As We Came to Do

As We Came to Do

Sep 4, 2014 | all, art, beauty, belonging, inspiration, poetry | 5 comments

We’ve begun again in the direction of home as the first sharp winds sweep changed leaves onto the lake – they’re taken. This is the first time this has happened again. We’ve done as we came to do, by not a wish of our own, but a marrowdeep migration we’ve always made on weakening wings. The coming together, the falling out of formation, dizzying rests for breath and grazing. As we came to do, we’ve come and done for the first time once more, chasing the skirts of summer gone and back again. Toward home in the cycle at home in the turn in the cycle home in rotation of ponds and puddles creeks and lakes seas and streams we’ve always never seen. We land swimming and fly singing, as we came to do. © Toko-pa Turner
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Sedna’s Signature

Sedna’s Signature

Aug 28, 2014 | all, beauty, creativity, dreaming, dreams, inspiration, myth, poetry | 11 comments

Call upon our great ocean that she may grace your shores with her foamy lapping. Make yourself as still as sand, who knows the patience of millennia, having been ground down to its essential parts. Wait your turn at the edge of known things that she might soak you with her rising swell. Wish for nothing but to be dislodged by her power, carried into her depths for the chance at a glimpse of the underlife. May that you be taken into her possession, even for a moment, to know the absence of gravity and participation in her rhythms. Let your body be for what it was intended: an expression of her grace. And what small ways you make of this encounter in poetry; what strange songs you sing out of your own silence; what migrations and what ripples you disturb in the world; may they have something of her signature on them. May the you that has been touched go on touching in her phenomenal multiplication until we are all suffused with awe and a salty vastness upon our skin. 2014 © Toko-pa Turner
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The Guardianship

The Guardianship

Apr 30, 2014 | all, ambiguity, beauty, creativity, inspiration, paradox, poetry | 24 comments

Do not be ready before your time. There’s no knowing what symmetry is marshalling itself below this confusion. First the long attentiveness of listening must be paid. Don’t brave your way out of this husk while it serves to protect your impressionability. Let yourself be kept a while longer in these origins where you are mine alone and I am only yours. Let something sweet be made of our secret. Put not your offering into the world too soon. Let it ripen in the guardianship of your trepidation. Let this fallow time be stretched For it is in this unreadiness that beauty takes its form. Live a season longer in this holy refuge. Because soon what nectar is made of our union will be for all the world to drink, or not drink. And you will need to remember what grace was allowed only by your long staying hidden.
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Thomas Merton Listens to the Rain

Thomas Merton Listens to the Rain

Feb 8, 2014 | all, art, beauty, inspiration, poetry | 13 comments

Artwork by Eyvind Earle (1916-2000) Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness. The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the wood with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer. I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain...
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A Prayer by Nina Simons

A Prayer by Nina Simons

Jan 1, 2014 | all, ambiguity, art, beauty, consciousness, creativity, dreaming, inspiration, paradox, poetry | 2 comments

May we rediscover the power of circles, of sitting in council to listen and learn; the power of trusting the wisdom that emerges from the voices that are quietest, least valued or that we least expect to learn from. May we recall the power of listening patiently for the intelligence of the whole to emerge, without rushing toward conclusions. May we risk that first step of standing on behalf of what we most love and value— knowing that the first step is the hardest, and trusting that once we take it we will be met tenfold. May we practice growing ourselves, cultivating our capacities to connect and curbing our habituated tendencies toward comparison, hierarchy and isolation. May we be willing to feel the depths of our despair so that we may dream ourselves into the possibility of soaring together. May we be informed by our wounds but not defined by them. May we remember the power of empathy and practice seeing the world through others’ eyes. In this great interdependent web may we remind ourselves that whatever befalls others happens to us. May art remind us that it can reveal and awaken new possibilities as we look to our artists to reveal pathways forward. May we recall,...
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Leaving Your Shoes Behind

Leaving Your Shoes Behind

Dec 12, 2013 | all, beauty, belonging, consciousness, creativity, grief, inspiration, poetry, relationship, Writing | 3 comments

In preparation for his most recent (7th) book of poetry ‘Pilgrim,’ David Whyte collected stories from everyone he knew who had walked the great Camino de Santiago, a 791 km pilgrimage from the foothills of the Pyrenees in France to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. He writes about life through the eyes of a pilgrim – a person who has, intentionally or not, found themselves in a place of meaningful transition. This being on the road between things may take many forms – illness, heartbreak, loss, depression – but what they all have in common is that you are no longer who you used to be, but not yet still who you will become. Whyte maps the subtleties of this landscape, which you may pass through quickly or ache to turn back from. Sometimes the nature of your destination changes, sometimes the weather keeps you staying put. You live by the hospitality of strangers, and sometimes you go without. But throughout the journey, you are accorded a special freedom from your identity: the freedom that only comes with having a temporary name – pilgrim. At the very end of the Camino is a dramatic peninsula overlooking the vast Atlantic, called...
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Morning Never Remains

Morning Never Remains

Nov 22, 2013 | all, art, beauty, creativity, inspiration, poetry | 12 comments

How do you endeavour words at the marvel of dawn – slow but suddenly arising in your heart? How do you speak to the dispersing cold and fog from the treetops, the gradual bathing of your outlook in gentle pinks and gold? What can you say towards the stillness of things, even as they move, like a sleepy barge drifting through the channel, reflecting the presence of that forgiving first light from all its bright sides? How can you say I am sorry for all the dawnings you’ve not gambled in poetry? Perhaps today, you think, you’ll make up for it – steadily pulsing in your reverence, keeping these embers of attention aglow. But morning never remains. Instead it grows into a glory of chaos, dropping its gifts – too numerous to carry – in an afternoon heap at our feet. Generous as it is, the day collapses us into a womb of darkness, where we can finally rest our magnificent failures at being all the way alive.   2013 © Toko-pa Turner        
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Under our Surface

Under our Surface

Nov 2, 2013 | all, beauty, consciousness, creativity, dreaming, inspiration, poetry, Writing | 2 comments

Oh to meet, however briefly, the greatness that lives under our surface. To summon enough bravery to be without armour and strategy, for the chance at meeting that irreducible power. Oh to make of our terrified hearts a prayer of surrender to the God of Love; that we remain safe in our quivering ache to be near that Otherness, even for a moment. To touch that ancient life who will never relinquish its wilderness, who lets instinct make its choices, whose knowing lives in bones and whose song is a wayfinder.    
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Lighting Fires of Affection

Lighting Fires of Affection

Oct 18, 2013 | all, art, beauty, consciousness, creativity, grief, inspiration, poetry, Writing | 16 comments

So many of us are out at sea, looking for home. We try this way and that, battling the endless march of adversaries, led by cynicism and apathy. We fight them with every poetry we possess. We are gentle. We yield. We get back to navigating our crafts. Every once in a while, exhaustion can turn into despair. The tiny flame, which takes our every resource to shield, blows out on an unexpected gust. Even then, lightless and alone, some of us remount our enterprise. It helps to think of more than ourselves. It helps to see the earth workers, the artists, the mothers, the lovers, the singers, the poets and dreamers as threads in a web. By ourselves we are fragile strands, songs with no listeners, but together we are a relentless network. Wherever there is depression, there is colour made vivid by the grey. When I feel this fog rolling in on me, I light fires of affection in the hearts of others. I tell them in tangible ways how the life they live makes me live mine differently, how precious and important they are to the rest of us. That fire then becomes like a beacon which burns through the grey and which I can sail towards.  
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Making Friends with the Wind

Making Friends with the Wind

Oct 12, 2013 | all, art, beauty, creativity, grief, paradox, poetry, Writing | 5 comments

I am making friends with the Wind – who used to feel like an intruder rifling up my sleeves chasing debris down the tunnel She made of my street. But now I hear she’s howling for all that’s kept unfree. She whistles at gaps and rattles loose that which is inessential, raising in upward spirals things past their due, clearing the ground with her sharp, elbowing through. I am making friends with Change – who’s an agent of things not yet as they came to be. I’m making friends with the Clearing – not the eventual filling, but the pause before the hello when the Beloved picks up the other end of this phone. The moment so easy to miss – of Expectancy. The growing of something I myself must have once seeded. Yes, we are friends – the Wind and I – though she whips my hair into my mouth, slams doors and gives me a fright – but I just bundle myself well and meet her on the hill, make an offering of these leaves falling in their completeness, and let Her pull me off my feet So I may see further what is coming in on her distant, composing breezes.   2013 © Toko-pa...
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Waiting

Waiting

Jul 15, 2013 | all, art, beauty, creativity, poetry, Writing | 3 comments

There is a good kind of waiting which trusts the agents of fermentation. There is a waiting which knows that in pulling away one can more wholly return. There is the waiting which prepares oneself, which annoints and adorns and makes oneself plump with readiness for love’s return. There is a good kind of waiting which doesn’t put oneself on hold but rather adds layers to the grandness of one’s being worthy. This sweet waiting for one’s fruits to ripen doesn’t stumble over itself to be the first to give but waits for the giving to issue at its own graceful pace. © Toko-pa Turner (2013)            
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I Want to be Alive with You

I Want to be Alive with You

Feb 3, 2013 | all, art, beauty, belonging, creativity, inspiration, poetry, Writing | 44 comments

I want to be guided by older-ups. I want babies to be born where old people die. I want to be sandwiched in the middle of a messy togetherness. I want to be warned before I do something stupid. I want to be forgiven when I do it anyway. I want wisdoms to be tapped out on my eardrums and not Googled. I want transitions to be recognized by fire. I want gifts to be educed from children. And teenagers and adults and I want to mean something to my community. I want to get drunk on substance morning and night. I want to hear your dreams. I want to raise a revolution for gentleness. I want to call out the bullshit on consensus reality. I want to get rich so I can billboard the highways with validations. I don’t want to be another faker. I don’t want to show you my good side and hide my humanity. I don’t want to dole you out my Self in digestible status-chunks. I want to challenge you in long, drawn-out rituals and still find you interested. I want to feed you seventeen course meals made with spices I crushed. I want to recite you circular poems, each beginning cutting a deeper grasp. I want to make you feel something, even if it’s awkward. I want to sing you...
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Beautiful Things

Beautiful Things

Aug 16, 2012 | all, art, Beautiful Things, beauty, consciousness, creativity, inspiration, poetry, Writing | 9 comments

1. The longing to hand-make beautiful things has overtaken me recently. It was seeded some 4 years ago when I was gifted a deerskin medicine pouch by a friend in ceremony. She had learned to skin & tan the hide herself, working it until the tassels hung gently and the slipknot moved gracefully along its braided path. 2. Recently, I was given another miraculous gift – an anatomical drawing of a long-gestating moth carved into the broad side of a reishi mushroom, by a woman who also wove her own baskets. So enamoured was I, that I set about weaving my first grass basket for a sister on her wedding day. 3. Since music, writing and dreamwork are all ‘invisible’ arts, I have an inextinguishable thrill whenever I create a thing in 3D. In a more pronounced way, physical arts feel as if they go on to live a life of their own once they leave my hands. 4. When a dear friend sewed me a vibrant string of prayer flags for my birthday, into which she’d woven symbols and objects that were meaningful to our shared history, I finally understood why hand-making calls me so strongly. It isn’t just the long efforts to bring beauty into the world, honouring that...
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Love like…

Love like…

Feb 17, 2012 | all, art, beauty, creativity, Photos, poetry, Writing | 0 comments

Love like days bowing to dusk, always in the motion of surrendering to trust. Without guile, Love like a newborn’s smile; the ease of a heart receiving more than it dreamed. Love like life itself is an altar to revere every small beauty as it parades near. Love like sea and sky meeting, and fruits on branches offered up for eating. Love like silence for the one who made us, the one to whom we owe every rest. Love at the start, middle and end of every moment, in laughing and in weeping, in filling and emptying, in readying for the always more, don’t close the door,  on every floor of Love.      
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Beautiful Things

Beautiful Things

Aug 20, 2011 | all, art, Beautiful Things, beauty, creativity, inspiration, poetry | 0 comments

1. Visiting the organic cafe where my Beloved has been working for the last month to find he has made everyone fall in love with him. 2. After a long housing drought, we are suddenly showered with options. As we are walking from one viewing to the next, we make up the Options Opera in harmonized rounds. 3. The beach is covered in  a white shawl of seaweed, blanched by the sun. 4. It is so peaceful in our borrowed cabin in the valley that it’s a revelation when I discover the community of radicals living tucked in the forest behind us. 5. Our first home together is a palace, perched on a mountain in the trees. 6. The owner of our house, an exquisite potter, is a Buddha. She is one of those special creatures who deeply loves being alive and thusly whom abundance reaches. 7. Inspired by my Beloved’s unfailing mastery in the kitchen, I decide to step it up a notch and make a tantalizing kidney bean biryani. 8. The summer air, thick with dragonflies and significance. 9. Willingness to turn down a lesser free ride to invest in that which is in true alignment. 10. Opportunities springing into colour like wildflowers. 11. Feeling into the physical sensations of Havingness...
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Beautiful Things

Beautiful Things

Jul 20, 2011 | all, Beautiful Things, beauty, creativity, inspiration, poetry | 0 comments

1. I sit in the loft to write in the evening light. He pads around the kitchen making us a meal. The slow, meandering goodness that is love. 2. Michael Waters, a guitar genius, says, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is I now know how to reach Source through music. The bad news is I don’t know how to do it in less than 35 years.” 3. Winding up and then down, around cedars and over creeks, through berry patches and over moss mounds we go. Every path into town wishes it was this lush. 4. The protection of the forest, now an amphitheater for fat raindrops. 5. We find a sculpture garden beyond an inviting gate between the trees. The first installation is a giant boulder invisibly suspended from a giant cedar, called Faith. The second installation is also a boulder suspended,  this time by a neurotic bondage of ropes, called Lack of Faith. 6. Spiraling ridges of cedar bark, berry boughs heavy with wet, the earth’s sweet perfume after rain, the lone call of a songbird. 7. Slowing down to notice the miracle of presence. 8. When we arrive home, there are two tiny fawns grazing outside our cabin, gentling across the...
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Total Eclipse of a Yesterday Me

Total Eclipse of a Yesterday Me

Dec 22, 2010 | all, creativity, dreams, grief, inspiration, poetry, Uncategorized, women, Writing | 12 comments

As the tide rises above its own highest mark, it swallows every last reluctant debris. Among them is my body of yesterday, which I have anchored down with stones & prayer and which, like a cicada’s shell, is molted for wings. I recognize the gravity, the all of everything she has pushed through for me. Feet having dug, fingers having scraped, heart having heaved, voice unmuffled I now speak for my underground nymph and her faith. Feeding on root juice and things you can’t prove, her life was an exit tunnelling all the way through. Yes the shedding is long, but the swallowing is quick. I witness the sea lick the last of her lifelessness under, standing taller than my would-be fears, I wonder if she’s left anything in me behind. But my gratitude eclipses the dark fullness of her sorrow; the fractures in her backbone are in me twice firm; into the emptiness of her loss my fullness pours; and where she stood alone, I fly in formation. My heart is her much-deserved award. Gilded and inscribed in defiance, it is for her that I shine.
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Dreamspeak: Under the Override

Dreamspeak: Under the Override

Nov 9, 2007 | all, ambiguity, art, beauty, consciousness, creativity, death, depression, dreaming, dreams, Dreamspeak, grief, poetry, Uncategorized, visions | 2 comments

There’s a great scene in Osmosis Jones, a semi-animated flick about the insides of zookeeper Frank Detomello’s (Bill Murray) body, when a serious virus hits “City of Frank.” Instead of going to see a doctor, he pops a flu pill saying, “Sick? I’m not getting sick! I have far too much planned.” Meanwhile, down in the ailing metropolis of Frank, the mayor (without due process) throws the Override Switch. It’s remarkable how many times in a single day we do the same. If we aren’t ignoring the messages from our bodies, we are behaving oppositely to our feelings, doing what’s expected, staying in the canoe when we’d rather bail, acting kindly when we’re mad as hell, or putting on a happy face to mask the miserable. Now, at first glance, overriding may not seem problematic.After all, we have to behave in civilized society. We can’t just throw tantrums in the grocery aisles when we feel tired and fed up.But when you consider the cumulative effect of a society of overriders, the results are staggering. To understand what override looks like at the collective level, consider the sheer volume of people taking...
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