Category: Poetic living
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Let’s Behead Ourselves: Living As Symbols, Not Images
As I spend time thinking about language and its imperfections, how it only reveals slivers of truths, not a whole truth, I discover how easily we deceive ourselves into believing we could possibly ever know something wholly. Take self-identity for an example. We define ourselves by our jobs, at least in the U.S., in such… Read more
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The Bridge of Bear Mother: Ancient Slumber and Quickening
St. Brigid, Imbolc, and the 5 of Cups The bridge draws my eye first along its breadth, the bridge to which the figure in the image looks, the thing that connects one bank to another. What draws us together in this way? St. Brigid, her quickening breath that had slowed for winter slumber, warm and… Read more
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Resting but Ready
Hibernation is always on my mind, particularly in the season when it’s at least somewhat socially acceptable. This week I’m thinking about hibernation in terms of the Tarot card Strength, which has an image of a woman holding the mouth of a lion. Whether she’s shutting it or keeping it open, I’m not sure. Strength… Read more
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Wisdom from Riddles
Bard by Morgan Llewelyn has a great passage about a society too focused on the material world: The speaker describes two roads to take: “One would develop the forces locked within our minds; the other direction led to the constant refinement of tools and weapons, increasing reliance on matter rather than spirit. In choose the… Read more
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The Emptiness of Letting Go
I practice the tradition of doing something New Year’s day that sets the tone for the year: I always go hiking. This year I hiked at my local park, Lakeside, with my Rottweiler mix Losi, and followed Bobcat Way, then Shade Seeker, and completed the circle by finishing on the Outer Loop. Though the parking… Read more
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Linda Hogan’s poem “Eucalyptus” and Imagining the Self
By losing herself, the speaker in Linda Hogan’s poem finds herself: “and like the tree I can lose myself/layer after layer.” “Eucalyptus,” the first poem in her collection Rounding the Human Corners, though it begins in the present, quickly references the ancient past to draw upon its wisdom (“the others are… Read more
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Plant Your Words
It’s spring, but I feel a little like I’ve missed the seasonal transition from being so busy: I just clicked submit to send my poetry thesis to my supervisor as partial completion for my MFA in creative writing. My husband and I put a house up for sale that I bought fourteen years ago and… Read more
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Growing Love and Thorns
“Growing Love and Thorns While Reading Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’” My husband and I, fatigued from pandemic fear and wishing to travel as Covid-19 restrictions had decreased, planned a trip to Europe this summer. We wished to visit friends in Austria and Belgium who couldn’t attend our wedding in 2021, and my husband had… Read more
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“That Hairy Heart Inside of Us”
“That Hairy Heart Inside of Us” – Some thoughts on Daniel Ogden’s new book and wolves. “To be rigorous about wolves—you might as well expect rigor of clouds.” – Barry Lopez Of Wolves and Men Daniel Ogden’s new book The Werewolf in the Ancient World is a survey of primarily classical Greece stories of… Read more
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Beasts of Prairie and Woods
Review of Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis Corpses of bison strewn across a field. An 1899 woodcut of a woman adorned in feathers, a live bird, clutched by its tail, held aloft in one hand. A man wearing a camouflage coat wades through snow, hoping to find wolf tracks, eager for “the visitors… Read more