9 June 2016
Having a bit of an identity crisis 🙂 Maybe not a crisis LOL 😀 but definitely a shift, some kind of transition, reinvention maybe.
“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”― Jeanette Winterson
Make art about changes in identity, about shifting views of the self.
8 June 2016
This was one of my mama’s top favorite poems. I have so many memories of her reciting it, again and again. Thinking a lot lately about the sons I’ve raised, about the young men I teach, in a culture where there’s so little guidance, so many confusing messages, on what it means to be a man.
Make art about boys, or about what it means to be a man.
7 June 2016
My sweet daughter Lia, a brand new mother to an amazing baby boy Max–I call him Little Star–is beautifully maneuvering her way with Love and tenderness through the new dance of parenting, and marriage as a parent, and her own professional work.
Another sweet young mother I know, one of the daughters of my heart, is in the process of making a new home for her two little ones, having made the courageous decision to leave a marriage that wasn’t working or healthy, for her or her babies.
So I watch them in awe, as my own son used to say, “like we were just us, a crew on our own little pirate ship!”when his brother and sister and he and I were in the same place, me a mom making a home for us 🙂
How these young women astound and inspire me 🙂 how I admire them ❤
Make art about mothers, or about the daily rituals that go into making a home.
Art by Katie m. Berggren
6 June 2016
I have a special affection for deer, for many reasons. I sit out on my little stoop and they slip like shadows from the woods, all velvet eyes and dancer feet, and they let me enjoy their company, their beauty, as they browse and graze through the section of the yard I leave wild just for them, what my kids call ‘Deer Diner.’ I planted them a persimmon tree there in that corner a couple of years ago, and I leave them three cups of corn daily 🙂 paying my rent for sharing this little wooded four acres that their kind occupied long before my house was built. I love them more than I can articulate. Their presence brings me into a place of peace like no other animal. I think they understand this 🙂
Make art about deer. Or about what in nature brings you peace.
HeartWood reading now for our October issue!
Seeking poetry, fiction, and nonfiction! Also seeking profile & interview proposals for our Appalachian Arts section!
5 June 2016
“In a field /I am the absence/of field.”~Mark Strand
Make art about absence, about being out in the field, about who you are in the field.
I dreamt my husband and mama, both gone now for years, having walked on to the next life, were helping me in the garden, setting up two new raised beds, working the dark rich soil with rakes and with our hands. I was planting turnips, the seeds so small, so many shades of purple, lavender, violet, plum, deep purply rose. “Plant cabbage with them,” Mama said, “Good companions.” John nodded, “Or spinach, or peas.” He grinned. “They like each other.”
I woke up thinking about companion planting, about ecosystems.
Ecology is all about interconnection and eternal change, creating patterns, connection, cause and effect, that shape every organism and phenomenon. Our own minds work this way, but, I wonder, Can we step back and recognize that? Can we extend that eco-understanding beyond our needs, thinking like an ecosystem”? Recognizing, developing, and honoring our “eco-mind”?
Wouldn’t an eco-mind also able to see that the survival of our own species, our own existence, our own desire to thrive, is connected to our consciously creating the context needed for that thriving, and that it is inextrcably tied to the well-being, the continuation, of other species and the health of our wider ecology.
Can we learn to see that we don’t exist above or beyond the ecosystem? That those turnip seeds, in their tiny purple majesty, are as essential as the bees that come to the comfrey, the deer who watch from the shaded wood, the cardinal that sings from the Guardian Oak, the groundhog who thinks I don’t see her in the tall grass at the edge of the yard, to the spider silent in the rain-silvered web at the side of the garage, are as essential to our own survival as they are to ours?
Make art about interconnections, about ecosystems
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1 June 2016
Apocalypse (Ancient Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis, from ἀπό and καλύπτω meaning“uncovering”), translated literally from Greek, is a disclosure of knowledge, i.e., a lifting of the veil or revelation.
Make art about revelation, or about spiritual awakening.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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