An Easter Note: Spirituality, Blogging and Dorothy Parker

 

I confess, here on a sun filled Easter morning, I miss our Northern California redwoods and the hill of trees above our house. Where my husband would rise while it was still dark to hide the goods: jellybeans, chocolate eggs, malt-balls tucked inside the neon pinks and yellows of plastic eggs. From the upstairs bathroom window I’d see the flash of his legs as he powered along the acre trail ringing our property. We’ve new rituals to make at our sunny San Diego home where we’ve as many hummingbirds flitting amidst the birds of paradise as we used to have juncos in their black hoods bobbing along the deck of the old house.

Easter holds for me the memory of my father waking our family of five in the dark so we could drive to the top of the nearest hill to wait for sunrise. Remember? The chill of night air, the smell of damp grass and dew wet sneakers. Then, jostling shoulder to shoulder beneath sleeping bags with my brother and sister in the backseat, the last handful of stars starting to wane in the predawn grey as we stepped out and spread out our blankets on the hill. How still and quiet. Nothing to do but wait. Gradually the layers of grey, muting brighter. Til more silver than gold, the morning light surrounded us and the sun’s rim crowned.

I love that Easter has been an experience my body remembers, that my father gave us a way to know it. Watching the sun come up, connecting to something so far from us in the sky that radiates with the same heat as the core of the earth. Or, now that I’m older, a mother myself, reading Dorothy Parker’s, “Prayer for a New Mother,” written for Mary, which opens with the lines, The things she knew, let her forget again-- / The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold…praying that Mary have all the peace and time with her son that other mothers have in their earthly incarnations. By stanza three, she begs on Mary’s behalf, Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd, / The smell of rough cut wood, the trail of red… For now, there is enough time. To bask in the sun. To imagine one’s children grown, thriving.

I’ve also fallen down the rabbit hole into my new Transformative Blogging site, but an equal portion of my heart lives here still at Feral Mom, Feral Writer. My hope in launching The Year of Inquiry for Women Bloggers was to learn as much as I taught and the trail of synchronicity has already begun. I’ve met new writers, creatives, and bloggers to engage and play with along the way. Edith O’Nuallain, who blogs at In a Room of My Own is one such new writing companion (she also happens to be a mother) who took the time to interview me about the work I’m developing in my classes for women bloggers. Edith’s questions, such as her lead, “Why transformative blogging? What is the connection between the spiritual and the personal?” took me on a reflective journey you can read here: Tania Pryputniewicz on the Art and Craft of Transformative Blogging.  And Edith just posted part two of the interview here.

I’m throwing a good deal of my blogging energy into giving examples of each of the posts from my Twenty Inspiring Blog Posts You Can Write to Kickstart and Transform Your Blog worksheet (offered for free to email subscribers on my main site). Here are links to those latest posts:

Inquiry Posts, Chaucer and Blogger as Pilgrim (about question posts and considering blogging as pilgrimage)

Trickster Angels: Collaborative Posts and SynthesisBlogs (about hybrid blogs and teams and pairs of bloggers)

An Interview with the Collaborative Team Behind TheScience of Parenthood (about a humorous postcard blog put together by a writer-designer duo)

And the latest post I wrote for Mother, Writer, Mentor, is part of a “Postcard for Nursing Mothers” series I started, though my postcards are metaphorical:

Postcard for a Nursing Mother: Be Where You Are

And if you wish to read Prayer for a new mother, I found an online version of it here at Poem Hunter:

Prayer for a New Mother

photos by Robyn Beattie.