Making wholes from pieces
when do you feel vastly alive?
begin from there, over and over
ocean as skin
life flows soft, then ferocious
feel it all
cycle on
beautiful work will not wither
in the face of change
make it possible that new things
can blossom from the transforming
the gift of cycles is sustained vision
ancient rivers did not know
where they were going
they listened to the forest
to feel the path
every dream dawns
from within the listening soul
only in quiet
can a seed follow its sacred song
use the strong rememberings
to feel your way home
create medicine
from that which you love
to be in love with the world
is to whisper sweet songs to the sky
to behold sacred breaths from the trees
to dream deeply with life
for it is here
in soft fertile soul
that life can bloom
free yourself from surrounding worry
soothe them gently like you would a lonely friend
they are weary with a longing only your joy can nourish
This title "making wholes from pieces" was a very spontaneous and unexpected title. It came about, I guess, because I wanted to see what would happen if I combined all of these little fridge magnet poems I've been creating over the last two months into one cohesive poem. Taking the pieces and making a whole.
I'd say it was a success, subjectively. You're entitled to your own opinion, of course.
But this title has me thinking more about the idea of making wholes from pieces. We do this all the time. We take separate ingredients and make something new, something more whole. Flour and water and yeast become bread. Two ideas you had a year ago plus one you had just yesterday combine to become your latest creative project. Eight people gather together to sing and create an embodied sense of community more whole than any one or two people could have ever accessed alone.
Making wholes from pieces. I think it's safe to say that almost anything that falls under the umbrella of "creativity" or "community" is likely a bunch of pieces being made into a whole. Can you think of something that's not?
I think maybe sometimes I'm not patient enough to wait for the pieces to be ready. Are you? Like those fridge magnet poems, I had to wait two months for each individual piece to be written, had to wade through the day to day life experience that influenced each one, had to feel all the feelings and listen to what was stirring in my heart, and then finally today I could take those pieces and see what they were like together. Could see what kind of whole they could make.
I wonder if dreams and creative visions could be like that a little bit. We all have ideas and hopes for things we want to create in our lives. Places we want to land, things we want to offer, relationships we want to create. Ways we wish the world would be. But maybe we rush through the experience of collecting all the pieces.
I'm in a time of collecting pieces right now. Listening and waiting and asking myself not to rush and trying to remind myself that this time is just as rich, if not more so, than any perceived destination that I think I'm going to land at. Plus, we're all just pretending we know too much anyway, according to my friend the Cedar tree.
Wishing you much joy along the way of collecting your pieces. And may the wholes that you make be astonishingly more beautiful than you could have imagined.
And I'll leave you with a poem that I recently discovered. After writing one last month myself about ancestry, I was delighted to find this one.
Ancestry by Fred LaMotte
My DNA results came in.
Just as I suspected, my great great grandfather
was a monarch butterfly.
Much of who I am is still wriggling under a stone.
I am part larva, but part hummingbird too.
There is dinosaur tar in my bone marrow.
My golden hair sprang out of a meadow in Palestine.
Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin,
but I didn’t get his dimples.
My loins are loaded with banyan seeds from Sri Lanka.
My uncle is a mastodon.
There are traces of white people in my saliva.
3.7 billion years ago I swirled in golden dust,
dreaming of a planet overgrown with lingams and yonis.
More recently, say 60,000 B.C.
I walked on hairy paws across a land bridge
joining Sweden to Botswana.
I am a bastard of the sun and moon.
I can no longer hide my heritage of
raindrops and cougar scat.
I am made of your grandmother's tears.
You conquered rival tribesman of your own color,
chained them together,
marched them naked to the coast,
and sold them to colonials from Savannah.
I was that brother you sold.
I was the slave trader.
I was the chain.
Admit it, you have wings, vast and golden,
like mine, like mine.
You have sweat, black and salty,
like mine, like mine.
You have secrets silently singing in your blood,
like mine, like mine.
Don’t pretend that the earth is not one family.
Don’t pretend we never hung from the same branch.
Don’t pretend we don't ripen on each other’s breath.
Don’t pretend we didn’t come here to forgive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEbBfzZw6BY