Photo Credit: Project Apollo Archive


Earth Love

We severed continents and divided countries:
Seeing the state we're in, poplars were aghast.
Although the earth unfurled its golden feast
Where our hands were joined by bread and salt:
Brother, we failed to understand.

Nights made us all the same until dawn
As they drifted over our beds.
There we were, more foolish than frogs.
While leaves on the pond told the unity of time,
You lived apart and I lived apart.

What evil magic strangles our fate:
For ages our thoughts remain fast asleep?
What mystery is this, white and not white?
We love one another's trinkets and beads,
And not one another's land.

- Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca
translated by Talât Sait Halman in Defense Against the Night



Dana Wyss Healing Arts
http://www.danawyss.com/

Photo of Earth taken from the Moon, Project Apollo Archive


Now, we take the moon
into the middle of our brains

so we look like roadside stray cats
with bright flashlight-white eyes

in our faces, but no real ideas
of when or where to run.

We linger on the field’s green edge
and say, Someday son, none of this

will be yours. Miracles are all around.
We’re not so much homeless

as we are home free, penny-poor,
but plenty lucky for love and leaves

that keep breaking the fall. Here it is:
the new way of living with the world

inside of us so we cannot lose it,
and we cannot be lost. You and me,

are us and them, and it and sky.
It’s hard to believe we didn’t

know that before; it’s hard to believe
we were so hollowed out, so drained,

only so we could shine a little harder
when the light finally came.

- Ada Limon,
"We Are Surprised" from Bright Dead Things


Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
www.danawyss.com

Photo by Dana Wyss



The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too,

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

- Philip Larkin



Dana Wyss Healing Arts
http://www.danawyss.com/

Image / vegasisrael

I’ve been thinking lately about the power of individual and collective attention, about the importance of dreaming and visioning to any process of change, about the difference between magical thinking and the kind of hope and creativity necessary to plant and nourish what’s possible-but-yet-unseen. So often, my thinking brings me to this space - this online neural network we all create and support and feed on. When we log on, we effectively enter a larger nervous system - one that acts upon our individual system clearly and immediately - which accepts and weaves in our own individual impulses, ideas, and responses with those of our “friends” to create new states of being, new ideas, new rhythms of heart and blood, new possibilities. What we see, say, and experience here colors and informs our view of the world, our expectations about “where it’s going”, and our creative capacity to birth different visions for our lives and our world than those that are being fed to us by those who would profit from our fear and laziness, from our forgetting the power of our own word and thought.

I had a beautiful dream last week:

“A large crowd was gathered, sitting peacefully and attentively in a large room. This was like a town hall, but the meeting had more of the feel of an important tribal gathering. I had the sense that these meetings were happening all over the country, and as I looked around the room, I felt very proud of my community: Austin had arrived, bringing all of her healers and artists. The room was brimming with singers and seers, doctors and energy workers, poets and surgeons, photographers and midwives, mothers and painters and landscapers. Activists and architects. A child, perhaps 6 or 7, walked near me, and as she did so, I could hear all of the voices of nature typically beyond my ear, a music that took my breath away with it’s beauty. This little one, still playing with friends and going to school, was also a powerful medicine woman, under apprenticeship with another healer in the room. This room was bright and full of peace and love, the two woven into a solid and unwavering presence. While in my dream I did see faces, it was clear that this gathering was happening on a non-physical plane. We were all here to address the leaders of the world, to speak into being the world we knew was possible, a larger world like the one we’d already created within our small tribe. We were here to paint the vision for the leaders, to give them the dream. To hold it strong within our minds and hearts as it took root in theirs and among the larger land. To nourish it, fiercely. We were also here to say, and clearly, that THIS is the future we would accept. Without anger or violence, we brought a vision so strong that the other dream, the old one, could not continue to be held – that dream was lost. Into the world we were dreaming a people who cared for one another and treated with respect and honor all of the earth, her offspring, and all of her people. A people who valued harmony and creativity and recognized our responsibility to offer both to those among us. A people who saw their role as nurturers of the land, and of one another. A people who knew the great power of their attention, and who were committed to using it skillfully, never giving their power to lesser visions or to fear…”

This takes a great deal of attention and commitment on the individual level, yes. AND we have such wonderful opportunities here (online) to nourish our individual efforts with collective reinforcement.

What are you giving your attention to?

What messages are you pouring into our connected mind?

Are they building the world you want to dream us into?

If not, please let’s change that. We have a greater ability to connect and collaborate right now than ever before, at least in this real/virtual world. Let’s honor this space - this shared online gathering space, this collective nervous system, this mind-of-our-whole-tribe - as the sacred space that it is, with all the potential and power to respond to our shared thoughts and words that it does have. I am blessed to know so many incredible minds and gorgeous hearts that I hold great faith in our (humanity’s) ability to take back our dream, to redirect our attention, to revision our world. It is time now.


In Chains
by William Carlos Williams

When blackguards and murderers
under cover of their offices accuse
the world of those villainies
which they themselves invent to
torture us we must perforce either
join arms with them or bend
to their designs while our thoughts
gnaw, bite and snap within us
helplessly unless
from that we learn to avoid
being as they are, how love
will rise out of its ashes if
we will water it, tie up the slender
stem and keep the image of its
lively flower chiseled upon our minds


Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/