Tag: Lynn Ungar

What the Angel Didn’t Say

WHAT THE ANGEL DIDN’T SAY

I notice that when
the angel spoke to Mary
she got news that God
was pleased with her,
and that she would bear a son
destined for greatness,
but no mention was made
of torture and early death
and the way her heart
would break completely and
irrevocably. The angel told her
not to be afraid, but didn’t mention
the need to take the baby
and run from Herod or even
giving birth in a stable.
If the heavenly being hinted
at a future seated at the right hand
of God, it never acknowledged
how different that feels than
having him seated at the
family table for supper,
and the ache of an empty chair.
Maybe she knew, and said yes anyway.
Maybe the big ask
is to open the door to suffering,
which is the door marked Love.

– Lynn Ungar –
December 16, 2021

Since returning to Italy in October, truly my heart’s home, or at least one of them, I splurged on a subscription to the weekly ITALY Magazine and follow its daily posts on language, culture, food – with beautiful photos – on Facebook and IG. Yesterday reading the current issue, I was reminded that December 8 is “la Festa dell’Immacolata Concezione,” the Feast of the Immaculate Conception when the Angel visited Mary, the day in many parts of Italy where trees are festooned with lights marking the beginning of the Christmas season. So this poem from Lynn Ungar, stored in the dark of my virtual file since last year, fit the bill for today’s post.

Earlier this week, I read an essay by Perdita Finn, wherein she gave an alternate interpretation to the feast day: that of Mary being immaculate, born without sin, free from karma. That she symbolizes the universe’s womb, the dark matter out of which all life emerges on earth. “This is why so many of the old Madonnas were depicted as black, as black as the original mothers, as the soil, as the space between the stars.”

Aligning with the Celtic celebration of Solstice and its honouring of the wisdom of the dark, when what is planted, resting fallow hidden in the depths, can decay or gestate, renew, transform. Mary becomes the the earthly embodiment of the divine feminine and its creative-destructive cycles of life and death.

Or as Lynn offers, the suffering that is Love.

Much love and kindest regards dear friends as you enter the ever growing darkness of December.

Weaving

WEAVING

First set the warp,
the plain, stable threads
that hold the pattern in place –
the infrastructure of joy,
the girders that hold up all we build
of meaning, or justice, or peace.
Use strong threads left
by those who have gone before.
Only then pick up the weft,
the colored thread that you will use
to weave accordingly to your plan.
Choose carefully – this is what
the world will see, each tiny act
that builds the bright pattern
of your life. Yes, the threads
will tangle or knot or fray,
and the flaws will show.
Oh well. Tuck in the ends
as best you can and start again.
This is not the time to stop your weaving.
So much is pulling at the great design.

– Lynn Ungar –
Breathe, 2020

Call it synchronicity or coincidence, I quickly picked up one of two poetry chapbooks I had just received from Lynn Ungar and the page opened to this poem, the perfect companion to Monday’s blog post, Spinning the Sacred Feminine. I’d been inspired to feature a poem on weaving today, thinking back to one I had “composed” as the conversation harvest from an activity designed in collaboration with a textile artist-community developer eleven years ago for our professional community of practice. I don’t recall the specifics, but we provided strips of fabric for the group of facilitators to weave together as a way to consider our work grounded in conversation and story. This was the result:

WARP and WEFT
An engaged community inspired by the virtues of beauty, hope and simplicity.
Texture foretells of mystery and transformation.
Beauty, the loom for creativity.
Inspiration, the weft.
We, the warp.
Beginning.

Berber Carpets, Chefchaouen, Morocco



January

JANUARY

Of course it’s to be expected:
the dim light and early dark
and the endless days of rain.
And if the week of brutal cold
wasn’t what you signed up for,
well, it’s what you got,
so might as well make the best of it.
Other people got blizzards,
and friends have flooded basements
or days without power
or lost everything to wind-whipped
wildfire. Of course, there’s nothing
less comforting than the notion
that others have it worse.
Misery doesn’t love company,
it just spreads like an oil slick
across the dull land, and we
have moved on from terror
to a cranky ennui. But one day
last week, the clouds lifted,
and there was the mountain, shining
in all its snow-clad glory.
My breath caught to remember
that what I see is not
the sum of what is there.

– Lynn Ungar –

So this is January, 2022.
Today, a Facebook cartoon meme showed Lucy complaining to Charlie Brown of the new year, suggesting we had, in fact, been stuck with a used one. Last year, or even the one before that. Where I live, we’ve had weeks of “brutal cold” suddenly broken overnight by above freezing temperatures and rain, making for treacherous travelling, by car or foot. House fires with fatalities. Inflation rates the highest in 30 years. Unprecedented numbers of Covid cases with friends suddenly succumbing.

And yet the beauty of snow laden trees and brilliant blue skies. Wolf Moon an incandescent marvel illuminating the night. My parents’ 68th anniversary. The birthdays of my husband and niece. Poetry books in the today’s mail. Stories shared and books reviewed on Zoom. Tonight’s easeful meanderings in my women’s circle. An abundance of goodness and gratitude, more than named here. This is my January, 2022.

Conspiracy Theory

CONSPIRACY THEORY

You could be right. Maybe
there is a vast conspiracy, a web
of lies wrapped around generations,
a fraud so vast and pervasive
that only the enlightened
catch glimpses in shadowed alleys.
Do you want to know? Do you dare
to tug on the smallest of those
tangled threads? Are you courageous
enough to look at the edges
of your vision? Begin with these questions:
Whose stories have I not been
allowed to hear? Who have I placed
outside the circle of my concern?
If I were to really listen,
what might crack open
and be born?

– Lynn Ungar –
November 29, 2021


With the new covid variant “omicron,” gaining traction and making global headlines, countries are responding, re-heating debate and dissent, protest and polarization. Ungar’s questions are wise reminders to help us hold the centre when there’s heat on the rim, to invite us into curiosity, to remind us of all we do not know.

A Perfect Day

A PERFECT DAY

I wonder if some language
has a word for it – the elation
of a perfect fall day, crisp and
gilt-edged and glowing,
mixed with melancholy
of wondering whether this might
be the peak, the moment when
the fruit is perfectly sweet
before it tips to decay.
I mean not just the coming winter,
but the dropping shoe of it all-
flood and drought and
the cruelty of the terrified and in denial.

And what if another perfect day
does come, and I fail to notice?
What if I wake up as if from a dream
in which I’ve opened a room full
of opulent gifts, and then neglected
to thank the giver? It happens.
The ground is littered with
bright leaves and sturdy acorns.
I carefully select a few to bring inside,
when I could lie down and roll
in the brittle beauty of it all.

– Lynn Ungar –
October 2, 2021

“Gosh, I could gush every day over the golden, glorious gorgeousness of these autumn days,” I wrote to a friend in response to the photos we were both posting. And then I read Lynn Ungar’s most recent poem, and knew that before these perfect fall days pass, I will lie down and roll in their brittle beauty and thank the giver.

The End Times

THE END TIMES

We knew it would come crashing down,
but now we are in the clatter –
fire, drought, flood, smoke, heat,
the million and one ways
that beings cry out. We thought
there would be more time.
We pretended that we didn’t know.
We squandered so much
that we might have saved,
and for what? Trinkets. Glitter.
The pleasures of ignorance
and a basket full of Happy Meals.

It’s time to ask the dying
what they know. What will you give up
to cure what is killing you?
What do you pursue
when your days are numbered?
Gaze into the eyes
of a beloved old dog.
Bury your face in her neck
and engrave the scent on your memory.
Let your heart break open.
Learn to cherish what remains.

– Lynn Ungar –

Lynn Ungar first came to my attention last year with her “viral” poem, Pandemic. Straight to the point and heart, her words pierce with truthfulness. A week ago, our beloved Annie dog went under for a brief diagnostic procedure. Thankfully an “all OK” diagnosis, she returned home that day woozy and with a package each of probiotics and antacids, hopefully to curb the somedays’ frantic rush to eat grass. But with eleven and a half years under her belt, and a decade this month with us, I know the times we walk together are ever precious. But isn’t it so for each of us – how life changes on a dime? Once again, around the world, we see how precarious, precious, and fragile our circumstances.
Reading Radical Regeneration: Birthing the New Human in the Age of Extinction (2020) by Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker makes the unequivocal point that we are living in the end times. The posthumous One Drum (2019) by Richard Wagamese cites ancient prophesy of a time “when words would fly like lightning bolts across the sky, and ” when “the human family would move farther apart and that this separation, the break in energy, would cause great stress upon the Earth… floods, titanic storms, famine, earthquakes, the departure of animals, strange diseases, and turmoil among all peoples.” (22)

It is time to learn to cherish what remains.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.



Essential

Hand made Berber bread in Morocco

ESSENTIAL

How do you know what’s essential?
Could you have predicted
this particular version of paring down?
Perhaps your work is essential,
but maybe not. The face you wear
to the outside world, the picture
in the mirror, has probably slipped.
Even the fundamentals of human
touch might not be required
to assure us that we are not alone.
Who could have imagine
that we would somehow come down
to making bread even without yeast?
To the fact that with nothing more
than food and water and air and time,
even the least of us
will find a way to rise?

– Lynn Ungar –
April 28, 2020

One year ago this week, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Determining what and who was essential continues to be of consideration in decision making. Global vaccination rollouts promise a light at the end of this very long, dark, and lonely tunnel.
While this past year, much has changed and too, much has remained the same. Hoarding toilet paper is giving way in some countries to hoarding vaccinations. Home bakers are making their sourdough creations their livelihoods. Virtual meetings, family gatherings and celebrations have become “de rigeur” and may change the landscape of onsite work. Here at home, I continue to feel the absence of essential connections.

“I miss you in my bones and by my body.”

Winter into Spring

January Buds Waiting

WINTER INTO SPRING

The trees, along their bare limbs,
contemplate green.
A flicker, rising, flashes rust and white
before vanishing into stillness,
and raked leaves crumble imperceptibly
to dirt.

On all sides life opens and closes
around like a mouth.
Will you pretend you are not
caught between its teeth?

The kestrel in its swift dive
and the mouse below,
the first green shoots that
will not wait for spring
are a language constantly forming.

Quiet your pride and listen.
There — beneath the rainfall
and the ravens calling you can hear it —
the great tongue constantly enunciating
something that rings through the world
as grace.

Lynn Ungar
(Bread and Other Miracles)

Last week when I wrote about Wintering, I was aware it was Imbolc, the ancient Celtic holy day, midway between Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, that honours the “barely beginnings” of new life. Try as I might to acknowledge that in my post, I couldn’t, needing instead to simply stay put in the depth of wintering. Maybe a prescient response to the deep Arctic cold that descended upon us this week, nonetheless, those barely beginnings are evident. Sun rising earlier in the morning, sitting higher in the noon sky, setting later in the afternoon. Hyacinth, tulip and daffodil bulbs forced in greenhouse warmth. Latent buds on trees. We wait. It comes. Winter into Spring.

Wind’s Wisdom

BREATHE

Breathe, said the wind

How can I breathe at a time like this,
when the air is full of the smoke
of burning tires, burning lives?

Just breathe, the wind insisted.

Easy for you to say, if the weight of
injustice is not wrapped around your throat,
cutting off all air.

I need you to breathe.

I need you to breathe.

Don’t tell me to be calm
when there are so many reasons
to be angry, so much cause for despair!

I didn’t say to be calm, said the wind,
I said to breathe.

We’re going to need a lot of air
to make this hurricane together.

– Lynn Unger –

One Morning

The Way It Is

One morning you might wake up
to realize that the knot in your stomach
had loosened itself and slipped away,
and that the pit of unfulfilled longing in your heart
had gradually, and without your really noticing,
been filled in—patched like a pothole, not quite
the same as it was, but good enough.

And in that moment it might occur to you
that your life, though not the way
you planned it, and maybe not even entirely
the way you wanted it, is nonetheless—
persistently, abundantly, miraculously—
exactly the way it is.

– Lynn Ungar –
2015

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