The prosperity of time.
In today's Joy Work lesson we will listen to three poems and write in response to each.
You may remember Anne Sexton featuring in a poem from a few lessons back.
Well she's back in this one called Time Like the Calendar.
Time like the herb.
Time time.
It's time said Anne Sexton hurrying to what I would find 30 years later in an archive that her husband beat her and she was too early for me too and anyway in that long-legged way of hers she stole the clock and beat him back.
It's complicated there is no timer on this.
I'm late said the rabbit as Alice took him down the rabbit hole named for his being and there was no very important date for it is always now and when the Queen says off with your head we still have time because we are being and not yet dead.
There is no alarm it is a matter of waking up.
There's time I said to my daughter and she was little and her hands smelled like lemons as I taught her to rub the leaves from the roots to the stem.
Even then she was beautiful and everything was possible as we navigated waters of when.
It's happening.
There are arms on a clock and arms on our bodies for a reason and we break through the thinking to the feeling when when when when when.
Turn to your journal and write for two minutes.
It is time for me to.
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Stepping down the steps into the shaded yard,
Thinking there are yellow roses near the fence,
I stop halfway with this.
They are fading leaves.
Already.
Maybe from the heat.
But then,
The breeze surrounds me both west and east,
And a cardinal waits in the tulip poplar nearby,
Chirps his Thanksgiving song for what I've given.
And I think of all the mornings I didn't come this far into the grass.
Stayed on the path.
Let the routine take over.
And this is how leaves suddenly can turn gold and crimson from mint and clover.
And just like that,
It will all be over.
And faster than we want to admit or tell ourselves we know.
Our paths and our routines,
Maybe even the way we say the seasons are the same.
We are part of it.
Right for two minutes.
I am facing the fact that.
.
.
Okay.
I see trees of green,
Red roses too.
I see them bloom,
Forming you.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.
In our last poem for today we reflect on the longer aspects of time in history and eternity and the legacies we are creating each moment of our lives.
Pisces,
Crises.
Pisces is the sign of poetry and I am up again at 3.
30 and this time has haunted me since childhood in Minnesota villages with witches.
Now,
The moon is watching me in public as I sit with coffee on the porch front this time shedding shame and drinking coffee from her cup.
But I almost once threw up in a meeting,
Led by a famous psychiatry professor.
When I presented my research on poetry and trauma,
And he said it didn't exist.
It is only narrative,
He said,
Only story that can be taken as evidence and eyes bowed down to him around the seminar table.
And I had no witness.
Once again.
So,
What happens during Pisces C.
Is that the mind goes offline and heart takes over gathers ingredients from dream and body to help remember.
In this world of human that we survived.
They didn't want to see this 20 years ago and barely want to read about it now.
But constitutional crises bring it out.
I have learned to anticipate the signs and avert the hidden danger headed down the pike by waking up and watching words make ways across my page.
So take my advice and do not wait for it to be all over.
Because then it is too late.
And one crisis will only lead to another.
Because this is how it always happens.
Do something now with all that mindfulness you've learned.
And be here in the present.
Saying,
Doing,
Feeling,
Being what is true.
As the moon is always teaching us to do.
Turn to your journal.
And write for two minutes.
My truth is.
Alright.
I see trees of green,
Red roses too.
I see them bloom,
Fall in you.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.
May you feel the prosperity of time.
