The Arts - Certain Trees

Certain Trees

My life is tied to the lives of certain trees;

A cypress on the high Oaxacan plain

That once defied the cruel Conquistadors

Still in buttressed majesty remains.

An ivied oak shades gravestones in a grove

Revered by Druids in emerging time,

The island’s tale inscribed in every seam

Of that rough trunk whose darkness spoke to mine.

At pondside stands an ash whose limbs bend low

To shelter travelers all at rest or play;

The soft corona of its foliage gleams,

Guiding a summer swimmer’s shoreward way.

Dearer than these, in Autumn pride most rare,

This maple guardian of our homestead stands;

Uniting heaven and earth it weaves the air

And holds my numbered years in leafy hands.

(7/05—9/20/05)

- Submitted by Emily Pena Murphey

The Arts: Like Sliding Mud

Like sliding in mud Life is messy, Like the smell of the earth in the earliest moments of Spring; Musky, dirty, fresh, hopeful. Like birth, bloody, scary, joyful, warm. Life is messy, Like risking love, fulfillment of life, Never knowing if it will endure. But we always, we always, take that risk; Because the ride, though perilous and frightening, Offers so much. Like sliding in mud, we love; we fight for life; we hold on to anything, Everything that will help us endure. And we never, never give up hope because Like sliding in mud, there is earth beneath to hold us; From which we came and to which we will one day, all of us, again return. Submitted by Barbara Darshan

The Arts

Thanksgiving, 2005

(11/25/05)

To be given just enough

Surely is the greatest gift.

Yet how I’ve carped, complained, and cried,

Feeling my just share denied!

Sour resentment poisoned thought;

Envy and desire did naught

But conceal from me this truth:

I am given just enough.

Humble shelter, simple food,

Form not beautiful but good;

Pain enough to mortify,

Mindfulness that I’m to die;

Work for sustenance, not wealth,

Lest matter overshadow health;

Solitude, my natural state,

Scant society abates;

Love not passionate, but kind

Leaves me room to know my mind.

Just enough to soul sustain

Might free the spirit and the brain;

Keep one restless, yet at peace;

True abundance is just this.

Softly I’ll draw breath and sing

To see life in strict balance swing.

- Submitted by Emily Murphey

The Arts

I know that when I leave this house

I know that when I leave this house

The things I now regard with scorn,

This kettle with its scalding spout,

The soiled brown carpet long outworn,

Will in my parting gaze reveal

The aura of some gloried crown;

The peeling paper in the hall

Looks on the stairs a child ran down.

Each tattered object that I see

Will glow with warmth of homely ways;

Life’s talismans that, carelessly,

I valued not until the day.

How do we cast so lightly by

These things which human touch have known?

Hearts would prefer some soothing lie

To living mindful of such woe

As one day leaving all that’s dear

And stepping outward toward vague fate;

A veil that’s woven of small cares

And hemmed with silver thread of tears

Obscures the stone beyond the gate

And damps the pulse of fleeting years.

A Memory of Parting

(10/12/04)

The season of death is stealing in,

The mist-filled wood smells of decay.

This time four fleeting years ago

I saw you last, then went away.

Called from this blazing autumn vale,

I travelled far to your bedside.

There, in a foreign, open land

Low mezquites crouched resaca-side.

That arrid place was your first home,

Land of your sweet, ill-fated birth.

There in a hammock bathed by sun

You first knew love upon the earth.

The circle of your life closed fast;

We knew the time would not be long.

It was my gift to leave you last;

As you slept I sang a song:

“Now I am going to the harbour

“Where one meets the ship of gold

“That must bear me away.

“ Now I am going;

“ I have come only to say farewell.

“Goodbye, my love; goodbye forever, goodbye.

“Never more will your eyes look upon me,

“Nor your ears hear my singing.

“ I will deepen the ocean with my tears.

“Goodbye, my love; goodbye forever, goodbye.”

- Submitted by Emily Murphey

The Arts

Spirit in Matter
This was the morning when I saw through their grey veils
The souls of the stones.
Suggestions of weathered faces
Peered from beneath hoods of moss and the detritus of fallen leaves.
One bore a beard of pale lichen,
Another sported a downy cockade of unfurling fern.
A slick quartz boulder revealed itself the group’s leader;
The others encircled it heeding a silent homily
Imparting the wisdom that accrues
To a being that has lodged for centuries in an earthen hollow.

Round about, the trees kept watch;
Drawn up erect, all cellular senses honed,
Their alert intelligence vibrating
With the hum of a tautly-stretched wire.

Regiments of bloodroot
Massed on a southward slope
With green mantles folded beneath snowy helms,
Awaiting the high-pitched blast
Of a fairy trumpet.

Meanwhile, a grateful pool slowly filled
As a replenishing brook rushed down its throaty channel.

To be here at such a time each year,
To be silent,
To perceive the world with unnamed senses;
This is my commitment.

- Submitted by Emily Pena Murphey


Enchantment
This is the part of the tale
When suffering silences lips.
A veil has congealed over eyes;
A clasping of hands is let slip,

Dissolved as brute vengeance is spent
And a flood-tide of hate sweeps the land;
The lovers’ near-union now rent,
Each finds a way best as he can.

For bewitchment turns him to a frog
And her now likewise to a toad,
Their sacred humanity lost
To ruts of low, disparate roads.

And yet something inward, remote,
A crystalline substance unchanged
Is drawn by the lodestar of hope
Beyond their baptism of pain.

Restored forms of woman and man
Will meet herding flocks in a glade;
And there lamentation’s sweet tone
Cast moonlight on faces in shade.

Each sees in the other’s his own,
Two hearts yield up grief at joy’s birth,
Rebound with a cord that was twined
Before the creation of earth.

- Submitted by Emily Pena Murphey
[Inspired by The Grimm Brothers, “The Nixie of the Pond” (#181)]

The Arts

Dream of a Bear
It loomed there outside the picket fence. The heavily falling snow
Dusted the broad shoulders and massive head, matted the shaggy cinnamon breast.
Whence or for what it had come no mind could divine,
But with mute purpose it shattered the yard’s perimeter,
Wooden slats falling away in fragments before it.
With lumbering grace it moved forward,
Traversing the drifted enclosure with mighty strides.
It then steered its bulk up the hillside,
And I realized with regret that this visitation would be brief.
(Such magic cannot stay.)
Some bestial inner compass impelled it to press onward through whiteness
To disappear into the dark among laden spruces
Beyond the painted human pale.

I watched it go.

It left in its furrowed wake the consolation of a mystery to muse upon,
And Spirit knew despite its rue that in some unfathomable way
This glimpse of majesty would long leave traces
Leading to the gate of my frozen heart.


Milagros*
I long to travel into the darkness
To view one by one
The radiant objects suspended there.
Golden, bejeweled, finely wrought;
Some high, some low, some far away, some close at hand;
Revolving with a sedate grace
They reveal themselves to the marveling eye.
Of splendor absolute, existence eternal,
Their crystalline forms and shadows govern birth and death.
At times they cast off sparks like blinding daggers
Which penetrate the shroud of temporal earth.

Intricate structures,
You are that remote, indifferent source of all imagining.
Your glow from within suffuses the void with light.
I, poorest of pilgrims, beg your leave
To prostrate myself upon this floor of stone:
Your witness.

*“Milagros” is the Spanish word for “miracles”, and also refers to the small golden emblems which are affixed to cathedral altars throughout the Hispanic world as offerings of gratitude for answered prayers.

- Submitted by Emily Peña Murphey

Sacred Suffering

Its hard to write about psychotherapy
in a soulful tongue.
Its hard to listen during psychotherapy
for soul expressing itself.
Psychopomps turned psychotherapists.
All caught up in the trappings of thinking
and of what comes to mind
and the mechanics of bandaids on pain
forgetting how rich and potent mining pain
can be for getting to the essence of things.
Pain is where we all struggle to maintain
integrity under attack, duress, and loss.
Its counter intuitive to stay with it
stay in it. A rite of passage we neglect now.
So soul initiates by making messes of our lives
hardly anyone remembers the rituals,
stories or songs for getting through it.
So we reinvent it over and over but don’t get it.
We just want it to stop and go away.
But we also need it or love it and want it to stay
like the drinking and drugging and puking and cutting
the 10,000 ways of acting out
all triumphs and tribulations made mundane and profane
unconscious, unfeeling, unguided, unimagined
out of relationship to time, to history, ancestors, place.
So we make a holy ground of the psychotherapy space
where the sun and the moon are seen in the soul of self
and the solitary centers are filled with being
and the empty and full is exchanged in every breath
and becoming human is just being real
in the company of someone else who sees you,
and keeps an eye on things so you can go there,
till you learn the way
and can go there and back on your own
and creates language and hears the story of your healing
and watches for the time of new budding
and knows that you are now well rooted,
your trunk strong and with the right degree of flexibility
and welcomes you home to yourself
and then says good bye
go in peace and with love.

-Cynthia Hennard