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Come with me into the expansive gift of poetry to experience a disruption of habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. The magic of poetry happens when it is spoken, heard and felt as vibrations in your body.

In this blog I offer you heartfelt, homemade recordings of some of my favorite poems. I invite you also to spend time with their pulsing vibrations and pregnant pauses, to savor the luscious sensual syllables on your tongue, and to feel the subtle changes in your being as you play with the poems.

Listen, read and then slowly speak them out loud. The medicine of poetry will endlessly surprise and delight you as a portal into your own wild multidimensionality!

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First Lesson

7/17/2022

 
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Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's-float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

    - Philip Booth

Belonging

7/10/2022

 
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​Belonging is a river
not a goal.
Every point is holy--
but you cannot linger there
without losing yourself
for you are the motion
of your journey.
No idea,
no attainment,
no goal,
can encompass
the truth
which lives only as it dies
into new life.
Your are the pain--
let it go.
Your are the joy--
let it go.
You are actions taken and not taken--
let them go.
Your are the dream--
let it go.
Move with the mark
of the unknown upon you
and life will enter your blood like a river.
This world was always holy
and you were always a rising flame
upon its altar.

​    - Bernadette Miller


Betwixt and Between

4/10/2022

 
Picture
Vienna street art

Betwixt and between.
Not confused.
Conjuring a poem.
Sitting between 
dawn and day,
health and illness,
the mundane and 
the sacred.
But wait!
The mundane is also 
the sacred,
is it not?

How do you 
station yourself 
in the middle 
of the same thing?
The left hand and the right
are not separate entities
(though they are).
Betwixt and between them
are the body, the head, the legs.
We are positioned very securely
in the center of things,
and it is all of a piece.

Where am I going with this?
I suppose I am trying
to get comfortable with
living (and dying) all of it.
In the midst of being
betwixt and between
is exactly the place to be.
Don’t let it confound you.
Betwixt and between
is the practice ground.
Be welcome here.

        - Maya Spector

Glimpse

2/13/2022

 
Picture
Glimpse by Cindy Wood
www.cindywoodart.com

​It was as if a window suddenly blew open
and the sky outside the mind came flooding in.
My childhood shriveled to a close,
just like that, thread of smoke
that rose and touched a cloud - or the cloud’s
replica adrift on the slow river of thinking -
and disappeared inside it. In that dark water,
a new lily was opening, sky-white out of the muck.
It was only a glimpse, quick,
like a bird ruffling,
but I saw the flower’s
beautiful stark shape, an artichoke
brightened from within by the moon.
A path lay shadowy under my feet,
and I followed it.

    - Chase Twichell

The Scripture of Circle

1/30/2022

 
Picture
Female Strength by Helena Arturaleza Schotman

There is no refuge 
No destination 
No resolution 
Only This

Blessed are the fruit of my womb 
Blessed are the cycles that have no end
Blessed is the Wound 
Blessed is the Hole 

Blessed is the space that holds you always 
Blessed is this unfinished life 
Blessed is the eternal and unchanging
Blessed are we who bear the unbearable 
who carry our cross from first to last breath 

Blessed are we who know the relentless mercy of the 
Mysterious Other 
known only when we sacrifice our reaching 

There is no refuge 
No destination 
No resolution 
Only This

To you who are the Birther of Samsara 
and the doorway to Nirvana 
To you whose Love 
is the bridge that flows between them 
To you who holds the mirror of perfection 
inside the crack of imperfection 
whose Road leads nowhere and is everywhere 

To you whose breast is the refuge of no refuge 
To you whose passion dissolves all ignorance 
and whose innocence reveals unstained beauty 
​
Enveloped by your Grace
With nowhere to go
Around and around 
Heart to the Ground

Here
I
am 

-Maya Luna

The Story

11/14/2021

 
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​Step closer to the story that scares you~
the one that has you gasping for air
in the night, searching for ground.
This one wants to take you past
the lip of the void to the birthplace
of stars, where all stories dissolve
into the blessing of original song.

Leap into the love that terrifies--
you know just what it will do.
It will un-hinge every door in your house.
It will blow in like a hurricane
and re-arrange your furniture.
It will howl like a banshee through your bones
and leave you delightfully hollow.
Without this love you are only playing
at this life– and you are so tired of that!

Turn your wild horses out
into the fields in the morning,
when first light purples the hills.
They are hungry for this earth
under hoof, this thunder of full gallop.
They may trample all the places
you have so carefully tended.
They may leave you in a cloud of dust.
And yet, this is the only way
they will return to you truly,
without a fence to keep them in.

Let the current lift you
out of the churning eddy. 
There is only one place where this river flows--
through slot canyons and the eyes of midnight,
through singing valleys and greening glens.
These holy waters will have their way with you.
They are dreaming you into a body of light.
Why fight what you most long for?

    - Laura Weaver

Heart Sutra

10/17/2021

 
Picture
"Luna's Care". Photo by Grandpa Scott Palmer.
Used with permission.

Beyond hope and fear
good and bad
low road or high road
curse or blessing
there is this moment
this invitation to arrive
on your knees
in your glory
awake.

The forestlight trembles
the mountains surge and quake
the meadows exhale wildflowers.
For even as you see, you are seen.
As you bless, you are blessed.
As you drink, you are drunk.
Nothing is outside of this.

Even when
we are dis-mantled
bone by bone
cell by cell
taken back
into creation's great belly
there is no where to go.

I once dreamed
we were a winged people
who had forgotten our wings
and then designed a whole world
whose sole purpose
was our re-membering.

Can you see us?
Violet feathers
silver sky
singing on the wind?

    - Laura Weaver
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Bearing Witness

9/5/2021

 
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Art by Andrew Ferez

Sometimes we are asked to stop and bear witness:
this, the elephants say to me in dreams
as they thunder through the passageways 
of my heart, disappearing
into a blaze of stars. On the edge 
of the 6th mass extinction, with species 
vanishing before our eyes, we’d be a people 
gone mad, if we did not grieve.  

This unmet grief,
an elder tells me, is the root 
of the root of the collective illness 
that got us here. His people
stay current with their grief--
they see their tears as medicine--
and grief a kind of generous willingness
to simply see, to look loss in the eye, 
to hold tenderly what is precious, 
to let the rains of the heart fall. 

In this way, they do not pass this weight on
in invisible mailbags for the next generation 
to carry. In this way, the grief doesn’t build 
and build like sets of waves, until, 
at some point down the line--
it simply becomes an unbearable ocean.

We are so hungry when we are fleeing 
our grief, when we are doing all 
we can to distract ourselves 
from the crushing heft of the unread 
letters of our ancestors.
Hear us, they call. Hear us.

In my dreams, the elephants stampede 
in herds, trumpeting, shaking the earth.
It is a kind of grand finale, a last parade
of their exquisite beauty. See us, they say.
We may not pass this way again.  

What if our grief, given as a sacred offering, 
is a blessing not a curse?
What if our grief, not hidden away in corners,
becomes a kind of communion where we shine?
What if our grief becomes a liberation song 
that returns us to our innocence?
What if our fierce hearts
could simply bear witness?

     - Laura Weaver

Of Being

7/18/2021

 
Picture
Photo by my awesomely ineluctable cousin,
Scott Palmer.
Used with permission.


I know this happiness
is provisional:

       the looming presences-
       great suffering, great fear-

       withdraw only
       into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
       this mystery:

​    - Denise Levertov

Please bring strange things

3/14/2021

 
Picture
Thunder Woman and the Big Moon
by Sandy Eastoak. Used with permission.


Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
And the ways you go be the lines of your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
And your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
Walk mindfully, well-loved one,
Walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
Be always coming home.​

    -Ursula K. Le Guin

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  • Home
  • Wild Words Poetry Blog
  • Ecos de la Marea
  • About
    • About Xochitl
    • Spiritual Midwifery
    • Client Experiences
  • Services
    • The Emotion Code & The Body Code
    • Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy
    • Quantum Touch
    • Reconnective Healing
    • Death Midwifery & Home Funeral Guide
    • Animal Healing
  • Events
    • Workshops
    • Ceremonies
  • Hours & Fees
  • Contact