Birthing

I've got a couple poems forming in my mind's embryonic fluid but it's not time to birth them yet...soon. For now it's enough to feel joy as each new word flutters into existence.

In moments like this, I turn to other writers for company and inspiration.

From Proust's Swann's Way:

"When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form."

From Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm:

"Esoteric Christianity, I read, posits a substance. It is a created substance, lower than metals and minerals on a "spiritual scale," and lower than salts and earths, occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is in touch with the Absolute, at base. In touch with the Absolute! At base. The name of this substance is: Holy the Firm."

From Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree:

"Granma said that the spirit mind was like any other muscle. If you used it it got bigger and stronger. She said the only way it could get that way was using it to understand, but you couldn't open the door to it until you quit being greedy and such with your body mind. Then understanding commenced to take up, and the more you tried to understand, the bigger it got."

From Linda Hogan's (Chickasaw Indian tribe) story "The Feathers" found in Reinventing the Enemy's Language - Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America:

"There is a still place, a gap between worlds, spoken by the tribal knowings of thousands of years. In it are silent flyings that stand aside from human struggles and the designs of our own makings. At times, when we are silent enough, still enough, we take a step into such mystery; the place of spirit, and mystery, we must remember, by its very nature does not wish to be known. There is something alive in a feather. The power of it is perhaps in its dream of sky, currents of air, and the silence of its creation. It knows the insides of clouds. It carries our needs and desires, the stories of our brokenness. It rises and falls down elemental space, one part of the elaborate world of life where fish swim against gravity, where eels turn silver as moon to bread."