Petrarch had his Laura, a phoenix feather for his pen. Danté's blessed Beatrice sent him to hell and back again. Rilke's heart-sick panther. Burns' wee tim'rous beastie. None tremble with the thrill I feel whenever you retweet me.
Author: Alison Leigh Lilly
Alison Leigh Lilly grew up a shy Irish Catholic hippie girl, exploring the woods and fields surrounding her childhood home with the same curiosity and enthusiasm she would later bring to her studies of mysticism and nature spirituality. Seeking the spiritual heritage of her Celtic ancestors, she discovered poetry and story, mud and blood mingled with the scent of peat fires and the slick feel of damp stone. Eventually, these interests landed her roundly in the square hole of Academia, where she graduated valedictorian of her class, humbly accepted her degree, and ran for it.
She now resides in the lovely, rain-drizzled cityscape of Seattle, where she lives with her husband, her black cat and pet frog. She devotes her time to cultivating a spiritual life founded on peace, poesis, and attentive engagement with the inner and outer landscapes of wildness, wilderness and nature. She explores these themes through writing and visual art, and her work has appeared in a number of publications both in print and online. You can find an archive of her available work here.
Burning Bush
This bush is on fire, and we have misplaced god.
Dear Copyeditor,
I am writing you this poem the way a gazelle must grow ever sleeker and quicker to escape the indelicate jaws of the lion.
Pieces
The thing about puzzles is, there’s a moment between when you have all the edges done, and when you have enough of the middle filled in to see what’s missing, what’s left.
Another
Crow in a birch tree shakes rain from its wings...
Young Female Writer’s Lament
Why is everything I try to do coming out stilted and slow today? I blame you. The general, faceless you. The you who keeps telling me I need to be smaller, wittier, brief.
#WritersResist: Bring the Fire Down
Move. Between justice and mercy, between nakedness and warfare, between all that you would not do and all you have done, unknowing...
Can Clowns Save Our Souls?
We might try to follow where the clown leads, but we cannot hope to pin him down. It is only when we stop insisting that the clown be just one thing that he is free to become the multiplicity of being that he really is.
Honoring the Past: Weaving Story from Memory
Pagans like to say, "What is remembered, lives." Memory is re-membering, the act of giving life to the past through rituals of witness.
Soul Writing: Finding Balance in Group Spiritual Practice
Writing in a group setting is different, much more like praying together. Or sitting together in meditation. Being present to each other in-process, witness to the very act of discovery and composition, soul-deep in the chaotic waters of creativity. This is writing as a spiritual practice — a kind of sacred deep listening, what Karen Hering calls in her book Writing to Wake the Soul, "contemplative correspondence."
Alison Leigh Lilly 