Back to the Bards

I'm back to Nef's bards--my little book cards. They've been calling me with flashes of new ideas for  page pop us and serendipitous encounters with design ideas. I spent this past weekend at a poetry retreat in central PA, at the Kirkridge retreat center, led by Michael and Kathleen Glaser and Jean Richardson. And what an exquisite experience that was. To bathe for three days in my essential questions. To explore my rich and turbulent inner life through the voice and lens of poetry. That's what these Kirkridge poetry retreats are all about, as opposed to spending three or five days trying/learning to write poetry. There are other places for those objectives; they're called writing classes and writers groups. But a retreat into oneself with an invitation to explore relationships, our world, nature, and essential questions is something sweeter. 

I digress. This weekend I made a new accordion fold bard that was a metaphor for a map to my centering place. (I also learned about an amazing mystic named Howard Thurman who advises: "How good it is to center down!") So now I'm centering in on a way to take this simple design--with its pop ups, cut outs, inserts--and do

something different/fresh/surprising. I'm starting to feel this artist's life is a constant movement and circling around possibilities, much like R. M. Rilke's following poem:

I live my life in growing orbits

which move out over the things of the world.

Perhaps I can never achieve the last,

but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, that ancient tower,

and I have been circling for a thousand years,

and still, I don't know if I am a falcon,

or a storm, or a great song.

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I, on the other hand, live my life like a cockeyed owl

which looks out over the whispers of night in two directions;

within and outside the heart's secret places

Perhaps I can never achieve a singular, laser focus

but that will be my attempt, as well.

I am circling around a real unchanging Truth

and I have been circling for countless incarnations 

and still, I don't know if I am a ghost,

or a beam of God, or a cockeyed owl.

                                                            -- Nef