A Changing World: Let’s Go Deeper Still
Dear Alums,
The quickly changing world-scape continues to create uncertainty and agitation. Of course, many of us are feeling the economic impact of this uncertainty and emotional strain of continued physical/psychological/isolation. The “shifting-sands” make predictable patterns of living, anything but familiar and certain. Yet, in addition, beauty shines through. As I write this to you, I am hearing so many songs of the birds outside my home office. Their melodic voices now able to be heard in the relative still of the so little ambient noise. The “Quiet,” too, a new part of a Changing world.
In times like these (have there ever been times quite like these in recent memory?), an opportunity presents itself. Yes. Let’s support one another, particularly in our Community of Depth Psychology, Imagination and Dream to live a more fully animated life. Let’s personally and collectively engage in a praxis of “creative incubation.” Let’s go deeper still.
I suggest the following steps:
1) Write down either a sleeping or a waking dream
2) Now write it out a second time.
3) Identify what feels to you the most resonant line or two in your descriptive account.
4) For the third time, write it out once more, this time poetically. This need not be a “perfectly crafted” poem. Simply, in imaginative play, spontaneously write out the lines poetically. Remember a Dream loves to be met by a Dream and/or a Poem.
Now, let’s share our poems in the wider Alumni Community. Let’s offer back what moves through us. No matter if the images that visit are beautiful or horrific, lets each offer back the “poetics” alive in realm of our collective imagination.
So, gift our community with your poem by sending it to us here, and we will post it on our websites.
Together, let’s continue to contribute to our community of the caring, a community rooted in the regard and love for imagination, dream and for one another.
With warm feeling and love,
Steve Aizenstat
Founder and Chancellor
Poems from the Alumi Community
15 on the Hour
I am back home;
my apartment on Mayfield
has become the old place on Glendon Avenue.
GLENDON HOUSE is written across the facade
but two letters are missing, the N and the S.
I can still see them in the negative space
left on the weathered brick.
It is very late . . . I am picking up the phone to call time
but there is no need to dial—
“15 on the hour.”
The voice was already there.
The sun is still setting or rising,
its light streaming through the shades,
through to me, right where I am.
The far sky, gleaming mandarin, is vibrant and warm.
A mild draft glides through the living room,
rustling the ceramic chimes hanging from the porch.
They are sounding, for the first time, in hardly enough wind.
I am growing tired.
On the second floor, girls are laughing on the ledge of the balcony.
It is the same, now as before; I am worried about falling asleep.
How do you know which way things are moving—
which way, in darkness or light, and in what hour?
The past has returned; it remains
echoing and reaching back for itself
in a strange fluidity of elements and images.
I am confused by the air, the cast,
the sounds that cannot be made.
Everything is transfused.
Yet I am floating, breathing with ease.
Again, the voice speaks,
“Here and there, sometime, elsewhere.”
Something lives in the glow, painting a portrait of this or some other world,
in a theater of gold and immanence.
I close my eyes, but still, I see—
all the days, belonging together, and drawing apart.
All coursing like clear water in a shallow stream,
bending and dropping through the meadow,
flashing—and fading—in the low sun.
15 on the hour . . .
It is dreamlight.
—
Matthew Fishler
Music of the Spheres
The cardinal holds forth loudly,
his song as vibrant as his shocking red.
There is nothing like a glimpse of him in bright sun.
A reason to dole out seed,
doing my part,
more for me than for him,
but an honest bargain, nonetheless,
keeping hope alive.
—
Barbara Birge
May 16, 2020
