Kundalini Splendor

Lisel Mueller––A Bulwark Against Barbarism

She was above all 
elegant, precise.
She was the observer
who saw what the others missed,
or forgot,
or felt was of no importance.

Hers was the subtle voice,
the delicate perception,
the angle that many
ignored.

Though her sensibility was honed
in the furnace of twentieth century
violence, her poems
focused on the personal
insight, the close perception,
the undeniable revelation,
a painting with significant
undertones,
the music with evident nuance.

She avoided certain controversial
positions––feminism, patriarchal deficiencies,
the egregious tactics of certain males––
and thus became a darling 
of male judges, critics, editors.

Still, her work was worthy
of the highest acclaim,
a model for the less famous,
a standard for the rest.
She took us where we had not been,
delivered us into unexplored territory,
made us feel wiser, more knowing,
more human.

Dorothy Walters
February 28

The Follower

I gave up wife and child
to come to this place.

Now I sit here
with a straight back
and a loin cloth
as I say my mantras,
even the ones
I composed,
that just came.

A bit of rice
now and then for food,
recitation of sacred passages
for the master to hear.

Long walks
by the river,
the ground
to sleep on.

He tells me
that such austerities
will purify the soul,
bring the spirit
to enlightenment and joy.

Sometimes when I
am sitting
under the stars,
 their radiance
warms my heart,
and I feel something strange
open in my chest,
as if I were being kissed
by an unknown love.

I wait to see,
do not tell him.
He knows the way.
I must listen in silence
as he gives me more repetitions
and twisted moves,
more cold nights,
till I reach my goal.

Dorothy Walters
February 20, 2020

The Stranger

Something has carried me
into a new place,
a country where
I have not been before,
a language
I do not know.

This dervish on the screen
now turning in my heart,
spinning me
into newness.

This music from
an unnamed source,
its drumbeat of
unity and love.

These leaves trembling
on the tree nearby––
now they are me,
now they have invaded
and overthrown
what I thought I was,
boundaries dissolved,
cells all given way,
faded into
this familiar stranger
I have become.

Dorothy Walters
January 19, 2020

A Flower

(for Rumy)

What shall I do?
I am become this flower,
this scent, this other
of who I am.

Sweetness flows from head
to foot,
a gentle stream of forgetting,
of becoming only this,
this fragrant reality,
this is of what is,
what I am,
what I am going to become,
this irrefutable evidence
of All.

Dorothy Walters
February 18, 2020

(Today I was still in an altered state from the excitement of the magical afternoon on Sunday.  Then, this flower caught my attention and as I held it near to enjoy its sensuous odor, I felt gentle but very real flows of shakti.  So this was my morning practice, as I moved my hands near but not touching my various chakras.  An hour later I stopped to smell it once more, and the odor was gone from it and also the remaining blooms in the vase from which it had come.   This transitory experience was like a brief visitation from the goddess, who is indeed Kundalini.)

Amazing Day

Yesterday was special.  A friend of mine set up a performance of music and poetry in a nearby city and it was a smashing success.  We had some very good local poets, music (flute and harp) from Val the organizer and harpist, and poetry from both Val and me.

Seventy people came––an amazing turnout for a poetry reading (often you get 10-15 for these.)  Every one seemed to love it and some even cried during the reading of sacred poems.

I am still vibrating from all the excitement.

I think it is events like these that remind us that we ourselves are in fact talented and creative and such community gatherings can help us survive during these difficult times.

Blessings to all,

Dorothy

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY

Penny Evans

Love wears red tights, of course, and a long loose top so she can dance easily.  She rides a bicycle decorated with bells and flowers and carries chocolates in a big canvas bag which she hands out liberally.  Contrary to popular opinion, she does not own a bow and knows nothing of archery.  She also shares poems everywhere she goes. She’s a Quaker and loves silence but also is known to use curse words now and again when things don’t work out.     She doesn’t wear make-up.  She seems to cause people to fall and she has unusual disguises.  She likes to sneak up on YOU.  Sometimes people mistake others for her.  She has imposters.  Watch out for them!  They usually seem too good to be true – and often are.  When she’s done her work, she leaves you alone to figure out the hard stuff.  Because she’s real, she does have some warts, scars and occasional bad breath.  You have to take the whole package.  She can break your heart – but, that too can be a sort of gift sometimes.  She likes it if you prepare the way for her;  sweep the path,   expect her to arrive.  Be home.  And, if she came into your life long ago and you’ve begun to take her for granted – dust her off – buy her some flowers – ask her to dance.

Garrison Keilor

An old man’s Sunday morning annotated

“Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet!” said the prophet Isaiah, which we read in church on Sunday, but nobody shouted. We are flatlanders, brought up to be still and behave ourselves and listen to instructions, but if the instruction is to shout out and raise your voice, wait to see if other people do it and then, depending on which ones do, maybe do it yourself but quietly. And we are Episcopalian so what would we shout? A poem by Mary Oliver? A recipe for bouillabaisse?

I would shout, “God help us and do it soon.” I was provoked last week to wonder where I would go if Democrats hand over the White House and the Current Occupant remains for sixteen or twenty years until he’s in his mid-thirties and I thought, “Iceland.” England is an obvious choice but I don’t understand Brits when they talk and Icelanders speak beautiful English. I was in Reykjavik once, driving around, lost, and saw a large white home by the sea and walked up and knocked on the door and it was opened by the president of Iceland. It was his home. He told me to get back to my hotel. He spoke perfect English, of course. Imagine knocking on the door of a white house and it’s opened by the C.O. The thought is depressing, not to mention his English.

But the Sunday service moved on to the confession of sins and I thought of my unfair bias against pop music of the past thirty years and the replacement of melody and harmony with rapping and tapping and my shameful bias against people with tattoos. This is wrong of me to dismiss my fellow creatures just because, on a crazy impulse years ago, they had enormous orange flames inscribed on their left shoulder. Or the young woman I saw in the grocery last week with green leaves tattooed on her neck. Just because she imagined herself as a trellis is no reason to look down on her. Someday I may be in a vegetative state myself and I hope people are no less kind for that.

I confessed this to Almighty God to Whom all desires are known and from Whom no secrets are hid, including my envy of a friend who lives in a majestic house with umber tile floors and rattan carpets atop a hill overlooking the blue Pacific, which he earned by cranking out mindless TV shows in which unattractive people snarl at each other to the accompaniment of a laugh track, which enables him to jet down to Brazil and hike into the rain forest and have more fun than I do and so I entertain hopes that he will fall off a ledge into a slough and be bitten by poisonous fish and catch a rare fish-transmitted disease that leaves the victim feeling lethargic and stupefied and for which the only cure seems to be fasting, chastity, and immersion in cold water. I imagine visiting him to express my insincere sympathy. I confessed the sin of envy but as you can see it is a continuing problem.

On my way home I remembered more sins, including a loathing of braggarts who cannot bring themselves to ever admit being wrong and a strong intolerance of ducktails on older men. I know of a man who is very committed to maintaining the swoop of hair with distinct comb tracks behind each ear, touching them up every fifteen minutes or so even though he is allegedly fully employed. I knew boys in high school sixty years ago who were dedicated to their hair but the habit tends to fade as one acquires children, wives, debts, etc. Barack Obama has zero-maintenance hair, unimpeachably so. Nobody imagines him spending time doing his makeup and sculpting his hair. The gentleman in question is also the biggest braggart in the history of America. When you hear him spout off about his perfections and you see the duck marks on his head, there is a cognitive dissonance like the sound of a stack of china dropped on a concrete floor.

Be that as it shall be, I am thinking that Iceland may be worth a look. My people left Yorkshire in 1774 and came here and it’s been good but eventually things run their course. Next Sunday in church I will say a prayer for the man and for his hair. I think baldness would be good. He is bald-faced so why not the top too?

The light bulb is out and needs changing

I flew into New York last week, descending over the East River onto LaGuardia, and outside Baggage Claim I was surprised to find men and women in official yellow vests guiding us tourists toward the taxi stand, helping with luggage, saying, “Welcome to New York” and “Thanks for using LaGuardia” and “Enjoy the city.” This is not the New York that we Minnesotans expect to find, but thank goodness the cabdrivers are still genuine New York cabdrivers, surly, scrappy, contemptuous of the stupidity all around them.

In Minneapolis, the cabdriver who drove me to the airport told me, without prompting, about his brief career as a guitarist in a band, his failed marriage, the difficulty of getting back to music. Call me a cynic but it struck me as a plea for a big tip, which I, a Minnesotan, duly gave him. In New York, no cabdriver would take that tack. He is a fighter who will get you from the airport to the Upper West Side five minutes faster than anyone else could.

New York is a good place to visit when you feel the country is falling apart. On the island of Manhattan, high-rises keep rising, water mains break, rush hour is crazy, you can’t help but feel the fragility of the complexity of the place and yet people cope. They cram into subway cars and find privacy in a book or a pair of headphones. I sat next to a woman once who, I swear, was listening to Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” while looking at a solid wall of people’s legs and rear ends. Everywhere, you see the resilience of the human spirit.

The country is splintering, farmers going broke, government stewardship of the planet is a dead issue, the Arctic is melting, we’ve come to accept dishonesty in high places, and in January we watched the cruel punishment of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., chained to a chair and forced to listen to the Senate’s impeachment trial, like making Wynton Marsalis listen to one hundred hours of air horns. But the president won a big victory, just as the state of Kansas did in the Super Bowl, and now we move on to other matters, such as socialism: what percentage of American voters consider themselves socialist? Five? Eight? Three?

My phone rang in the cab. It was a friend I’d recently been miffed with. She said, “My kid told me a joke and I thought of you. Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Amish.”

“Amish who?”

“That’s funny, you don’t look like a shoe.”

It was the first knock-knock joke I’d heard in years: I don’t know many nine-year-olds. I am a mature American male, a tax-paying Episcopalian, and this joke kills me. It made me forget whatever it was I was miffed at her about. This is the beauty of jokes: if they’re funny, they erase bad feeling. “Why don’t Amish water-ski?” I ask. “Because it’s so hard on the horses.” She groans but she is amused.

I’m sad that the lightbulb joke has vanished in America, it was clever, often funny, but it made fun of categories of people and this was seen as offensive. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? (One but the lightbulb has to want to change.) Irishmen. (One to hold the bulb, nine to drink until the room spins.) Jewish mothers. (None. I’ll just sit in the dark and suffer.) Episcopalians. (None, we have candles.) Amish. (What light bulb?) Germans. (Nein.) Comedians. (This is not a joke, it’s a question.)

Trump is the first president in my lifetime who’s incapable of telling a joke, a remarkable thing about him, plus his inability to smile. When he refers to dissident Republicans as “human scum” and African countries as toilets, he’s not kidding. This is old-fashioned New York street talk. Trump is New York through and through, elected by Midwesterners who were charmed to find out that someone could talk like that and run for public office. They decided we needed an abusive leader. Meanwhile, the yellow vests at LaGuardia who said “Welcome to New York” were under strict orders from a powerful boss who can fire them in five seconds: this was not voluntary, trust me. I liked our cabdriver. He didn’t tell us about his problems, he just got us where we were going. Meanwhile, the big news is that Melania has put Trump on a diet so he loses five pounds a week. In a year, we’ll be rid of him entirely.

What goes on in Minneapolis on a winter night

I drove to the grocery the other night and there, near checkout, saw a freezer case with the sign, “Artisan Ice Cubes,” a bold new step in our march toward Preposterosity. I asked the checkout guy if maybe the sign meant to say “Artesian” and he wasn’t interested. Word usage is not his responsibility. To me, artisanal ice is in the same category as organic non-GMO ice cubes. I’m a Minnesotan and I appreciate the beauty of frost and snow but an ice cube is an ice cube.

I drove home and saw a man and a woman alone together on a neighborhood ice rink, skating as a pair, side by side, arms crossed, and I slowed down to watch. He swung in front of her and turned, skating backward, holding her by one hand as she lifted her back leg and struck a pose, then they turned in a wide arc, paired up again, and did a figure eight. They were in their sixties, no longer sylphlike, and this public display of artisanal skating was very romantic. Made me think of bell-bottoms in the Seventies and Elvis’s muttonchops.

This is the spirit that draws people to the opera. We live in the Age of Numb Disbelief, but the opera is one place where the heart speaks and passion rules and Aida descends into the tomb with her lover, who has been sentenced to death; she cannot live without him so she must perish with him. Meanwhile, they sing a gorgeous long duet that if you leave early to avoid traffic, you are missing the whole point.

I come from a family of Calvinists, my wife from a family of violinists. Twenty-five years ago, she and I were living together while my divorce went through and I brought her out to Minnesota to meet my elderly parents, I the scapegrace son bringing my illicit lover, and she, whose family are huggers, walked up to my mother and threw her arms around her neck and held her close and then did the same to my father, and that was that, they loved her from that moment on. Rational discussion wouldn’t have accomplished what she did with her own warm heart. When I came home from the artisanal ice cubes, she did something similar to me and, old as I am and slow afoot, it was thrilling. The full frontal embrace of the woman you love — let’s face it — can make a man forget about Ukraine and obstruction of justice.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton was so much more appealing than what we’re seeing now. It involved temptations of the flesh and who hasn’t been there? What we have here is a drug deal. A bundle of cash for a load of OxyContin. The Clinton impeachment had possibilities as a movie musical. This one? I don’t think so.

So when I got home (where we have our own ice cube maker, which is purely mechanical, not artisanal) and the woman embraced me and held on, it put the U.S. Senate entirely out of mind and made me want to go get my skates (which I do not have) and take her to an ice rink and do some figures in the dark. I’m a Minnesotan. Wrestling with girls in the snow was my earliest erotic experience. I was nine and “erotic” was not in my vocabulary but I knew that I was tangling with a mystery that would only get more and more interesting.

This is where the word “artisan” truly belongs, with matters of the heart, not with solid water. Every romantic engagement is a work of art and craft, especially a long and happy marriage. We walk into a room to find the other and we gracefully engage. The verbal back-and-forth has a cadence and music that is unique to us. We have our private laugh lines. I stand behind her as she makes a salad and put my hands on her shoulders, my two thumbs pressing on either side of her spine, and she says, “Lower,” and sighs with pleasure. I tell her about the artisan ice cubes at the grocery and it’s of no interest to her, she is engaged with her lover’s hands on her back. I’m an old man but I am an artisan when it comes to her shoulders. Now my job is to convince her to fly away with me to England in April when daisies pied and violets blue paint the meadows with delight. I could use a delightful meadow at this point.

Pity the Nation

 Ferlinghetti’s thought-provoking poem (2006), in a riff on Gibran’s, is a searing call to action which still remains very relevant today.

PITY THE NATION
(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

 — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
San Francisco, January, 2006

Becoming Angels

Some are speaking with angels.
Others are growing wings.
And still more
are the mothers of children
who are recalling
when they lived elsewhere,
have strange memories
of other families,
husbands and wives,
when they themselves
looked different,
had different talents.

Who are these young ones,
where are they from?
Where did they learn
what they seem know?
It is as if
they have been
to a different school,
sung in a different chorus,
and we are doing our best
to understand what they
are telling us,
learning to speak this
unknown language.

Dorothy Walters
February 8, 2020

I read a fascinating article today about the collapsing glacier on the west side of Antartica.  It is happening much faster than expected. When it completely melts, sea levels will rise a lot and all coastal cities will be threatened.  Islands in the Pacific may be inundated as a result.  We need to be alert to the problem and prepared to deal with the situation.

Greenland is also in big trouble.

Similarly, our own democracy/republic also seems to be collapsing in front of our eyes.  So sad on both counts.

Aprylisa Snyder
·
Interview by Aprylisa at Pennies and Dimes with Poet, Musician, Artist Valerie Szarek about Afternoon Delight, Sunday, February 16, 2 – 4

Brewing Market, 95th and Arapaho, Lafayette

Contacts: Valerie Szarek, poet and tickets
https://www.facebook.com/valerie.szarek.3

Dorothy Walters https://www.facebook.com/dorothy.walters.397

See the interview on Aprylisa's FB page for February 3