soul. 
* 
A special, sacred-everyday moment captured on camera, or perhaps a snippet from a book, a recipe still warm from the kitchen or something whimsical that simply made me smile.
 * 
Here are a few simple things that have fed my soul this week. 

What has inspired/fed/nourished your soul this week friends? 
*
 Feel free to link up to your own soulful spaces either at the bottom of this post or in the comments.

 
   

    An InLinkz Link-up

   

Soulfood Friday

Every Friday I'll be pausing to notice something from the week that has nourished my soul. 
* 
A special, sacred-everyday moment captured on camera, or perhaps a snippet from a book, a recipe still warm from the kitchen or something whimsical that simply made me smile.
 * 
Here are a few simple things that have fed my soul this week. 

What has inspired/fed/nourished your soul this week friends? 
*
 Feel free to link up to your own soulful spaces either at the bottom of this post or in the comments.

"The wild god reaches into a bag
Made of moles and nightingale -skin
He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
Raises an eyebrow
And all the birds begin to sing."

Extract from the poem  Sometimes a Wild God by Tom Hirons

Sometimes we forget about the wild God and the birds stop their singing in our lives.
We lose our hearing of their call, chatter and chant.
*

"But here I have lost
the dialect of your hills,
my tongue has gone blind
far from their limestone roots..."

Extract from the poem "Oh, The Wild Trees of My Home" by Laurie Lee

Far from the Madding Crowd, like Bathsheba Everdene, our true love is close to home; friend of  simple rhythms, and homespun ways, like Gabriel Oak of the story, he is always found guarding the flock and the harvest, though the revelers forget and the storm of the world beyond rolls on unbound.

The cyclical nature of the seasons help us remember these truths, grounding us with their rhythms, traditions and festivities.


 

A copy of Tom and Rima's beautifully illustrated book  can be found here at Hedgespoken Press.

 
   

    An InLinkz Link-up

   

Epiphany

I found the above quote
on the Angel Wings and Herb Tea Facebook page.

This year I hope to 

stand more steadily,

Barefoot on bare earth.

Feel a belonging to the country of my story

my native truth

my inner being.

I don't need to assimilate

Or unlearn my mother tongue

To understand the riddles of a new country.

I can speak my own language,

Sing my own poetry

and write my own story.

Simply, authentically, quietly my own.

Because that is the gift I was given

And the only one I can return

That will be of any worth at the end of the day

I hope only to stand on my own little wild scrap of earth

without fear or dismay

and connect fully and compassionately with others as they stand on theirs.

If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.

Dag Hammarskjold