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November 30, 2023
A thread of connection
By Gary Lindorff
I wasn't angry when I wrote it. / I wasn't sad either. / I didn't feel anything /.It was just something I needed to do
::::::::
There is a bottle of turmeric on the table
Next to two small yellow gourds
Lying next to each other by the green glass vase
That is 2/3s full of murky water.
There are yellow flowers in the vase,
Old ones (wilted)
And fresh ones with longer stems
That lean out over a stack of junk mail
And a bunched up green napkin
That is one of a dozen
That my brother and his wife
Gave us for Christmas last year.
I am typing this on my old Apple computer
With the screen leaning against a crystal candle holder.
We light the beeswax candle at dinner
If we remember to.
Ayla is hiding among the plants by the sliding door.
She had surgery on her teeth yesterday
And has been acting skitterish
Ever since we brought her home.
Yesterday I wrote to a friend who would understand,
"Sometimes I hate the United States.
It shits on everything I hold sacred."
I wasn't angry when I wrote it.
I wasn't sad either.
I didn't feel anything.
It was just something I needed to do
Like taking out the compost.
Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.
He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.