Happy Holiday Supermoon

This one and the next two full moons are called “supermoons” because they are so close to the earth…big, bright, beautiful, bountiful…

and a perfect opportunity to say ‘thank you’ to all my Beloved Backers by posting the Kickstarter Hall of Fame on this website – click on ‘About the Book’ where their names are carved in cyberspace stone…with Love.

 

Half Full Moon

Is the moon half full or half empty?

Always the optimist, the moon is in fact waxing…

and on this final day of March, a haiku from Halcyon Days.

 

                                                          March

smell the earth turn

pressing her breasts to the sun

she shrugs off winter’s kiss

Buster’s Nap & Garden Dreams

Yes, this is mighty late as the full moon has surely waned…still in the spirit of compassion for self and generosity to all, I offer two new haiku

 

       Buster’s Nap

watch my red cat breathe

slow belly rise belly fall

who takes care of who?

 

      Garden Dreams

squat down in the yard

smell of mud and first flowers

sweet ache of new life

Three’s a Charm

‘For the Feeling Love & Transformation from New York to Cape T own’ is alive and well!
She weighs in at 236 pages, 8.5” X 5.5” in size…quite a beauty.

After the book’s first projected release date of October 2011, then revised to January 2012 it’s finally available for purchase online at:

https://www.createspace.com/3693277

Also for sale on Amazon in the next few days, I’ll post an update.

For those of you who pledged at the Kickstarter reward level that includes a book, I’ve placed a bulk order and your copy will be shipped directly from me as soon as they arrive.

Cheers!

Kind of Blue Moon

This post is beyond overdue for last week’s full moon, still, I trusted my intuition and waited to post my February haiku from Halcyon Days…

 

FEBRUARY

you scoff at Valentines

chocolate hearts

not the only ones to melt

 

 

 

Happy Lunar New Year

The Tao Te Ching has been one of my great inspirations for…well, probably lifetimes. Here’s an excerpt from a  favorite translation by Stephen Mitchell.

Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

 

Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn’t possess,

acts but doesn’t expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever.

This Year

This haiku from Halcyon Days was written seventeen years ago in 1995 and was originally entitled ‘Next Year’…it was about this year

 2012

no regrets, no fear

say yes to what is possible

you own your life

New Moon, New Magnificent Human

Congratulations to Torkwase and Salim on the birth of their daughter and my first grandchild, Mia…born beautiful and healthy on the new moon in Capricorn, Christmas Day, 25 December 2011.

This poem, ‘Welcome’ was written for my son, Salim, when I was pregnant with him.

                                                               

                                                              Welcome

we come through mothers

no less

sit beside their souls

while they talk with God

become their prayers for peace

and prosperity

two bodies

in one skin

wait in sacred darkness

for the cue

to swim upstream

to swim towards the Light

our mothers are there to greet us

Memory & Vision continued…

Following is a continuation of the July Full Moon post about my first class at the University of the Western Cape in 2004. Special thanks to Leon Mugabe of the Kigali Institute for Education for his assistance with these edits. This was intended to be the December Full Moon post and due to technical difficulties is a bit late…the first part of the Memory & Vision excerpt is at:

July Full Moon

In the class are two men from Rwanda. One is round and jovial, with a prominent scar across his chin where he was gashed by a machete during the 1994 holocaust. For over a year, he has been away from his wife and infant daughter still in Kigali. Like many displaced African people, he manages to maintain an air of optimism despite his extended separation. The other student from Rwanda is thin and quiet, his language and social skills poor. I wonder how he’s made it into a master’s program in English. For their play assignment, both men choose to write about Rwanda’s tragic civil war culminated by the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis.

At the beginning of the semester, before the play submissions are due, I evaluate my students’ writing proficiencies with a short assignment. My awkward, subdued student hands in an obviously plagiarized paper. After uttering fewer than two sentences in the entire class, he submits a very sophisticated essay about South African theater after the democratic elections. I am in a dilemma. It is my first semester teaching in a foreign country, and I’m faced with what is a difficult situation for any instructor. I defer to my department chair, a deeply caring professor who tutors the student into producing, albeit badly written, an original essay. I appreciate my chair’s compassion. Neither of us wants this young man to fail.

When the student in question presents his script at our final readings, it is poignantly clear how theater allows us to express our deepest selves. His play begins very much like feuding Montagues and Capulets except that we hear Hutus and Tutsis in a raging argument in the village center. This writing is most certainly original. It is his voice we have not heard all semester surfacing though a horrific story. The final moments of the script again take place in the village center. We sit riveted as several characters confess their war crimes in haunting litanies:

“My name is Kamana of the family of Muzindutsi, I am a Hutu from the tribe of Abazigaba and I am guilty of committing these crimes: the rape of Nzamukosha, the young daughter of Mutunzi that I killed a few hours before; the murder of Kalimunda’s entire family, I played a big role in the mutilation of Mushumba and his wife who were our immediate neighbors. For all these innocent persons I killed and mutilated, I ask forgiveness to the survivors of their families; to the Tutsi group members who used to live on this hill; to all Rwandese and to the country as a whole.”

Over and over, as the fictionalized names change, the actors describe atrocities, express guilt, make pleas for forgiveness. The intensity gives us just a glimpse of what this introverted, almost invisible man has experienced. What he has endured is almost too difficult for us to hear.

His compatriot writes a compelling play with a long academic title more suitable for an essay than a drama. In the talkback after his reading, I question one of the most provocative lines.

“In your script you quote a statistic ‘one million people dying violently in a hundred days.’ Is that accurate?”

“That was the death toll in my country.”

“Then that is your title, One Million People in One Hundred Days.”

In teaching Memory & Vision, I practice applying creativity to constructing a new society. I recognize how making theater can support the process of transformation. I realize that people can write insightful, expressive plays if you don’t tell them that playwriting is difficult. I’m eager to share what I know about Art and Theater and Life in this foreign and familiar country. I am grateful that my students are my teachers.

Less is More

from Halcyon Days..

November

our birch tree

sheds garments of ashen gold

stands naked and will not blush