Poetry

A Seventeen-Days-Late New Year’s Blessing

~ Alina ~ 6 Comments

I know it’s three Fridays into the New Year. So posting a New Year’s blessing now feels late and a bit silly.

I also know it’s been two weeks since I blogged. I haven’t gotten up early every morning, and I’ve been writing a lot, but not 5 times a week. It’s discouraging to see myself fail to achieve my noble-minded New Year’s resolutions so quickly.

But maybe three weeks into 2014 is exactly when I need to be reminded that the year is still fresh and young. And maybe especially because those resolutions are already broken, it’s a good time to be reminded of grace. I shoot for the moon and miss on the first try. But thank goodness God isn’t done with this wayward archer.

Alina's Camera 00120

My mom tied up this poem with ribbon and gave it to me at Christmas. I love that it skirts the victorious sentimentalism of many New Year’s reflections. Rather, it focuses on a living relationship with God: sometimes gained through sorrow rather than joy; through failure rather than success. It’s a narrative of grace and a song of hope.

I hope it blesses you today.

New Year’s Blessing

In the new year I do not wish for you
that God will bless you,
since God already intends
only the deepest blessings for you.
I don’t wish that good things will happen to you,
since I don’t know
what will most beautifully shape your soul—
in what losses you will receive grace,
in what challenges you will gain wisdom,
in what struggles you will become more truly yourself.

Instead I hope for you this blessing:
that your heart be at peace,
that your mind be open
and your will be lovingly present;
that you live each day this year with love, courage and beauty,
with gentleness, trust and gratitude.
That you speak and be the truth,
that you find joy and wonder in your life,
that you be deeply mindful
of God’s indwelling presence,
God’s deep delight in accompanying you
in every breath.

May your work be fruitful,
your hope vibrant,
your voice clear,
and your friends faithful.

Whether you feel it or not,
deep blessing will be yours this year.
May you know it, and rejoice,
and live in harmony with God’s grace.

~Steve Garnaas-Holmes
(http://www.unfoldinglight.net)

Pumpkin Fun

~ Alina ~ 5 Comments

Today’s post arrives on a Wednesday. I hope that doesn’t lead you to think that tomorrow is Saturday…

I am introducing this confusing mix-up because tomorrow is Halloween and I want to write about pumpkins! 
My very favorite kind of pumpkin is the costume variety. I think all babies should be dressed up as pumpkins at least once in their lives. 

Photo credit: James Willcox

 Awww…just TOO adorable! Dogs make pretty cute pumpkins, too:

Photo credit: C Jill Reed
But at my house, there being neither babies nor dogs to dress up, we paint real pumpkins. One of the vegetables below was designed by the engineer, one by the artist, and one by the writer in the house. I’ll let you guess whose is whose.
See? They’re Betty Boop, a hot air balloon, and a poem.
Last year, I stopped trying to fight my klutziness and penchant for stick figures and instead repurposed Halloween as the World Literacy Project, decorating my pumpkin with the opening lines of “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes.

This year it’s a different famous, slightly spooky poem (which I subjected my family to a reading of as I was writing it out in Sharpie). 10 points if you can guess the title and author! 
But though I’m greatly enjoying the World Literacy Project (and I hope the neighborhood kids will, too), there’s nothing wrong with stick figures. In fact, they can even make pretty cute costumes. Get a good laugh out of this one, and enjoy tomorrow!

Blogiversary #2

~ Alina ~ 6 Comments

I love fall. The student in me thinks of September, not January, as the beginning of the year. As the weather gets cooler, I get an almost Pavlovian excitement for office supplies, pumpkin spice lattes, and new beginnings.

Photo credit: Jason A. Samfield

But what almost took me by surprise is that this approaching fall season also marks my second blogiversary. I went to write this week’s blog post and realized it’ll be two years on Sunday! Which prompts a bit of reflection.

It’s a little harder to track this year’s progress than it was last year. I do know that I’ve published a total of 95 posts and accumulated nearly 20,000 page views since starting this blog in 2011 (numbers which thrill, startle, and humble me by turns). Sometimes numbers help me step back and get some perspective on the small routines I perform regularly.

This year I have branched out to share a wider variety of art forms, including poetry, photography, and excerpts from my novel-in-progress.

Speaking of which, that novel is in its 4th (and hopefully final) draft! Sometimes not losing vision in the last stage is the hardest part. I’m both eager and nervous to set out on the road to publication.

I struck the words “recent college graduate” from my Blogger profile. Now that I’m 2+ years out of academia, I think I’m really beginning to consider myself a working adult.

Which is beginning to make sense, now that my weeks are full with 15 tutoring students, regular freelance editing projects, novel revisions, and some very dear relationships that make my life full and sweet. Sometimes living has been so sweet that I’ve clean forgotten about blogging (that’s why there’s no December under the 2012 tab).

I had a chance to share my life story with some peers a few weeks ago and it gave me a chance to realize what this blog has done for me. Not only has it kept my writing muscles limber in busy times when other writing projects have gone into hibernation, but it’s been cathartic for me as well. Sometimes it’s easier to blurt out the truth in a public forum (especially online) than it is to be honest with your close friends and family.

Here I’ve reached new levels of honesty as I’ve broached subjects like vulnerability, loss, and lament poetry. What’s even better is that some of you have come to me and shared that my halting admissions of hurt, confusion, and failure have made you feel freer to admit your own struggles. And that makes it worth it.

It’s also been joyful to celebrate new beginnings throughout the year, noticing small magic, overflowing like popcorn, and cooing over adorable hedgehogs. It’s wonderful to celebrate fullness and joy. I think honesty about the empty and the hard makes this part even sweeter.

And with that, I commence celebrating blogiversary #2. No pumpkin spice lattes in my local Starbucks yet, but I’m waiting. Oh yes, I’m waiting.

Photo credit: brina_head


In the meanwhile, let this changing season give you a chance to reflect. What milestones are you celebrating? What are you looking forward to this school year? 

So Many Books…

~ Alina ~ 8 Comments
So…I did it again. 
Yes, I am reading all of these books. At the same time. Count them. There are fifteen. One-five. 
Nearly 16 months ago, I wrote this post, getting my knickers all in a twist over reading *gasp* seven books at a time! Today, my past self would be shocked and probably horrified. Fifteen is a lot of books. 
It’s also a lot of inches. Maybe I should start measuring my reading that way. 

When I’m reading this many books at a time, my progress advances infinitesimally. Some of these titles have been on my bookshelf for a year. 
Tsk, tsk. So read fewer books, you say. 
But which ones to choose? 
For spiritual growth, I’ve got Philip Yancey’s Prayer and Disappointment with God, Sacred Pathways by Gary Thomas, C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, and Me Addiction by Rick Brown &c. 
On the topic of relationships, there’s His Needs, Her Needs by Willard F. Harley Jr., Sacred Search by Gary Thomas, and an old favorite: Boy Meets Girl by Joshua Harris. 
Halfway there. 
Now, for creative inspiration, we have Alan Jacobs’s biography The Narnian, about C.S. Lewis. There’s The Imagineering Way, by Disney’s team of Imagineers. And a particularly fascinating one called Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, about the process of creativity (a great loan from my knit-designing friend Audry). 
Some books for discussion with my tutoring students: The Library Card by Jerry Spinelli and Mandy by Julie Andrews Edwards (yes, the actress of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music also wrote a children’s book!). 
And finally, some just for fun: Foundling by D.M. Cornish and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” in a beautiful 1893 edition of Longfellow’s collected works (a find from my latest library sale). 
Oho. But wait, there’s more. 
Now I can read even more  books at a time. Being the die-hard fan of paper books that I am, I held out a long time on an e-reader, but finally caved when my family gave me a Kindle for Christmas. Now I realize that, while I may always be partial to the smell and feel of paper, I don’t have to choose which method to love.
More methods of reading means more books 🙂 

Kindle reading does come up smaller by the inches method, but I’ve already got more in-progress titles on here, including Dreamwalker and Mourning Cloak by writer friends Angela Wallace and Rabia Gale. 
*Sigh* Maybe I need this on my wall: 
Library Wall Clock So Many Books, So Little Time

How about you? What are you reading? 


Lament

~ Alina ~ 8 Comments

Two weeks ago, I did something terrifying.

I read poetry in front of people.

Scary poetry. Honest poetry. Lament poetry.

Lament is one of my new favorite words. Merriam-Webster (almost the best dictionary ever, after the OED), defines it as an intransitive verb, meaning to mourn aloud. 
Free image courtesy of stock.xchng and OmirOnia

Mourn. Aloud.

I love my church. It’s my family. But over the last year especially, I’ve been realizing that the larger church–or at least many people in it–has little space in its theology for the bad things that happen. I’m not talking about little struggles, bumps in the road. Those are a natural part of every human’s life. I’m talking about the bad things–the things for which there is no sense. Eight-year-old girls who get leukemia. Forty-five-year-old fathers who die of cancer. Classes of kindergarteners shot down by sick, deranged gunmen.

Volumes and volumes of Christian theology are devoted to understanding these things. Logical treatises, high-caliber philosophical explanations are offered. Yes, in moments of quiet, those explanations can help us understand a world that shakes us to the core. Yes, there is a place for understanding. But it’s not in the middle of the suffering.

It’s natural to want to skip past the pain to the victory; to tell thesis-driven, neatly packaged stories of conflict, climax, and resolution. We minimize the dark, torn-up moments of life because we don’t know what to do with them–instead we fast-forward straight to the overcoming, the lesson learned, the transformation accomplished. All those are good things to see and give thanks for, in 20/20 hindsight. But sometimes, when you’re in the midst of the story, you have no idea what the resolution’s going to look like. And when your feet are bloody from the road, you may not even be sure you’ll ever reach the destination.

Free image courtesy of stock.xchng and jagoelaar

My pastor has started a sermon series on laments in the Bible, and it brings me joy because it means our church is talking about these things. The most helpful thing, when all the walls of your world are caving in and you have no pain tolerance left, is to mourn. To acknowledge the pain. The frustration. The fear. The confusion. The anger. The abandonment. These are real feelings. If you haven’t bled on the sharp point of these feelings yourself, others’ cries of lament may sound grotesque, depressing, even melodramatic. But listen anyway. Mourning sucks the venom from the snakebite. It keeps the sorrow from drowning you when you can’t yet see the shore. And to listen to someone else’s mourning, to be a safe sound room where their raw pain can be released, is to help them heal. 

Free image courtesy of stock.xchng and anyone71

So here are a few laments. Though my lament two weeks ago was in poem form because I love the power of poetry to express raw emotion, laments can also be expressed through songs, stories, paintings, articles, novels, and maybe even forms I haven’t discovered yet.

Here’s one of my favorite laments, a poem called Bereft by Robert Frost: 

Where had I heard this wind before

Change like this to a deeper roar?

What would it take my standing there for,

Holding open a restive door,

Looking down hill to a frothy shore?

Summer was past and day was past.

Sombre clouds in the west were massed.

Out in the porch’s sagging floor,

Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,

Blindly struck at my knee and missed.

Something sinister in the tone

Told me my secret must be known:

Word I was in the house alone

Somehow must have gotten abroad,

Word I was in my life alone,

Word I had no one left but God.

And a piece of a lament from Psalm 13 (The Message):

Long enough, God—
    you’ve ignored me long enough.
I’ve looked at the back of your head
    long enough. Long enough
I’ve carried this ton of trouble,
    lived with a stomach full of pain.

And one from me: 

I am not a poet

I am just a

kid broken by the thunder of

gunfire

brimming with words that

have noplace else

to go.

Though laments are scary to share in all their raw honesty, the sharing is worth it if it frees even one other person to mourn aloud. Or maybe if it teaches someone how to listen. 

Have you ever tried writing a lament? Tried sharing it with others? 

The Spark

~ Alina ~ 4 Comments

In a season of leafless trees and wet skies, here’s a change of pace on this blog: some winter poetry.
Free image courtesy of stock.xchng and Kadha
The Spark

Raindrops like

flowers of glass

clinging to twig latticework

A net of liquid pearls

against the opaque sky.

Unchained

slipping down like

unguarded

strings and strands of diamonds.

One lets go,

falling freely

spinning into space—

—a spark—

concentrating the

dull grey morning un-dark

to a single, fiery

flash—

an upside-down

world-mirror

that catches a glimpse of

hope—

breathing,

reflecting,

transforming,

reimagining the world in

one glass raindrop,

a vision in freefall.

Death and Song Lyrics

~ Alina ~ 1 Comment

Very early on the morning of November 6th, my grandma passed away peacefully, her wracked, skeletal body stilling and ending eleven months of daily burial.

In the heat of caregiving, when all you can feel is strained muscles, all you can taste is sweat on your upper lip, there is no room for poetry, and the people who sit off to the side in armchairs, seeing the big picture and attempting ameliorating words, feel like clichés.

But when the whistle blows at last and the laborers collapse in a heap, there is a sudden silence. Suddenly, without work to do, your hands twist idly, mind freezes in the cold strange silence, and with long flabby stretches of time and no inclination to industry, then the poetry comes back to usefulness. 

I made one CD mix for my car, a jumbled mix of songs that plays in endless circles as I drive. This poetry help to shout down the emptiness, to bring at least rhythm, if not sense, to the cacophonous thoughts. Here are a few of the most played.

Paradise, by Coldplay
Life goes on and gets so heavy

The wheel breaks the butterfly

Every tear a waterfall

In the night, the stormy night, she’d close her eyes

In the night, the stormy night, away she’d fly

And dream of paradise…

Run, by Snow Patrol


Light up, light up

As if you have a choice

Even if you cannot hear my voice

I’ll be right beside you, dear…


Desperado, by The Eagles


Desperado, you ain’t getting any younger

Your pain and your hunger,

They’re driving you home…

In the moment of pain, we screech or grunt without thinking. When it’s quiet and still again, though, there is time to search out words for the shapeless animal howls. Through poetry, our own or others’, we weave severed tendons into a tapestry that bleeds and tells the story of bleeding. 

How do you make sense of the senseless? What methods of expression are helpful to you?

Halloween and the World Literacy Project

~ Alina ~ 6 Comments
As I have previously confessed on this blog, I am a baking-challenged person. Today’s confession is that I’m also challenged at the visual arts. That means that this time of year, when people are putting cute little decorated vegetables on their doorsteps, shows me for the stick-figure artist I am. Also, I’m a klutz and big knives scare me. 
So rather than compete with my mom, who painted her pumpkin as an idyllic, full-color rendition of Bag End, complete with cotton-fluff smoke coming from the chimney…
…or risk chopping off my fingers with a big knife, this year I decided to bring my own branch of art to the pumpkin-decorating frenzy. 
Poetry! 
This pumpkin is my attempt both to sidestep artistic humiliation and contribute to world literacy levels and cultural awareness. Come on, little Rapunzels and Captain Americas. Have some candy. And some extra brain cells.

These famous opening lines spiral consecutively around the pumpkin, creating both a ghostly ambience and celebrating the beauty of words. 

Now, here’s the challenge. Using only these snippets of famous opening lines, plus the author’s name in the photo below, can you identify this poem? Ten kudos points to whoever gets it right (and no cheating by my friends or family members who’ve already seen it in person)! 

Ready, set, go!

Poetry with Feet

~ Alina ~ 11 Comments
With the weather back to spring temperatures here in California and more rain predicted for this week, I found a poem I wrote about a month ago. This was about the time I started taking walks every morning. I’ve found that a walk in the morning, even if it’s only fifteen minutes, gives me a chance to take care of myself holistically, focus my thoughts for the day, and get ready to write.

Morning walks are especially fun on those days when rain is blustering on the horizon, like a little boy full of energy, but it hasn’t quite come into itself yet. The air is full of wind and electricity, and in spring, all the flower scents blow everywhere and the green comes out to shine. On one of those days, I went for a long walk, wearing my rain jacket but only occasionally needing it. A poem started to form in my head (and of course I forgot my Moleskine at home) but I repeated it out loud to myself, tinkering with the sounds of the words until the neighbors probably thought I was crazy, to keep it fresh until I got home.

And now I’m going to get brave and share it with you: the first poem I’ve put up on this blog.

Nomad

I walk shadowless under a sunless sky.

Sun’s brightness swallowed in

filmy grey envelopes,

 distant hills erased,

painted out in white.

I am rainchased,

windswept,

a petal blown on a gust,

a wave whipped across a pond.

I drink in the smell of sweet freesias

and sharp spicy rosemary,

I caress fragile budding leaves,

I see silver shreds flapping in the wind.

I walk under rain, but I am not wet;

I wander abroad, but I am not lost.

What interesting thoughts have come to you while walking? 

Holistic Reading…and Living

~ Alina ~ 4 Comments

Can you read just one book at a time?

I can’t, unless it’s impossibly engrossing (the last one was Here Burns My Candle, a Scottish historical novel by Liz Curtis Higgs).

I don’t always mean to get started on so many books. But I love them because they speak to my heart and mind. They wriggle past the outward fronts I put on and give me sharp lectures or hope-giving inspiration. They’re companionable when I don’t feel like talking. They’re adventures that come cheaper than a plane ticket. So I put a good read on my nightstand…and then add another…and another…and so it goes.

Really, though, I think I read multiple books at a time because real life has many parts. I am more than just a learning brain: I am also an imagination, a soul, and a body. I am a worker, a server, a dreamer, a pilgrim, and I stand in need of beauty as well as instruction. I read multiple books simultaneously for the same reason I schedule more than one type of activity into my week. I lesson plan, but I also watch movies. I have coffee with friends, but sometimes I’m alone in the quiet house. I spend time both praying and walking. We are whole people with multiple areas of life, and each of those areas has different needs.

I suppose you could call it holistic reading. The good part about it is when I have a moment to read, I almost always have something I  feel inclined to read right then, no matter what time of the day or week.

The downside?

Overextension.

Just as I sometimes schedule too many activities into a week, however holistic they may be, sometimes I take on more reading than I can actually handle. Ever have that feeling? The spines look so pretty, all fitting snugly together on the shelf, until you realize you haven’t opened any of them in a week. Or more. And that even when you do snag a stray hour for reading, you spend a quarter of it in paralysis before the bookshelf, worrying and wondering over which volume you should spend the time on.

Right now, for example. It started out as a very holistic plan, with some books for each different area of life. It went like this:

Tutoring:


Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
Devotional books:


A study on the book of Isaiah by Navpress
Grace for the Good Girl by Emily P. Freeman (who, by the way, has a great blog: http://www.chattingatthesky.com/)


Fun Stuff:


Cover for 'Phoenix Feather' 
Phoenix Feather by my dear friend Angela Wallace (angelawallace.wordpress.com)


Classics:


The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

Nighttime reading:


101 Famous Poems (see “Why Busy People Need Poetry”) 
Whoops…suddenly I’m reading 7 books. And my “To Read” stack is still growing. 
Perhaps there’s balance to be found in this reading mania. There are so many great books to read, each equipped to meet different needs. Maybe the key is to limit the number of categories…and the number of books per category…and the number of times I say “yes” to a new book…
The challenge is to remain holistic without becoming overextended. Sounds a lot like my life. 
Imagine that.
What are you reading right now? Do you have a one-book-at-a-time policy?