a place to ponder metamorphosis, a place to share experiences, a place to witness growth "That it will never come again is what makes life sweet" -Emily Dickinson
drawing by Carmen H Gray
The Rich Deep Tones of A Cello
by Carmen H Gray
I’ve heard it in my dreams
As if he called to me
His voice in that same living tone
Of her beloved instrument
The sound waves echoing from our distant past
An expanding ripple of spheres
That reach across time
Pausing to recapture
The rich, deep tones of a cello
That hold so many memories
She ordered resin today
The parentheses have had their moment
I feel the exhaling of one hundred breaths
“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”-Oscar Wilde
From A Dream
by Carmen H Gray
You and I, we made such vagaries of the mind
We called ourselves by unrelated names
And wandered into an altered world, where our ages
Were neither young nor old, nor anything in between
As if we were ageless, we were
I saw you writing and you watched me daydreaming in this distant place
I could not remember who I was anymore
As if I had disintegrated into no one, but everyone at once
And you were there to witness such an existence
What strange lives we have lived together
Thought I
art & poem by Carmen H Gray
Harbinger of Truth
Night Scout
Spirit of the hidden realms
You called out
Before dayspring with its auspicious, tender light
Caught me, heedless in my faraway flight
Who? Who? You asked
And I heard the question
Though I found no origin
Surrounding my perception
What were you foraging?
So attentive to the starkness
A keen awareness to the rustling
Of flight wings in darkness
Harbinger of Truth
Night Scout leave-taking
Giving me pause
As dawn was breaking
Benediction with a farewell sigh
As you moved swiftly
Into the violet-gray sky
Art & Poem by Carmen H Gray
I wrote the poem below 25 years ago. Found it today rummaging through old things this morning and it inspired a self-portrait. Although I am quite sensitive/empathic, in all these subsequent years, but especially in the last 5 ones, I have learned how to shore up my psychic boundaries, practice self-care and self-compassion. This has created a firmer foundation for me to explore who I am and what I feel, apart from others around me. It has led me to shed the burdens that I have allowed others to place upon me. In other words, I have a better sense of me. I read this poem now and realize, I no longer feel these emotions. I absolutely can and do sense the grief and heaviness in others, especially I can tap into this during my reiki sessions with my clients. I hear the feelings/experiences that are present in their subconscious. But, there is no need for me to take on another person’s healing process now. I am there to reflect it, but not to feel it for them. For my own healing unfolded, and for this I am grateful.
Dark Night
To be alert and eyes wide open,
Heart exposed, vulnerable organ that it is,
Is to be both cursed and blessed.
But it is the only way to truly be
To truly live, and see and feel and die.
As I witness sad souls beat down in this world,
My heart feels heavy with the weight of their sorrows
How insignificant it may be, that in my life
I am present when your restless soul seeks
The warmth of another, reaching, hands outstretched, searching, searching…
How common that I mourn for you
When nights are long and painful
The senses are heightened
For every smell is sickening
And even silence is too loud
How simple to share moments of despair
When a blanket of nothingness surrounds you
Groping, blindly for hope
Hope, hope…this is what will save us
Returning to our human condition
Sharing our dark night of the soul
*art and poem by Carmen M Gray
Length of a Day
Dormant slumber
Amidst the hushed quietude
Stillness holds a transformative potency
Like the young century old trees
And the watchful view of the Stag
Bathed in the faintest moonrise light
All of us captive
To the sun
Telling us to lean into
The length of the day
70,000
by Carmen H Gray
(art by children, ages 10 and 11, while staying at a respite center run by the Catholic church in McAllen, Texas)
70,000 is a neat number
Rounded up for sixty-nine thousand and something beyond fifty
Easily divisible by two
Until you keep dividing in half
Eventually you reach fractions of a whole
Those shards of whole parts
Are not just numbers
They are fractured pieces of a person’s soul
Disturbances in family fault lines
That refuse to lay dormant
You can see it in the drawings of the children
Who are crying, “¿Dónde está mi mamá?”
And in the exanimated eyes
That can no longer produce tears
Those quashed emotions inhabit
An exponential fallout
From this tidy number
art and poetry by Carmen H Gray
Sundays in Autumn
Sundays in Autumn are alive
In and amongst the decay
The burnished rust revealing
That even an exquisite crown
Moves from its gilded beginnings
To evidence of archaic vulnerable venerability
All this I see with a deep inhale and an exhilarating sigh
That great oak, grande dame, standing
Gazing back at me
Telling me these truths
That’s what Sundays in Autumn are for
Art and Poetry by Carmen H Gray
Autumn
The clouds opened up in October
Fay beings in my garden
All of the old souls summoned from the cold, misty northlands
Landing hither and thither
On that one flower that overshadows me
It grew from seed, you never know what will happen
When you send seeds forth
Into their future states of being
One might become
The one that surpasses you
To stand in that hushed intermission
Of fluttering souls
All Soul’s ShadowSelves
On a steady path south
To a mountain where I have lingered in this lifetime
art and poem by Carmen H Gray
Tenderly she rivers the night sky
With petals in place of feathers
She moves in body and soul
All strings and stars expanding
Impermeable and eternal
Creation cradled to heart
Beating softly in the enveloped song of Humanity
They are vast as the sky together
Wider than infinite time
Encompassing the yet to be
Hope
by Carmen H Gray
Isn’t it wondrous, I thought
That she made it
To the end of her journey
She, being smaller
The scant resources did not curtail her instinct to continue
To do what her very existence
Summoned her to achieve
As if some greater force was at play
Guiding her gently to her intention
We can learn grand lessons from such small wins
In the savage Jungle
