The Gravedigger's a Daughter III - Nature's law

How long will a man lie i' the earth ere he rot?

- Hamlet

One
little two
little three
little graves
and perhaps a fourth?
All just within this season

Did I forget to write the obituaries?
Or carve the inscriptions on the headstones?
Here and there such and such do lie...

Or will I ever visit these absences again?
Will there be a need to know
where each of them is hidden?

Oblivion does to so-called love
what worms do to a corpse
It is nature's law

The Gravedigger's a Daughter II - Pájaros de barro

Hago pájaros de barro

y los echo a volar.

- Manolo García, Pájaros de Barro

I am not a bird
I'm a murder of birds
Shifting my shape
When my tongue finds the word
When my eyes find the fault
When my feet find the trail
When my hands find the clay

Words drifting away from Jesca Hoop's Murder of Birds

The Gravedigger's a Daughter I - Wings and Earthquakes

I dance in graveyards
Still looking like a vampire
in the dawn
And I love, and I hate

I laugh in the face of kings
never afraid to be right
And I hate, and I love

And I watch you wither
and fight
over your Christmas parties

(Yellow bird flying
got shot in the wing
good year for hunters
and little earthquakes

I'd rather be a winged rose
that safely changes her color
Escapes from being left here
silent
And brings her own self back again)


Una otra posibilidad de Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes

En busca del tiempo perdido XX

Otras veces, reconocer que lo que perdimos, se ha perdido. Que todos habitamos como fantasmas en las memorias de quienes nos amaron. Que si hay algo que los sentidos pueden reconstruir, es sólo la ilusión de nuestra presencia.

Que ante una innecesaria prueba más de que nadie se baña en las mismas aguas dos veces, sólo queda vivir el duelo de la segunda pérdida, y el de la tercera: reconocer que tampoco somos quienes fuimos.

Que lo que queda, si queda voluntad, es reconocer que somos viejos desconocidos, e inventar todos los encuentros necesarios.

Que lo que queda, si la valentía y la compasión alcanzan, es invocar las voces desnudas, colocar las manos sobre los pechos, y sostenernos en el recuento de todos los naufragios.

Tutte queste piccole magie (e su i vecchi fantasmi)

Amo la pioggia d'estate
l'aria di quiete e di libertà
Amo l'odore dell'acqua
su questa terra affamata

Amo la pioggia d'estate
questa città che ascolta
le voci di vecchi fantasmi
i palazzi e i suoi silenzi

Amo l'odore dell'acqua
su questa terra brusciatta
qualcuno che sorride e non parla
e con gli occhi mi abbracia

(e provo a non dimenticare
che la felicità abbraccia già questa vita)

Not quite Carmen Consoli's Piccola magia

(I want to remember)

L'édifice immense du souvenir se reconstruye, one song at a time.

Moments of Being VII - The Moment again, the Present, always wanting to be filled fuller and fuller

I

If I let myself, I cannot be in the now because I am overcome by the power of the then, the beauty and grace of all that I have left behind. Life is like the sea. A wave of memory sweeps in that threatens to overwhelm us and then the wave retreats, leaving us to wonder at what has been washed ashore.  Today I must work to have faith, to trust the newness that has been made from my loss. To trust what has been put in place of all that went before. I must live, as the wise ones tell us, one day at a time. One day at a time.

The present is big enough to hold the past. I must let the present enlarge enough to become rich and deep. I must live in it, not just occupy its time.  The past is huge. The future may be huge as well. What remains for me, what is given, is to do the small tasks of the day, of the life that I have now, the choices I can make today to find beauty in what is given to me.

II

Instead of priding myself on the velocity of my life, I want to turn each moment to the light, cradling time like a fine Fabergé egg - or perhaps a crystal casting shards of light on my life. I want to be "in the now," not rushing ahead to a hectic future, not pining for the past, gilded by nostalgia.

Why not slow down? Half a year has hurtled past me, but I still have half a year left to savor moment by moment. That is what I will do. I will string together the beautiful beads that make up my life. I will slow down and savor my days as they unfurl. Slowing down and paying attention to particular moments, people, and feelings will help me to appreciate them - not to take them for granted.

III

You are making a portrait of your consciousness at this point in time.



Almost completely faithful excerpts from Julia Cameron's The Sound of Paper and The Creative Life.

A matter of Grace

A summer storm
Graces all of me
Highway warm
Sing silent poetry
And I could bring you the light
And take you home into the night

(Lately, I just can’t seem to believe
Discard my friends to change the scenery
It meant the world to hold a bruising faith
But now, it’s just a matter of grace)

Favus distillans: Ursula virgo est

A dripping honeycomb was the virgin Ursula

Milk and honey under her tongue

Like a fruit ladden garden and splendour of flowers

She gathered a throng of virgins around her

Therefore rejoice, daughters, in the noblest dawn

A personal selection of Hildegarde von Bingen's Favus distillans, from 11000 Virgins: Chants for the Feast of Saint Ursula.

Preacher in the Grey Cap y la cuarta dimensión

¿Qué es la meditación? Fue lo primero que dijo después de que me pidió permiso para sentarse en mi mesa -tan llena de mí-, sacándome del éxtasis creativo en el que me encontraba sumida.

En medio de la confusión sobre las intenciones de ese desconocido, I thought that the question could be addressed through an array of answers, a very wide color spectrum: but No, he said, No, la meditación es, y grábatelo bien: and then something I should remember very clearly and do but not in words: the journey through the self to some absolute truth which, in my opinion, is both absolute & absolutely relative: so many truths to learn, so many guises and shapes and sounds that make up an infinite number of different melodies through which that one truth manifests itself.

Being an absolute relativist myself, and having been trained in post-modern philosophical thought, I felt very uncomfortable with the word Truth, con su mayúscula tan imperativa. Still, I have never quite grasped that stuff about the 4th and 5th and 9th and etc. dimensions, something he did not promise to explain but kept talking about as though I understood it all: Reality is the fourth dimension. Piensa, repiensa, reflexiona, y... actúa? or another couple more non-negotiable instructions, which I unfortunately forgot rather soon, la sobreintelectualización being uno de los males de los cuales intento deshacerme en los últimos tiempos.

I do believe, though, he was right about something: Love is not a word, it is a fact. Factum, non verbum, haciendo gala de su erudición. Elaborando al respecto: Love is not love which makes a sound that does not reverberate. Anzi, Love is not a sound: it is an act. Como diría ese sabio y afamado cantante, El amor, amigues míes, es verbo, no sustantivo. Maybe, if I am misinterpreting correctly, the fourth dimension could be the dimension of the Reality of Love.

Aprende a amarte para que puedas amarnos: de todas las cosas que me ordenó que me aprendiera de memoria, ésta es la única que recuerdo con absoluta claridad.

Still I will harvest beauty where it grows

Her the inhabiter of diverse places
Surmising at all doors, I push them all.
Oh, you that fearful of a creaking hinge
Turn back forevermore with craven faces,
I tell you Beauty bears an ultra fringe
Unguessed of you upon her gossamer shawl!

Edna St. Vincent Millay