Image / Aliaksei Skreidzeleu


The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”


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

Image /  Marina Strizhak

"If I were asked for two words to summarize the habits of the heart American citizens need in response to twenty-first-century conditions, I would choose chutzpah and humility. By chutzpah, I mean knowing that I have a voice that needs to be heard and the right to speak it. By humility, I mean accepting the fact that my truth is always partial and may not be true at all, so I need to listen with openness and respect, especially to "the other," as much as I need to speak my own voice with clarity and conviction.

American Democracy is a non-stop experiment in the strengths and weaknesses of our political institutions, local communities, and the human heart. The experiment is endless unless we blow up the lab, and the explosives to do the job are found within us. But so, also, is the heart's alchemy that can turn suffering into compassion, conflict into community, and tension into energy for creativity amid democracy's demands.

Today we are in the middle of another election cycle. Once again, false claims, half-truths, hateful rhetoric, fear-mongering and demonization of the opposition dominate our civic space, driving out the genuine issue-oriented debate a democracy needs to survive and thrive. We need citizens with chutzpah and humility to occupy our civic space and call American democracy back to health. There is no reason, at least no good reason, why our number cannot be legion."

- Parker Palmer drew the ideas for this article
from his book, "Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit.



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

Image / belikova

Recently, I had occasion to reflect upon The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo.
The following is my own response, an attempt to give voice to what's being conveyed in this powerful piece:

"You've asked me to give voice to this, to tell you something of what it means to inhabit this space.
But voice relies on breath, you see, and mine comes only in sputters and gasps these days.
Waves of pain, impending defeat, emerging sobs - all of these obstruct my voice, my words.
I could wail for you the sound of an empire groaning under unsustainable weight, could shriek for you the metallic friction of disordered connections, could roar for you the voracious fire that has consumed all simple pleasure, could moan the instant of surrender, disintegration.
But then, my voice too has been consumed. Let me instead show you..."


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

Image / welcomia


Dreams
by Mark Strand

Trying to recall the plot
And characters we dreamed,
     What life was like
Before the morning came,
We are seldom satisfied,
     And even then
There is no way of knowing
If what we know is true.
     Something nameless
Hums us into sleep,
Withdraws, and leaves us in
     A place that seems
Always vaguely familiar.
Perhaps it is because
     We take the props
And fixtures of our days
With us into the dark,
     Assuring ourselves
We are still alive. And yet
Nothing here is certain;
     Landscapes merge
With one another, houses
Are never where they should be,
     Doors and windows
Sometimes open out
To other doors and windows,
     Even the person
Who seems most like ourselves
Cannot be counted on,
     For there have been
Too many times when he,
Like everything else, has done
     The unexpected.
And as the night wears on,
The dim allegory of ourselves
     Unfolds, and we
Feel dreamed by someone else,
A sleeping counterpart,
     Who gathers in
The darkness of his person
Shades of the real world.
     Nothing is clear;
We are not ever sure
If the life we live there
     Belongs to us.
Each night it is the same;
Just when we’re on the verge
     Of catching on,
A sense of our remoteness
Closes in, and the world
     So lately seen
Gradually fades from sight.
We wake to find the sleeper
     Is ourselves
And the dreamt-of is someone who did
Something we can’t quite put
     Our finger on,
But which involved a life
We are always, we feel,
     About to discover.


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

Image / gostica



As I look around the world, as I go about my life, here and there I can run into snags. I may encounter hitches and glicks, I may worry momentarily over something done or not done, or may I see something that seems like a problem coming my way. All part of being human, and to practice is to notice these moments, observe my reactions to them, to pause and breathe and choose a more skillful response. Nothing new there. But for a couple weeks now, there is something new, a thought I'd not had before. Lately, when I'm considering a problem (or considering whether there is a problem at all), I keep having this thought:

"Countless generations before you have dreamed of being here, where you are in this moment. Countless beings would kill and die in order to have this set of gifts and troubles in front of them, to have the chance to think about and discuss these issues, to have the freedoms to act and choose that you have in this moment. Countless beings have lived and died in hopes of reaching a moment just like this one..."

Every time I have this thought, it tends to shift my perspective about whatever I'm contemplating, pulling me back to a larger viewpoint, softening the heart and mind a bit, allowing a spacious clarity to arise. And it also brings with it thoughts of my ancestors - a sense of connection to them and an appreciation for their dreams and the efforts they made here before me. I know so little about so many of them, but I know that one doesn't leave home (especially lands of great beauty) lightly. What impelled them to leave all things known, travel to distant lands, and create a new life from scratch? How many of their dreams were realized in their lifetimes, and how many of their dreams might live in my own heart and blood? How much of my own path has been informed by the longing and support of those beings both unknown to me and yet woven into my bones?

For many immigrants, the desire to assimilate inspires a decided obliteration of the past. The old stories, the old knowledge, the old ways are left in the old land, and pushed into dusty corners of the hearts and minds of the relocated. I know nothing of the traditions, the habits, the humors of my Swiss ancestors. I know none of the colorful stories of my Irish kin, nothing of the loves and losses that inflamed their lives. We've been here too long, and those things were neither retained nor passed down along the way. At points in my life, this has felt like an amputation of sorts to me. An unsolvable mystery that surely held vital keys of understanding my presence here. Our past is a blank canvas.

While there's untold loss in that, there's also real freedom in it, and that is what I'm most aware of now. The spaciousness of it, the creative potential it must have offered to the several generations before me, that it offers to me now. For the first time, it occurs to me to consider that - freedom from the larger past - as a gift that my forebears hoped to offer. What could life be like if unconstrained by the demands and expectations of a tribe? What new dreams might arise out of one, were the old rules discarded? Where would we grow if we weren't looking only at models known to us? What would we do differently with our precious lives if we were unconcerned about the opinions of our elders?

It's a set of questions that I'm just beginning to explore in new ways as an individual, and perhaps they'll have relevance for other hearts and minds at this time, too. In my musing and thinking about these things over the past week, I found (as I'm wont to do) a poetic thread that relates: 

"The knowledge I'm interested in is not something you buy and then have and can be comfortable with. The knowledge I'm interested in keeps opening wider and wider, making me smaller and more amazed, until I see I cannot have it all - and then delight in that as a freedom."  -  Heather McHugh, Hinge and Sign

May you each enjoy your freedoms, and all the space you have to open wide, wider, wider still. And may you really live, may you truly delight in, every moment of this precious life. Happy Independence Day.


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