Response to Prompt #33
What a journey this prompt has been.
When I first read it, I immediately had things writing themselves in my head. I loved how inspired I felt. Now, did I write those down even though I told myself to? Nope.
Dope.
Then last weekend I tried to recover those thoughts, to no avail. Instead, I decided to dissect Blanco's poem, looking at number of lines, blah blah, and pretty soon everything that was inspiring was gone. I knew I just had to step away and let it come naturally, so I set it aside.
On Friday morning I took a walk and had several verses write themselves, all on theme of survival. Fair enough. I definitely wrote some of those ideas down, and figured I was good to go.
But something else interesting had happened along the way. After the tragic week of violence that touched me way too closely, I realized I have got to move with more purpose in my life, to find how I can help beyond just being a teacher, which has been my fallback position all these years. I just knew that there was more, so I put the question clearly in my morning pages:
What can I do to be of service on a grander scale? How can my skills and everything I've learned by put to use?
Saturday morning I had some other ideas while I was getting acupuncture, but whatever it was seemed to drift away. I don't recall what any of it was, as instead I went to the park afterwards and wrote a blog about that.
This morning I headed out to Bowman's Beach and brought along Thich Nhat Hahn's book
Jesus and Buddha as Brothers. I've been making my way through this book again section by section as the spirit moves me. Today I read about Amita, the Buddha of Light, then walked in the sun, and it all started falling together more clearly. Ideas were just flooding at me, the way things connected together to the word "light." I got down as much as I could before I left the beach, and even took additional notes while stuck in Art Show and Farmer's Market traffic on Sanibel.
Don't get excited. I have not found my ultimate purpose. But I have found a way to start.
So, here it is, my (much longer) version of the mentor poem.
Of Lions and Light,
Sun and Fire
I’ve been writing this since
I heard Joni Mitchell sing about
the light in the kitchen on a Chelsea
morning, and on the album cover notes
she thanked her 7th grade teacher
for igniting her to love words,
and I was drawn in to her passion.
I’ve been writing this since I knew
I was born in the sun sign of Leo,
tempered by the waters of Cancer,
and the name given to me that seemed
so cranky and old-fashioned means
“light.” These
elements seem to
be contained in me, wherever I look.
I’ve been writing this since
my senior year of high school
where a poem about a candle
burning down and one called
“Shine On” were published.
Even then, light was my guide,
my inspiration, my muse.
I’ve been writing this since
that day in October I stepped
off a plane onto the tarmac at
the Cancun airport, and was
greeted with a fire of sun more
intense than I had ever felt in
all my days. I feared that sun
at first, but then came to love
its healing presence in my life,
year after year, the way it made
the water
turquoise, the sky bright,
and the sand startling white.
I’ve been writing this since
I watched The Lion
King while
on vacation in North Carolina, and
I heard Mufasa say “Look to the stars,”
and “Remember who you are,” and
that evening a mountain lion resting
on a rock was seen within our headlights
as we drove the winding Blue Ridge
Parkway, and I knew it was a visitation,
a call to courage, a remembering.
I’ve been writing this since
I found myself walking out of
a workshop in Washington D.C.
to lie on the cool November
ground in Rock Creek Park, and
everything around me shimmered,
like energy come alive – the trees,
the bikers on the path – all
vibration and light and fire.
I’ve been writing this since
the light seemed to go away,
the blackness around me felt
all-enveloping. Yet even in
that dark night, I found the light
of teaching and my real purpose.
I found glimpses of light in
stories and healing words and
music, my constant companion.
I’ve been writing this since
I sat with a glass of white wine
at dusk in Northeast Ohio and
listened for the first time to
Miles Davis' Kind of
Blue,
contemplating how my life
was changing by choice, and
not much longer would I sit
during twilight in my home
state, and never again could I
hear that album as the spiritual
experience it was.
A jazz light
slipped in as daylight slipped away.
I’ve been writing this since
I left the bleak winters to
live in Southwest Florida,
where the light continues
to be my muse, a delight, a
wonder every day: the way
it dances on the water, lights
up our faces, filters through
the swamp, gives us the
intense colors of sunrise
and sunset. I
came to live.
I stay for the light.
I’ve been writing this since
that August night I could have
died in my bed from a perforated
appendix, the August morning
I got married to my true love,
the August afternoon I hunkered
down during my first hurricane,
the fresh August mornings when
I’ve met my new students, that
hot August night with my friends,
caught in the passion and light
and sound of the Dixie Chicks.
I’ve been writing this since
I read about Amita, the Buddha
Of Light: “Light of mindfulness,
light of love, light of practice,”
a light that “touches countless
worlds without any obstacles,”
and I knew this universal light
is mine to give, through sun
and signs and names and the
river that runs and the sky that
changes every minute, but is
always there, clouds and stars.
And my way now is to be, as
Sun Bu-er wrote in the 12th century,
“a single image of light” and
to light the world on fire with love.
I’ve been writing this since
my walk on the beach where
a lion’s paw shell called to me,
the sun warmed me, the sun I
no longer fear after being told
I must. The shell was left in the
remnant of a tree, graying and
weather-beaten, close to the
waves of the Gulf, where it will
stay and be my symbol of this
day and what I have come to
know about my purpose and passion.
I opened the moon roof in my Tucson,
and when I arrived on the peak of the
Sanibel Causeway, the “sun poured in
like butterscotch and stuck to all my
senses,” another visitation, another
calling to be Lion and Light, Sun and Fire.
