Sacred Body: Biology and Soul

This is one of my favorite poems to say, to hear, to feel the echo of spiraling through the past and the future and the present.  We heard it at the end of the Nia New Year’s class this morning.
I Live My Life
I live my life in growing orbits,
which move out over the things [...]

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It’s weird to be back on all the asthma meds again — high levels of prednisone and doing the nebulizer four times a day — after all these years baruch hashem of feeling so healthy.  But I bless all these drugs which allow me to live.  There are big differences now, compared to when I [...]

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(First in a series about healing pneumonia and asthma.)
Last night, my friends Sharon and Ronen came over to visit.  They brought chicken soup.  Ronen read this poem.

 
 
 
 
 
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to [...]

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Eternity
He  who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
– William Blake
(1757-1827) 

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Red Brocade
The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.
Let’s go back to that.
Rice?  Pine [...]

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The class focus on Saturday, chosen at random from the basket of focii, was “Daily Connection With the Earth.”
What is the sensation in your body when you hear and feel these words?
My teacher, Robert Bly, taught me how to spontaneously tweak the language in a poem I am reading according to the promise of the [...]

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Just as it says in the song from “Hair,” at dawn on February 14, the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars — all in the sign of Aquarius.  In honor of that planetary configuration and in honor of the play “Hair,” we danced to the entire original soundtrack of the [...]

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A Love Letter
Within a circle of one meter
You sit, pray and sing.
Within a shelter ten meters large
You sleep well, rain sounds a lullaby.
Within a field a hundred meters large
Raise rice and goats.
Within a valley a thousand meters large
Gather firewood, water, wild vegetables and Amanitas.
Within a forest ten kilometers large
Play with [...]

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Lost
Stand still.  The trees ahead and the bushes behind you
Are not lost.  Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.  Listen.  It answers,
I have made this place around you. 
If you leave it, you [...]

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Her Longing
Before this longing,
I lived serene as a fish,
At one with the plants in the pond,
 The mare’s tail, the floating frogbit,
Among my eight-legged friends,
Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip,
Like a leech, looping myself along,
A bug-eyed edible one,
A mouth like a stickleback, –
A thing quiescent! 
But now [...]

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