Announcing the release of LUMINOUS!
Hello beloved readers and friends~
I am thrilled to announce that my poetry collection Luminous: Poems & Inquiry for the Soul’s Journey will soon be available on Amazon and other major distributors. Thank you to all for your patience and support around this project. It has been quite a wild adventure to birth this collection into the world! And here it is!
If you are in the Boulder/Denver area–PLEASE JOIN ME FOR A READING AT THE BOULDER BOOKSTORE NOVEMBER 8, 2018 7:30PM. And, if you are coming to the reading, please buy your book from Boulder bookstore–as more sales through the bookstore will keep the book on the shelf–and help it get out to other readers.
If you are interested in hosting a reading/poetry experience in your home or community, please write to me at weaverpoetry@gmail.com. I would love to schedule something with you.
And, if you contributed $100 or over via Go Fund ME, you will receive your copy of the book in the mail in the next 6-8 weeks.
More details to come….
sending love and gratitude!
Tightrope
A highwire stretches across a vast chasm.
We might spend a year or a lifetime
walking back and forth across this tightrope.
*
Perhaps we have even learned how to balance
on one foot, walk backwards, spin and leap—
and other such circus tricks!
*
But what if the great yawning maw below—
that which we tread above, with the aid
of our fancy gadgets and years of training—
*
is the very thing we seek? And we thought
we must endlessly study ourselves
and corset our own soul to avoid this!
*
But now you are exhausted
from all the precarious balancing.
You are killing yourself tip toeing around,
*
making up stories about what happens next.
Look down. Let the mind dizzy.
Let the foot slip. Fall hopelessly
*
into the chasm of your unbearable joy.
©Laura Weaver
LauraWeaver.org
soulpassages.wordpress.com
NOTE ABOUT LUMINOUS!
My poetry book Luminous will be available in the next two weeks via Amazon and other outlets! Stay tuned for an announcement.
I am so excited to share this all with you! Thank you for your encouragement–and your patience around the timeline of this book.
Broken Open
Some days we fall to our knees
and pray for a new heart
that is free from the scars of this life.
*
For this ancient heart of ours
has been dragged around the wheel of time
behind the horse cart of suffering
for a few miles— or perhaps thousands!
*
There is our childhood of course—
this perfect wounding
that is passed between generations—
the pain we thought we should take on—
this pain that is not even ours.
*
Maybe there is even an existential
exhaustion we only notice
in the moments between sleep and waking—
an obsession with hand wringing
we can’t seem to turn away from.
It all seems so personal!
*
Just remember— We were warned!
Our hearts were made to break open~
It was in the contract we signed just before
we tumbled down the spirit ladder.
It was in the fine print we don’t ever read.
*
It said:
You will encounter the tumultuous winds
of your unfathomable fears and the blooming
of your own exquisite light.
*
You will feel abandoned, disappointed, betrayed.
You will be asked to forgive everything—
and most of all –your own luminous self.
*
Your heart will break open—
and spill its mysterious treasures—
This is good news!
Don’t try to stop it!
*
You may feel like you are on fire
with all that is awakening.
You may feel you won’t make it
to the other side.
*
But this is your heart—
and your heart was made
to break open.
*
And as you pray at this altar
of your broken open heart—
you will find the handwritten note
you left yourself on the mirror
of eternity so long ago.
*
Note to Self:
You will have the chance
to be healed by Love.
Take it!
©Laura Weaver
LauraWeaver.org
first published on soulpassages.wordpress.com
Remembering our Descendants
The day comes when you realize
you are not young anymore, at least
not in the way you thought you would stay.
The wheel turns, the circle widens
and you now occupy a simpler place~
the illusion of your importance dissolving
until you see that you are more a field of light
than the flaming arrow that once burned a hole
through the sky. After the inevitability of our fall,
of our many falls, after the surrender
to our own exquisite dismemberments,
we know we are not any of the identities
that have ever claimed us. Ever.
Some things are created and destroyed—
and this life is a long kiss that opens us
to the beauty of our own disaster
and inevitability of our exquisite return.
We know the way grief and ecstasy
couple again and again, like two hawks
spiraling up the current. And from those heights
we cry out, as we see our own changing face
in the sea waves, in the wildflowers, in our children
running full stride in the fields of the world.
And in this harvest of our life, we feed the world
with our offerings, fully given. And the rest, the chaff,
goes back into the fire that sustains those
who will come long after we are gone from this place.
If only we could wear these wings of our second life
with merciful ferocity—and live as the ancestors
our descendants will remember
as the ones who would not turn away
from the impossible, or give up when all seemed lost.
Yes— as the ones who held nothing back,
as they rode through the center of the storm –
forever tending what matters most.
©Laura Weaver
UPDATE ON LUMINOUS: thank you for your patience!!!! The book is coming this fall! The delays have been at times, well, challenging–AND, I’m trusting the perfection of the timing. For those of you who contributed to the Go Fund Me–your copies will be shipped out as soon as the book is released. More details to come.
Clematis
When I reach into the soil
I reach for stars—the miracle
of seed swelling itself into flesh. When
I search for you in the middle of the night
I move towards the beyond—the curve
of your hip a valley I have walked over
and over like a nomad. The cottonwoods
shed their fluffy seed, the tender grass bolts,
the press of summer is upon us. I shift plants
in moonlight to act out this restless stirring
to spread beyond first planting. Tonight
your fingers rub tomato vines, trace the tendrils
of clematis dancing up the lattice on the axis
of the sky. Already we have forgotten
the barren nights. And in the fullness
of this heat, we stand on teetering apple ladders,
reaching for the fruit just beyond the green fur
of leaf—our want a kite tugging to get off its leash.
Then where would we go? Would we find sky
in that floating? Or would we long only for our feet
on the ground, hands in the earth, mouth
upon mouth in a wild, unweeded garden?
Reflections:
~What is your relationship to your own longing, eros and sensuality?
~How does your relationship with the natural world feed and nourish your sensual self?
©Laura Weaver
LauraWeaver.org
soulpassages.wordpress.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Soul Wringing
In the dream, a wise man and I fall to the earth
laughing over nothing, our bellies quaking
on warm soil, the air filled with our delight.
He has recently been to the edge of death—
his body riddled with parasites,
and now—miraculously well again.
I ask him what his illness taught him.
And he says: It was an experience of soul wringing—
—my soul wrung out of every pride,
every arrogance, every prized accolade.
I see it in his face—the way this wringing
brought his joy back, how he was restored
by letting go of what seemed most precious—
how now he can give himself
all he could never before receive.
In the dream, this man is a beloved teacher
and I, a kind of daughter learning the ways
to whole my own heart. And this soul wringing—
not some penance or punishment,
but more of a gracious peacemaking—
where each morning I gather
morning dew from the tongues of grass
and drink each drop—one by one.
©Laura Weaver
LauraWeaver.org
soulpassages.wordpress.com
The Feast
It is green and teeming again,
the soils supple after years of drought—
after the parched places
called like a lover for rain,
after empty reservoirs
filled overnight, and the earth
offered her great generosity
so that everything is opening,
blooming, gleaming
with sweet golden light.
*
There is so much
we could resist in this life—
drought and famine and flood,
the turning of every season,
the arrival of each decade,
the falling away of a beloved,
our own aging bodies, every betrayal
or hurt we have ever held close.
We could spend every moment resisting.
*
For this mammalian heart aches—
we attach, hold on, scan the field
for potential loss. We love so intensely,
we push love away—lest it break us.
And yet to inhabit this body
in every cell, with no holding back,
we cannot avoid touching those
trembling notes of our impermanence—
those strands in our lives which
arrive for a time, but cannot stay.
We cannot avoid risking everything.
*
For in this exquisite love affair
the world will court us again and again—
and in this awakening of spring,
we will forget the other seasons of lack—
as we are reborn, renewed, unwrapped.
And the heat of earth’s wild eros
will rise through us—the poppies bursting
their seams, the fillies cantering
in the just born grasses,
the creeks racing high and fast.
And we think—yes, perhaps it will
always be like this—now that I have
emerged from this final winter of my soul.
*
But all of our seasons will come around again—
grief and passion and fear
loneliness and ecstasy—
they will all knock on the door.
And perhaps, in our forgetting,
we will be surprised by these
familiar strangers who come
in the dark hollow of the night—
or perhaps we will remember this feast
we were invited to long ago—
and we will lay the table with devotion,
pour the wine, and laugh with delight
with all that is offered,
here, now, for all time.
©Laura Weaver
first published on soulpassages.wordpress.com
LauraWeaver.org
