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New ground

Author Cindy on May 20th, 2010

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning.” — John O’Donohue

It started off as a horrific week. My Web site was attacked by a malicious virus, requiring several days of tedious repairs (and I’m still not finished with the archives yet). Later that same day, my dermatologist removed five pre-cancerous patches from my skin. It got a little worse than that, but I won’t go there. It’s enough to say that everything seemed to be eating away at me all at once, or was trying to shed itself.

Regardless, I was making plans for my garden this morning when I was struck with an overwhelming sense of grace and peace. Which shouldn’t surprise me.

My worry list always seems less significant when I breathe deeply in a garden. Working the soil, I forget about midlife health issues, household chores, film bookings, aging parents, unfinished projects, and what I should try to publish next. I forget about blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I forget about all those outdated magazines piling up next to the bed, unread. I turn off the endless loop of chatter from the outside world.

Weeding the Zen garden, I am fully engaged in the moment. Clearing space around the stepping stones, I consider summer’s possibilities. I feel the green stirring of something new, though I cannot name it yet. This Celtic blessing says it all. – CL

For a New Beginning
by John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

–Reprinted from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings by John O’Donohue, Doubleday Religion, 2008. Special thanks to Sharon of One Woman’s Life in Maine for sharing this beautiful poem with me.

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Poems to inspire

“Wild Geese”

Author Cindy on May 13th, 2010

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination.” — Mary Oliver

“Wild Geese” is another favorite by our old friend Mary Oliver, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry we’ve explored in previous posts. Listening to Anne Lamott’s Word by Word, an audio CD on creative writing, I learned that Lamott posted this poem near her desk — and advises all writers and artists to do the same.

“Wild Geese” touched a tender place in my soul. Like so many friends of mine, I was taught as a child to obey the edicts of the organized religion my family practiced. I was terrified of making mistakes — and terrified of disappointing a punitive, unforgiving God. (Not to mention disappointing my parents and teachers.) No matter how “good” I was, or how closely I followed the rules and colored within the lines, I still felt unworthy. A nasty inner critic took up residence inside my head, too, sitting right next to the punitive God.

Today, I follow a strong code of ethics and my own faith, but no longer allow fear to constrict my life or narrow my view. As Mary Oliver reminds me, we were all made to shine our creative light, and to dance freely in this gorgeous world of ours. — CL

Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

– Reprinted from Owls and Other Fantasies, by Mary Oliver; Beacon Press; 2003.

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Events and news, Poems to inspire

How poetry heals

Author Cindy on May 6th, 2010

Poetry is such good company when no other form of human communication can touch the deepest parts of us.” — Sheila Bender

I was lucky enough to meet Sheila Bender early in my writing career. In two days I devoured her writing guide, Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down, then wrote to tell her how much it inspired me. To my surprise, she contacted me when she visited Detroit on business, and we met for lunch.

Seventeen years later, Sheila still inspires me. She’s a prolific author, poet, essayist, and master teacher — and I encourage you to visit her online magazine, Writing It Real. I was so deeply moved by her newest book, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, that I invited Sheila to be a guest blogger for the “Poems to Inspire” series this week. — Cindy La Ferle

Guest Blog by Sheila Bender

I started my writing career as a poet and I believe that poetry is my “home page,” the place I return to for investigating my feelings and perceptions and to recognize those of others that are so like my own. As poets, we write from joy, sorrow and wonder; our poems record our responses to being alive and they create a sense living intensely, rather than walking shut down through our days.

Many authors write about the way only poetry, both reading and writing it, has helped them cope with sorrows. Writing, even about the sadness of circumstances, is a kind of celebration of life — the pleasure of images and words to reconstruct even as we must let go.

And that ability to include opposites (something John Keats named “negative capability”) is exactly why poetry is such good company when no other form of human communication can touch the deepest parts of us. I realized this when I wrote about the loss of my 25-year-old son in a snowboarding accident in A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief.

Madge McKeithen wrote in her book, Blue Peninsula, how certain poems were the guides and solace she needed as she watched her young adult son dying of a terminal disease. Others have turned their attention to the way poetry helps when other therapies and conversations don’t: David Rico in Being True to Life: Poetic Paths to Personal Growth and John Fox in Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making.

Over the years, I have known I would start poems because of seeing the wet outline of my husband’s swimming trunks through his slacks as we drove after arguing, because of attending a traditional tea ceremony with my daughter as she was coming of age and the tea ceremony hostess’ mother was dying, because of awe I felt at the fragility of human life after looking down the Columbia River Gorge with my young son.

I’ve written a poem because a blue moon in August made me sit down and consider the feelings I had when my daughter left for studies in Japan. And certainly, when I was in the deepest grief, it was poetry I called upon to bring my son back to me, to make it impossible for me to forget him, to render pain into some sort of beauty so I could go on and be of service to my family and others.

Usually, I have only the feeling of needing to write and no knowledge of what I will write. But as I write each poem, I begin to understand the poem as a means of finding out what I might not otherwise have known I had to say.Â The more I write poetry, the more poetry I read, as absorbing other poets’ strategies for delivering perception always helps me find ways to explore my topics.

Here’s a poem I wrote under the influence of the cadences and repetitions in Walt Whitman’s poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking“:

Six Months After My Son’s Death, I Chant to Sing for Him

Out of daily steps and out of drives

on highways, out of hour’s rocky patches

and moments made of weeds, memories come.

I sing the evening I visited my son and watched

his friends working in his kitchen with hops and yeast

and recipes downloaded from the Internet.

I sing the carboys they showed me topped

with see-through tubes and shiny copper

for reading yeast’s performance.

I sing their logs of sugar content and bottled

batches, the way the young men sterilized the bottles

they used, invited people for the harvests

of oatmeal stout and porter. I sing each week

they went to school between their Sunday fests.

Long and deep, I mourn and wake to sing the sun

to rise, to thank my son for time he spent

inside my dreams. I sing, I sing and do what

he was doing, siphoning good spirit from sediment.

_________

I hope I have encouraged you to try your hand at poetry. Find a poem you like and read it several times. Then see what happens when you put your pen to paper (yup, I always begin poems on paper). – Sheila Bender

– Top photo: Detail from “What We Remember,” a mixed-media construction by Cindy La Ferle. For a closer look, click on the image. –

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Events and news, Poems to inspire

Wild words

Author Cindy on May 2nd, 2010

What more could I do with wild words?” — Mary Oliver

I’m a cat lover and a morning person, so Mary Oliver’s “Morning” spoke to me the first time I read it. And each time I revisit the poem, something else strikes me.

Last week, for instance, a student in one of my workshops told me that list-making helps her get started when she’s trying to write a piece. Note how the first few lines of Oliver’s poem, below, work as a list of her morning observations. And note how the cat becomes a metaphor for “wild words,” and how, once again, the most ordinary experiences are sheer poetry. — CL

Morning
By Mary Oliver

Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.

–Reprinted from New and Selected Poems, by Mary Oliver; Beacon Press; Boston; 2005.

–Top Photo: Our wonderful cat, Jack, was a “wild thing” from the local animal shelter. –

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Just for writers, Poems to inspire

“In Perpetual Spring”

Author Cindy on April 19th, 2010

The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.” ~Hanna Rion

Spring reminds us that we humans were not designed to hunker down in front of a computer monitor for days on end. At some point, we must wake up and engage all of our senses. We need to feel the sun on our backs and to inhale the scents of plants and rich earth.

My own garden has always been a place of healing and renewal. I’m deeply nourished by kneeling in the grass, working the soil, and tending new growth. By the the end of April, I can hardly wait to dig in — and my heart pumps peanut butter every time I drive past a local garden center or nursery. It’s all I can do to refrain from planting too early.

I’m really looking forward to expanding the herb garden outside our back door when the real danger of frost is past. In the meantime, I’m soaking up these gorgeous lines of Amy Gerstler’s, below. — CL

In Perpetual Spring
by Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places
to sulk. You pass beds of
spiky voodoo lilies
and trip over the roots
of a sweet gum tree,
in search of medieval
plants whose leaves,
when they drop off
turn into birds
if they fall on land,
and colored carp if they
plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal
human desire for peace
with every other species
wells up in you. The lion
and the lamb cuddling up.
The snake and the snail, kissing.
Even the prick of the thistle,
queen of the weeds, revives
your secret belief
in perpetual spring,
your faith that for every hurt
there is a leaf to cure it.

–Reprinted from Bitter Angel, by Amy Gerstler; New York: North Point Press; 1990.–

– Garden photo by Cindy La Ferle –

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