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Small Kindnesses — Danusha Laméris

5/8/2022

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"I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
It's been a while since I posted a poem. But this one keeps finding its way across my path, and the idea that kindness will make the world just a little bit better, that moments of holiness are found in these interactions between us, resonates with me.
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Ninja Status — Achieved

25/6/2022

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Picture
Okay, I'm not a ninja. But I am now a first degree black belt in Haidong Gumdo, a Korean martial art with swords that is non-combative. Using swords, we learn different forms, but we don't fight each other. We begin with a wooden sword (mokgum), and then we move to using an aluminium sword (gokgum) which is not sharp. Eventually we do use sharp swords for specific skills, like cutting bamboo (see video below). 

Why do I do this? When we moved to Moncton mid-pandemic, it was one of the only physical activities I was doing. My yoga practice suffered greatly — I was at home practicing by myself and sometimes following a video or online class, but it lacked the both the vigour and the calming effects it often has had. My cousin (centre in the photo above) has practiced Gumdo for years, and she and her friend Jessica (left, above) invited me to join them. Three times a week we went to class, moved vigorously and joyfully, often letting off steam, frustration, anger through movement. The added load of the sword has helped stabilise my wonky shoulder (there's nothing really wrong with it, it just feels, well, wonky). When I'm in Gumdo I feel strong and resilient. And my brain enjoys the challenge of learning the forms.

It's felt good to achieve something so outside of my normal box. I'm glad that restrictions have lifted, that COVID is doing so much better where we live, that our renovations are getting "close" to finished, and that I'll be able to teach yoga classes here in my new community soon. But there won't be classes Tuesday or Thursday evening, or Saturdays at noon. That's when you'll find me upstairs at the Chung Won Institute, with Grand Master Chung, swinging my sword.

These are four forms I performed in my testing.
In this skill for my black belt test I had to break the stick with my wooden sword. It was hanging in loops of newspaper from very sharp swords, and the newspaper had to be intact at the end.
This is my teacher cutting a tree with three different cuts. He is using a sharp sword.
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Learning to Rest

4/6/2022

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​"Cats are a wonderful waste of time."
~Alva Hughes Clark (Gracie)

PictureHestia (l.) and Circe (r.) observing the world from the porch on a sunny day.
I never met my mother-in-law. My husband and I were married in 2018, and she had passed on many years before that, but my husband often quotes her. She said many fabulous, curious, funny things — I get the impression she was a formidable woman. And on this point, the point about cats, I thoroughly agree with her.

​
And although there are many lessons to be learned watching cats, the one I've been thinking of this week is this one — rest. There they are now, one on the cushions in front of the fire (which is not on today), and the other one, across the way on a chair. They've had food, they watched birds out the window, played "chase me" up and down the stairs. Then they asked for more food, and now they are resting. The entire day will be a repetition of these elements, with resting happening often.

How often do you, do I, feel tired, but press on because we feel we should? Yes, we have obligations that cats do not — someone has to earn the money to pay for their first and second breakfasts as chase me pays very little these days. But is there a little more room for some rest? How would you be more productive, more creative, more playful, more well in your health and relationships, if you only took the time to rest when you needed to?

Excuse me, I'm going to go have a nap.

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Spring in my Mind

10/5/2022

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PicturePhoto by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash
It's spring, and I'm planting new seeds in the garden of my mind. It's still too cold here to plant outdoors (I know, that's crazy — that's Canada!) but I'm diving deep into yoga therapy with new ideas of how to support people. The seeds are ideas, they're qualities I want to nurture in myself and others. And these seeds are imagined as plants. Some of them are vegetables — nutritious, supportive of good health, something to be harvested at some point. Others are merely beautiful — food for the soul. Of course, the tomatoes and the daisies are of equal importance in the cultivation and nourishment of a whole person.

Which seeds are you planting, and tending, in your own mind?


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Woodworking at the End of the World ~Ocean Vuong

30/4/2022

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In a field, after everything, a streetlamp
shining on a patch of grass.

Having just come back to life, I lay down under its warmth
& waited for a way.

That’s when the boy appeared, lying next to me.
He was wearing a Ninja Turtles t-shirt
from another era, the colors faraway.

I recognized his eyes: black buttons salvaged from the coat
I used to cover my mother’s face, at the end.

Why do you exist? I wanted to know.
I felt the crickets around us but couldn’t hear them.

A chapel on the last day of war.

That’s how quiet he was.

The town I had walked from was small & American.

If I stayed on my knees, it would keep all my secrets.

When we heard the woodcutters coming closer, destroying
the past to build the future, the boy started to cry.

But the voice, the voice that came out
was an old man’s.

I reached into my pocket
but the gun was gone.

I must’ve dropped it while burying my language
farther up the road.

It’s okay, the boy said at last. I forgive you.

Then he kissed me as if returning a porcelain shard
to my cheek.

Shaking, I turned to him. I turned
& found, crumpled on the grass, the faded red shirt.

I put it over my face & stayed very still—like my mother
at the end.

Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life
the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.

& I was free.
​__________________________

Excerpt From Time Is a Mother
Picture
Photo by Abby Savage on Unsplash
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Still I Rise ~Maya Angelou

29/4/2022

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You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Picture
Photo by Kunj Parekh on Unsplash
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Frequently Asked Questions to an Iraqi Refugee ~Ahmed M. Badr

28/4/2022

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 Is Osama bin Laden your cousin?

No. But I have a cousin named Osama. You should get to know him — he loves Americans and their questions.

You're from Iran right? Or is it Iraq? I always get them mixed up.

Let me make it easier for you.

Think weapons of mass destruction. Think George Bush.
Think lies.
Think war on terror.
Sorry.
War of terror.

How did you survive the war? It must have been so hard for you and your family, living under such a brutal dictator.

Sometimes I forget who was brutal. I forget whose side brutal was on. Brutal kept showing his face on the news, so I assumed he had friends on both sides.

You must have so many stories! Did you talk about any of them in your college essay? Oh my God, you would get in everywhere!

Actually, you know the Common Application, where you go to apply for college? You can attach files to your submission. I tried to upload some weapons of mass destruction, but for some reason I just couldn't find any.

Do you consider yourself Iraqi-American?

It's a label I struggle with. Some days I wake up not knowing whether I'm the conquered or the conquerer. In 2003, a rifle was pointed at me. In 2008, we moved to American, and suddenly I was the one holding it.

This time I was pointing the rifle at my old identity, asking it why it always mispronounced English, why it thought there was a difference between freedom and democracy, asking it whether it thought Arabic was written from right to left to confuse the West, and asking it if the Mississippi had ever heard of the Euphrates.

In an interview with CBS News on September 12, 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked the following question:
"We have heard that half a million children have died [in Iraq]. . . . Is the price worth it?"
She replied, "We think the price is worth it."

I recently found out that Secretary Albright teaches at Georgetown. I was rejected from Georgetown. My application essay was 500 words long, but I wanted to write 500,000.

Growing up Mama always told me, el maerof yergos iegol al gaa oja. "Those who can't dance always say the ground is crooked."

Mama, it's hard to dance because the ground has 500,000 cracks whispering under my feet.

They're telling me their names, ages, stories, and asking just how many cracks a medal is worth.
Picture
Photo by Ramin Khatibi on Unsplash
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It's Not a Terrible Thing ~Jasmin Kaur

27/4/2022

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to be alone
when you have
at the very least

yourself

but i didn’t.
but i didn’t.
i’d never even
spoken to
that girl.
Picture
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What I told the Doctor ~Sabrina Benaim

26/4/2022

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​the eyes are not reliable.
not windows. not mirrors.

my ears have eroded,
leaving two broken telephones.

my hands have embraced what they always have been;
two grasping panics, two torches to everything i love.

feet - nothing more than two rocks some days.
​
& my heart has developed a kind of amnesia,
where it remembers everything but itself.
Picture
Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash
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I Meant To Do My Work Today ~Richard Le Galliene

25/4/2022

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I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand--
So what could I do, but laugh and go?
Picture
Photo by Ryk Naves on Unsplash
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Sonnet 116 ~William Shakespeare

24/4/2022

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Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
          If this be error and upon me prov'd,
          I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Picture
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
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A World of Dew ~Kobayashi Issa

23/4/2022

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PicturePhoto by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
​




​A world of dew,
And within every dewdrop
A world of struggle.


~Kobayashi Issa

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Good Grief ~Amanda Gorman

22/4/2022

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PicturePhoto by Rostyslav Kondrat on Unsplash
The origin of the word trauma
Is not just "wound," but "piercing" or "turning,"
As blades do when finding home.
Grief commands its own grammar,
Structured by intimacy & imagination.
We often say:
We are beside ourselves with grief.
We can't even imagine.

This means anguish can call us to envision
More than what we believed was carriable
Or even survivable.
That is to say, there does exist 
A good grief.

The hurt is how we know 
We are alive & awake;
It clears for us all the exquisite,
Excruciating enormities to come.
We are pierced new by the turning
Forward.

All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish.
Call it instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in the sea.
Despair exits us the same way it enters--
Turning through the mouth.
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues.
We are built up again
By what we
Build/find/see/say/remember/know.
What we carry means we survive,
It is what survives us.
We have survived us.
Where once we were alone,
Now we are beside ourselves.
Where once we were barbed & brutal as blades,
Now we can only imagine.

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FROM GITANJALI ~Rabindranath Tagore

21/4/2022

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Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Picture
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

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Traveler, There is No Road ~Antonio Machado

20/4/2022

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PicturePhoto by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.


Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake on the sea.

translated by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney

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Under Milk Wood ~Dylan Thomas

19/4/2022

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This is a play for voices, and is really mean to be heard more than read. The sound of the language at times is as important, more so, than what it means. Listen below.
Picture
New Quay, Ceredigion. One of the models for Under Milk Wood's Llareggub, and a home for Dylan Thomas for a time during the second world war.

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'–and–rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see find to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkared, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or flide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite states of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. and you alone can here the invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, startfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.


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Breeze ~Michael Ondaatje

18/4/2022

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Picture
For BP Nichol
___________________

Nowadays I listen only to duets.
Johnny Hodges and The Bean, a thin slip
of piano behind them
on this page on this stage
craft a breeze in a horn.

One friends sits back and listens
to the other. Nowadays
I want only the wild and tender 
phrasing of "NightHawk,"
its air groaned out 
like the breath of a lover.
Rashomon by Saxophone.

So brother and sister woke, miles apart,
in those 19th century novels you loved,
with the same wound or desire.

We sit down to clean and sharpen
the other's most personal lines
—a proposal of more, a waving dismissal
of whole stanzas — in Lethbridge in Edmonton
you stood with the breeze
in an uncomfortable Chinese restaurant
in Camrose, getting a second cup
at The Second Cup near Spadina.

I almost called you this morning
for a phone number.
Records I haven't yet returned.
Tapes you were supposed to make for me.

And across the country
tears about your death.
I always thought, someone says, 
he was very good for you.
Though I still like, Barrie,
the friends who are not good for me.

Along the highway
only the duets and wind fill up my car.
I saw the scar of the jet that Sunday
trying to get you out of the sky.
Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkings.
An A and an H, a bean and a breeze.

All these twin truths

There is bright sumac, once more,
this September, along the Bayview Extension.

From now on
no more solos

I tie you to me
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Rilke's Book of Hours 1,9

17/4/2022

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Picture
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
I read it hear in your very word,
in the story of the gestures
with which your hands cupped themselves
around our becoming — limiting, warm.

You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be.

But before the first death came murder.
A fracture broke across the rings you'd ripened.
A screaming shattered the voices

that had just come together to speak you,
to make of you a bridge
over the chasm of everything.

And what they have stammered ever since
are fragments
of your ancient name.

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If There Were No Emptiness ~Margaret Atwood

16/4/2022

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PicturePhoto by Josè Maria Sava on Unsplash
If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.
Think about it.
All those electrons, particles, and whatnot
crammed in next to each other like junk in an attic,
like trash in a compactor
smashed together in a flat block
so there’s nothing but plasma:
no you no me.


Therefore I praise vacancy.
Vacant lots with their blowing plastics and teasels,
vacant houses, their furze of dust,
vacant stares, blue as the sky through windows.
Motels with the word Vacancy
flashing outside, a red neon arrow pointing,


pointing at the path to be taken
to the bored front desk, to the key-shaped key
on the dangling brown leather key holder,


the key that opens the vacant room
with its scored linoleum floor a blear-eyed yellow
its flowery couch and wilted cushions
its swaybacked bed, smelling of bleach and mildew
its stuttering radio
its ashtray that was here
seventy years ago.


That room has been static for me so long:
an emptiness a void a silence
containing an unheard story
ready for me to unlock.
​

Let there be plot.

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Que Syria Syria ~Ken Babstock

15/4/2022

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Picture
Photo by Chris Knight on Unsplash
Slide whiste and shit bucket. We'll do 
our own rendition. Convictions, like haircuts,
hold true until the morning they don't.
I'll be proved wrong down the road --
not far down the road, mind you;
likely just past the next gum coin,
before that streetlight retrofitted
to look more lampish. Why are disarticulated
feet washing ashore in their Nike carapaces
like hermit crabs adjusting to habitat loss?
The North Pacific Gyre spits out basketballs,
pen caps, rat-tail combs for the well-behaved
and habitually cagey. Kids, eh? I could have
taken prisoners but lack administrative skills,
all those numbers followed by letters followed
by answering to Amnesty and ghosts
bringing in ghosts that exit as corpses.
I have my suspicions. It's just I doubt their validity.
I take my legs off above the knee, lean
both against the armoire, and slide in Chopin
while tomorrow balls up its tinfoil and begins to chew.
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    Jennifer

    You can find some short thoughts here, some personal moments, and other nuggets. I hope you'll join me on The Journey.
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    *April was National Poetry Month, so along with some other posts, there was a poem every day here.

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