Tag Archives: poetry

Finding Lost Things

By Cheryl Renee Long

“Snowy Owl.” Watercolor by Cheryl Renee Long.
I see owls  as messengers between worlds. I call this space between worlds “parallel reality.”
This is my story. 


I went out of my way to see and hear popular poet David Whyte. I could read his poetry in his exquisite backpack book, but no, it was his voice I wanted to hear.

David Whyte’s mother was from Waterford, Ireland. and his father was a Yorkshireman. He attributes his poetic interest to both the songs and poetry of his mother’s Irish heritage and to the landscape of West Yorkshire. 

I fought rush hour traffic that day to see him and to hear him read his own work. I wanted to understand his internal path to his unique ideas. Perhaps he is informed by his mother’s ancient Irish tradition; I don’t know, but he takes me new places.

David Whyte arrived to a full house, and he read my favorite poems. For over an hour, his hypnotic voice filled the room. People paid rapt attention-writing in tiny journals, falling under his spell.

Excerpt from David Whyte’s poem, “Consolations”

When he finished, 300 people started to breathe again, looking at each other with amazement in their eyes.  After the reading, David signed books, standing to greet people close up, face to face. He had an exchange with each person including me.

I commented that the theme of the evening seemed to be children. He agreed, and I gave him a warm smile of thanks.

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

David Whyte, The House of Belonging

As I stepped away, my hand moved to the collar of my hooded coat. Precisely at the moment I left David, my hand found a long lost silver feather pin under my collar, a precious pin, given to me with love that I thought I had lost.

Finding lost things…like this silver feather pin…

I thought: a magical intended coincidence!

In the next moment my hand went to my pocket, and there I found a long lost turquoise bracelet.

Finding lost things…like this turquoise bracelet…

It might be easy enough to say, “Well Cheryl, you only wear this dressy Pendleton coat a few times a year.”

But I know, during the time with David Whyte, something in me slipped through into a parallel reality. My new year cycle initiated just then.  The old  year ended, and the new year began with recovering something invisible yet visible and sacred.

With his signature charm and searching insight, David Whyte meditates on the frontiers of the past, present and future, sharing two poems inspired by his niece’s hike along El Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

Will She Come To Me Now?

–Sandy Brown Jensen

(This poem is about my unusual muse, who is a ten foot tall hominid who survived the Ice Age and still roams the Pacific Northwest. She is not to be confused with Sasquatch of urban legend fame or Dzonoquah of the sacred Kwakwakawak tribal pantheon except that in Dreamtime, she is both of those. I am working on a book of poems called Giantess.)

 

Will she come to me now when

the little creek of grief is nothing

but dark water in an old ditch

inching upward with the swell

of winter rain?

She is a creature

of the far North. All winter

She sleeps as the bears sleep.

She lets her dream body loose

to roam, held to her sleeping

bulk by the thinnest of silks.

When the winter nights

are tin cold and the stars

so far away that I may as well

have my head in a bucket

punched with holes, I look

for her between fir trees. I listen

for her in the gunshot snap

of a frozen limb. I try

to find her thread

and lead her to me here.

Now the March thaw

is breaking up the rivers

the way, long after a death,

the heart begins to rise again.

I know she is traveling

toward me now, the long

southward beaches still roaring

with open mouths their storm

surge songs.

She is finding

cockles among the seaweed,

and her eyes, if you could see them,

have twin catchlights

like inverted crescent moons.

You Mustn’t Be Frightened

This is a full double page view of my art journal.

This is a closer view of the right hand page.

This is a closer view of the left hand page.

“You mustn’t be frightened

if a sadness rises in front of you,

larger than any you have ever seen;

if an anxiety – like light and cloud-shadows,

moves over your hands and everything you do.

You must realize that something is happening to you,

that life has not forgotten you,

that it holds you in the palm of its hand

and will not let you fall.”

–Rilke

This is from Sandy Brown Jensen’s current art journal. It is being featured this week on Tumblr’s Journal-Inspirations site.

Creating a Gratitude Art Journal

I am documenting my journey through Laura Valenti’s Meditations on Gratitude Online Photography class with short videos. This one introduces my art journal as a place to collect my moments of gratitude.

My favorite moment in it is when I totally serendipitously video my cat Pookie curled around a stone called “Poetry.” I took a screen shot of it, and I’m going to put it in as the first image in the journal.

My cat Pookie curled around the Poetry stone. She will go in my art journal.

Moon Roses

 

This is the first sketch I did for the Color Your World colored pencil online art class from Toucan Create! It reminded me of the poem, “Moon Roses” by my husband Peter Jensen. The marriage of the two speaks to the soul of the Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal.

Moon Roses

                       Written after my shock at 9/11 turned into an endless grief

 Sometimes, we have to leave the Earth.

Some times are bad times, war time, time

to learn how bad humans can be. That’s

when we order roses from the Moon.

 

Moon roses show up, brighter than summer

roses, pale and day-glo and neon

as if they were grown in an off-planet

hot house. They appear too good for this world.

 

We ordered four hot pinks, two purples, and two

creamy oranges, and they last as if their petals

were silk spun by Moon moths

in our winter cool solarium.

 

As proof of where they came from, the Moon is full.

At night, I can see our Moon roses longing for home.

                                    —Peter Jensen