Oceanic

If I knew how. The swirl-over. In the bank's marble concourse, the ocean wraps you in its currents. We are never far from sea-salt, the briny wind, even inland.

The gentle breezes, long before Sandro, before she came gliding on the fan-shaped scallop sea-shell under his paintbrush.

Before we clothed her with poetry.

The birth of love in the world.

Veils to clothe Boticelli's Venus with

A poem arises catching the energy, imparting meaning, hestitatingly, faltering for words, images, rhythms.

My love for you.

Slowly through endless revisions,
shaping this love.

Disparate layers emerge, an undercurrent infiltered with strands, approaches, understandings, memories, hopes, desires, the way the sensual mind composes.

We create ourselves through each other. It's more complete,
who I am with you.

Not a version of reality but a veil of being,
the poem of love that is
a transparent garment we clothe ourselves with,
our metaphors and concepts of a world

which resists
our gaze.

Writing is a deeply
meditative act.

A language of love.

A listening.

Drumbeat

The palm drops
on the inside
of the skin
animal drumming
beating on the drum
drumbeating the night
beating on the eardrum
drum drumming deeply
drawing the heartbeat drumbeat.

My body is the drumbeat
drumbeating my skin
sweating, hot,
drumbeating my body's
percussion, rub, snare,
pounding, colliding of
musical pulses
lyrical sinewy
or staccato modern
or wild shamanic
hair flying
free.

Red shiny satin clinging,
wet
sweat.

The djembe hip bag that I scrubbed, suede dyed to emulate Holstein cow naugahyde, in black and cream, with a wild boar bristle brush and saddle soap because of the dark streaks, smells of animal hide.

I hold it to my nose, and smell. Animal. Hide.
The drumming of the jungle.
An animal skin.

Taut.

Primal beat bounding
resonating, resounding.

You gaze at me, though you haven't looked at me.

I am in your gaze without your seeing me.

It is my hunger you remember feeding,
that you want to feed.
Our heat burns hotly.

Drumbeating
the rhythms beating in us,
the African djembes
dance us.

__________________________
Lately I've been dancing to fabulous drumming. I'd like to thank the drummers at Toronto Tam Tam at Xing Dance Theatre, Shara Claire at 5Rhythms™, Gary Diggins, and Kwanza Msingwana at Tribal at Dovercourt House in Toronto, all in the last 3 weeks.

As a lyrical poet, I use the I-Thou relationship often in my writing. The "you" is a muse and doesn't refer to anyone in particular...

The Walker...

I passed her in the alley on the way home, large, in clogs without any socks, grey hair dyed blonde, the rain turning to snow with a wind rising, cold, gingerly braving the asphalt, hanging onto her walker, out, exercising, steps barely felt by numb feet and legs but each touch of the ground and forward motion an accomplishment. We crossed the road. Opening my door, the dog ran out and greeted her, which lit her face up. But where the pavement curved to meet the drain she fell. Sideways, on her hip. After assuring us she was fine, a neighbour and I lifted her to her feet. The ambulance was already flashing behind us. "I'm fine, I'm fine, thank you." I placed her purse on her walker and she began her slow step forward. Her hands couldn't grip the walker, it was uneven, the ground, and she fell again. The snow falling on bare skin, I pulled her top down, a small dignity, as the paramedics came and spoke to her and then lifted her and gently took her into the ambulance... perhaps diabetes, I didn't ask, only blessed her and wished her well and waved good-bye, and then came and wrote this, a sketch to remember her by.

My daughter's photos of moi...

Photos on the blog are one way I keep track of myself, I suppose. The composite shot happily imbibing from a usually-packed away Waterford crystal wine glass that's one of the few remaining from the gift they were 30 years ago was taken in December on my daughter's birthday by her with her new camera. The Krishna-blue lady was also taken then, as a black and white photo and don't ask how I managed to colour it so, call it an act of 'soul force' through Photoshop, the path of filters and colorations I have forgotten. I'm not sure if I've shown it to her, but I like the blue skin and hair of fire... creative collaboration, of sorts.




A little self-portrait reflected-in-the-mirror from September. The thing is that top is a danceskin and my legs were bare and so I had to paint in a dress -you know how it is... :-)

Back to regular programming shortly...

Rising from the Green Ashes

Needles follow the crinoline green tree like a wake as it is dragged out, on this day of unseasonable warmth and a rain that is barely more than mist. I know now. Comprehending in its enormity.

A criss-cross of green needles on the floor, over the carpets, down the stairs, so profuse the woods are overtaking. They crackle underfoot. They exude the intoxicating aroma of the resins of pine trees.

Were there lightly brown brushed earth and a firepit of dancing flames and a wide-starred sky. In the moment that the place buried in the core of the city turned into wilderness you came, and stayed. With your wild-boar ways, your genteel touch. We all wore our hiking boots in the small enclosure because the green was growing. We found half a red bird, shorn wing, lying, torn from the tree, while the other half flew around the room alighting on the couch or desk at whim, a red decoration, a whirling flame. Today was Epiphany, and it surprised us.

When you let the green in your veins flow instead of blue, verdant, fecund, rich. When we find the wilderness within the endless procession of us, passing by, layers upon layers of meanings, fluxes, the city crowds, where the wild where the red-feathered bird is whole, and sings like any decent phoenix.

I expect you to rise from the green ashes.

Is that tree tinsel, glittery, like pyrite? Be wary, the city offers satiations, pleasures, whatever you want. Is that what you're searching for? With obsessional focus? The tracks, pine needles stuck to your boots, falling off as you go, that I follow deep into the wilderness of your mind, where you dwell in loneliness mining yourself.

Bliss Queen Poster

Spinning into a New Year with many beautiful wishes...

Sometimes sameness stretches in every direction and the days open and close like readings of the book of your life that you expect, and nothing shifts even if you ache for it. Other times the sheathes of pages of days open at alarming rates and you barely understand what's happening, let alone 'get a reading' on where, what, how, when, or why.

This festive season and as we make our way into another spiralling year, the latter rather than the former predominates in my life. Sorry if I've been absent, a family crisis has created shifting and buckling and reconfigurations... and both of my beautiful children are by their choice now living with me.

Wishing you all a great year ahead, loving, warm, successful, and especially feeling good about mostly everything, yourself, your family, friends, colleagues, work, health, finances, art, the whole marvelous and spinning wonder.

Remember there is nothing, ultimately, but our love for each other.

Solstice Greetings

The very best wishes of the festive season
and a bright and happy New Year~

love Brenda

(embedded image of the sun from SOHO, taken today)

Air Singing Words

It'll return differently. My inaudible voice. The leaves of the Poinsettia are indistinguishable, except for their colour. Hidden stamens in a red enfolded heart.

Voiceless, I spoke. The unheard words. Deep pressure of language pushing at my throat.

The man who couldn't speak came. I heard words that aren't spoken.

The chords couldn't vibrate in my vocal folds. A laryngitis, inflamed, swollen larynx, a temporary absence of speaking. The air from my breath couldn't sing on my words.

Uttering inaudible, squeaky synechdotes of words, charades, finding sign languages. Or forcing articulated sound through. What shapes into words that string their sentences over the landscape of plants and carpets. I enjoy the silence, resting in soundlessness.

My tongue, lips and mouth pantomime sultry words, my dear, but you can't hear. Listen for resonances. In the silk of the red Poinsettia blouse that I wear. And the tinsel of the season, green and red globes where we are reflected, cherry and gold ribbons tied into bows, sparkling prisms hanging from green pines, strings of lights lit, teasing at what's unsaid.

Hubris before the Flu Gods

Hubris, that's it. For boasting that I hadn't been sick in three years. For many people, such a length of time sounds good, even if I had a bad bout of bronchitis back then, in January 2005, and was bedridden for 3 weeks. It was just after the tragic tsunami struck the countries of the Indian Ocean. I wrote a poem during that illness, lying in my bed in Vancouver.

And not a sniffle since then.

Until this week. And how quickly it developed into laryngitis! It's punishment for yelling. Whenever I do, I suppose.

Hubris and Punishment. And they sprayed Lysol around me at work, laughing, after the coughing spell, after I tried to eat my hot chili pepper spiced stew, after which I lost my voice. It's fun losing your voice when you know it's the punishment for the hubris of boasting before the Gods of the Flu.

Can't say I'm enjoying it too much though.

So I slugged codeine-laced cough syrup for the rest of the afternoon and no longer cared.

Solstice's coming...

Taken with the Sony DSC-W55 Digital Camera that I bought for my daughter's birthday recently. Quite different to the cell phone camera's shot. The words of the little poem there I don't think have the quality of being born out of this image...

Ma Doggie

The bug that's going around caught me, sore throat, coughing a bit, etc., first cold in 3 years, time for sure, so posting a little pic of ma doggie taken on Saturday morning...while I was talking to ma son on the telephone while ma daughter was out getting us something to eat. That was before the blizzard. And before I came out from my shadow, though that's another story. I'm not a good sick person - I don't like getting sick! Grumble grumble. Back ta bed wit' ya! Rest the best medicine. xo

Blizzard in Toronto

It's heavily snowing, you'd be ice-encrusted in minutes, and blowing, and as the ground rose whitely through the day even thunder and lightning struck from the billowy sky. Not a day to be out, and I went grocery shopping with my little red basket and bought far too much and purchased a luggage rack and was tormented by heaps of snow which dragged my little basket this way and that waiting for buses and walking the short route home after the subway ride; the snow, a light and beautiful cascade from above, became impassable white heaps of resistant solidity on the ground. If you fall into snow, it closes around you fast and becomes like cement, I remember that from an article on avalanches.

A blizzard. Predicted to be the coldest Winter ever having begun. Snow crews out in force tonight.

How many angels on the way home stopped to help me? Such gallantry, men and women. 'Do you need help?' 'Yes... thank you.' Me, who is stubbornly independent had to admit I couldn't carry my load. Why'd I buy more than I could carry? Why didn't I know the snow would render my wheels useless? How could we not chuckle, the helping angels and I. And how many blessings did I give?

Someone set out to film cold, uncaring Torontonians, and found us rather the opposite. We generally go out of our way to help each other.

Toronto friendliness is something I missed when I moved away. It was so good to come home to. With my badly constructed, over-full, precariously swinging basket and its ridiculously attached wheels, oh even the blizzarding snow must have laughed at me, I received much appreciated warmth from the people of this city today.

fields of light

encrypted first draft of a poem

_______________
Click for larger size. There is so little time for the hours a photopoem takes that surely it's not quite, but then maybe. On the other hand, the next day now, I see the colours are not so good - it was taken with the camera on my phone & maybe should re-do with a better camera. The little poem is also part of a larger stream of thoughts that I recorded during meditation and which drifted into the strangeness of time. The clustering of molecules and why motion and life/birth/death occurs. Oh, and then how our solar system's magnetic field is warped, asymmetrical, which was in the news. And then I thought, maybe time is issued forth from the great burning fields of the sun itself. And I saw photos of sun spots that were so large the entire earth could fall into them. And how close-up images of the sun resemble Van Gogh's last painting, of the wheat fields. That's how the sun's surface looks - like Van Gogh's burning fields of light. And in the movie, Sunshine, how the crew die rapturous deaths in the sun. And how I've always been a worshipper of the light, mystical and real. And it's all intriguing and thus very exciting to me. But to weave it all into a prose poem! Oh, la!

Lights in the Pre-Dawn

encrypted first draft of a prose poem

Lights

Perhaps words later...

Sign at Computer: Gone Mobile...

Wow! After much research that was, naturally, inconclusive, when I saw the HTC Touch, I succumbed. Almost instantly, but when you're ready, you're ready. I used a Pocket PC for years, so this seemed natural, and I found a good plan, 200 min a month, unlimited local calls after 6pm, unlimited browser, no system access fee, the price of the phone affordable, a 3-year agreement. Oh, so what if the Canadian cell phone market has been de-regulated and prices should drop in 2008, I needed it now. It's time for a new computer and I really would like the new iMac rather than a MacBook and this phone seems an ideal mobile device - tiny, discreet, but with amazing capabilities. So I've been having fun all weekend, between putting up our tree and watching movies on IFC, exploring this little contraption. On which I'm posting now in a coffee shop listening to jazz. Too bad I can't get up and boogie!

Burning Brightly in the Night

Because this poem is under consideration for publication, I have encrypted it so as to keep the comments intact and as something easy for me to find in the great archiver Blogger is.

Encrypted poem.

Vishnu on Chinese New Year

blue lines, watchers, boxes

.......................martial arts
a whole room jumping, jabbing
kicking, cutting air

falling gold bands

then the red

......vision, blood, shirts on the backs of

floating discs, cut, fresh green

.....eyes that see
...................everything

horizontal lines raised

red banners, orange tigers

blue bricks, pink band, luminous
candles, prison

control your destiny


labyrinth, blue-black hair
smoke, the floor disappears

a dragon of virtue

immensity of primordial waters

jump from stone to stone


on the ying-yang, muscles flying

bells

opening of the passage
incense, the moon


the hooded men
striped tigers, white satin

red dragon
blue god

entryway to the past
.......................opens

......create the future




Vishnu Visvarupa, Preserver of the Universe, Represented as the Whole World | Unknown
19th century | watercolor on paper | 15 1/4x 11 in/38.7 x 28cm |Victoria & Albert Museum, London UK

Early Snowfall

Snow drifts from the sky whitely combing
the red and golden yellow leaves;
when it melts,
bare limbs climb into the sky.
I want to lie on those whorls of wood,
like mastheads of stately Nordic goddesses
or my tender frozen ancestral grandmothers,
dreaming of Daphne, firey gowns
stripped by solar winds to stark
nude greys of Winter.
Thick ridges of weather
carved rivulets
in the bark.

_____
Visit Riverside Rambles for the 18th edition of the Festival of the Trees, where this little poem is included among many great entries.

Magnolia Stellata

A desolation out of which writing comes. An emptiness of words. The streets are dark as I walk. Perhaps love is not fullness but the absence itself.

'Despair....invokes beauty only to pour the void into it. The emptiness of the soul is so vast, its cruel advance so inexorable, that any resistance to it is impossible. What would be left of paradise if it were seen from the viewpoint of despair? A graveyard of happiness.' E.M. Cioran, Tears & Saints.

We cannot merge. Are we are in love with each other's absence? Our holy madness is our love, founded on renunciation.

I am emptied in my love for you. I have no desire to possess you - desire emphasizes lack. Even in this violent wrenching towards each other where we are alienated and jubilatory. When we are empty of ourselves we take joy in the sweetness of the other.

If I could tell you a story, I would. There are no avenues of magnolia trees here, though I wish there were.

'Loneliness means I am at last whole.

Only with him could I be lonely. Open up to him. Completely open, completely for him. Welcome him completely into myself. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know it is you.' Peter Handke, Wings of Desire.

I am alone with he who is alone. Seul á seul.

I'm looking for the essence
that I can drop on my tongue,
until I am suffused with the
scent. Until my kisses are
magnolia,
........soft white petals of perfume.

Imagine the magnolia trees where Venus is born aloft on the shell blown by Zephyr.

Where writing comes to an end and sinks into its
emptiness.

Only then.

Rubies In Crystal - a new template

A new design. You noticed, thank you, Jean. I resurrected my old Rubies In Crystal banner (of 27 layers, my first real attempt at creating a composite image in Photoshop, it took forever) and decided to make the post titles a deep red, you know, to match - like pillows on the couch with the heavily brocaded curtains of rich rubies and Merlot, the, ahem, 'Tibetan red.' I struggled with the html in the template (which uses 3 numbers for colour, not 6 or the RGB code that I could easily access in Photoshop Elements), a template which I'd already fiddled with quite a bit, and wished I'd taken courses in webdesign, and finally saved the whole mass of computer jargon in a word file just in case, and took the leap into the "new" and easier templates Blogger offers. Along the way I discovered that any photos you post to your blog are automatically saved in a file at Google's photo site, Picasa, which is neat, and where they remain unlisted unless you choose to make them public. Google is creating a marvelously integrated package, with Gmail, Documents, Reader, Calendar, and Groups, plus lots of other stuff - I love Google and its increasing array of offerings.

Rubies In Crystal is a reference not only to mystical caves of jewels that are the colour of the vibrant life force but to wine and the full enjoyment of life as expressed in Sufism, and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, one of my geologist/geochemist/scientist father's favourite books (perhaps I'll try to elaborate in another post sometime). I like the simplified look of the site now, the ease of the addition of the red accents as well as the ability to put the banner in a red background, and the way the font appears. The template still needs tweaking - like why are there question marks before the archived posts (which seem to work nevertheless)?

Forays into html for another day...

:-)

Composite SOHO image of the Sun

"This composite image combines EIT images from three wavelengths (171Å, 195Å and 284Å) into one that reveals solar features unique to each wavelength. Since the EIT images come to us from the spacecraft in black and white, they are color coded for easy identification. For this image, the nearly simultaneous images from May 1998 were each given a color code (red, yellow and blue) and merged into one." SOHO Gallery: Best of SOHO

The very best image of the sun, and it's nearly a decade old! What was I doing 10 years ago? Oh -?! Gasp. Never mind. SOHO's sun of three-wavelengths was far better.

The Gravity of the Situation

Without the attraction of this force of 'holding still' we'd fly off
surely.

Cacao Trees for Three Millenia

Natural laws. Diurnal follows nocturnal. Inbreath, outbreath. The world works: in it's clashing, it fits together. It's trustworthy. We rely on it's smooth operation. What rises falls. What is alive dies. Boiling water turns to steam. Nice, this regularity.

Without the natural laws, I couldn't rest.

Have you noticed how clean the microscopic world is? Blood platelets hang together like little solar systems of planets, each with space. Fierce dust mites look tidy.

The four forces, electromagnetic, the atom-binding strong force, the radioactive-controlling weak force, and gravity dependably weave our universe.

Or the four humors before them, but never mind.

It's a relief. The regularity of process. Eating chocolate, as I am, produces sweet heaven on my tongue. It always does. Chocolate can be trusted.

Perhaps you are like creativity,
dangerous.

I don't think about anyone else.

I'd better come back in,
where stars sparkle behind my eyelids.

At the deepest level, there is no chaos. It's troubling. An insane waring bloodbath is a neat and tidy microscopic world of platelets suspended in solution. Or the decay. Molecule by molecule. Lovely chemistry, that's all. Electron microscopes are revealers of the secrets of matter, I tell you.

Love wherever it happens is the most extraordinary of all.

Earth's Nightside

We are moved by our stories, their involving narratives with plots, characters, themes, structures mimicking us in our real lives but grander than us, more dangerous, the stakes higher, but I, oh, what can I say, and ought I to apologize, I find this image of the dark side of the earth taken by a passing spacecraft with our cities shining like stars more moving than I can find words for. All of the stories are here. I ache for this world; my heart beats for this sun-rimmed beauty - I am thick with love for this world of ours. Doesn't everything in you reach for what is within this image - us, in our nighttimes, on our rolling planet.

_______________
"On Nov. 13th, Europe's Rosetta spacecraft flew past Earth, swooping a mere 5300 km above the southern hemisphere....Rosetta also took some spectacular pictures of Earth's nightside, capturing city lights and possibly some auroras, too: annotated image. Inside one of those dots of light, a team of Italian astronomers (Giovanni Sostero, Ernesto Guido, Luca Donato and Virgilio Gonano) were looking back at Rosetta. Here is the view through their 18-inch telescope; Rosetta is the dim streak of light cutting through the starry background. Bon Voyage, Rosetta!" SpaceWeather.com

Some thoughts on injury during dance...

If we try to exceed ourselves too much we injure ourselves. It's important to excel beyond oneself, to lose one'self' in the ecstasy of the dance, but safely. There is a hubris to an injury - an overdoing. If the ego tries to stretch with the expanding/dissolving self it's called ego-inflation and perhaps the emotional corollary of physical injury. The muscles stretch but at a point they have to 'let go,' 'relax,' even in intense, highly aerobic movement, otherwise there'll be damage: a pulled or stretched or torn muscle or tendon, a broken bone, a dislocation; harmony is lost. I find most of my injuries occur when I am working in an area of unacknowledged emotional tumult. Then I push myself and overdo it when perhaps I should be tenderly reaching in with self-compassion and loving-kindness. I forget limits, my fragility. And remembering to be humble towards what I can and cannot do.

Self-care, how important this is.

Most of my thankfully minor injuries take about six months to heal fully. Often I overdo and re-injure. In the high octane of the dance it is easy to forget that a part of your body needs constant TLC.

TLC, for myself.

Ah, should we not all do that more often, and not just when we're injured?

________________
An expansion on something I'd written in the feedback for the 5Rhythms dance workshop I attended last August.

Dance

On the edge of a great cloud bank
wet, each pore
fire suffused, open,
bones like wind
sunlight of the Summer, free
asking where the words went
when they rained, drenching the heart
the beat of the circle, writing on drums
words flashing in air, lightning.
It's electricity
not gravity
that connects us.
Blue paints the tops of the clouds,
lit.
Waves across the world.


August 26, 2007

_________
Written at the 5Rhythms workshop Taeji and Shara held at Dovercourt House - towards the end of the 2-day event, we were each given paper and pen and asked to write something that would be sent to us a few months later: received in the mail from Taeji today.

November Sun

leaves, fire colours
reds and oranges
the fallen sun

a street carpet
of fragmented light

sodden endless rain

paper garden bags,
of collected leaves,
raked and packed

my heart, enfolded
withdrawn

an economy of words

no fixing it, either - if it's
not there in the first sweep
it'll never be

I was on a pathway
that disappeared
before I arrived

the large wood-wet oak
a shiny canopy of leaves
held by powerful branches
bright yellow lanterns
slivers of sun

scattering¹


______
On November 8th, browsing radio stations I came across Don Jackson in his nightly spot, "Lovers and Other Strangers," and found him presenting a marvelous Autumn show composed of November-inspired poetry and music, that, hmnn, has obviously been inspiring...

¹While I couldn't work it into the poem, I was also playing with an origin of the universe metaphor with a reference to the point of the "last scattering" when, in the diffuse plasma of ionized atoms, particles and anti-particles annihilated each other for the last time, leaving about a billion photons for every particle of matter, thus making the universe transparent. I wanted this reference to echo the emotional underlayer of the poem where fragmented light leads to a naked transparency of the heart, a clarity.