Leisa A. Hammett

ONE (Part 2)

Two months ago I shared on "The Journey with Grace" that my artist friend Pam Jolly Haile was collecting 3,000 thumbprints to create a mandala for a project called "One." This, below, my friends, is the result of her work:

Stunning, huh?

Here's what the artist writes about the piece:

"One [...] incorporates approximately 3000 individual thumbprints collected by [more than] 30 collaborators [me, Leisa, included]. The [thumb]prints represent the beautiful diversity that makes up our world: children, 90-somethings, men, women, LGBT, various ethnicities, spirtualities and religions, people with autism and other disAbilities. The intention is to make a statement that although individusals, we are all ONE."

Before I decided to post this today, I had talked earlier to my shaman friend who is writing a book about radical spirituality. I called him and asked him to read to me again one of the summary points of his book in progress. Here is how he summed the point and related it to artist Haile's work:

"Each individual thumbprint is each individual's universe of experience. However, when we put them all together, which the artist did, they become a picture of the Unity of One."

Thank you, Pam, for your artist labor of creativity, which reminds us in a world hell-bent on creating separateness, that though we may each be unique in our experiences, we are all one in our humanity. We need that message right now more than ever. Bless the artist messengers.

Resurrection [A Partial Easter Re-post]

 

"Happy Resurrection from Fear to Love, from grief to joy,

from ego to Field, from separation to Unity. You are Loved

and kept in the Light."

Photo & quote originally published last, and a much warmer Easter, April 8, 2012. An Easter message emailed to me while I was in South Carolina, from my spiritual teacher, Ken Wheaton.

Spring Has Sprung...Or, Has It?

It's been a blustery, snow-ish Spring Break here. Last week was "intercession," and this week Grace is going to camp for three days while I rewrite my book proposal. Meanwhile, we're aiming to stay warm! We bundled up, mustered courage and got out late last week and took a photo walk:

You can't see it, probably, but the mid-left side above the tree line in the bottom right photo, diagonal from the sun shot, is an early moon--a white speck via my iphone. (The price I pay for using my digital SLR in favor of my cameraphone.) 

Mothering Mojo Through Time

Three days, all I did, seemingly, was stand in the kitchen, chop, steep, simmer, stir and wash my hands. Grace came home from her weekend away with a cold. This one was a little more tenacious than the usual variety that we've been able, the last couple of years, to knock off in a couple of days. Chop. Chop:  homemade chicken and rice soup with onions, garlic, celery and carrots. Chop: fresh apples; peeled, juicy clementines. Chop, steep, stir: garlic, mint, ginger, lemon and honey--a cocoction of herbal tea that sssshhhed! the cough and shoved it out the door.

I had my mothering mojo on and it felt good. I remember the first time I experienced the pleasure of taking care a sickly version of my beloved flesh and blood creation. She was a wee one then, first exposed to the buggy mother's day out culture. It took her until about age eight not to bring home half the germs she met out there and me about four years to align my immune system and mental-emotional health to not welcome them into my own body.

Lately, I've been in the kitchen a lot. I'm cooking again now that we're nearly all settled in our new condo. I didn't cook much the last five years. I was in a relationship with a gourmet and between eating his rich, fatty fare and ordering and eating out, I lost my groove there.

Thinking back, I lost a lot of my mothering mojo those years. Distracted and winding blindly around an enormous learning curve of life. 

I start to go there, grieving the loss of that time, but remind myself I nurtured, tended and helped build a life with my daughter and for my daughter in other ways, such as her art.

I think we parent in seasons. Especially as special needs parents. My wonder friend John Shouse, said once that sometimes we are on fire with passion in our parenting advocacy for our differently abled children. And then other times, we are still parenting at our best, but it looks different. It looks different because of whatever is going on in our lives, with our energies. We are still at it, still there, though it may may look and seem like less at the time.

We can't be full throttle all the time, can we? We risk burnout if so, I believe. And, this is definitely a long haul journey that needs our constant, steady stamina.

Meanwhile, apron tied on, it feels good to mother-nurture her body and mine with the fruits born of our rich earth mother. It's fine mojo and it feels good.

Finding Love?

There. There it was. A sign....A year-and-a-half ago, I walked down the sidewalk from my then rental condo. I had just months before moved out and moved on from Marriage 2.0. There. There on the sidewalk, lay a heart-shaped leaf. I took a picture of it, and shared it some time later as a visual for another blog post.

I showed the picture to my then-new spiritual teacher and said, look what I found! He was not impressed. I was certain that the heart-shaped leaf was a sign from the Universe that, just as I had found that leaf, I would find love again. Actually, I already knew that love was not about seeking and finding. But the message, I thought was that I would have love again.

Yesterday morning, I stepped off the curb in front of my new condo and noticed a gray, heart-shaped stone. This time I understood the message, though it took me about a day to get it.

The message was not about having, attaining, summoning love to me. That is external-focus. The focus, I have learned in the year-and-a-half since I found that heart-shaped leaf, is the internal. I do have love. Love is within me. "So within, so without." All those months ago, I had the message confused as to what would come to me from the external.

How many during this week of Hallmark-celebrated love are looking for something outside of themselves instead of knowing that we have love, we are love? That. Is a complete package. Then, to be in relationship with another is to have complement to the whole. 

Namaste.

Ode to A Lover* (+ Blog Hop Details)

Sheepskinned seductress,

you are.

To only you do I write poetry.

 

Most people batten down their hatches

and

shut tight their blinds.

For you

I rip open the shades

and

fully expose my raw heart.

 

YOU are poetry.

Your naked limbs,

arching over me like a canopy bed

or the sturdy stone cathedral arches when we wed.

 

Barren and searching are your branches

yearning toward a moody gray sky

or

a brilliant but cold blue one

if you're in the mood.

 

Like none other,

unlike your autumn, summer and much-fussed about spring siblings,

you urge me to go dormant

like the earth beneath my mortal feet.

You remind me

it takes time

it takes time to

germinate.

It takes time to give birth

to the lovelies.

At first, I must inhale your frozen breath

and warm to my own touch.

 

Oh, Winter.*

You seductress, you.

You woo me every time you come around.

 

Photo: The bare-limb cathedral archway under which I commute two to four times weekdays; ©LeisaHammett.com; I read this poem at the Art & Soul Studio Mid-Winter Poetry Reading last Friday evening. More on that to come.

WELCOME BLOG HOP VISITORS!: Charlotte Rains Dixxon, my writing coach/mentor knew I follow a "Wordless Wednesday" format (ha-ha). The above post was prescheduled to coincide with fading winter and the recent MidWinter Poetry Reading. I will write about my upcoming book project on Friday and tag five more authors. Please visit back! Thank you!

Winter Affair

Go ahead.

Take your long, sultry, sweltering days of summer.

Not me.

Give me the blank canvas of a winter landscape.

A gray sky challenging my heart's eyes to see her glory.

Barren arms of trees,

absent their dress,

fallen to earth;

germinating,

awaiting new life.

Without winter,

there'd be no spring birthing life in color.

Winter whispers:

go within.

Tuck in.

Wrap up.

Both body and spirit.

Sssshhh.

Quiet now.

Listen.

What will your spirit deliver

in the months to come?

"When Heart & Art Take Flight"

We did a double take at one another in the vitamin section of Wild Oats. It had been more than a decade since I'd seen Dawn Kirk. She sported long gray hair. She'd become a hippie and went to great lengths to let me know how much she'd changed. For years after that encounter I chuckled to myself musing: "Does she think she's the only recovering Southern Baptist who flew the religion coop?" We'd met during our just-out-of-Baptist-college days at a Baptist church singles group. A lot of spiritual journeying had taken place and we'd both experienced divorce. She had become a psychotherapist. I had hired the services of a number of psychotherapists.

Another decade passed and we again saw one another. This time across a table of vegetarian manna at Art & Soul Studio--evidence that once again, our paths had mutually wound the alternative route. A few years later we began connecting over lunch, where we'd laugh and commiserate about our younger selves.

I've loved watching my old-new friend merge into the blogosphere and encouraged her as she boiled down snippets of heart resonating words paired with Instagram images of captured nature. I watched her champion environmental and animal causes on Facebook. I had borne a child in our earlier years apart. She had not. But, I'm convinced that Dawn is a mother-nurturer of the souls she helps tend in her counseling practice as well as to the animals and other children of our Great Mother Earth. She is creative, that one. And so, I'm thrilled that she's bumping into one of my causes and melding it with one of hers.See below. I've featured Pacesetters on "The Journey with Grace," here. Go, Dawn!: 

Did you know 15,000 Sandhill Cranes winter in Tennessee? 

Join us and learn more while enjoying the imaginative artistic creations of the Pacesetters.

"When Heart & Art Take Flight:

An afternoon devoted to Tennessee’s Sandhill Cranes & Art

Reception and Art Show

Sunday – December 16^, 12:15 pm to 3:00 pm

Radnor Lake Visitor Center, Nashville, Tenn.

“Introducing Tennessee’s Cranes,” presentation by Melinda Welton, 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm

Art Show - Pacesetter artists from Cookeville & Sparta

Pacesetters is a non-profit organization formed in 1971 to empower and support special needs adults and their families in 14 counties east of Nashville. In 2000, the art program started with a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission. Pacesetter artists have had their work displayed at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, as well as the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center.  The art program is taught collaboratively by Cookeville Artists Merritt Ireland and Ramie Nunnally and storyteller Marcia Donavan.  More info at www.pacesetterstn.com

Plus: Save the date! Jan. 19-20, 2013, The TN Sandhill Crane Festival & “ Dinner with Darwin.” More info at www.tncranefestival.org

The Crane above is the work of Pacesetter artist Mike Rewis. You can check out Dawn Kirk via her website, http://www.imaginetheshift.com, and her blogs: imaginetheshift.blogspot.com, Busy?Be and Little Farma.

The Pitfalls of Categories & Categorization, Part II

We formed a line that started in the restroom and snaked out the door. We were waiting to use the facilities at a special disAbility fundraising event. The floors were littered, the toliet paper chained to the cement block walls and missing in some stalls, which also had no doors. As I waited for Grace to finish, several women at the door bemoaned the condition of this public park restroom. "They let the bums use it," said one woman who sported a tee shirt proclaiming her support of a group of people with disAbilities. She went on about that a sentence or two more until I interrupted: "I'm glad they have a place to go." She agreed and then became silent.

My point here is not to proclaim self righteousness for speaking up or to point a finger at the woman. As Mother used to say, there are four pointing back at me. But rather, I'm musing aloud here that our purpose for being there was to raise money and awareness for a minority.  And yet, the irony was missed that the homeless, "the bums," too, are marginalized in our culture.

And that's the problem with categories. Each of us can be stuffed into some box and labeled something or other--male, female, girl, boy, children, old people, "disabled," Republicans, Democrats, Christians, Jews, Muslims, even "animals"--and, then marked with the ingredients of the derogatory characteristics we assign each category.

We can feel smug that "we work for a living," or have homes, or our children are gifted or are "normal." We aren't feeble like that old lady pushing a cart at the drug store. We can treat our animals or our earth any way we choose if we believe we are dominant over them/it. But, we aren't. We are all aging from the moment we are born. We will all be old some day if we are fortunate. We could all have an accident tomorrow and have a resulting brain injury.*  And then who are we? What are we?

A catgegory.

Photo: Mast General Store, Valle Crucis, North Carolina

*TBI--traumatic brain injury is the leading cause of disAbility.

This post is the second half of a series. See: The Pitfalls of Categories & Categorization, Part I

Give Thanks. This Day. And. Every. Day

Gratitude is "good." It is heartfelt and lovely. And somehow I missed the call out that the 30 days of November would be a social media exercise for sharing one's daily gratitude via Facebook. So much of the messages on the medium are any thing but positive and grateful. So, I appreciate the effort. The trick to practicing gratitude, in my experience, is not to reserve that daily shout out for the next to last month of the year. But, to do it everyday. In a journal. As we speak to others. Or, whispered (or said aloud) to one's self.

It is when I look at the skies I am reminded of the wise words of another one of my teachers. The year-long class was at an art studio. But not just any art studio. Art & Soul uses all media (song, movement, visual arts, poetry, drama) and reaches far beyond the chosen medium to the source of the media. That is, what's inside that makes the art. That means a lot of emotional and psychological flotsam and jetsum can be dug up in these sessions. At the conclusion of one particular day of digging, our teacher had us close our eyes. She acknowledged that many of us had experienced some signifcant pain in our lives or were  currently. But, she reminded us, we could always find reasons to be grateful.

So, Arunima, I think of you either directly or on some conscious level when I look to the skies with gratitude. I will always remember you directing us to the gift of nature as an eternal font of gratitude. Driving Grace to school the other morning, I watched the sun rise and whispered "thank you." My current teacher reminds me to begin my first-morning meditation by thanking the four corners of the earth, starting with the East. The sun rises there and without its' beautiful golden glory, we would have no life. The West is sometimes the least easy to thank. In Native American culture, from the West comes the wind, rains and storms. And from the West come our trials in our lives. But without them we would not learn. Next, I thank the South and all the beautiful things that I have seen growing that previous day. The flowers, the trees. And then the North that provides our cover, our nuture, our succour.

Each day, I see this view, pictured above, or some form of it. It is the land trust that borders my new back yard. I am grateful. In the beauty, the bounty, the nuture and in the lessons that teach me. Happy thanksgiving to all. May you find joy in the bounty of your blessings this special day of Thanksgiving and in everyday. And: Thank you for reading "The Journey with Grace."

Namaste.

“Gratitude should not be just a reaction to getting what you want, but an all-the-time gratitude, the kind where you notice the little things and where you constantly look for the good, even in unpleasant situations. Start bringing gratitude to your experiences, instead of waiting for a positive experience in order to feel grateful.” — Marelisa Fábrega