Motivation

Mary Oliver, one of our past poet laureates, writes, “Poetry is prayer, it is passion and music, it is beauty, comfort, it is agitation, declaration, it is thanksgiving…Often poetry is the gate to a new life…It brings new thoughts or welcome remembrance of old ones. It offers simple pleasure, complicated joy, and even, at times, healing.”

Motivation

From the Poetry Out Loud website:

The National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation have partnered with U.S. state arts agencies to support Poetry Out Loud, a contest that encourages the nation's youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and recitation. This program helps students master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about their literary heritage.


Please take a moment to watch this video: Poetry Out Loud : What is Poetry?

Motivation

After an Illness, walking the dog
By Jane Kenyon



Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.

When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
The he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and Goldenrod bend low.

The top of the logging road stands open
and light. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.

Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.

A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until we’re nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist—
imagines to the end that he is free.

Motivation

Tishani Doshi reads Lesson in Stillness

Motivation: Spoken Word

Mayda Del Valle at the White House

"We are all truly miraculous."

Motivation : Passion

Does poetry even matter? Is it at all revelvant in our world today?

I guess you have to then ask the bigger questions. Is art important? Is self-expression necessary?

For me poetry is passion. It is a way for me to connect in a meaningful way to myself and my surroundings. It is a way to process, to experience and to share.

If you can recite a song, can name a photograph, painting , sculpture, quote a book or phrase then you have connected to another person's passion. If you have written a letter, a wedding toast, a eulogy, made up a song to rock your baby to then you are a poet. If you have said a prayer, chanted a meditation, hummed to the whistle of the wind then the passion of poetry is inside you.

Here is Kim Rosen at TedX talking about how poetry is our first language. Enjoy, go forth and be passionate.

Motivation

Motivation

 Today I am fighting one of those colds that makes every thing foggy and distant. If there is any clarity for me then it is this poem by Rumi.

A Voice Through the Door
Rumi


Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you,
as fish out of water hear the waves,
or a hunting falcon hears the drum’s “Come back. Come back.”
This turning toward what you deeply love saves you.
Children fill their shirts with rocks and carry them around.
We are not children anymore.
Read the book of your life, which has been given you.
A voice comes to your soul saying,
Lift your foot. Cross over.
Move into the emptiness of question and answer and question.

Motivation

In order to have a writing practice, you have to practice. Time your writing. Sit down and write for 3 minutes with no strings attached. So don't think about the novel, story or poem you've been working on, just write. You might surprise yourself!

Below is a timed writing I did for 6 minutes. I wrote for the first four and then for the last 2 minutes I took a turn writing from the opposite perspective. The prompt I chose was beginnings.

A beginning is also an ending that breaks when it rains instead of snows

and there are puddles in place of snowbanks.

Spring beginning and winter ending.

How difficult is it to picture the beginning of spring

when you are skiing through the woods and

the snow sparkle is blinding?

But yet you know it's there.

Is it even possible to imagine the difference in smell?

How the smell of the winter woods is cold and crisp

and the dank dampness of spring has yet to exist at all

and the bird sounds have become few and muted.

Nonetheless spring is there below the snow beyond your comprehension. 

And why is it we harken and haten then edning of one to begin another?

The accolades of a winter storm seem 

distant when we are barefoot on the hot summer sand.

Endings are beginnings with an end in sight

plans made for a begiing like the third trimester 

when it is time to ready the nursery and

when it is time for birth

it is time for death

Death ends and then begins anew.

What is this life but endings where I can begin.

Motivation

Opportunity 

By Robert Winner

Opportunity I love you

Windows and watermelons march down the street

The air is nobody

Sky is in position

I am ready to endure my freedom

A riderless horse on a saffron plain

A lake that spins

A tree that lets the wind decide

Robert Winner, "Opportunity" from The Sanity of Earth and Grass, published by Tilbury House. Copyright © 1994

Motivation: Being Open

Last week my husband and I went to an open mic called OutLoud at the Joy Center. Basically people come together to share stories, songs and poetry. I was really nervous about sharing my poems. But hearing the other's stories I knew that I was in the right place.

So I shared.

And at the end of the night as everyone was bundling up to go home, a woman approached me and explained that she was the editor of a local magazine called Health & Happiness  that promotes well-being. She gave me her card and asked if I'd be willing to send her one of the poems I read. Without even thinking I replied, Of course.

The thing is that 6 years ago if she had asked me the same question I probably would have thanked her and declined. I was so caught in where to be published and how to be published that I would have turned up my nose.

Boy, have I learned a lot in a few years.

Humility.
Gratefulness.
Openness.

It's not about accolades or prestige or the publishing game for me any more. Right now it's about opening myself up to what the world has to offer. And getting the chance to share my true love of writing poetry seems like a pretty good deal!

Motivation

The Promise

By Jane Hirshfield

 

Stay, I said

to the cut flowers.

They bowed

their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,

who fled.

Stay, leaf.

It reddened,

embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.

It sat as a dog does,

obedient for a moment,

soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth

of riverine valley meadows,

of fossiled escarpments,

of limestone and sandstone.

It looked back

with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.

Each answered,

Always.

"The Promise " from Come, Thief. Copyright © 2011 by Jane Hirshfield

Motivation

Acceptance!

Please join me on this Monday in doing the happy acceptance dance.

After years of submitting poetry, my first poem has been accepted by a literary magazine.

The success is that much more sweet because I am sharing the honor with my husband, Tim. You see the poem that was accepted is a collaborative piece written by Tim and I.

We have been both submitting poetry for awhile and have always joked about how the other might take it when the first acceptance letter came.

So now we share the victory in our 12th year of marriage! Cheers, love!

Motivation

Rejection can be a great motivator. My favorite kind of rejection is the kind that comes in a form letter with a little something tacked on at the end.

Most recently I received this one.

Dear Regina,
Thanks for submitting your poems —we greatly appreciated the chance to read them. However, after careful consideration, we don't feel they are a fit for us. 

[Here is where I almost hit the delete button until I glance at the following line]

We really did like your style, though, and we hope you'll submit to us again in the future.

[This is when I get motivated and start looking through all of my work to find the next poems to submit]


Maybe the next time I hear from this publication it maybe an acceptance. And even if it's not I know I can turn rejection into motivation.

Staying Motivated

Some days you'd rather pull the covers up over your head and go back to bed. I am having one of those kind on Mondays. So how do you stay motivated? I'm going to read some poetry and try to start this week anew.

Why I Wake Early
by Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and crotchety–
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light–
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

Motivation

For those of us feeling a little foggy on this Monday. Here is a quality we could all use.

Clarity from Book of Qualities by Ruth Gendler

Clarity

My visits to Clarity are soothing now. He never tells me what to think or feel or do, but shows me how to find out what I need to know. It was not always like this.  I used to visit other people who visited him.  Finally, I summoned the courage to call on him myself.  I still remember the first time I went to see him.  Was I surprised.  He lives on a hill in a little house surrounded by wild roses.  I went in the living room and sat down in a comfortable chair by the fireplace.  There were topographical maps on the walls, and the room was full of stuff, musical instruments and telescopes and globes, geodes and crystals and old Italian tarot decks and two small cats.  When I left, he presented me with a sketchbook and told me to draw the same thing everyday until the drawing started to speak to me. 

Motivation

Overcoming adversity, moving beyond obstacles and the hero's journey all describe a man I admire and adore, my husband, Tim.

Today for motivation I am sharing his latest column about dealing with anger through poetry that appeared in the Grand Rapids Press.

Our daughter, Eliza

This is the first part of “Anger. Joy. Forgiveness,” a three-part series that offers a very personal account of the emotional experience of raising my three children, two of whom have disabilities.

In 2010, the youngest of my three daughters, Eliza, suffered a traumatic brain injury due to a medical error.
Up until that point, I was already the father of two children, Gwen, who had cerebral palsy due to difficulties of a twin pregnancy and Violet, a rambunctious toddler.
Eliza was diagnosed with cerebral palsy by the time she was 1 year old. This event not only was one of the toughest tests I’ve faced in my life, but it was also an opportunity for me to learn the tools for navigating life.
As I began caring for my three daughters in a full-time capacity, my life changed in so many ways. I left my job of nine years - a job I loved. I started going to see a psychologist to help me cope (something I wish I could continue). I began a mediation practice to help me steer through the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
I also sought the help of a poetry therapist. I began reading, writing and reciting poems as way to reconnect with the world. It was important for me to understand the emotions of others who had suffered, albeit differently than I did.
In my healing I began to understand the importance of experiencing and expressing all of my emotions regarding my daughter, Eliza. It took me three years to write about my anger of the event, in the poem that follows:

After the Pyre (named after an original poem by Li-Young-Le)

It turns out, what keeps you alive as a parent at mid-life
following your child from Isolette caves to surgery rooms to a household at war with a hospital and any other parent who looks like you,

what allows you to pass through scratched-out,
yellow-bricked halls, through stations of nurses
smiling about the merits of a new children’s hospital,
15 floors, brick-by-brick of better medicine by better technology,
and doctors thinking they’re contenders for Sainthood, and
will tell it to your face, coup d'etat to all of the other medical facilities in town, brand-new mothers going home with their children, and pigeons on the burned-out helipad, fire-retardant dried on the windows of the seventh floor where it all came crashing down, the overdosed kid with a tracheostomy that can’t be reversed, the doctor who turned a valve the wrong way causing brain-damage - the child who’s a perfect sister for her siblings - to devastated parents in the cancer ward next door, knowing medicine couldn’t douse the pyre before it's updraft took their children, a stuffed penguin left behind,

what keeps your children safe even among the others, some like them, some more like you, some numb, some crippled by pain, some barely alive, some always smiling, some never saying a word,

tricks you learned to become impervious,
knowledge-keeping you perfected, playing nurse, playing
doctor, playing devil’s advocate, stupid, weak, strong,
playing communications expert, playing student, playing poor-little child, playing Dutch-reformed, playing Methodist, playing caregiver, in love, parent-of-the-year, playing crazy, healthy, blessed, immoral,

playing terrified, playing fearless, happy, sad, sleep-deprived,
over-caffeinated, puzzled, playing interested,
playing bored, playing unfair, playing post-traumatic stress disorder
playing "I'm just so blessed with this life," it turns out,

. . .

now that you're older
nearing the beginning of a different life,
what kept you alive
all that time kept you from living.

After writing this poem, I was able to process that difficult time of carrying anger inside me. While I still have emotional moments, writing down exactly how I felt helped embrace anger instead of living with it negatively each and every day.

Motivation

Think Like a Tree

by Karen I. Shragg

Soak up the sun
Affirm life’s magic
Be graceful in the wind
Stand tall after a storm
Feel refreshed after it rains
Grow strong without notice
Be prepared for each season
Provide shelter to strangers
Hang tough through a cold spell
Emerge renewed at the first signs of spring
Stay deeply rooted while reaching for the sky
Be still long enough to
hear your own leaves rustling.

Motivation

 

 

"Through the empty branches

the sky remains.

It is what you have.

Be earth now, and evensong.

Be the ground lying under that sky."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Motivation

To the Light of September

By W. S. Merwin

 

When you are already here

you appear to be only

a name that tells of you

whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though

you are still summer

still the high familiar

endless summer

yet with a glint

of bronze in the chill mornings

and the late yellow petals

of the mullein fluttering

on the stalks that lean

over their broken

shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know

that you have come

the seed heads of the sage

the whispering birds

with nowhere to hide you

to keep you for later

you

who fly with them

you who are neither

before nor after

you who arrive

with blue plums

that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

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Source: Poetry (September 2003).