The Muse of November 22nd

Late November tugs at me, reminds me of a painful moment that changed my consciousness. A dark bell tolls. Like everyone of my generation I can tell you exactly where I was on November 22, 1963—I was in the kitchen with my baby on my hip. My upstairs neighbor, Andrea—a friend and fellow student at Berkeley—came slamming through my back door in a tumult of voice and feeling: “The President has been shot!” She had just been on campus where everyone was dazed and no one knew what to do. Go to class? Go home? Call Mom and Dad? I remember my own confusion, disbelief, fear. How could this happen in America—my family’s sanctuary from the terrors of the Nazis? I remember my own internal incoherence: I was so mad at Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs—his invasion of Cuba felt like a personal betrayal. Could I mourn him? I remember hours in front of our enormous old black and white TV, watching the recital of catastrophic events. I could not then imagine that this would become a collective ritual—over and over we’d sit in front of all the TVs of our lives, watching the aftermath of assassinations, church bombings, school shootings…

The Muse of Tomb Envy

“It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome

Three Dead Poets

The Day of the Dead is approaching, and I find myself musing about the gravestones of poets. I had an experience with three of them recently, in the lovely cemetery for non-Catholic Foreigners in Rome. Keats is buried here. Most of Shelley is buried here—though it is said that his heart was snatched off the funeral pyre by his friend, Edward Trelawny and given to his widow, Mary. To my surprise I found the grave of Gregory Corso, the beat poet, who is of Catholic extraction, buried here as well.

Gravestones used to be a high art form. Dan and I wandered among impressive busts and marble ladies lying in eternal repose, past a stone Psyche divesting herself of her mortal coil—high on a pedestal—to mourn a woman whose husband wrote: “Her loss is as that of the Keystone of an Arch.”

A Catholic Muse?

in the city where the music began
i hear the song of my life in your voice

yours is the clamorous “te deum” of the bellsyours the fingers of the early morning suntouching my face and the crown of my head  

—Lowinsky, “to the lost nurse of a childhood in Florence”
in red clay is talking p. 30

A Secret Catholic Soul

For a Jew, I have a very intense relationship with Catholicism. I find myself mesmerized by news of Pope Francis, the new Pontiff who castigates the church for being obsessed with people’s sexual behavior, forgetting love, mercy and social justice. Why should this make me feel so glad and hopeful? Why should I get all weepy and emotional? 

Maybe it’s because my childhood was steeped in Catholic church music. My father, a musicologist, focused on the music of the church in the Renaissance. My young sense of the sacred was shaped by Gregorian Chant and the Stabat Mater of Josquin des Prez, Pergolesi, Palestrina and Scarlatti. I experience the holy in churches, mostly when in Italy. When there I light candles for my beloved dead, and for friends and family who are suffering. Dan and I have just returned from a trip to Italy. My favorite church on this trip was the Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere, in Rome. This medieval church embodies, in image and architecture, my experience of inwardness and interiority.

Celebrating the Harvest: Reading for the Earth

An Invitation:

Harvest is an ancient and sacred ritual, marking the year’s cycle, expressing our gratitude for the fruits of the Earth. In these dangerous and fragmented times how do we give thanks to our Mother Earth and to the farmers who feed us?

We are three poets and a novelist, who engage passionately with ecological issues in our work. Please join us for a harvest of earth-centered writing at First Light Farm Stand.

When: 2:00 pm, Sunday, September 29th, 2013

Where: First Light Farm Stand, 4588 Bodega Avenue, Petaluma

Who Will Read: Novelist Patricia Damery and poets Frances Hatfield, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and Leah Shelleda

If you’re worried about Monsanto and the loss of species, or want to know more about the poets who will be reading, check out Sharon Heath’s blog posting On Butterflies and Men http://www.sharonheath.com/2013/08/of-butterflies-and-men.html.

A Publication

My poem “Lust and the Holy” is featured in the on-line literary magazine Wild Violets, http://www.wildviolet.net/2013/07/28/lust-and-the-holy/#.UgPLcHBDXJw accompanied by a delightful image. I hope you’ll check it out.

The Muse of Dreaming

Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. 

                —C.G. Jung, The Red Book 

Follow the Track of the Dream

The dream is the muse of my muses—my portal, my guide, a letter from the gods. Sometimes it is a terrifying soothsayer of catastrophe, sometimes a wild animal that slashes old ways of being, insists I become myself. I can tell you my whole story in dreams. I can read you the stepping stones of my path in poems sparked by dreams. My poetry collection, crimes of the dreamer, is full of poems that began as dreams. Here’s part of one:


if you follow the track of the dream

from life to life one     planet blending into another     in the company of the man
who reads stone          maybe you’ll find yourself
                                    on a boat in the ocean                       chasing a whale

or in the middle of the woods        startled by a fox with turquoise teeth
he grins at you      then dashes off into the undergrowth

Those of us who follow the track of the dream have been given a gift. The Dream and Its Amplification, with that magical sleeping giant on its cover, has just been published by Fisher King Press. Edited by two Jungian analysts, Erel Shalit, an Israeli and Nancy Swift Furlotti, an American, it is a treasure trove for the dreamer and the dream interpreter. For me, The Dream and Its Amplification is a dream come true. I am honored to have a chapter in the collection. To find myself in the company of an international group of Jungian writers who tell spellbinding stories of the inner life and the power of dreams, writers who move seamlessly between the conscious and unconscious realms, who take our hands and lead us into the deepest mysteries, is a harvest of my life as a dreamer, a Jungian and a writer. Their writings open doors to realms that amplify my own dream life.