Open to the irritation, grit forms a pearl it’s been said. Fish for mermaids, dive for pearls . . creativity@maryannmoore.ca

Calling the Circle

by | Aug 25, 2021 | A Poet's Nanaimo

Wherever our ancestors lived, they gathered in circles around a fire. Through the years we’ve gathered in circles in various ways such as quilting, for prayer, women’s consciousness raising, for self-help and for honouring the changing seasons.

A poem by Danusha Lameris, “Small Kindnesses,” includes a reminder of how much we’re missing without the circle around the fire:

We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire.

I began offering women’s writing circles in 1997 as a way to be together with our stories, each having an opportunity to be seen and heard. My motto when I began was: “Be seen. Be heard. Be amazed at what comes out of the stillness.”

In the writing circles I offer, we are a community, creating and celebrating in a form of ceremony that awakens and honours our own spirits and the seasons including the seasons of our lives. Now that September is approaching, it’s time to call the circle again, gathering women for sox-week circles to begin in person in Nanaimo on Wednesday, September 8 and via Zoom on Thursday, September 9. (I’ve included info about both circles at the end of this blog.)

“I’ve always wanted to write but I don’t know where to start,” someone may say. “I don’t call myself a writer but I keep a journal,” someone else may say. All may have a longing for a place to be heard. In the Writing Life circle you are supported by guidelines that offer a structure to explore within, as well as by one another. You can honour and give voice to your longings and dive into the stories waiting to be told. Our stories, written and shared in the circle, take us into the realm of the sacred.

We are engaging in the ancient wisdom of the circle in a modern application. As Matthew Fox said in his book Creativity: “The building of strong souls and strong communities requires strong rituals – occasions that both link us to our ancestors and that speak in a language that is fresh and challenging.”

While there are many components to the circle such as connection, communication, compassion and curiosity, I’ve narrowed them down to ten.

The Ten Components of the Circle

Container
Writing is a ceremony. Ceremonies are meaning containers.
Gail Sher, The Intuitive Writer

The circle is a container, with a structure and circle agreements. As there is structure in a story, there is structure in the circle where we learn to stretch ourselves and also learn to pause. It is a simple yet powerful way to honour ourselves.

Ceremony
The candle is lit. Some sage may have been burned to clear the space. This holy smoke is an element of most spiritual practices of the world. The poetry and prose we create together defines our longing and creates a ceremony of stillness and consciousness.

Conversation
For all creativity is communication; it is the utmost in communication, the telling of our story, our hearts, our truth, our inner wisdom, our search for beauty, and our telling of pain.
Matthew Fox, Creativity

We live in a noisy era where the levels of sound increase as the needs of people to be heard become desperate. In the circle we sit down and listen with an intentional conversation.

Composting
What we may see as scraps for the compost pile can becoming nourishing for the soil/soul. The ideas percolate for awhile and as various elements come into assist them such as the support of others in the circle, sparkling imaginings can result. Out of the daydreams, are ideas for your own stories from life.

Calling the Circle
When I put the word out about a new writing circle, I don’t think of “marketing” but rather calling people back to the circle. “A circle is not just a meeting with the chairs rearranged. It is a return to an original form of human community, as well as a leap forward to create a new form of community,” Christina Baldwin says in Calling the Circle. “Calling the circle is a declaration of readiness to link where we came from, where we are, and where we may go.”

Coming Home
I read Christina Baldwin’s book on journaling, One to One, in the 1970s and went on to read her other books on journaling and on the circle. She is a pioneer in journaling and circle work. “I want to come home to the earth again,” she wrote. Simply sitting and listening to ourselves and one another can bring us home.

Centre
The centre of the circle where I’ve placed a candle, a talking piece, and the ting sha to ring our beginning represents the great good or great spirit. As we look to the centre of ourselves, we look to the centre of the circle for strength, guidance and wisdom. The centre of the circle is like the centre of the medicine wheel, a cauldron full of possibilities.

 

Creativity
“The Celtic imagination loved the circle,” John O’Donohue said. “It recognized how the rhythm of experience, nature, and divinity followed a circular pattern.” The circle is a place to get in touch with all the ways in which we are creative, to remember the joy we experienced from planting a garden or creating a collage of sticks and stones on the beach or by picking up a musical instrument. In the circle we may do some collage, take a walk to loosen the ideas, create paint chip poems or a group poem, and read a poem together one line at a time.

I like what Flora Bowley says in her book The Art of Aliveness: “Now, more than ever, applying the philosophies of the creative process to our lives and to our world is not only helpful, it’s vital.”

Community
Ideally, community is a place where we can meet with others wholeheartedly to celebrate our sameness and our differences. It’s a place where we get to live up to our full potential and are supported for it. In the circle we create a community where we learn what it’s like to be all we can be and we take those experiences into creating healthy communities in our neighbourhoods and workplaces.

Celebration
How wonderful it is to celebrate together as each woman is honoured and each rite of passage is acknowledged. “Won’t you celebrate with me,” Lucille Clifton said in her poem with that title.

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

I look forward to gathering in the circle in Nanaimo as well as on Zoom with women who are further away. “Keep holding the hearth – these sometimes nearly invisible islands of calm and circle and feminine energy are the soul portals of the world at this chaotic and dangerous time,” Christina Baldwin wrote to me many years ago. How accurate those words are for us today.

There is a fire of welcome in my Nanaimo living room, although not a literal one, as well as on Zoom where we can see and hear one another to keep the embers glowing. It can become a sacred place.

Writing Life women’s writing circles
Nourish Yourself. Honour Your Voice. Write Your Stories.

Writing Life women’s writing circle in person in Nanaimo
Theme: Where Many Streams Meet
In the Writing Life women’s writing circle, you will find your voice and trust it as you’ll learn to trust the people on the journey with you. You’re not alone. Sing your song and dance your truth as you realize your stories as a place where many streams meet.  Notes and handouts will be sent to those who happen to miss a week.

Wednesday, September 8 to Wednesday, October 13, 2021 from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
(six Wednesday mornings)
+ a Writing Life salon for sharing your work from the six-week writing circle on Wednesday, October 20
Fee: $270 payable by cheque or e-transfer

You can be in touch with questions or to save you a space in the circle by emailing me at creativity@maryannmoore.ca.

Writing Life women’s writing circle via Zoom
Theme: Where Many Streams Meet
In the Writing Life women’s writing circle, you will find your voice and trust it as you’ll learn to trust the people on the journey with you. You’re not alone. Sing your song and dance your truth as you realize your stories as a place where many streams meet. Handouts will be sent via email before each weekly circle. Notes will be sent to those who happen to miss a week.

Thursday, September 9 to Thursday, October 14, 2021 from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Pacific time
(six Wednesday mornings)
+ a Writing Life salon for sharing your work from the six-week writing circle on Thursday, October 21
Fee: $270 payable by cheque or e-transfer

You can be in touch with questions or to save you a space in the circle by emailing me at creativity@maryannmoore.ca.

Black Bears in the Carrot Field

Black Bears in the Carrot Field

by | Aug 2, 2021 | A Poet's Nanaimo

Isn’t that a great title for a poetry collection? Black Bears in the Carrot Field is Linda K. Thompson’s debut poetry collection, published in July 2021 by Mother Tongue Publishing on Salt Spring Island B.C.

The title comes from Linda’s poem “Saying Goodbye”:

My family back on the mainland are sleeping 
tight beside tall rocks. Dreaming about black bears 
in the carrot field, and the Eiffel Tower 
that has appeared in the middle of the barnyard.

Yes, a blend of the practical and the imagined or rather, the metaphorical.

Linda includes some notes in the back of the book so we learn that Linda’s brother, Bruce Miller, told her that “his friend and fellow farmer, David Hellevang, told him the story of the black bears in the carrot field. David and his crew were in the front field digging potatoes and, unbeknownst to them, the bears were in the back field ripping through and chewing up his field of carrots. Such a metaphor for life, don’t you think? Sometimes you just can’t win for losing. But you keep on keeping on.” There’s Linda K. Thompson’s philosophy of life in a nutshell, or rather in a potato skin.

Linda  kept on keeping on learning from various (and famous) poets, being encouraged by friends and family along the way and published her poems in several publications including her own chapbook entitled Four Small People in Sturdy Shoes (Hot Tomato Studios, 2013). Her work has recently appeared in Prairie Fire and Release Any Words Stuck Inside of You: Canadian Flash Fiction and Prose Poetry.

Among the teachers Linda makes note of is Susan Musgrave, another B.C. poet who spends most of her time on Haida Gwaii. In recent years, both Linda and I have attended poetry workshops with Susan and  in 2006, I think it was, we attended Susan’s workshop at the Victoria School of Writing where we met.

Linda and I attended many poetry retreats with the late Patrick Lane who is acknowledged as providing Linda with the two opening lines to her poem “Near Nice, France – 1941:

A paper lies on my desk, one corner folded under.
I won’t want to write about love again.

At the end of her “thank-yous,” Linda says: “And to Patrick, who  understood my poems best of all.”

Patrick’s fellow poet in love and in life, Lorna Crozier, has been our teacher at retreats in recent years and Linda thanks Lorna for her “midnight ‘poetry intervention’ — shoring up my spirits when I might have stalled along the rocky road to publication.”

Linda was born in 1950 at Vancouver General Hospital  and was raised on a potato and cattle farm in the Pemberton Valley, B.C., a flat river valley with rugged coast mountains rising sharply on both sides. As Linda says in her notes: “100 years later, Pemberton is well known for its superior seed potatoes.”  Linda’s Great Uncle Jack Ronayne followed the suggestion of a Department of Agriculture representative who, in 1922, thought farmers ought to take advantage of “this unusual isolation to develop and grow a disease-free seed potato.”

Linda has lived for many years in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island.

I asked Linda about her poem “My Story Begins” and what she meant by “thimble babies / that left the house in the night,” and I should have figured who she is acknowledging as the next lines are:

brothers and sisters that never
quite took, but we loved them anyway,
like we loved the eggs in the hatcher:
for the mystery of them.

Just like “old home week” as we call it when we run into old friends, Linda names lots of them including a couple of cows, Bopper and Fudge, in her poem “Cows in the Family.”

Linda may have known Kathleen and Steve and of course her sister Janet. Other may have been made up but sure have a “real” ring to them such as Dick Black, Ethyl Peach and Bud Fournier in her poem “Bob’s House. (There was also a family  English sheepdog named Bob when Linda was young.)

The places beyond Pemberton in Linda’s poems include Taos, New Mexico where Linda attended a poetry workshop and still recalled her father in the cottonwood. (“Courtyard in Taos”) “Near Nice, France – 1941” is written in the voice of Monique, one of Henri Matisse’s models.

“Buffalo in Yellowstone” describes the narrator with Bob (there he is again!) and she says:

I had lots of time
to think about old boyfriends, which I do now and then,
when I’m feeling life is less than I had expected.

As for “Gone to Windsor,” a prose poem, one never knows what is fact and what is made up. We poets do that sometimes i.e. make things up.

You can count on humour throughout Linda’s collection. That’s what we always looked forward to at poetry retreats when Linda would read a poem she had worked on, long into the night, the day before. “Ye Olde Burd Turd Grocery” is one of the places she notes in “Mr. Carlisle” as well as the “Cut to the Chase Beauty Salon.”

There is much poignancy too such as in “Bring This Stone to the Grave.” The title is beautiful and the poem is a gorgeous memory of the pastures, “last fall’s potato fields,” the orioles and waxwings, and a stone “smooth as one of Father’s old Viyellas.  The last lines are:

Still, the sun across the cottonwoods that line the Lillooet
will nearly break your heart.

Wow.

Black and white photos throughout the book, like a family album, are from Linda’s collection as well as from Pemberton & District Museum & Archives Society. The first photo is of Linda as a baby with her parents: Elsie Glover and Don Miller. It was taken in 1950, as Linda notes, “near Kamloops on trip home from Vancouver to purchase a new Chev truck and drive it to Lillooet to be loaded on PGE and delivered to Pemberton. There was no road in or out till the mid 60s.”

The next photo is of Don and Elsie’s farm  c.1975, “looking south towards Mount Currie from the farmhouse.” The photo acts as a background to Linda’s poem “Home Ground.”

Hippocrates believed humans absorb the topographical influence
of the place they are born and separation from this place
can be injurious to one’s health. Susan tells me this is called “vivaxis.”
I do not know the word. But I know the feeling.

What a marvelous collection of poems celebrating family and place. While letting us know about a particular locale in British Columbia, Canada, the poems can’t help but hearten readers to remember their own beginnings and the “topographical influence of a place”.

You can order a copy of Black Bears in the Carrot Field from your local independent bookstore or directly from Mother Tongue Publishing. There is free shipping within North America.

Linda has some B.C. readings coming up:

September 25 at the Pemberton Museum
October 2 at the Victoria Writers Festival
October 16 at the Gabriola Library with Bill Stenson

I’ll ask her if she has any plans for Windsor.