CREATIVITY AND OTHER LIFE QUALITIES: To Remember

Tuesday

To Remember

Today is the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. Here is a version of one of the poems I wrote during that time, published in TOTEM. The photo is of the "I HATE WAR" sculpture at the FDR Monument, Washington, DC.

Petunias

Last night, the ultimatum.

We hold our beloveds and wait.

Flowers in our courtyards

are too fragile
for these days.

Wind whooshes hard ice

parting my hair

so my scalp stings

as I pull aching shoulders

up around my neck.

Petunias hunker down

in the stark light

of an azure sky

that seems too bright

to be ironic.

Everywhere flower bursts

are pushed down,

almost flattened

against the brittle ground

by a searing cold.

After the fires, there will be

monarchs boasting,

dead sons and daughters

--all of them ours,

and even the flowers

will be drenched

in humanity’s shame.

For your journal/discussion: War, Ultimatum, Fragile, Stings, Brittle, Searing, Drenched, Shame. Choose one word, write for 3-5 minutes, or longer. Then choose another...and another. Use all your five senses, or as many as you can. Then read what you wrote. See if you have the beginnings of a poem. ("Petunias" originally appeared in TOTEM, the visual and literary arts journal of the California Institute of Technology.)

Diane Solis

The poetry of Diane Solis has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, excerpted in Expressive Writing: Classroom and Community, and has been published or is forthcoming in literary journals and magazines, including, America, Big Muddy, The Healing Muse, Hobo Camp Review, The Lost Country, Psychological Perspectives, Sinister Wisdom, Slink Chunk Press and elsewhere. Her chapbook ART SPIRITS, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A science writer and technical editor by trade, Solis practices contemplative and Zen forms of meditation and travels to remote places to photograph and write about the "wild" she encounters there. She resides on the Central Pacific Coast with her partner.

www.dmsolis.blogspot.com

The Latest Quotes for Contemplation:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. --Annie Dillard

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, age after age, forever. ~ Tagore

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.... ~ Frank O'Hara

Of all fires love is the only inexhaustible one. ~Pablo Neruda

Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long. ~Joan Chittister

When I say be creative, I don't mean you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem. ~ Osho

There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier? ~ Mary Oliver

Without warning, as a whirlwind swoops on an oak, Love shakes my heart. ~ Sappho

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding"

Love many things, for therein lies your true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well... ~ Vincent van Gogh

I have found that to love and be loved is the most empowering and exhilarating of all human emotions. ~ Jane Goodall

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone--we find it with another. ~Thomas Merton

I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for our victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
~John F. Kennedy

I cannot write convincingly about anything that I am not passionate about. ~Darrell Bourque, Poet Laureate of Louisiana

In the lover's heart is a lute which plays the melody of longing. ~Rumi

But perhaps the most important thing about my father was that he taught us the simplest things -- Navajo things -- like how to just sit and be quiet, to blend in and watch, or to move so silently we'd become a part of the forest. My father taught us how to live the concepts of our culture, especially the importance of communicating with the natural world. ~Lori Arviso Alvord, M.D.