from Lori

Hi, fellow lightning bugs,

Here are some of the flashes of light I managed to capture during the talks.

On poetry:

Luci Shaw, in her talk "Harvesting Fog," spoke about the importance of wonder, of our longing for moments that connect us to the beyond. She said that poetry "enlivens our sense of the unseen," that there is revelation in the concrete details of life, and that poetry translates the spiritual into word pictures -- it sends a "whiff of heaven into earth."

Mary Karr spoke of the importance of being guided in her writing. She writes to discover or recover. For her, poetry conveys, with little information and great intensity, an experience or image. She disparaged the trend of the last fifty years toward hyper-intellectual poetry. Scott Cairns disagreed; he thinks that puzzlement engages the reader. Mary responded that it isn't puzzlement but the feeling in poems that engages the reader.

Parker Palmer:
In speaking about Quakerism, he encouraged listening to "that of God" within ourselves and each other. He said that our outer and inner lives keep co-creating each other; in Quakerism, the dialectic between inner and outer tensions are held constructively. In dealing with these tensions, we all have a longing to "come down in a place just right."

We need to live in community and learn how to deal with our differences, to "let the heart break open but not apart."

We also need to remember that our conceptions, forms of worship, and religions are simply earthen vessels that carry the treasure of the spirit of God. "If the earthen vessels are too small, obscure, or defile the treasure, they must be smashed."

I, too, appreciated his description of the quest for truth: "pursuing things of great importance with passion and discipline."

Poetry Spoken and Sung
The last lines in a poem by Kazim Ali: "Should I pray that my thirst be quenched or should I pray for an unquenchable thirst?"

A few verses from the song "palm" by Joel Navarro:

you hold me in the palm
of your hand
and I nestle
in a crease

you catch me in the palm
of your hands
joined to pray
and I drink
sweat and blood

I hold that palm open
and I strike
with my palm
as a hammer
on a nail

and you seize me with the palm
of your hands
as a nail holds
and will
not let go



Amen.


Lori