The Secret of Poetry
Click to Play Join poet Laura Hope-Gill as she explores the relevance of Eastern and Western alchemy to poetry.
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The Secret of Poetry
Click to Play Join poet Laura Hope-Gill as she explores the relevance of Eastern and Western alchemy to poetry.
Sitting with the Negative
Click to Play Join poet Laura Hope-Gill ( www.thehealingseed.com ) on her exploration of poetry, sacred texts, life and alchemy.
Zoe the Dog
On Tuesday morning at 7:15, just a little bit before my daughter's school bus comes to pick her up, Zoe and I said good-bye to each other, ending our 13 year partnership in this world. Her death ended a three month battle of me against her death. I fought like crazy, turning my back on two suggestions by her vet that we "do it now" and compiling an array of medicines, holistic and non-. Antioxidants, vitamins, drops, iron, vitamin E, prednisone, nausea pills, painkillers. . . and I was feeding her "dogsure" with a syringe. Death has been living in my house, pacing. And now it's gone. The way she died mystifies me. I was holding her as I have done so many times, my arms wrapped around her neck (by now so skinny) and my face buried in her fur. I had never visualized how she would go. I only feared it and wept for it since the vet told me in November he'd found cancer in her liver. But when the moment came, when her breathing changed, I talked her through ...
OLD --for Michele and Barack Obama He has grown into an old man, Even older than Mandela did who also did The remarkable thing simply by doing the only Thing he could do. Be. His hair is longer now, not fully gray. It is as though he has stopped time the same way Anyone who changes the course of history holds a power over time. He stands tall, still, Dressed, as always in his best Because that is what his grand-mother taught him. He remembers every single one Of her lessons because she gave them in the Soft language she knew could shape a man from the inside. His wife is old now, too, and she Still holds him to her every word and to his Word and to the words of the world. She is his weaver And he is her web. Their love forms A constellation of stars all the places they walk. It lights the path. Two presidencies down, they still talk mostly of their daughters who are Grown and do not recall A time when either a woman or a person with dark Skin could not make a home of the White House or...
Life as God Has It
LIFE AS GOD HAS IT ζωη(zoe) n. - greek "life". Life in the absolute sense, life as God has it, that which the Father has in Himself, and which He gave to the Incarnate Son to have in Himself (Strongs #2222) In his adaptation of an Abenaki legend, Joseph Bruchac speaks of the origin of dogs as Great Spirit’s gift to human when He saw we were moving farther from the natural world and therefore farther from Him. Spirit saw that human was in trouble and needed an animal that would sleep inside the shelter, curled up at the foot of the bed. And so came Dog. I named my dog “Zoe” because it means “life” in Greek. More specifically it means Life as God has it. My dog “Zoe” now as I write this is leaving this other life, life as mortals have it. She’s lying next to me as I write this, as I’ve written so many other pieces, with her beside me through every word. Her white and apricot fur is healthy. It is her winter coat, thick with curls and swirls. The softest fur covers her head, eme...
Zoe the Dog
My dog of 12 years is dying. She has cancer, at the very least, of the liver. Two months ago I took her in for a rabies shot. The vet, feeling something in her abdomen, told me we should operate immediately. During the surgery he called me (I was across the parking lot, at Old Navy, looking at turtlenecks as though they mattered) and offered to just "put her down" then and there, having seen the cancer. More than a month later, and two weeks ago, he told me again it was time. I didn't listen and have had two more weeks with her. Yesterday we went for a long walk at the Biltmore Estate. This morning she is lying on my bed, warm and cozy. Every night I say good-bye to her, and then in the middle of the night I wake and reach my foot over the blankets to feel her breathing. I want to cancel everything I have to do today just so I can sit with her, walk with her, talk to her. I know she'd get tired of me, though, and, as she often does, she'd get up from wherever we w...
Alchemy and the Political Scene
I have not written on this blog for some time now. This has been partly due to my need to reconcile the deep work I was doing with alchemy with the more surface stuff of life. Truthfully, I didn't realize when I was writing this that the inner eloquence of alchemy was so closely related to hearing loss and deafness. Now I see they are inseparable for me. Deafness has continued to move into my life, as both physical reality and as metaphor. Only in alchemy--in taoism and its shared deepest roots of Christianity--can I make sense of it. And it makes perfect sense. I am working with Debra Roberts on developing a website. We've done some video which allows me to talk very freely about the Bible's roots in alchemy. I prefer just talking about it. Writing about it so often falls dryly from the tree of ideas. Also, I feel the rising need to accelerate an understanding within Christianity of these ancient processes, the processes of change and improvement which the texts speak of i...
THE MOURNING PATH
I've been reading the Gospels for references to mourning. I see so clearly how little space there is for mourning in our society. We are moved from one tragedy to the next with hardly space for a sobbing breath in between. Years ago, when I lived on Riceville Road and taught at the Juvee, I bought an enormous block of clay and molded chunks of it with my hands into these hollow standing figures, only two of which survive. An art historian friend told me they were examples of funerary art. I hadn't known such a thing existed and just continued making them, one after another. There's a movement in Qi Gong called "Carry Tiger Up the Mountain." And every time I did Carry Tiger, which you repeat 17 times or something, I'd weep then feel sobbing approach. It was the strangest thing. None of the other moves had this effect. My instructor explained one day (he'd never comfort me during the practice, always left me to do the work myself) that the movement was begu...