The Gleaning: A meditation on our times

May this not be a time of hoarding. May this not be a time soaked with fear. May we not turn into our respective houses and hearts and close the door. May we not take the last of anything. May we instead leave a gleaning, and then some, for those who need it. May we consider the edges of our field. May this be a time we look for the day laborers unlikely to receive assistance. May this be a time we make sure to give to the man on the corner. May we consider our neighbor who doesn’t drive and could not get emergency supplies. May we remember the artists, the musicians, the nannies whose funds will run dry. May corporations care more about their employees than their bottom lines. May we send cards. May we pick up the phone. Send out heartfelt prayers. May our caregivers and healthcare professionals be blessed with courage and wisdom. May we risk our own livelihoods, but never the lives of others. May we love more and not less. May we participate in a great turning outward. May we remember those who could not gather. Though we cannot hold hands, may we reach out: our hearts, our words, our wheat. May we look back on this time and remember: this was not the time we shut down. This was the time we opened.

Alexandra Donovan | March 13, 2020

Gleaning by Arthur Hughes

Shambala and The Gift of Music

One of the biggest goals I have when I teach poetry is the restoration of the creative birthright, the idea that we all can be and in fact already are poets, writers, artists.

I love watching people’s eyes light up, their shoulders relax, their pens start to move, their backs straighten as they watch themselves write, then maybe even share what they have just composed on the spot. Creativity is our birthright; it is the force that keeps the world growing, changing, inventing, renewing. It is there in us even when it gets warped, suppressed, expressed in thwarted or unhealthy, even destructive ways. (Arthur Mindell says in his book The Shaman’s Body: When a people fail to dream, we dream in guns.) Thwarted creativity is actually destructive.

So, my personal mission has been to help anyone I meet in a workshop or writing retreat to re-acquaint themselves with their creative inner child, the one who for whatever reason grew up to believe she was not an artist, who was either told she was no good or who told herself she was no good. Or perhaps the world told her there is no place for her art, at least not within the framework of a successful, responsible life. I have seen so many people realize that they do in fact have the healing flow of words within them, just below the surface, and I have seen the power of those words to change both their own hearts and the hearts of those with whom the poems are shared.

If anyone is familiar with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, you know the power of morning pages, artist dates, and the simple daily practice of leaning into our trust in our own creative selves.

I’ve been preaching this sermon for a while now. And, yet.

This weekend, I went to an absolutely incredible “Healing Sound” Drumming & Chanting retreat with my husband at the Shambala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, led by the amazing teachers Christine Stevens (UpBeat Drum Circles) and Jonathan Crowder (Peak Rhythms). The retreat was a powerful time of community, rhythm, prayer, healing, and devotion. We sang, we danced, we drummed, we rattled, and we carried our offerings of sound and love in the culminating procession to the beautiful Stupa of Dharmakaya, where we laid down our instruments and took up our own most primary instruments: our voices. We chanted in the kirtan style, invoking many languages and sacred songs from across traditions. We cried. We swayed. We laughed. We shouted with joy. We pulled others who had joined us into our circle and THEY dang and cried and swayed. We sent our most heartfelt prayers for the world straight up and out of that Stupa, straight up to the jewel-bright stars. It was a night to remember. And for me, it was life-changing.

Despite all my talk about our creative birthright and the ability we all have to be poets and artists, I have been leaving out an important word. Somewhere along the line I had convinced myself that I am not musical.

I have been believing for so long now that I missed the boat for music, that I just didn’t get the singing voice and that I should have kept up with the piano lessons from the 5th grade but didn’t, so now it’s too late. I have harbored pipe dreams of learning the guitar or ukulele, but those dreams kept the possibility of music at arms length, and at best several years away from whenever I decided to do something about it.

I have been longing to bring music into my chaplaincy practice, to bring melodies that bring peace, joy, remembrance to my dying patients.

Except for the times when I am desperate and compelled to sing to them, I have had to outsource this desire, playing music on my phone or asking outside groups to bring the music in. (And, sometimes they don’t get there in time.) Strangely and by grace, my singing is better in this setting. I have surprised myself with the most heartfelt renditions of Amazing Grace. Hymns have come out of me that I never knew I knew (and have since forgotten). Once I taught a daughter a Spanish Taize song to sing at the bedside of her dying mother. So, somehow, I have been doing this all along. And yet, in a big way still, I have been denying myself, and my patients, the music in me. The truth is, I thought there was no other way. I mean, how quickly could I possibly learn the guitar? And forget learning music theory or even reading music—that too ended when I stopped piano at the age of ten.

This weekend, with my loving group and encouraging, playful teachers, I realized: this is so much easier than I have been telling myself it has to be.

I have been putting up so many barriers to my own creativity, to the music that wants to come into my life and through my life. Sure, great music takes practice; great music takes years of experience. But GOOD music can happen any time, around a fire, with just a drum, a rattle, a chant, the basic beat we all have inside, and a willingness to go for it. The beauty of chanting, and drumming in a group, is that there’s no pressure on any one person. This isn’t a performance. It’s more about harmony and rhythm than accuracy or pitch— a very lucky thing for me. Still, every voice counts, every instrument adds to the whole and would be missed if it were absent. And we had some good, good music this weekend.

During our last session on Sunday morning, our endlessly generous teachers invited me to read a poem I had written the day before, and we as a group put it to music. I don’t mean we wrote a score; we improvised on the spot. We chanted the lines in rounds. We took words and ran with them. We got up and we danced.

Never have my words been honored in this way, and quite soon they were not my words at all; they were the group’s words, lifted and carried and given new life. I’m finally understanding something I’ve known for a while to be true: music is the original home of poetry. It felt so right, and it felt so freeing. The poem didn’t have to be this tight-knit thing because each part of it had a life of its own that could take off running, or dancing. I still love a good, well-crafted poem; that kind of poem has its own, quiet kind of music, its own form of harmonic resolution. But for the first time in my life I think I’m understanding what it is to offer my words up to the fire, to watch them become more than my own, to watch them dance, and to watch them fade. Who cares if they get written down? And that’s in part why, originally, they never were. Songs and stories were passed down through generations, and they were allowed to change with every telling, every singing. They were alive. They transformed.

We create, as we live, in the present moment. Perhaps that Stupa had more power over me than I realized: I am feeling less need to hold onto things, to call them mine. To hoard as if there might not be more where that came from. Annie Dillard says in he beautiful book The Writing Life:

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

I cannot tell you how excited I am to start bringing music into my life, to start letting it flow through my life. It was as though a huge part of the human experience had been waiting for me behind a door I had locked and told myself was not for me. I had forgotten I had the key all along. Thank you, Christine and John and my beautiful tribe of musicians, for showing me where I had put it.

Here is the poem we chanted on Sunday morning:

THE HEART KNOWS WHAT IT KNOWS

Originated at the 2019 Healing Sounds Retreat

Shambala Mountain Center

The heart knows what it knows

and the mind will catch up later.

Science finally dances

at the edges of our fire.

Let us let in all the skeptics,

our own hearts first.

Let us welcome them

with the drumbeat.

Let us cry loudly

to those who least believe:

you are home. Home. Home.

The heart knows the tune.

The mind, if we are lucky,

names the dance.

Here comes the dance!

You can’t help it.

Ah, what a chill.

Ah, what a wind.*

*Borrowed from the end of a Peruvian Dance song by the Ayacucho Indians (Source: Technicians of the Sacred p. 90)

And here is me, with the Native American flute that I took home with me, thanks to Christine and High Spirit Flutes. I cannot wait to play. And I do mean, PLAY.

Natural Combinations: Where Chaplaincy meets Poetry

Recently I was asked by Karen Van Vuuren, the Executive Director of Natural Transitions, to write an article for Natural Transitions Magazine about the intersection of poetry and chaplaincy within the world of hospice.

It’s an article that’s been brewing in me for a long time. Poetry, chaplaincy, and hospice work are the most natural combination in the world to me, though it’s not always easy to define just why this is the case. Somehow, poetry (and writing in general) help me to metabolize both the pain and the beauty I experience in hospice work, allowing me to honor both without carrying either for too long. Chaplaincy helps me stand in that place between pain and beauty without running away, or being sucked in too deep. Hospice keeps me grounded in the beautiful, awful privilege it is to be human in this world: to love, and to suffer loss. I don’t know how to chaplain without a healthy sense of the mystery on either end of our lives, and I don’t know how to write without a grounded sense of the reality that “everything dies, and too soon.” All three are critical ingredients in my life right now, so it was an absolute honor to begin my reflection on this intersection through my article for the journal, which focuses largely on the various writing workshops I’ve been offering to help others work through their own losses.

I HIGHLY recommend you buy a copy of the magazine (only $1 to download), not for my article but for all of the other beautiful and crucially informational articles involved. This is one of the few magazines I read cover to cover whenever I get my hands on it. Spend a well-placed dollar and give it a solid read with a cup tea: Click here to see all issues; my article is included in Vol. 8 No. 1: “Faith Communities.” “This issue of Natural Transitions Magazine spotlights heart-centered and healing rituals around death in our faith communities. We hear about Orthodox Christian practices where the deceased is treated as a likeness of God, Bahai and Zoroastrian traditions, as well as one writer’s dance with Jewish rituals around death.”

Here is a small teaser of what I wrote for the magazine:

I have the unusual distinction of being a hospice chaplain who has her Masters in Poetry, rather than Divinity. (As if one could master either!)

 When you are a chaplain, people assume many things about you, and I often get called “Pastor,” “Sister,” or less frequently “Reverend.” Though I attend an Episcopal Church and have a background in religious studies as well as professional training in pastoral care, these days I find that my identity as a chaplain is more fundamentally rooted in my identity as a poet, as well as in the path of the shaman, than it is connected to the identity of pastor or preacher. Of course, I rarely disclose this fact to my patients as it’s rarely pertinent to the provision of spiritual care. As a chaplain, I enter into the framework of whatever is meaningful to my patients, whatever is providing them with strength, courage, or fear and doubt, and we work from that place in order to create meaningful discussion, ritual, presence. And typically, though I never lie about the titles I do and don’t carry, I tend to accept whatever role my patients are wiling to bestow on me. As one of my supervisors tells me repeatedly, it is our patients who ordain us in this work. Still, in this work I am most primarily a poet, and poetry remains my primary spiritual modality. It was poetry, after all, that helped me through the experience of my own mother’s death, and eventually poetry too that allowed me to welcome a new and expanded faith back into the picture.

 It’s rare in my work that I get to bring poetry directly into patient care, but poetry is the place I take the work when I need to give it over, to metabolize my day, to let in the hurt and also the beauty and to place both side by side on some altar. Often I find that once I have written a poem about a patient or patient encounter, I am finally able to let go of whatever it was that haunted me, having honored the connectedness or memorialized the hurt I carried out of the encounter with me.

And here’s just one more teaser from the article, a poem that Natural Transitions graciously published along with the article itself. When I teach a workshop, I force myself to do the writing activity along with my students. It’s an act of humility, really; often I’m so wiped by the time I get to a class that I’m tempted to just set the timer and watch the pens move. But I find over and over again that forcing myself to write alongside my “students” forces me to be honest with them about the process, immersed as I am in it myself, and it forces me to step more fully into my faith in the process. Sometimes, often, I am rewarded by the surprise of what’s waiting inside me to be written, just as I have promised my students that they too will be surprised. The following was a poem I wrote while teaching at the Fort Lyon Supportive Residential Community in Las Animas Colorado as a Denver Lighthouse Writers Workshop Writer in Residents. The poem was an unexpected gift I gave myself. Many thanks to Natural Transitions for giving it a home in print:

PORTRAIT OF MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

She’s standing up, straddling the portable commode,

her soft black leggings down around her ankles.

I am wiping her after she is done

and for the first time I feel how soft and frail

she is down there; for the first time I see

how much of her has become thin, and soft as bruised petals.

The hair is gone here too

as it is from her head and the rest of her,

a thing I should have expected

but hadn’t thought about.

We never talked about this moment.

I never asked what shame or pride or love it held for her.

But I tell you: I carry no greater memory

than this, of cleaning and caring for

this place where I am from,

this bare and honest earth,

this old house of passion

now a country cottage

who has begun the slow collapse

back into the wild garden of herself,

who is showing me even now the path home,

my own way forward

into soft earth,

the wild fertility of ruin.

Touch Drawing by Alex Donovan: Boy with Flowers

And finally, if you are in the area, we have two more “Writing out the Loss” grief & poetry workshops at The Natural Funeral parlor in Lafayette, co-sponsored by Natural Transitions and Compassus Hospice. It’s free and welcome to all who are wanting to work through their own losses. Please join us!

A Place of Grace: Mother Stump Book Launch

Yesterday was the book launch of Mother Stump, and I couldn't be more grateful. I am grateful for everyone who made it possible:

I am grateful for Anne Yale at Yak Press, the most kind, generous, astute, and supportive editor a person could ever ask for. She is no less than a Godsend. 

I am grateful for All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena for generously hosting the event. All Saints was the first church that I felt welcomed in after a "breaking away" from a life of faith, and it is that place of refuge for many. It's a place where love and acceptance trump judgment. It's also a place where my mom and I attended several workshops and seminars together before she died, and so it has always felt like a place of grace, a place she had, somehow, prepared for me. 

I am grateful to my fellow Native Blossom Series poets for showing up with poetry, love, scones, and tea sandwiches, and for paving the way and giving me my first home in the publishing world.

I am grateful to my friends and family, some of who traveled hundreds of miles to be there, and all of who humble me with their outpouring of love. We had a full house and had to pull out more chairs! 

I am grateful to everyone who has supported me on this journey and believed in both me and the creative spirit within me (especially when I did not).

I am grateful for my "students," who are each more friend than student: Sarah, Janice, Chie, Robin, and Sheila, who all gave beautiful readings and testified to the power of poetry in their lives. 

I am grateful for my father, who could not be there--who instead was flying out to Kentucky to be with his own father, possibly in his final days--who sent beautiful flowers in his absence, and with whom I have such an understanding that we both know how much love is present even across distance. 

I am most specially grateful to my mother, who keeps showing me the arrows, and who showed me a love so fierce and so fundamental that losing her became a place of wild fertility in my life. The void she left became my path forward, and even (especially) in her absence she is an ever-present force of love and grace. Just last Wednesday, a hummingbird came and buzzed me--three times in a row. The first time it came up to about a foot in front of my face. Then it buzzed away, and I asked it to return, which it did, then flitted away. I said to it, "one more time?" and it zipped again from the tree where it was perched just in front of my face and on to another tree. That kind of love is extravagant. That kind of love is a grace. 

Finally, I am grateful for baby Adeline, who knows what it really means to consume poetry. Her book was the best one I signed all day. 

P.S. If anyone wants the recipe for the chocolate-covered cheesecake bites, you can find it here! 

Notes from the Field: Fort Lyon

"Most everyone at Fort Lyon is in some form of recovery, and the more time I spent hearing the stories that led into addictions and life on the streets but also the stories of strength and courage and overcoming, I began to get a real glimpse, for the first time in my life, of the world of recovery. It’s a world where courage and grace meet daily, and though it’s a place I haven’t myself lived, it’s a place I can recognize from afar, to a small degree, from the not-too-distant shore of my own human struggles, and the writing life itself. I stand in awe, and even perhaps jealousy, of the choices the residents and staff here make on a daily basis to create a life that is self-aware, humble, proactive, and other-oriented."

Read the rest of my reflection in my blog post, "The Equality of Chaos, the Beauty of of the Broken," at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Blog!

There you can also find an Erasure poem by my student Kat, a nature-inspired poem by my student Sam, and a poem about "The Worst Day" by my student Jason. 

Teaching poetry at the Fort Lyon Supportive Residential Community was a dream come true, and I don't use that phrase lightly. In this place, the rubber hits the road, and if poetry doesn't matter in a place like Fort Lyon, my theory is, it doesn't matter at all. (Spoiler: it mattered, a lot.) I am hopeful for a chance to visit again someday soon. 

True Worship & The Box of Darkness (or, my answer to the eternal question: "What is Poetry?")

When you call yourself a poet, people will often ask you hard questions, such as “what is poetry?” As if I should know! (I should probably know.) Except, that poetry is this mysterious, amorphous thing that is notoriously, and by necessity, hard to define. Hard-to-define is part of the definition of poetry. But, that’s not a very satisfying or useful answer to give to eager students, or at cocktail parties. It doesn’t get you much but blank stares and offers to refill your glass. So I’ve been thinking. In fact, if I’m honest, I’m always thinking about this question, and for the first time, the feel of an answer, however ephemeral, has begun to emerge in my mind. 

I write poetry for a lot of reasons, but one of the main reasons is my ongoing need to metabolize the world around me as well as the world within me. I need some way to help me face and integrate into my psyche things like loss, grief, betrayal, war, the deaths of children, fires in the hills, the unexpected beauty of a torn butterfly wing on the ground. I need to know what to do with school shootings; I need to have somewhere to go with the faces of dying patients in the hospital where I volunteer as a chaplain. I need a way to hold that pain, that darkness, without it taking hold of me. I need to mark the moment, to put a flag in the ground, to say “I will not forget,” but there’s something more too. I need to hold that box of darkness until I can see light at its edges.

THE USES OF SORROW by  Mary Oliver, from Thirst

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

In the past, when people have asked me this question, I tried answers such as the following, all of which hold parts of the truth: "Poems contain an image or a thought that transforms within the space of the lines." "Poems are a portal through which you exit out and then return changed." "Poems allow you to inhabit the other, a persona, a different part of yourself, to try on another truth for size." All of these things I still believe to be true, but I've been needing something more to explain just what it is poetry does for me, for the world. 

I was talking with my publisher, Anne Yale of Yak Press the other day, about the poems and poets in the Native Blossoms Chapbook Series produced by Yak Press. We got talking about the poetry of Cody Deitz in his chapbook Pressed against All That Nothing, a beautiful collection of poems for and about the author’s brother and his journey through the military service, rehab and recovery, PTSD, and what we might call “reintegration.” This book had a profound impact on my students at the Fort Lyon Supportive Residential Community in Las Animas, Colorado, many of whom are veterans and almost all of whom are on their own journeys of addiction, recovery, and healing from trauma. Anne then gave me the kindest compliment I could have asked for: “What Cody’s poems do for people on that journey, I believe yours will do for those who have lost loved ones, especially mothers.” I replied, almost as a joke, “I’ve promised my husband that the next book of poems will be happy poems; I can’t seem to write anything but sad poetry!” “They aren’t sad,” she replied without hesitation. “They are about sad things, but they themselves have a luminosity about them. They are not sad poems.”

A luminosity. That’s it. That’s the box of darkness tinged in light.

YOUR FIRST MORNING by Alexandra Donovan, From Mother Stump

Your first morning was the gold

of a worn penny: cold and glowing,

the buddleia a purple so bright

it hurt against that quiet sepia,

that pooled metal stillness of dawn.

The ruby-throated hummingbirds trilled

in their shrill dive-bombs, plummeting

and pulling back up to the sky

in sharp V’s.

I’m telling you, it was beautiful,

your first morning

gone from me.

If you were to ask me tonight what my definition of poetry is, I would say this: a poem is a container for multiple simultaneous truths. It is a way of holding grief, anger, despair, or anything unbearable until some kind of beauty comes alongside it. Or in the other direction, it’s contemplation of something beautiful, or seemingly simple, until deeper shadows come into play. Poetry is a a way of sitting-with, of dwelling, of devotion; that is, we devote our gaze, our minds, our souls to a thought or image or memory long enough that multiple truths can emerge, can find a home together, side by side. After all, as Mary Oliver says in her collection of essays Upstream, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” True worship, then, does not seek one Truth with a capital T. True worship—what we might call “Poetry”—seeks a luminous box of darkness, a way of embracing the gift of this life that can and must hold it all—all pain, all beauty. True worship leads us not to answer, but to mysterious paradox, to the heart of our human experience in which searing pain and exquisite love require one another, and joy and sorrow mingle.

Mother Stump Book Launch!

You're invited to the launch of Mother Stump on August 11, 2018, at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. Alexandra and other poets from the Native Blossoms chapbook series will be reading from their collections. You can read more about the series and purchase books at www.yakpress.com. Mother Stump will be available for pre-order sometime in July and will also be available for purchase at the reading for $10. 

There Houses in You an Unknown Self

I just came across this gorgeous poem in John O'Donohue's To Bless the Space Between us. It speaks so clearly of what I've been thinking and reading about lately: that inner life to which we are blind by day and yet which bears fruit in our waking life and which seeks to communicate with us. This is where our anima/animus resides; this is the self within the self (or selves) who can be accessed only by dreams, imagination, intuition, and paths of contemplation. This is the self we must wait upon with patience; this is the flower that can't be rushed but also cannot be ignored. When we do ignore this inner life, it finds its way to us in repeated dreams, irrational outbursts, and emotions that take us by surprise. It is good (as all parts of ourselves are "good") but it is not tame. It is not safe. Only when we can love the wild, unruly, and dark parts of ourselves can we fully invite our lives, our "unknown self," to come out into the light. 

For the Unknown Self

So much of what delights and troubles you
Happens on a surface
You take for ground.
Your mind thinks your life alone,
Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,
Yet it seems that a little below your heart
There houses in you an unknown self
Who prefers the patterns of the dark
And is not persuaded by the eye's affection
Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience
With all your unfolding expression,
Is never drawn to break into light
Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness
And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom
That will often see you enchanted by twilight
Without ever recognizing the falling night,
It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:
All you do and say and think is fostered
Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease
That is not ruffled by disappointment;
It presides in a deeper current of time
Free from the force of cause and sequence
That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,
Its dark light might quench your mind,
For it knows how your primeval heart
Sisters every cell of your life
To all your known mind would avoid,

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,
Offering you only discrete glimpses
Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,
Magnetized by some resonance
That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night
As the poet who draws your dreams,
Creating for you many secret doors,
Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

It has the dignity of the angelic
That knows you to your roots,
Always awaiting your deeper befriending
To take you beyond the threshold of want,
Where all your diverse strainings
Can come to wholesome ease.