Tora Estep
“Resisting Expansion”
Collage and acrylic on watercolor paper
Response

Re: Things Governing the Size of My Universe
By Shannon Brown
Inspiration piece

The lenses that I look through, that tell me what is possible and govern the extent of things that I’m able to do, come in two types, the physically possible filter and the emotionally possible filter.

The physically possible has to do with physical laws, the conventions that those of us who set up the rules of the planet agreed on. We agree that one can’t be in more than one place at a time, that time itself is perceived as moving in the same direction for everyone on the playing field, and so on. These rules apply to everyone who buys a ticket and steps onto the tilting, whirling planet. If it transgresses the laws of physics, you can’t do it. Pretty basic.

The second set of lenses is concerned with, within the grand scheme of physical potential, what I am emotionally capable of doing. If an action demands that I create conflict, or that I do something that might possibly make me a “bad person,” in the unfortunately broad and looming definition enshrined in my overgrown ethics center, the antilock brakes on the possibilities are activated faster than I can blink. That action then falls squarely into the realm of the utterly impossible. (Sometimes it’s so abrupt I could swear I feel the airbags deploying.)

You’d expect that the first one, the limits of physical reality, would be the filter that most resisted expansion, but oddly, this is not the case. It’s the stuff you can physically accomplish in the world that has been expanding in fits and starts ever since I wandered into a meditation class in 1985. I have seen and done things that I never could have imagined, and this is one of my greatest sources of joy. It is the second set of limits that make up the more daunting obstacle.

The irony is not lost on me that the emotional filters on the possible really ought to be the ones crumbling in the face of years of meditation and therapy. The only untried strategy I know of to overcome them is, rather than fueling them with my resistance, is to love them unconditionally. To treat them with gratitude and say, thank you, lenses, for the times that you saved me. It’s such a crazy idea… that it just might work.

I’ll let you know.

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Jonathan Ottke
BirdParenthesis
Ink on Paper
Response

The Garden
Kathleen Finn Jordan
Inspiration

At last we’re all back here again
The Wall encircling us safe
The birds, the rain, the flowers pose
As the artists look and wait
The brushes swish and the little paints try
To mimic our beauty and shape
Appreciation fills the air
All life is bubble and bait
The bait of breath and heart and love
The wall is warming and stonily speaks
And grays and blacks and pinks and yellows
Dance in sketchbooks these artists will keep
And so the ballet of season and hope
Begins again another year
And no matter what visits in our darkened winters
The sketchbooks have captured the beauty now here.

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No One Said a Pandemic Would Feel This Lonely
By Amy Souza
Inspiration piece

TV people on a TV blanket watch TV stars then break into song

Absence feels like weight

An email asks if you know the key to happiness

Shows two friends laughing

The internet says to make your own fun

“If you can’t be alone, you can’t be with others”

You tell the internet to fuck off

But then you’re bitter and dig aloneness a deeper trench

Next you step outside to sense the air

The sky feels real

But the rest, who knows?

Like a tree that falls when no one’s around, all’s a mystery

Maybe silent, maybe on fire

You wash your face before bed, that’s real

Feed and exercise the body

But you can’t crack the most important code

That should be part of you like stardust instructions

Days of isolation compress your chest like

An elephant or a thousand sandbags

Someone said most humans live shallow

What you think you see belies reality

Everyone feels starved

The thing is this poem might never end

Because the sun will rise and hide the night sky

But it’s still there and we all know it

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Talking to the Dead
By Amy Souza
Response

1. They don’t care about salmonberries or our fear of needles overcome. We hope they miss us but we don’t know. We only know life. Green grass and river flowing. We can’t know death until we get there and the dead won’t spill their secrets to help us plan. Keep their beauty in our mind’s eye, miss their purple wings. The way their face lit up when they saw us. If we talk now, we might find their voice strange or feel attacked by their demeanor. How calm and happy they sound without us. Will they pay us any notice? Or will we look through fogged glass at a party so exclusive we can only imagine the particulars. Reminded we’re alone, surrounded by chance and seeking pattern. We think a shimmering curtain means they’re close but what if they have their own agenda that doesn’t include us.

2. A shaman saw a woman standing by me, so connected she couldn’t let go, with pain the shaman said transferred through the veil. She had a round face, wore black. Your grandmother, said the shaman, and then told the woman to leave. Tu lembra de mim? Aprendi tua lingua para que possamos falar. I learned that desire for the other side goes both ways and maybe is a family trait.

3. This morning my husband sounds like a stranger at the end of a shaky phone line and I feel like I’m talking to someone beyond. Someone so gone they forgot I exist. He hasn’t thought about me in days, maybe months. Jumped into another life with the role of me recast but forgot to close the curtain on our life first. A cruel ending for you, he said. Sorry. Now a phrase I wrote keeps haunting me: All my homes are lost.

4. Rain last night. Misplaced my boots. Someone sent an email meant for a person who shares my name. I can’t stop thinking about the day I meant to call you but got busy and forgot. I planted peas but didn’t stake them. Their delicate tendrils crawl on dirt, desperate for each other. Sometimes I miss you so much my lungs stop working until that invisible force takes over and I gasp. So dramatic and ridiculous. Did you see? We forget it’s okay to love.

5. When I reach the beyond, can I return to haunt people I dislike? Or do the passed lose their rancor? I wonder if all this was worth it. If memory’s enough.

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Darice Jones
“Sharing This Space With You”
Graphic pixel play
Response

Reflections at the End of a School Year
By Sarah Pizer-Bush
Inspiration piece

We sit together and remember precious moments that were only ours. Some difficult – paralyzed, frozen – windows of tolerance exceeded. In these moments, we would find ourselves stuck in silence. I did not really know where you went, but tried to be patient and await your return. (I too have places I need to go to when life is too much, I understand intimately this skill of dissociation; I too found it at a young age.) Often to help you find your way back I would lay out blank paper and colored pencils so we could draw together. You never seemed afraid of a blank page. You came back to life through the soft scratching sounds, hints of movement, soft color emerging.

It has been years now that we have returned to sit face-to-face and make space for the feelings that are ready to emerge. Though you learned early that safety meant hiding your feelings, not making waves, today we openly process the grief of your departure and I marvel as tears wet your face.

***

As a child, I moved between worlds with apparent ease, presenting an easy smile and unquestionable adaptability. I learned early to live in some layers and dissociate from others. The grief of all I left behind (family, friends, culture, identity) found refuge somewhere in my body, unfelt and unprocessed. It waited.

I still remember this dream: R2D2 and C3PO stand calmly at the place where shore meets water at a liminal time, either dawn or dusk. The sea is unusually quiet and still. The sky is a deep blue. The scene seems almost contemplative. Then, without warning, the dream shifts to first-person perspective. I look up and a wave as a big as a tsunami is about to engulf me. I wake up gasping, frightened.

My grief stayed tucked away for a long time. It did not really hit me until my twenties. I had to drop out of college due to undiagnosed depression. For decades, I have worked through layers of grief, which have revealed not only pain but also wisdom, beauty, and strength – jewels that are uncovered when we sift through the spaces we have concealed.

***

Now I sit inside a little room, so small that it could be a walk in closet. I decorate my walls with posters and stickers that seek to give permission: A self-portrait of a student that says “pride”, a message tacked to my bulletin board: “your imperfections are perfect”, a sticker on my wall: “you are enough.” Students sit down and I invite them to share the thoughts and feelings that elsewhere have to hide.

“How are you?”

“Good.”

“And what does that mean today? “

Soft eyes looking with no particular response required. Silence offered. Space to breathe and feel and spill out or just slowly drip. Be here and unburden is the invitation. It is surprising how easily they share, so hungry for a space to be seen, so ready to sift through they layers of their lives. We just need to remember to ask.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Sarah Pizer-Bush
“Retreat”
Inspiration piece

Beyond Shapes Like Globes
By Darice Jones
Response

We sent our elder’s souls into the bodies of small furry animals as a way to observe the practices Planet 4488-10, with all it’s wisps of blue and white. It was one of the small round ones. The beings there seemed to have no awareness that not all planets were round, like theirs. In fact, they knew so little about the multiverse these days. They had taken a strange but sharp turn in a relatively short amount of time.

When they were all still on one land mass (the largest land mass on the planet, which they now call Africa), they worked together well. There was a commitment to the best idea rising, as there is still in the rest of the multiverse. During that long era, life was less about competing and more about learning, testing that learning, and creating new ways of being. It was about the growth of the whole, and no one dare put personal gain over that of the whole of humanity.

Then, when some of humanity moved to the colder parts of the planet and experienced scarcity, they created competition and survivalism. What was once acute, became chronic for those people – and they lost their connection to abundance – then to each other. They felt so unsafe in their cold environments, that fear became their driving emotion, even after there was nothing to be afraid of. They taught each other and their children that the world was a threat rather than a sustaining force. The best thing, they claimed, was to conquer and control all they could. They practiced conquering and controlling with a religious fervor. And had they continued in that fashion where they were, they would have died out within 3 generations. But, to the chagrin of all life on the planet, they came down from their northern home and brought their toxic practices to the planet in the most egregious of ways.

I’m Della. I am from a cube-shaped world that itself illuminates 10 galaxies. I am tall, brown, round, and both handsome and beautiful, depending on the light and how tall or short you, the viewer, happen to be.

Today, I am coming to pick up elder Nzemi who claims that all the elders should shed these animal bodies and return home now, because they have seen enough. He is waiting for me under a rather lush tree, so his spirit should be calm by the time I reach him. How shocked the humans would be if a quarter of their animal population vanished one day. Even more shocking would be the realization that those animals were not native to their planet at all, but they had been created on mine for the purpose of this long study.

Nzemi claimed that the humans were so addicted to the concept of inner conflict, that they refused to allow each other to grow past the stage of being when souls are stuck in existential angst. Some of them were so caught up that they spent their lives in active destruction, and an even weirder hoarding of simple resources. Even their most enlightened spent far too much energy on this idea of inner turmoil. They seemed completely unaware that angst was just one way of being, relatively early in an incarnation, and that it wasn’t supposed to last their whole lives. This addiction to drama, combined with a kind of collective agreement toward spiritual immaturity, Nzemi claimed, was reason enough to bring our elder beings back home to the cube and leave these babies to fend for themselves.

I had only been on the planet during these trips to retrieve one elder or another, but in my short time, I had sense a beauty and a potential that had the power to enhance the galaxies far and wide. Because of this, I disagreed with Nzemi. So, I did what we do on our planet when we see things differently, I wrapped my body around his in a deep embrace. This allowed him to see the colors that I saw every time I came to this planet. It allowed him to hear the music of it. It allowed him to sense the beauty as I had. Even in the body of the small Black furry animal he now inhabited, I could see his eyes shift to a softer state, feel his breath loosen as he let out a hot exhale.

He felt it, and he knew. It was not yet time to go.

Written by Darice M. Jones

In the year of Wangari Maathai ©2022

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Sarah Pizer-Bush
“Ritual”
Response

The New Elements Cloak
By Darice Jones
Inspiration piece

I kept bending.
You were on a bender
Drinking my light like it was Facundo Paraiso and coke
I mistook the drool, the lean, and the gaze
For feelings that could fuel

Really you were looking at a reel
From 1994 that your soul projected like a movie
Onto my chest
It was a horror film really
That you hadn’t found the stop button for
Pain in full color, dark room, surround sound ugliness

Your words were enticing
Your dance an invitation
Your eyes an illusion
Your presence a phantom always in motion

My words were enticing
My dance an invitation
My eyes a window
My presence empathic, at risk,
a danger to myself as I plugged into you

Almost crashing, after soaring past the cliff
changed me for good
It wasn’t just my injuries
It was realizing how tangled my thoughts could become with another’s
Like electrical cords plopped into the same box
Like vocals booming from 100 different speakers on that one main street in the East Bay
I could not tell my playlist apart, let alone my own voice
It took a while to remember the shades & dimensions of my own soul’s story

I had to create an entire new world, so that I could call out to myself
Then listen close for the echo of my voice in the near empty valley
See the reflected light on the glass that part of me held in my hand
Travel by any means across the terrain to finally find me
I wept and rejoiced all at once at the sight of myself

I thought I was lost

I thought I was lost

I folded the new world around both the seeker and the recovered
Water, and fire, and earth, and fresh air

And I vowed to stay with me whatever came next

By Darice M. Jones
Covered in ether, In the Year of Wangari Maathai ©2022

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Darice Jones
“My Echo”
Inspiration piece

Blues Diary 2022
By Sarah Pizer-Bush
Response

Spent winter months cloaked in blues again. So many feelings suppressed. Sediment. Layers of loneliness, grief, rage, and despair. Undergrowth covered by numbness, sacred sleep, and dissociative practices, with whispers of compassion earned over the years. Spent birthday crying again. Cycle settled in around Thanksgiving; stayed until Passover.

Like the tarot card where the person hangs upside down, time spent partly buried, often heavy and dense. During blues much goes underground. Humor, wisdom and joy float in severed spaces – uneasy and inaccessible. But, over the years, I have learned to break rules. Like these unspoken rules in too many settings:

1. We don’t talk about blues. Definitely not in personalized and specific detail. Because, stigma is still a thing and people get uncomfortable.

2. When someone asks how we are doing, we say, “Good.” Then they can respond, “Good,” and smile, and walk away bolstered by an easy exchange of pleasantries.

At work, someone asks me how I am one day, I say, “OK.” They say, “Just OK?” I say, “That was rounding up.”

During times cloaked in blues, resistance to social conventions is required. Saying no is necessary. Phone calls unreturned, texts unanswered. Connection is there, but at a distance. Grateful for friends and family who understand. Who have learned to stay, but not push. Grateful for a therapist who sees the whole and can be gentle and kind – inoculation against shame that sets in when one is not living life in ways valorized on commercials and social media.

The push for productivity and growth in this culture is relentless. If we are not doing, we are not worthy. During underground months, metaphors of seeds can be helpful. In nature, all states have worth, are part of the growth and transformation of life. A seed must spend so much time waiting for the right combination of air, moisture, and sun to erode the shell and help unfurl what is within.

During this time of little outer movement, we navigate unseen inner landscapes. Despite how it might seem, nothing is not happening. Seeking is occurring. Healing is happening. These times necessitate new words and symbols only partially shaped, more felt than spoken, to steer through spirals of inner fog.

When it is time to reemerge, the blooms come so quickly it is surprising. The narrow places stretch. Hues of hope heard in the song of birds or the timing of a podcast that gives voice and shape to a feeling brewing within. A bridge alights, as if out of nowhere, leading somewhere new.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Ushering the Moon Into the Lake
By Leslie Grollman
Response

A yellow comfy chair
from the Saturday Flea

perfect for teatime and tossing
seeds to the birds:…….gull…….duck…….sparrow

perfect for sneaking a smoke
and staring through sky—

Sometimes flashes of childhood
never wished for on a candle

Sometimes reels of running
under sprinklers, the giggles and shouts

to drown out the dinnertime silences
Sometimes nothing until the nothing

gets lonely

…………………………..gets hungry

like the birds:…….heron…….egret…….swallow
knew if they performed for the summertime
regulars, there would be treats

Before the Wave comes
our summers— the kids the fathers the mothers

their fathers their mothers going back
so far we couldn’t keep track

of the seed we all brought
to the Lake

for the birds:…….pelican…….eagle…….goose
and the water

And the water
It is coming

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Madona Tyler LeBlanc
“Vote. Fight.”
Collage and watercolor
Inspiration Piece

Ideate
By KJ Hannah Greenberg
Response

In circumambulating ideas, folks tend toward imagining, actually conceiving

Bits and bobs that cleek outliers such that that some sodden, eager snatchers

Ratify otherwise unheard of duties.

While the ethical dimension of human rights has curried attention, more recently,

Little discussion has ensued per means to parsimoniously grapple with unwanted,

Prejudicial legislation.

Most semantic screening challenges no epistemologies, instead, historicity seeps,

Sloughs, otherwise overflows as a result of false freedoms. The majority of folks

Don’t grasp human behavior.

So, constitutional amendments notwithstanding, basic truths capable of impacting

Identities, ideologies & our power of invention remain phantasms, never verities.

Absolutism still stifles pluralism.

There’s no utility in avoiding referential problems inherent in cognitive practices’

Particulars, in skipping support for actions, or in embracing exclusive “universals.”

Objectivity will forever rot.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.