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a poem written to untame chronic disconnection
WILDFLOWER
content to bloom
without being ‘picked’ ~
freedom, unassailable belonging.
Even like this, how I am on year three of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Long Covid?), I’ve noticed that despite a continuing inability to locate the cognitive function required to write fairy tales as I would wish to do, so as to contribute something to the world — I can bloom. Here, on my own, away from everyone else, mostly in a chair. Hours and days and weeks and months and years in a chair. I manage to grow and bloom very quietly, without notice. In a grand solitude and with no chance of being ‘picked,’ I discover there remains good reason to bloom and it is this:
Beauty.
Bloom for the sake of Beauty. Alone.
Wildflowers don’t bloom with plans of being picked. Nor can they conceive of not-belonging. They simply (and naturally) bloom and belong in this world, bloom and belong in this world. How utterly content I imagine wildflowers to meaningfully be.
Even when far, far away…with no one to see.
I am a wildflower!
(featured photo of wildflowers by Lee on Unsplash)
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a poem about the truth of disappointing things
when she who turns out not to be a princess
looks in a mirror,
a confused and crestfallen face
floats behind a screen of thinning petals on twigs.
no longer a child, drifting within ice-crusted glass,
not wanting to come to disappointment,
she has forgotten that
petals are
fiercely vulnerable beneath a wishing-star, ever
willing to hold hands with every piercing and plucking wind
for this safe reason:
petals are
just as beautiful when fallen to the ground,
Just As Beautiful.
the truth behind a woman’s ‘demure’ gaze:
she is busy admiring her unique carpet of blossoms, fit for a fairy tale–
as telling as any crown.
inside mirrors of winter remember that
fallen petals are
dreams which never turned to bitten fruit yet are
Just As Impossibly Beautiful.
image of petals on ground by alexphotos
featured image by aaron burden
This poem was written on a hard day, to remember Wonder and an ancient Woman’s secret:
Dreams don’t need to come true; fulfilled or not, their simple and impossible existence is enough. Enough for you to be beautiful and standing in wondrous, creative pink bloom. This holds true for maiden, mother, and crone.
Remember. The purpose of some flowers is to give way to fruit, but some flowers exist simply for their beauty. This is an equally stunning magic, is it not?
If you find yourself standing barefoot upon dreams that never came true:
“Wise women know to laugh out loud and twirl with flying skirts upon thick-petaled carpets.” ~the Crone
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THE AUTUMN WITCHING HILL
THE AUTUMN WITCHING HILL
Just crowned, her first day as queen.
They bow to her.
With bare feet and silk gown staining,
she flees faraway
to where untamed roots give rise
to impossible beauties.
She requests the counsel she needs.
Tinder tangles into an ordinary brass key
that she swallows.
It tastes of smoldering seeds.
With no court watching
she drinks slanted sunlight,
gilded sky,
burnished hills,
the goddess tea of crisp gold grass.
Her confusion ebbs.
Bent by heavenly gusts
she bows
to a pocket of slight stems
crowned by florid stars. She listens.
She leaps and picks.
Her choice:
Wind in trees
above fame and jewels,
birdspeech over wished-for youth.
Her people are best served
by what is real.
This, she decides, is her creative will.
Yet why make proclamation
when her woman’s nature is to invoke?
Inspiration is her way.
The wind blows and takes her hair,
she turns to autumn copper.
The earth takes and decomposes her name.
Her soul turns to soil, the two indistinguishable.
Now she knows.
She is sunbeam much more than she is queen.
Now she chooses—
Not to be revered royalty
but to be witched and revere.
This poem is inspired by the Edmund Dulac art seen here, which I believe is an illustration for Beauty And The Beast. I made my own meaning of it.
I hope you felt a sense of wonder in the reading of this poem. If you’d like to receive inspiration for wonder in your email about once a month, I’d love to have you, please SUBSCRIBE.
You can leave a comment below on this poem; it’s wonderful to hear what you thought or felt upon reading my writing! Thank you ever so much.
~Cricket
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That witchy sense of touch
We go into Nature and LOOK and are enchanted. Yet there’s another way to glean Wonder from landscapes, one that is uncommonly spoken of or practiced. And a little witchy.
The sense of touch.
Let’s go for a walk, right now, in your imagination, to see how this works. (Wonder and walks naturally hold hands, as you know.) Off you go, out a hidden portal of your home. See the canopied path leading to a forest like any other.
Take off your shoes, for this is holy ground.
Set bare feet on the grit of earth.
As you go along, please know you may find yourself attempting to use descriptive words for what will come to pass. However, it’s most divine to Go Wordless. No vocabulary will be needed (on your part) for this imaginal experience. The point is to conjure sensations, not syllables.
Dip your head as you slip out of bright sunshine into the realm of what is emerald and sage-deep. This is you, bowing to the forest.
Pause. Feel the coolness on your skin. (Take your time with this.)
Press your palm against the flaked crevices of tree bark. (This is just the beginning.)
Graze the back of your hand along the velvet stockings of moss on exposed old-growth roots.
Allow the raspy tickle of a caterpillar’s crawl on your arm. Rub a ridged leaf against your cheek, next press it to the space between your eyes. It may happen that you intuit the wonder of wood breaching earth to stand inside a sky, to grow star-shaped hands to fall upon your head, autumn upon autumn.
Caress the perfect curvature of a river’s stone. Feel the sacred weight of it in your hand, how clean it is from rushing ice melts.
Do you understand? With touch comes closeness—a felt intimacy with Mother Nature.
Who notices when she’s being courted.
A fallen twig from a pine takes care to bump and prick beneath your fingertip. This is the braille of dryads, and as you read by touch you discover what the tree knows by heart:
Silence and birdsong and wind, the trifecta of primordial comfort.
A storm arrives. Tilt back your head and drift your eyes closed. Float your arms. Catch puddles of cloud; accept the thrumming patter of cloud-drops in your cupped hands. Become a chalice-goddess in the rain.
Push your toes into the mud.
A plant of spindly stems scratches. Breathe deep and ‘see’ the stems undergo a metamorphosis into gray-green tendrils of hair belonging to some tiny, wild creature straddling this world and the realm of Fae.
You may be surprised at this ability you have, at your age, to make-believe. Brace yourself. Images will flood your mind through the sense of touch, just as eagerly as through the sense of sight, if you come to the world as does a child.
Playfully.
Open, open, open.
Know this:
Mother Nature wants to tell you stories any way she can, using every last one of your senses and all of the world. To this end she’ll cross any boundary because she knows no boundaries.
Imagine if we all welcomed her outreach efforts. She might just extend her beauty and story so deep inside our psyches that we all move in a synchronized dance to tend our blue and green and creatured Home. And, one another. Earthy, natural miracles might happen.
The other day in my back yard, of a sudden an unexpected and seemingly related-to-nothing image arrived inside my mind:
War submarines beaching themselves like whales upon shores. Stiff uniforms popped out of metal-lidded spouts to spray onto a lapping beach and become people, relaxed and natural people, strolling on sands of all colors and origin stories.
It remains mysterious to me how such images and meaning-making come out of nowhere, out of imagination, which is the sublime stuff of the heavens. Just remember the axiom goes like this:
As above, so below.
Tactile immersion in Mother Nature holds power to transport you into Wonder. Go on and try it. Make it a practice to be witchy in wild places by way of the wondrous, liminal threshold that is your skin.
Much good will come of it.
“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
~To remember Wonder by Cricket Baker’s new pieces arriving in your email about once a month, be sure to SUBSCRIBE.
Pretty please leave a comment to share any thoughts you have on this piece 🙂
featured image by Yvor Punchev
image of forest by Lukasz Szmigiel
