Artful Dodging | Life-Built Poems

lighted paper lanterns floating above a crowd in the night sky

FOLLOW THE GOD-THREAD (Shaping Dilemma)

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Here’s the most pretzel-brain-making question there ever was in the history of human thought: “Life is ___________” (fill in the blank). That’s the deceptively innocuous-looking problem that, given even just a little bit of space and time, can toss you smack-dab onto the back of the Chaos-Beast that takes you on a ride straight down the most convoluted and paradoxical rabbit hole a thinking being will ever encounter. Argh! I’ll tell you right now going in: That question actually has…

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empty highway going over a hill with sun rising

INNER PEACE AND BOTTOM LINES (IPS)

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ANOTHER IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): A growing understanding that life is all about “multiple bottom lines” and the way you balance the lot of them promotes inner peace or inner chaos. [If you start getting frazzled, you know something’s gotten out of whack and you have to go hunt it down and bonk it back into line…which doesn’t SOUND particularly peaceful, but is kinda fun.] For weeks now I’ve been mired in a bog of paradoxes of the finest kind….

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sculpture of two human figures (male and female) pushing on a shiny reflective metal sphere

NAME IT, GAME IT (An Un-Seeing Exercise)

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Hawaiians have a saying: “In the word, is life; in the word, is death.” As a poet and a writer, I believe in the power of words. It’s a part of the nature of the scribblers in the world, that. We believe our words make a difference. No, I lie. Real writers and poets believe we are magicians who remake the world. When all is said and done, it seems to me, all of us humans are little more than…

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dandelion seed head at dawn

USE YOUR RESOURCES TO FIND YOUR WHY

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Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): an understanding that what you already have is the starting point for building the space where you want to be. [Gather your resources and see what you’ve got. What you choose to use and how you choose to use them breathes life and form and definition into the Why you are already living.] The Light of My Light (LOML) and I made some “What-Get Soup” again the other day. The soup is a throwback to…

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metaphor for boredom

DRAGGING YOUR FEET (Un-Seeing Exercise)

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I am reading Andrew Santella’s book, SOON: An Overdue History of Procrastination from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me. Again. This little book is setting off all kinds of firecracker strings in my head. Santella, like me (and maybe you too?), is a self-confessed procrastinator so he’s at least well-practiced in trying to suss out the whats, the whys, and the wherefores of that almost universally censured habit, procrastination.

metaphor for Seeger and his influence

BLESSING FROM AN ELDER (Pete Seeger)

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There once walked a gentle, funny, and very stubborn man, a musician who believed passionately in the power of people singing together out loud. It was his skill to induce crowds of friends and strangers to join their voices together and create transcendent harmonies that lifted up the people’s hearts and spirits and set the world to shining for a while, cloaked in visions of belonging, of unity, and of peace. With his long-necked five-stringed banjos, his 12-stringed guitars, and…

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illustrates point

CHECK YOUR FILTERS: Roadmaps and Story

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The thing about living your life as a poem or a story or any other kind of art is that there’s got to be a theme to the thing. (It’s one of the rules, according to grade school English and art teachers when it comes to analyzing some bit of self-expression.) This online dictionary I am looking at tells me that a theme is “an idea that recurs or pervades a work of art or literature.” It’s how you make…

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balancing rocks illustrating the theme

OTHER VOICES: Grace Iwashita Taylor

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New Zealand’s Grace Iwashita-Taylor is a Shaper and a poet. She lives her life as a single mother, as a loving daughter trying to deal with the realities and challenges of her beloved mother’s decline into dementia and as a youth worker in a place that is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. She is also an award-winning spoken word and published poet, playwright, and performer. The poet’s upu (words) circle around and around the…

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SMALL TOWN * BIG ART ON THE ISLAND

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One time a friend asked one of the old-timers who had lived his whole life on the island of Maui through the decades that made up the beginning of the end of the twentieth century what it was like to live his life in this place. They were digging holes for pasture fence posts at the time. The island had gone through numerous transitions during that one lifetime. Henry Burns had seen many of them. The laconic old man stopped…

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LEGACY-SCHMEGACY, KEEP ON WALKING

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Lately I keep tripping over people who are either “building a legacy” or are trying to convince me that I should be doing one too. It’s beginning to make me all kinds of grumpy. These strangers are telling me that my life will only have “meaning” if I do stuff that will somehow “impact the future” after I’m long-gone. That one makes me scratch my head. It’s even a bit intimidating. Me, I’m still walking towards my dream and I’m…

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