O Holy One, I ran through the fields and gathered flowers of a thousand colors — And now I pour them out at Your feet. Their beauty and their brightness shout for joy at Your Presence. You created the flowers of the fields and made each one far more lovely that all the skill [any person] could design. Accept my joy alone with theirs, this field of blossoms at Your feet. Holy One, as the wind blows through these flowers till they dance in the ecstasy of creation, send Your Spirit to blow through my being till I too, bloom and dance with the fullness of Your life. —Ishpriya R.S.C.J.
(Gwyllm Llwydd – “Black Mandala” – 2013
Pen & Ink (reversal in photoshop) This is a return to the basic work of pointillism combined with mandalas that I have done most my life. The return to form was inspired by contemplation of the lotus of the heart, ever opening ever dilating with love expressed through consciousness. It is dedicated to my sister Rebecca, who embodied such a sense of grace in her shining moments.
~~
With updating the site, and un-updating it, to repairs and then other events, this post is far to long in coming. This may be perhaps the last post of Turfing in this manner, good changes are planned! We hope to update the site this week into its newest mutation.
Thanks for sticking with us! Thanks to all,
Gwyllm
~~~~~~~~
Shooting Star:
As some of you may know, I lost my sister Rebecca a couple of weeks ago. We shared similar paths for many years, and shared adventures and friends. She was a few years older than me, and recently had lived in Portland. She died from septic shock, a complication of pneumonia, and the other problems that had accumulated for her.
She was a genuinely nice person, kind and generous. She was an adventurer, and very talented. She didn’t understand her impact on others, from the emails and notices on Facebook she touched and gave so much to so many people.
From her dance & theatre work, to her teaching of women’s studies in eastern Europe she affected change where ever she went. There is a memorial planned for her around the time of her birthday in June to allow friends & students from Europe, across the US and Asia to attend. It should be quite the event!
I wake up each morning with a sense of loss. I know others have experienced this, throughout time. I am thankful for the time we had together, and I ponder what could of been. This is of course the way of it all. She was the first person in our family to hold Rowan after Mary & I. She blessed him, and welcomed him. She will be missed terribly.
She was here, and now she is gone like, a shooting star.
-G
~~
To all that is brief and fragile superficial, unstable,
To all that lacks foundation argument or principles;
To all that is light,
fleeting, changing, finite
To smoke spirals,
wand roses,
To sea foam and mists of oblivion…
To all that is light in weight for itinerants on this transient earth
Somber, raving
with transitory words
and vaporous bubbly wines
I toast in breakable glasses.
—Maria Eugenia Baz Ferreira
~~~~~~
Harold Budd / Akira Rabelais: As Long as I Can Hold my Breath (by Night)
~~~~~~
Poems: Theodore Roethke
I Thirst By Day
I thirst by day. I watch by night.
I receive! I have been received!
I hear the flowers drinking in their light,
I have taken counsel of the crab and the sea-urchin,
I recall the falling of small waters,
The stream slipping beneath the mossy logs,
Winding down to the stretch of irregular sand,
The great logs piled like match sticks.
I am most immoderately married:
The Lord God has taken my heaviness away:
I have merged, like the bird, with the bright air,
And my thought flies to the place by the bo-tree.
Being, not doing, is my first job.
~~
Elegy For Jane
My student, thrown by a horse)
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her.
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover
~~
Night Journey
Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.
~~
In A Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
~~~~~~
We are here, then we are gone.
