Tag Archives: mindfulness

Love After Love

Posted on July 16, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Derek Walcott wrote this wonderful poem about celebrating life. He suggested we greet ourselves offering hospitality as we realize that we let other things take the place of getting to know the person who was us.

The poem describes a wonderful (wonder filled) companionship in the second stanza. Companionship is sharing meals as we sojourn. Journey is the daily, perhaps moment-to-moment work we do while sojourning. Jacques Derrida drew on an Algerian-French-Jewish background in writing about greeting the stranger, but I don’t know if he meant ourselves.

I considered this today as I prepared a presentation. The world speaks to us and we speak to it, but are we listening as the conversation unfolds? It is in listening to our self that we make sense of the world and it in turn makes sense of us.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

14 Comments

Posted in Community, Leadership, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged community, creativity, Derek Walcott, eloquent questions, hospitality, Jacques Derrida, Love After Love, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, poetry, spirituality, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

The Guest House

Posted on July 12, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Rumi wrote this beautiful poem 800 years ago. The message rings true today although we might resist it at times. Perhaps, in busyness and haste, we avoid the messages received in the guest house that our being and becoming entails. When we slow down encountering each guest as a transient event moving on, we learn lessons learned readily and easily.

In sabbath moments, whether a few minutes, hours, or days, we welcome these unexpected visitors. We recognize they will leave and, in treating them honourably, they may move along quickly allowing delight to return.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

26 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments, Sabbath and tagged creativity, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, poetry, Rumi, sabbath, spirituality, teacher as transformer, The Guest House. Bookmark the permalink.

This Is the Dream

Posted on July 11, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

One morning we will quietly drift into a harbor we did not know was there. Olav Haugue’s closing line is brilliant. We find the dream and its source in quietness. Without patience and a willingness to endure the difficulties which ultimately arise, the dream cannot be revealed.

I think the dream is not something we know in advance. When the dream appears, we know intuitively this is what we were waiting for and it speaks to us. The questions we carry open up the time, the heart, and the doors.

It’s the dream we carry

that something wondrous will happen

that it must happen

time will open

hearts will open

doors will open

spring will gush forth from the ground–

that the dream itself will open

that one morning we’ll quietly drift

into a harbor we didn’t know was there.

26 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, eloquent questions, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, Olav Haugue, poetry, spirituality, teacher as transformer, This is the Dream. Bookmark the permalink.

The Bright Field

Posted on July 8, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

About a year ago, Kathy and I picked up her mom about an hour away from where we live and drove her to the hospital for tests. She is non-verbal, but it does not mean she does not communicate. It was early morning and the sun lit up fields of freshly cut hay in furrows and bales.

Despite the early hour, about 6:00 AM, the scene was spectacular. Suddenly, I sensed movement beside me and turned to see Kathy’s mom waving her arm, smiling, and trying to form words. I think the treasures of those bright fields lit up the day for her filling her with rich memories reminding her of early mornings on the farm.

R. S. Thomas reminds us we live in each moment, not in dim futures and idealized pasts. There is brightness in moments when we realize that even when something cannot be spoken and words fail us, its essence is communicated and shines like a sun illuminating each field we pas in life.

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

22 Comments

Posted in Community, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged community, conversational journey, creativity, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, poetry, R. S. Thomas, teacher as transformer, The Bright Field. Bookmark the permalink.

Good Night

Posted on July 6, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

I was not in the US for the first time in several years for July 4. Yesterday, I recalled how it was unusual and refreshing to greeted with “Happy 4th” when I would meet people and go into various businesses in Spokane. For one day, I found differences seemed to be set aside and there was a celebratory feel in the air.

Carl Sandburg suggested there are many ways to say good night. As I enter my week-end Sabbath, the July 4 weekend ends. The word spell has several meanings. We can think spelling words in a living and celebratory story and we can think of it as a magical feeling experienced in living life with the fullest awareness possible.

Many ways to say good night.

Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July
spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.
They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.
Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blue
and then go out.

Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack mushrooming a white pillar.

Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields to razorback hill.

It is easy to spell good night.
Many ways to spell good night.

6 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments, Sabbath and tagged Carl Sandburg, community, creativity, Fourth of July, Good Night, July 4, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, poetry. Bookmark the permalink.

Travelling at Home

Posted on July 4, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Wendell Berry is one of my favourite writers. He writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. There is an honesty and sparseness in his writing that speaks to me deeply. He bares his soul in ways that poets should. Even in the country we know by heart it is hard to go the same way twice. It is more likely impossible, but I would give Mr. Berry the benefit of the doubt and believe that is likely what he meant as he suggests we attempt to make intent with what happens by accident.

I chose the forming of the person, more specifically the teacher, as a central theme in my dissertation. Actually, the theme chose me. It was unintentional and strictly by accident. As I read and write, I find myself drawn to the topic and new thinking emerging where any word can be the bud of new direction.

Judith Butler suggests becoming is the vehicle forming each particular identity and subjectivity against a cultural backdrop which is always changing itself. Even when we name something, it is traversing the land. We can never plan our becoming even in a country we think we know by heart.

Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make it a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

12 Comments

Posted in Community, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged community, creativity, Judith Butler, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, poetry, teacher as transformer, Travelling at Home, Wendell Berry. Bookmark the permalink.

Radishes

Posted on July 2, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

As we get older, what seemed mundane and work-like in youth holds different meaning for us. I think of this as maturing. My mother told us to go get radishes out of the garden and a variety of other vegetables such as carrots, peas, beans, etc.

What seemed unimportant and even beneath the ordinary gains fresh meaning. It is not only the vegetables, fruits, and flowers that were fresh. Their meaning becomes fresh. Sometimes, the chores were precursors to something more enjoyable. After shelling peas, we biked to the Peace River and rode down hill at break-neck speed.

Susan Auld’s poem brought up the memories of living at a time where box stores were not just a short ride away in the car. We depended on the produce picked from the garden, fresh eggs from a local farmer, and sometimes fresh poultry raised in a makeshift coop in the backyard. We enjoyed Nature’s abundance and freshness. Today, the memories are fresh as they take on new meaning.

Pull up some radishes for dinner, my mother said.

They grow next to the house under your bedroom window.

Afraid I’d pull up something other than a radish

I enlisted a sister, a brother

and we knelt in the dirt

under the screened window

looking

at what we thought

to be a radish.

Its leaves so new so green

our hands so hesitant so unsure

we reached and pulled—

Earth clung

to our fingers

to the fleshy roots

quivering in the summer sun

we pulled up radish after radish for dinner

handing them, a bouquet, to our mother.

She no longer cares for radishes.

My sister, brother and I tend our own gardens.

But, I wish everyday

to kneel again

under that window

feeling new and green

hesitant and unsure.

23 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged creativity, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, poetry, Radishes, Susan Auld, teacher as transformer. Bookmark the permalink.

Words

Posted on June 29, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

I read Emmanuel Levinas today. He suggested we experience phenomena in sensual immediacy. There is no recapturing the full essence in words. Humans are blessed with words which transform what we experience into something less or something other than its essence.

I attended a meeting the other night and another person commented when we name something it creates a permanency and assumes characteristics according to categories. In a way, the experience become inert.

Dana Gioia points out words’ shortcomings. This is not positive or negative, but is about awareness. When entering into each moment, it is important to fully experience that very moment which is indescribable. The world is filled with wonder and is thus wonderful. We recall that nature, living and non-living, needs no verbal praise. Our relationships and living in the world we co-inhabit are praise the praise. We need not summon airy words, but can sink into the living world’s sensuality. Sabbath provides opportunities for silence, deeper exploring, and the praise we offer without words.

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

30 Comments

Posted in Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments, Sabbath and tagged creativity, Dana Gioia, Emmanuel Levinas, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, poetry, teacher as transformer, Words. Bookmark the permalink.

Monarch

Posted on June 26, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

The universe we live in is magical. As Tere Sievers pointed out, nature arranges itself with slight of hand. A caterpillar slowly becomes a monarch butterfly. The caterpillar transforms from something we usually pay little attention to. In fact, we often see it as something that strips the last green leaf, but somehow nature keeps in balance in the caterpillar`s metamorphosis.

The striped suit fat worm takes a two-week nap and emerges bedecked in the ballroom gown of the monarch butterfly ready to begin its dance. When we take time and are mindful of the relationships that exist in nature, even those we do not sense immediately, there is something sacred in that process. Humans join in those relationships even when we do not see them. There is a co-dependency shared, yet not fully sensed. We live in community and communicate with all nature’s phenomena.

Black antennas twitch

as the caterpillar

strips the last green leaf

from the naked milkweed.

Striped flesh shed,

the green skin below

becomes a jade pendant

rimmed with gold,

hung by a black thread.

Nature, that green magician,

arranges a slight of hand.

The fat worm in a striped suit

slides into its chrysalis

naps for a fortnight

wakes,

draped in orange,

ready to dance.

13 Comments

Posted in Community, Mindful Life, Poetry, Reflective Moments and tagged community, creativity, Mindful Practice, mindfulness, Monarch, nature, poetry, teacher as transformer, Tere Sievers. Bookmark the permalink.

Atavism

Posted on June 25, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

I missed posting Saturday. I went to Calgary for the weekend and left my laptop at home.It was a busy weekend and trying to post under the conditions that existed would have added to the busyness. In a sense, I had a two-day sabbath with time away from the computer.

In retrospect, this poem is about looking for home during sabbath time. It is a place where I am with my self, people I am close to, and things that are important in life. It is a journey back to my roots looking for my whoness and whatness that makes me who and what I am.

On the weekend, people talked about the why and how of life a lot. I consider the why circular suggesting there is an answer to questions about who and what we are. How is a question about constructing something and does not speak to how we are always being and becoming. It is in quiet moments even when we wander, retreat, and get lost that we tap into our essence which is our isness, our whoness and whatness. William Stafford wrote elsewhere about just standing still and listening which is what we have to do to find ourselves.

Sometimes in the open you look up
where birds go by, or just nothing,
and wait. A dim feeling comes
you were like this once, there was air,
and quiet; it was by a lake, or
maybe a river you were alert
as an otter and were suddenly born
like the evening star into wide
still worlds like this one you have found
again, for a moment, in the open.

Something is being told in the woods: aisles of
shadow lead away; a branch waves;
a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its
path. A withheld presence almost
speaks, but then retreats, rustles
a patch of brush. You can feel
the centuries ripple generations
of wandering, discovering, being lost
and found, eating, dying, being born.
A walk through the forest strokes your fur,
the fur you no longer have. And your gaze
down a forest aisle is a strange, long
plunge, dark eyes looking for home.
For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers
wider than your mind, away out over everything.