Wednesday 10 February 2010

Longing: love and sorrow mix't


This chapbook, available through Rubicon Press, includes four long poems that I wrote between 1998 and 2008. The shortest of the long is a meditation on my relationship with my father, who passed into the spirit world this past December. The idea for the chapbook was sparked in my mind while reading through Aaron Paquette's Journal, and he very generously agreed to allow the use of his strong image, "Drumbeat," on the chapbook cover, and his own related thoughts within the pages of the small book.

Each of the poems is a meditation on matters of safety, and the heart, and these things come to mind over and over again. How do we, as warriors, have the safety and freedom that we need, to express who we are from the deepest levels, and to welcome others in who are relating from their own deepest levels of being? My fourth child was nearing school age before I realized that his tantrums were the same as those I'd witnessed my father having, through all my early years, and that I myself was prone to in those early years of parenting. How do we accept the pressures, snubs, insults of the world, and disperse them rather than carry them, so that we can step lightly through the days of our lives? How do we mend ourselves from the blueprints that we received from our parents? How do we engage with others who are expressing historical rage or grief in the here and now, without seeking to silence or moving into combat mode?

The answers to those questions are myriad, a thousandfold. The important thing is, to allow the energy to flow, to avoid stagnation, to lend strength to weakness and to receive expressions of pain with exquisite tenderness. To allow for and to embrace the multiplicity of truth.

I am grateful for my friendships, and glad that I hung around all these years, to see what would happen next: we all have our fragile moments, and we continue to live and to learn, from the young as well as from our elders, and from our colleagues and fellow travellers of every description.

all best,
Joanne