In a moment of sad synchronicity, only a few hours after I posted this I found out that Mary Oliver is seriously ill. Writers and poets are sharing their stories about how her work has influenced them, and sending their blessings and prayers. I know many Druids and Pagans are also familiar with her work and have been touched by her vision and love of nature. Please take a few moments today to express your love and gratitude for an amazing woman, and consider sharing your story with her by sending her an open letter.

In honor of our first Valentine’s Day as husband and wife, I wanted to share the poem that Jeff and I had read at our wedding, “The Ponds,” by Mary Oliver.

Read the poem.

I expect an eclipse of moon
to be a kind of dilation,
corona blaze of blue iris
flaring out from the pupil-
depths of midnight sky
cast, in its center, suddenly
to shadow by coy sunlight.
I expect a god, his gaze
past the austerity of bare trees,
sharp eyelashes against the pale
cheek of hill, and the thrill…

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She sleeps with fists
clenched and wakes with bruises
in her palms.
She is reversible.
She folds colored paper along creases
that could break
open the skyline,
then quietly she unfolds it again.
The moon rises.

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I’ve lived so long among ghosts, / the puffed up shells, / watery husks / shimmering transparent skins / that shiver in the wind. / Like so much sea foam, / they shrink away / from the outstretched hand, / fall back into their emptiness.

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The flattery bears
down on us, leveled like a weapon
in the shaking hands of frightened and starving
corporate titans groveling like great beasts before us, desperate
and drooling, to convince us that their teeth are brittle and useless and anyway not
smiling makes them cool, and meanwhile, we scrape along the earth as things keep getting worse…

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Reader libramoon shares a lovely poem in the Meadowsweet Commons as part of the Share Your Love Story contest:

…No one at home has time to do
more than pretend we’re all just fine.
How was I to learn more than my lines?
That promises have consequence?
That I am more than dreams
that don’t come true?
A quiet stone cottage
outlined by life-bearing
pine, firs, maple, birch
nature’s hues and cycles
my heart relaxes.
Meet me here.

Read more…

Erin Nightwalker shares a painful and beautiful love story on her blog, nightwalkinghedgehod. Here’s an excerpt:

“The little pink girlheart is long gone, crumbled to shards in the grinding, everpresent silence. From the ashes a new heart arose. It is warped, bubbled, scarred, pitted. The staples show, the duct tape too, and still, somewhere in there the ghost of the pink fool cries for dreams lost. It weeps, having learned its lesson too well, too late.”

Head on over to her blog to read the whole thing.

Don’t forget, you can share your own love story and enter for a chance to win a copy of the new anthology of Pagan fiction, The Scribing Ibis. More details here.

Now it is the end of autumn, I lay my body down.

A hush. The hill is still humming with the day’s warmth, the sun sinking into the far shore of the lake. For a moment, I can see it, as though with other eyes, submerged, rippling beneath the waters in arcing liquid wings of flame and dusk, flexing, alternating, a thousand of them, wings sprouting from the round, warm body settling into the depths. Then the vision is gone.

I creep silently along the shore, my bare feet numb and rustling through the long, dried grasses of autumn. The mud is moist and rough on my soles, each step sending echoes of energy sliding up my calves.

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When my partner Jeff Lilly and I were first falling in love, I wrote a story called “Yewberry.” Not on purpose. It just sort of happened one afternoon, after I’d been trudging through the ice-and-mud-thawing, bare-limbed woods of late February, my heart thrilling to the stirrings of warm-fuzzy romantic bliss for the first time in a long time.

But never mind about that! You want to know about the contest, and how you can enter to win your very own copy of The Scribing Ibis. Don’t worry, it’s easy: Share your own love story.

Keep reading to find out how you can enter and win!

Jeff and I are moving on to Series 5 and 6 of Doctor Who, featuring Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. I was determined not to like him. And I don’t. I don’t dislike him, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t like him. He’s just kind of… there. He’s quick and somewhat smart and occasionally even hilarious. But ultimately the Eleventh Doctor is, well, kind of shallow. And maybe that’s a good thing. The Tenth Doctor went dark, very dark, and lost pretty much everything a person can. I related to him intensely, grieving and soldiering on as each companion left, one by one. I’m not sure I could have withstood another season of that kind of intensity.

One thing I will say, though, is that I’m bored with people dying. I woke up at 4 AM this morning on a caffeine buzz flashback, and that’s the thought that kept rolling over and over in my hyper-wired, sleep-deprived mind. Because when it comes to the Eleventh Doctor, no one’s ever really dead. I’ve given up trying to count the number of times Amy or Rory are supposed to have died. They never really do. They never stay dead.

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