ceremony and conduits

Sometimes you read a request for submissions and just know you have found kindred spirits. Such was the case when I received the call for Volume 12, Number 1, The Braided Gift.

The ritual of ceremony has been on my mind since a recent conversation with a friend – a yoga teacher and musician returning from a journey to the Badlands. She encountered garnet in the mountains there, that stone that can resemble the seeds of a pomegranate. What is our fascination with stones? To me, it feels like they hold so much time inside. They are doorways into another dimension.

The Plumwood Mountain Journal is an Australian and International Journal of Poetry and Ecopoetics. Their most recent submission call was written by the issue’s esteemed guest editors: Shari Lynell, author of Foxstruck and Other Collisions and The Semiotics of Arrival, and Lucy Van, a poet listed for the Stella Prize and Mary Gilmore award. They quote Kimmerer: “You start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we ‘remember to remember,’” (5).

May we all remember.

birth-stone to head-stone

Sometimes a good rejection is the highlight of your day, and it was for me a couple of days ago.

Letters Journal is supported by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM), and a dream spot of mine to be published in. Read it here.

 “What logos lights the filament of time, / Carbon arc fusing birth-stone to head-stone?” (Jean Valentine, “Afterbirth”).

These little deaths we dance our way through, that is where we find our value.