Alla Bozarth Words and Images Welcoming Light in the Wilderness

Pristine, October's angel rose, day three, October 2, 2012
Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels

Promise, a diamond rose in twilight rain,
the last rose to bloom in the Fall,
the first in the Spring ~ Mothers' Day 2013

A Birthfeast Blessing
for Mind, Body, Soul and Spirit

May the dawn light of the East
enlighten your intellect

May the noon light of the South

illuminate your passion

May the soul fire of the West

strengthen your aspirations

May the night light of the North

starbless your inspiration

Alla Renée Bozarth

Love’s Alchemy and The Frequency of Light

Mothers' Day at Hay Stack Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon
1997 ~ photo by Robin Carey

Body of Water, Body of Land

this is where my soul lights down

and lands, deep into the heart

of the thick clay that is the particular

portion of Earth’s body I wear,

announcing itself like bone on drum—

this is the watery sea of salt and blood

and rivers of life that flow through me,

all I am in the world, the place where mind

lights into and leaps again from brain—

remembering now and then the silence

before the first bang of Creation

when All was One, and moontide and animal

voice were, if imagined, yet unheard

this is the wonder and glory,

the marvel and mystery,

the person in time

and space that I am

this is the now of me,

fresh from the then of when

and the Yes of Forever—

moving and moving

into the always of More

and soul saying Yes,

and Thank You,

and Not Yet

and Now

Alla Renée Bozarth

The Frequencies of Sound

Winter at Hay Stack Rock, Cannon Beach Oregon

1986 ~ photo by John Jarman

This blog is not meant to be used linearly, for as a whole it contains a broad range of reflections to visit again and again, as I make changes to them. It's more thematic than sequential, and even so, the themes interweave. As you read and scroll down past the following story, poems and pictures, you will see more pictures of the Pristine rose, with poems for a beautiful early autumn season of release to the hidden processes of renewal. To find it or go directly to something specific, click your Edit button and then click Find and type in what you seek. You'll be taken to it though you may have to click "Next"(in the bottom tools bar) to find the exact place you want. Another highlighted section follows the pictures and story reflections below to offer some guidance on how to use this blog, even if you've already visited. (In Find, type or paste How to Use the Rest of this Blog and click "next.") You can click on any posts from the right hand menus, Pages above, Posts below the Followers section. First, here's a prequel to this page, written on the Vernal Equinox in 2013.

Violin Lessons: How I Learned to Tell Time and Discovered My True Art~

I wasn't making any music! But I made a decent statue: Girl with Violin. That was about it. (Notice that embedded in the poem below in the picture of me at about five, posing for Mama in my ballet tutu, I am sitting.) My three violin lessons taught me one thing: how to tell time. Even though I look old enough to tell time, I was about four, and guess I never had reason to want to know yet. But there in that empty auditorium of the City Hall of Wood Village, I simply had to know what time it was as my hurting fingers struggled to follow instructions. Every five minutes or so I politely asked the teacher, "Is it time to go home now?" Dear God, P L E A S E.
She finally said, "When the long wand on that big clock on the wall is at the very top, which is 12, and the short wand is down there on the right at 5, it means 5 o'clock, time to go home." I grinned in appreciation and stopped tormenting her.

I'm crazy about excellent violin, viola, lute and cello music, especially the violin concerti of Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Max Bruch, and so very glad that I discovered early on that my real vocation is to listen and appreciate with full spiritual and sensory response. I'm a good audience member, even if it hurts too much to clap. I bring my hands within an inch of each other to avoid nerve pain and grin all over, whooping in large auditoriums freely, and am often the first to jump to my feet in tears, as when the Bolshoi came to Portland, and almost any opera I've seen, but especially Aida, when Tiki the elephant came on stage and stopped center stage to give her best ballet curtsy, showing us her painted toe nails, her jewels, her silks of bright colors, and her beautiful crown of rubies and gold. Three thousand human beings simultaneously leaned forward in their chairs, sighed audibly, "Ooo!" and fell in love.

As for that rather misleading picture taken by my mother in our living room, as if practice were underway, a friend commented that she had the very same outfit and remembers it well. I guess it was the little girl uniform of an era. I don't remember the dress, the socks, the shoes, the bows. But I remember the house, the room and the day when I watched Mama's Russian refugee cousins bring two violin cases through that front door and we opened them to find our beautiful instruments as a thank you gift for Mama. She took lessons, too, but followed in my path of discovery that we had no talent for the instrument.

Mama's oil painting of a Chinese Gentleman [in a deep red garment] is partially visible on the wall behind me in the violin picture. She loved painting him and always said he was her spirit's guide and inspiration.

I don't remember having this posed picture taken, but I do remember our living room~ beginning with watching our television set for the first time in order to see Queen Elizabeth's coronation. That was the reason Papa purchased the set, but then came the switch from Amos and Andy and Our Miss Brooks and Jack Benny on the radio to Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers and Dale Evens, The Lone Ranger, I Led Three Lives, the Mickey Mouse Club, The Cisco Kid, My Little Margie, I Married Joan, Mr. Lucky, Dragnet, Perry Mason, Edward R. Murrow's "You Are There," Disneyland, Superman and every 90 Minute Playhouse (which launched Grace Kelly and many other future stars)~ not to mention, being a delayed sleep phase insomniac from conception on, every black and white movie among the late night shows. That's when I got to see Jack Parr launch The Tonight Show, and eventually those early years of Johnny Carson with Cliff Arquette as Charlie Weaver. He'd come on the show to read his daily letter from his dear old mom in Mt. Idy~ "Things are fine in Mt. Idy," he began, and then, "She goes on." That was the comforting, predictable, hilarious formula, a distant prequel to News from Lake Wobegon. I also remember The Steve Allen Show, Ernie Kovaks and his cigars, What's My Line, Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Loretta Young Presents,The Jackie Gleason Hour (with the fabulous, kaleidoscopic June Taylor Dancers), Ed Sullivan~ and then other variety shows with Perry Como, Dean Martin, Sonny and Cher, Dinah Shore, Red Skelton, Andy Williams and George Gobel.

Somehow I had time to go to school, play outdoors and go everywhere with either parent and sometimes out to the drive-in movies with both of them. Ah, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Arsenic and Old Lace, Pork Chop Hill, The Nun's Story~ and Papa and I would go to the concession building during Intermission and bring back foot long hot dogs and fudge sickles for us and popcorn for Mama. This room is the last place I wrote on walls, in living color, using my crayons to make my first musical notes poems all along the baseboard. And all those parakeets who lived with us flew freely here.

My parents briefly hosted a community theater group and I got to sit in on readings of Hedda Gabler late into the evening in this room.

On New Years Eve we drank champagne in this room, and one year George the old mother parakeet decided to light on the rim of Mama's elegant crystal goblet and dip her beak into the bubbly. She dipped it three more times and flew up in wobbles and spirals, but righted herself and sang her little heart out through the night.

Next day Mama hosted Open House featuring her famous pastries and Christmas Tree Cookies. Ladies poured at the ends of the table from her graceful sterling silver service tea pots, and a variety of delicate English bone China cups and saucers and plates displayed steaming amber tea and the morsels I'd been helping Mama bake and freeze for weeks. These events got a big picture spread in The Gresham Outlook, sometimes with me admiring my mother's culinary art works and helping with the silver tea service.

Every summer Mama's second round of Christmas Tree Cookies along with her canned fruit and vegetables and her apple or berry pie and oil and pastel paintings won blue ribbons at the Multnomah County Fair. What a time it was.

I also managed to read a few novels and biographies every month and was quite fond of detective stories, preferring them to fantasies. I read the Narnia books beside my mother's bed for the five days that she slept when she was dying just before my 25th birthday. One or two of them were familiar from childhood, but I had until then no opportunity to read the entire series, which proved a meaningful backdrop to my mother's last days on Earth. Phil and I had been married for a week when she had her first cancer surgery in September, and during the painful months of her illness and death, my new husband cheered and sustained me as best he could by giving me both Winnie-the{ther}-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner books and arranging for Pooh Bear himself to come live with us as our guardian angel bear. My mother met and loved him as we read his stories out loud to her as well. That sequence of reading events finally began my childhood.

My grandma and I adored Shakespeare and Keats, Shelley and Byron and Emily Dickinson and yes, Allen Ginsberg, along with Pogo and Peanuts, and we spent hours together reading our favorite things to each other, but the ordinary reading pleasures of childhood waited for me to finish reading my fill of Freud and Jung and the classic philosophers and the Spanish mystics and start writing poetry before childhood finally took hold in my twenties when I married my life's best playmate, Phil. Singing and playing guitar while I listened and danced, and every night reading aloud together, the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Whimsey mysteries as well as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (this was in 1971), The Wind in the Willows and Pooh stories and Paddington Bear's as well, he gave me my childhood, and I am still playing with him and Pooh Bear, dancing with them easily across the borders between Heaven and Earth. With such help as theirs, I have been getting younger ever since.

It all sounds quite blissful because I wrote about some of my favorite memories. The reason why I could watch so much good television (tell-a-vision) and read so many books is that with lifelong fibromyalgia I was physically ill much of the time, hit hard with all the childhood illnesses which lasted much longer than normal, as well as allergies compromising my respiratory system with frequent bronchitis and asthma as well as the usual annoying and exhausting sinus involvement. And there were the numerous eye surgeries over the years that followed the stroke I had just after birth. The gift hidden in all this is that during that period when I was getting better enough to feel bored just lying there waiting to feel well enough to resume activities, I could enjoy books and the gifts of writers transformed by actors and film makers which were there at the turn of a nob for my enrichment. Those aspects of my experience are what I remember, because the misery is simply not helpful or useful to remember, but quite the contrary, it unnecessarily diminishes and defeats my present energy for life. Why perpetuate painful times when there are only so many minutes for memory in a lifetime, and we could be enjoying and benefiting from positive ones?

To remember is to relive, and the body responds accordingly, for ill or for good.

Swiss analyst Verena Kast wrote a wonderful book called, Joy, Inspiration and Hope, in which she advocates healing and maintaining the mind and soul by encouraging clients to write their autobiographies of joy by remembering and thus reliving their happy experiences instead of habitually dredging up the traumatic ones. Beginning the re-membrance back to as early as possible, one starts out more or less sequentially, but then in the practice and growing habit of thinking in this very healthful way, one invites moments to emerge on their own, revised as they rise through the layers of experience, allowing them to come spontaneously in any order. I began doing this as spiritual practice for myself, as well as teaching it to clients in addition to my dream work with them.

One summer afternoon after my tea brunch first meal of the day, I sat at the round glass top patio table that doubles as a summertime altar under the cherry tree and wrote in my journal. I have always said that my first memory was of falling down a flight of stairs when I was 18 months old, but sitting there at the table and eating ripe bing cherries, I breathed in pure pleasures and realized that I had done this before. And given the weather and what I was doing, it would have been this same time of year. I was in my baby tender in the back yard. Mama had left me there to enjoy the bliss of solitude in the care of the big old cherry tree and with the sweet, uncomplicated companionship of birds and flowers. I delighted in looking up and watching the play of light on the leaves, the dance of shadows and sun on their green bodies as the summer breeze moved them around. My eyes danced with the play of changing self-revelation of the elements in the scene. I felt the air moving the warmth of sunlight and coolness of shadow over my skin and became part of the dance. Ripe cherries were blowing loose from their stems and falling all around me. A baby tender is like a card table with a chair recessed in the middle of it, and from my place there I could lean over and grab the sweet juicy gifts dropping into my range of reach. A robin stood near the edge and joined me in the cherry fruit feast. I giggled and squealed with pleasure. This was all the bliss in the world.

When I finished writing it all down, I realized from the weather and ripe cherry indicators that I had to have been 16 months old. THIS was my true first memory, and not the traumatic fall down the stairs! I laughed out loud, leaned back in my chair, and looked all around to see the details of where I was~ sitting at my table under the cherry tree, eating sweet, dark cherries I'd purchased from a farmer in town, and beside me were the birds eating and singing at their feeder. It was the same scene, 44 years later! I was literally experiencing the same event and circumstance as in my first memory of Being Here.

What an important revelation, that first happiness can create a template for the rest of our lives, and this one was the template of Paying Attention to Beauty and embracing the gifts of creation with awareness, joy and spontaneous, absolute gratitude. All it takes to move from focus on a negative life pattern of pain, frustration and suffering is to find a deeper event, one that held us together before trauma, one that sealed the connecting wires in our brains that would give us access to Heaven on Earth which we could activate by intention and focus, a kind of mental search engine for an emotion of innocent pleasure and harmony, and then, begin doing so in different ways.

In fact, when we can't locate those connections, we can borrow them from stories, books, movies and music outside ourselves, receiving them as if they were our own sweet memories, which they are, for we're not stealing other people's thoughts and memories but allowing ourselves to be so empathically present to them that we receive the telling and giving of their words as if we were with them in the experience they share. Thus, we have within us the means and power to see ourselves through hard times with a simple activation of memory, imagination and full presence to the sensory details of the scene and our own positive emotional responses within it. This is a way to survive anything spiritually, mentally and emotionally, and to retain our sense of being able to hold onto our best selves. It's how prisoners of circumstance such as illness, war, or any kind of upheaval or loss endure and even enjoy solitude and intuitively overcome isolation by being Elsewhere in their minds and souls. Happiness is a repeatable sacrament. The gifts I received under the cherry tree were my first and ongoing Holy Communion.

Violin Lessons

Mama tried hard to help me

discover my talents, if any.

As it turned out, there were not many.

First, there were the treks on smelly city buses

and her holding my hand as I shyly met

the Russian head of the ballet school when I was three.

The Nicholas Vasiliev School of Dance

constituted several storeys of a round tower

at the corner section of an art deco era building,

with a huge 7Up sign in neon lights

that still half-circles the top of the dance tower,

painted the same shade of mint green over stucco

this half-century later.

I was nine when we gave up. Or maybe we saw

that I had gone as far as I was able and my time with ballet

was fulfilled.

When I was first learning to move in response to music, trying my hardest,
I could never figure out where my body was supposed to be relative to all
the other little bodies, though secretly in private for the rest of my life,
I would often break into a take off from the imprinted positions
and movements and launch myself into musical ecstasy.

More wonderfully, the learning experience of dance gave me the basis for freely
extrapolating when Spirit would decide to take hold of me in a spontaneous

act of worship and joy would twirl me into something once described by a bishop
as charismatic liturgical dance or Gospel Boogie, which I frequently
still practice around my kitchen floor.

The Church of the Advocate, Philadelphia~

25th anniversary of the Philadelphia Ordinations

Post-Communion Dervish

Alone with a friend and her camera afterward,

cooling off from hot flashes and the sweltering
July heat of Philadelphia, 1999.

I was five when Mama accepted the gift of two violins

from her Russian cousins brought over from Germany,

and she decided we should take mother-daughter violin lessons.

Ballet was confusing, but the violin was an ordeal.

It was there in the city hall of Wood Village that the local choir director,

Norma Sherman, inadvertently taught me how to tell time rather than how

to play the violin. My eyes were riveted on the big round clock on the wall

and I would ask, I’m sure every five minutes, “Is it time to stop?” or

“Can we go home yet?”

Weary of the interruptions, she explained to me about the numbers

and the long hand and short hand moving around them. I think Mama

must have felt as I did, for this experiment did not last very long.

Next it was swimming lessons.

For six summers in a row

it was swimming lessons.

I still can’t swim but I’m an expert

at the dead man’s float and can do

a decent dog paddle from one side

to the other of the shallow end of the pool.

When I was nine and ten and maybe eleven,

Mama herself tried to test her own arts on me,

not so patiently teaching me to sort of cook,

but really, to pass her things as she went about

her extraordinary art of baking and making

exquisite dinners. I was very good at washing up,

and fascinated by her skill, but had no interest

beyond that except in enjoying her end products,

for which she was famously known and awarded.

The same with sewing. I did make a whole outfit

for myself, and was dutifully proud, but relieved

when the subject never came up again.

I can do well with buttons and hems, and

a rough back stitch for mending seams,

and a small bit of darning. It’s enough for my needs.

Then Mama set up her easel and gave me her palette

of oils and pinned up a picture of a tree by a winding stream

and told me to paint. I was photographed in the local newspaper

beside my effort, but God knows why. Mama was regularly written up

for her consistently won blue ribbons at the county fair for her beautiful

paintings in oil, her textiles, and especially her pastel flowers,

as well as her jams and pies and canned fruits and pickles and vegetables.

I loved the trips downtown to the art store when she bought her supplies,

the delicious smells of the colors, the feel of the chalk powder

rubbed between my fingers, each color a different texture and scent.

The last thing my mother taught me actually worked,

and given the natural friction between our personalities

and her unhappy and irritable temperament and inclinations

toward angry eruptions, it was amazing how well we did

when she taught me to drive.

I remember sitting in the back seat of the used 1948 Chrysler

with fluid drive during her driving lessons a few years earlier,

how she tried to back out of a parking lot by shifting into second gear

and lead-footing the accelerator, and the next thing we knew

we’d broken through the brick wall facing us and found ourselves

surrounded by surprised butchers in the middle of a meat locker.

Perhaps Mama had vowed that if I showed

the slightest talent and promise for driving,

she would see me through so I could

drive her around afterwards.

And I did enjoy driving, but when Papa gave me the keys

to my own Plymouth Valiant for my sixteenth birthday,

I had no further interest in driving Mama’s fancy second hand

1956 Oldsmobile.

Papa also stumbled onto the other thing which I enjoyed when

he, for a change, drove me to my piano lessons for two years,

until I was left on my own with a wonderful old grand piano

that appeared in our living room picture window

when I was thirteen.

After that, the torture of lessons over, I soared, and ever since

the piano has healed and saved me and seen me through much insanity

and the sorrows of the world, as well as the joys.

                  Here's the baby tender, tucked up to the piano which right away

                        I knew was my instrument. I guess everybody forgot that, but

                        when I was nine, someone must have found the picture and

                        I was launched on my true path~ for my and God's ears only,

                        but it makes my soul happy.
Besides Mama giving me the skill and Papa the means

to freedom on wheels, I also did in fact accidentally discover

a talent, or at least a liking or two. The old Remington typewriter

with the black and red ribbon that I inherited from Mama,

the aspiring novelist, when I was four or five served me well

in preparation for the piano and for writing letters of appreciation

to all the people who, like my mother and father, are wonderfully

loving and generous, able to sooth and comfort a person

in pain, endlessly patient in compassionate care, capable

in useful arts as well as the breathtakingly beautiful.

Because of my parents being who they were,

I have the ability to recognize richness in the human spirit,

to take genuine interest in the stories of others,

and because of them, to forgive easily, while protecting myself

as much as I can from the harm they do not want to do

but cannot help but do. And this I understand.

Therefore, I daily thank my parents in heaven

for helping me discover the gifts of the healing power

and transforming joy of creative and performing arts,

of friendship, passion and compassion, which allowed me

to find in myself a natural talent for appreciation when

I regard these treasures in others.

As with those hours struggling with the violin,

pained by its nerve-piercing sounds artlessly made by my fingers,

but learning how to endure, how to wait, and how to measure

the passage of time, easily and speedily abandoning

what does not suit me without the least sense of shame or defeat,

but eager to keep the search going, I have learned to look forward

to the next experiment or surprising adventure, to be open to

unexpected success and the value of apparent failure, and

to remain alert and receptive to every miraculous effort

toward Grace which might still bring the best possible thing

by the best possible means at the best possible time,

and be nothing at all like what anyone expected.

                 Alla Renée Bozarth

My Blessed Misfortunes

Copyright 2012

And what happens in the kitchen sometimes~

Nothing but Some Angel, Better Let Her In

There I was minding my own business trying
to eat a salmon salad sandwich when it happened.
The music came on. That’s what did it.

Some celestial creature without a body
wanted to dance, dropped right down into my feet,
rose up from there and took over my torso and arms,
and we were up and dancing around the kitchen,
making fancy tread marks in the indoor/outdoor carpeting.

She sort of muttered or whispered,
“excuse me,” when she first slid in, like a skinny person
sliding her way to the front of a crowd at a rally or music fest.

After that no need to guess—
I was a more than willing partner.

This angel could move, could make moves
I couldn’t make, took up with Tchaikovsky’s
Scherzo and Waltz for Violin, did steps that thrilled
my usually bumptious feet~ little quivering side kicks~
and twirled without getting dizzy, then went into
slow tango leg twists and kicks front and back
from the knee, shifted easily when the hips and
shoulders got into slow rhythm action
to Paganini’s Sonata Concertata for Guitar and Violin.
She became positively Puckish with small, quizzical,
jerky gestures to Mangore’s El Sueno~
Dream of the Little Doll, then sat down for a minute
to sip a little water during Carl Maria Von Weber’s
Jubilee Overture.

She rose again and went all arabesque
to Vivaldi’s Sinfonia in G, when the arms
scooped heaven right into them and curled it
around the room, giving the lower body
less intricate work.

She was saving up for my decision just then
(I thought it was mine) to turn on a cassette
of A Prairie Home Companion in time to hear
Arlo Guthrie get down with The St. James Infirmary.

This angel was born for the blues.
Blue smoke rose right up out of the tape player
as she closed her eyes and let our dreamy body
sway where it wanted, hips moving slowly
and leading the way.

God, that angel was happy.
No jumping around, no fancy footwork,
just those confident, earthy hips and soul-blue smoke
coming out of the player to the end of the story.

That angel danced down to the end
of the gambler’s blues.

The show closed with
So Long, it’s Been Good to Know Ya,
and by the time we switched back
to radio and the Gregorian Choir
came on to sing Palestrina’s
Voices of Ascension, she was gone.
And God, I was happy.

      Alla Renée Bozarth

The Frequencies of Sound

Stretching after dancing with the angel, Matisse's painting, "Harmony in Red," in a poster above me. In the lower right corner of the poster is a photograph of me with the original at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia in March of 1992, just three months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union on the day after Christmas, 1991. I was in Russia with my artist friend Julia Barkley (whose paintings are featured in Stars in Your Bones). We were making a poet's and artist's pilgrimage of significant places. I had brought a small photograph of my mother as a young girl in Russia and intended to bury it at the tombstone of Tchaikovsky in the old Laura cemetery around Holy Trinity Monastery at the end of the Alexander Nevsky Prospekt. A few years earlier, I had seen a moving documentary about the great mother of modern Russian poetry, Anna Akhmatova, which included her funeral, illegally filmed by Andrei Voznesensky in March, 1966, in the Naval Church of St. Nicholas. The first thing I asked our guide when she met us at the airport was whether it would be possible for us to visit that church. She looked at me strangely and responded, "How did you know? It's the first place I'm taking you!"

We arrived at noon during a Divine Liturgy for the Dead. I walked straight to the large icon of the Virgin of Kazan and lit a candle for my Russian ancestors and another one for my mother. Having lost track of time in our traveling, I asked Julia, "What day is this?" She told me that it was March 27~ which meant that it was the twentieth anniversary of my mother's funeral in the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas in Portland, Oregon, where I was baptized as an infant before my father became an Episcopalian and entered the priesthood. While I was hastily packing a few nights before, I suddenly got the idea of taking Mama's photo from Russia and burying it in the earth, returning her to her Holy Motherland. As I tucked it into my luggage I thought, "What is today's date?" I checked the calendar to see that it was March 23, the 20th anniversary of her death. When Julia and I visited the monastery with our guide she pointed out the graves of Pushkin's family members, of the writer Dostoevsky, and composers Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky.

There was a beautiful but sad angel seated above his grave, watching over him, and the guide said, "Tchaikovsky was a very unhappy man, a homophoblic homosexual, an unrecovered alcoholic and manic-depressive who made everyone around him miserable . . ." I asked if Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was psychologically healthy. She said, "Oh, he was a cheerful and very decent person." When everyone had gone on, Julia loaned me her Swiss Army knife and I dug a small hole through the ice and snow into the thawing earth and entrusted my mother's mortal image there, as I hoped her spirit would delight in the perpetual joy of listening to the Easter Liturgy bells and music of this composer whom we both loved, as well as that of his neighbor who, perhaps, was still in heavenly recovery for all that had distressed him in his mortal life.

On the day we visited the Hermitage, designed by Catherine the Great to be her private retreat section of the Winter Palace which had now become the home of the largest collection of Western Art treasures in the world, we had very little time and aimed straight for the 19th and 20th century painters. When I came into a small gallery past the Impressionists and was instantly surrounded by the dancing colors of the Fauve artist, Henri Matisse, in my excitement to see a familiar beauty from a wall of my own home, I bumped the edge of this painting, "Harmony in Red." The old woman who guarded the room scowled and shook her finger at me. I went up to her the very epitome of contrition, and humbly said, "Izviniti," excuse me, and then with my hand over my heart, "Prostiti"~ I'm so sorry. Then I searched the distant aural memories of childhood and found the right words: "Krasavitsa" ~beautiful, sweeping my hand around the room's paintings, and then to her, eye to eye, "Spaciba"~ thank you, and "Blago slavi tibi Bozhe," God bless you! She melted into a beautiful smile and embraced me.

When Easter came later that spring, the Russians heard all their bells begin to ring at dawn, starting with the Mother Bell in Cathedral Square at the Kremlin in Moscow, followed by all 1500 bells of the city, each in its own sequence, as all the bells of the cities and villages from Kiev near where my mother was born on the Black Sea to Vladavostok where Siberia juts into the Pacific Ocean began to ring, and the people listened, overcome with emotion to hear the sound that had been silenced for the previous 75 years.

What is the Difference Between
            Poetry and Prose?

Galway Kinnell says
“Prose is walking,
poetry is flying.”
Flying or swimming.
Dreams allow these
ground-free elements,
and buoyancy above,
below.

As dreaming to waking,
so poetry to prose.

As wisdom to knowledge,
so poetry to prose.

Prose is a green pasture,

poetry a wildflower field.

Anna Akhmatova, an exile

in her own country, sits

at a kitchen table in her

friend’s apartment — She writes

a line on a sheet of cigarette

paper, hands it to her friend.

They both memorize the line,

then roll a cigarette and smoke.

This is the hard way to get published —

blowing smoke rings out the window

printing poems in the air that people breathe.

Prose is Akhmatova standing in line

to visit her son at a Soviet prison.

Poetry is her saying “I can,” to another

mother who asks, “Can you write this?”

Prose is sending poets to prison.

Poetry is the poet in prison secretly

composing poems by heart,

going right on with the truth.

Prose is noon, poetry dawn.

As singing to talking,

so poetry to prose.

Prose is walking, poetry is dance.

You can do it in the sky,

or in a cave under water.

You can do it lying down.

You can do it in loving arms

or any kind of prison cell,

in union or in solitude.

Poetry lets you walk through

all the walls.

Poetry moves.

It takes you

where prose cannot go

or dare not go.

            Alla Renée Bozarth

From Accidental Wisdom, iUniverse 2003

At home again, in harmony~

Here I am, truly about to make music~
Rachmaninoff, anyone?

             My True Instrument

                                                           The Shamantool

To play the happy medium

to Chopin, Grieg, Beethoven —

my fingers dance possessed

across a black and white pattern,

creating color between the counted lines.

So it comes,

the sought release,

the finding

of one’s soul,

coming home

to center

after

a cold winter’s

wandering.

To move out of spin

slowly, widening the angles

of one’s space, returning

to one’s own rhythm,

at rest in stillness —

and then take off

with grace

in the remembered

storm!

The power and sound

of the hands’ dance!

I could not play so well

by working at it —

I could not play so well

for ego or for others’ ears.

I play to lose myself.

I play to die to pain.

I play to the enfolding

silence, self-forgetting.

I play myself alive again.

            Alla Renée Bozarth

From The Book of Bliss, iUniverse 2000

While April blizzards rage eastern states, my garden pushes through death as usual and springs back to itself again, giving you a promise of what's ahead while enduring your falls and winters.

I always jump to the last page of a long book, so now you've seen the camellias, magnolias, and the ancient wounded healer silk mimosa tree at 41 nursing a new crop of daffodils, while under the cherry blossom branches the quail feast on life with everyone else. Now we can go back to the beginning where the late September, early October rose, Pristine, is replaying its life at top speed before it goes to sleep. With its kin, it is still sleeping, but all the bushes are loaded with healthy new red and green leaves shining in the spring rains, and a few buds are thinking about appearing . . .

How to Use the Rest of this Blog

This year-long all-in-one meditation on the seasons of the northern hemisphere, the liturgical calendar of my tradition and the seasons of the soul with tributes to many inspiring people can take you to Any Time. The Pages on the right are from November 2011 with Wisdom House, Book Covers and this page for Home added, but scroll down past the Members' images to find December 2011 for First Word/Wisdom & Wonderment, Advent's Star Sermon and I Can't Wait for Christmas, and for Epiphany and Russian Christmas at Bear Haven see January 1, 2012. Read about the God-as-Mother-Bear metaphor there and on May 1, Seasons of Resurrection, and find love poems of all sorts on February 1, for St. Valentine's Feast. You can visit Christmas in summertime or Independence Day in March if you click "View my complete Profile" at the end of the right menu to choose "Voting Well~Giving Thanks" from my 9 other single-topic blog sites~ and from this main blog of Welcoming Light, you'll find Easter all year through. You'll see living color images everywhere~ some of them from the Hubble space camera and some from my front yard and back pasture.

To contact me click "View my complete profile" after my photo at the bottom of the right menu~ See Contact and E-mail below photo. I wish you Well-being, Wisdom and Light! Every day, as my license plate has said for 40 years, Bear Up. See yourself through. You are in excellent company, here with other brave members of Earth's beautiful creation.

Blessings to you and your loved ones, and to all the sad and weary, hopeless and hopeful, complex Wide World. Now feast your eyes on the rapid autumn progression of the lifespan of this beautiful rose, shown above on its third day of bloom. On its first day . . .

September 30, Feast of St. Michael and All Angels~ and following

The Door to Heaven

The front door of the house,

the door to heaven,

opened to the sky—

and I passed through

into the beauty of evening—

I wanted to find the colors

of sky as it blushes deeply

when the sun kisses it Good Night—

but then it saw me, and gave more

than I came for—

Beside me standing there,

a single rose among the bedfellows,

still a green bud but yesterday—

In my fond absence it opened

and stretched northwesterly toward light,

then caught the rose-hued colors of twilight

on the tips of one wing—

And as the rose stood tall under

the vault of heaven to receive its colors,

it began to become a flower— to become itself—

Alla Renée Bozarth

Postcards from Paradise
Copyright 2012

. . . Sept. 30

. . . October 1

October 2 . . .

Pristine

In the Garden of Rosa Mystica, Wisdom House

on the Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels, October 2, 2012

Through a glass lightly

   . . . I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk . . .
                          Rimbaud

where the sun floated across the arc of heaven
by day, in the between hour of twilight, after
the pink feather fan flowers of the silk mimosa tree
have taken away their oriental perfume, one peers
between the curled fronds of deep-darkening green
at their sea of sky, filling with colors

that soon will become thick, black velvet night,
revealing the Milky Way, replete with
its ocean of stars

through the watery lens

of the eye, the world comes in

upside down

so that our shoes would be hats

and our hats would be shoes.

how can the brain

upright this mad hatter world
so quickly

that we do not know it?

we stand on a shore

and drown our ideas

of what’s real, staring

at the tree patterns

on the opposite shore

perfectly shimmering

on the still plate of water,

their tops coming toward us

instead of toward heaven

for which we are grateful.

then the image is broken

when an amputated arm

floats up to the surface

between the tree branches,

free-falling upward in the middle

of a river forest, and horror

slowly creeps into our spines.

an accident, a swimmer caught

in a propeller, we think, the whole

story already conclusive in the woods

of the mind’s construing, the story

we create to substitute for the reality

we never can know.

so the days fly down toward darkness

weeks before the fall equinox— time begins

to swallow light from both ends of the day,

and panic sets in.

how can we, who know so little, who know

next to nothing, live with even less light, even after

too much has nearly blinded us?

the accumulation of deaths accelerates, and

the disappearance of those we love into the darkness

beyond our meager vision seems to the soul like

the slow amputation of yet another part

of the body of our days—

taking our loved ones with them, hours one by one disappear forever

into fragments of the past— hurling itself like a black wave

over every experience faster than we can experience it.

thank God we have the future or eternity

to unlock and open ourselves and decipher the hidden meanings

what happens next may cast

no light on what just happened,

but the stories that come to us,

if they don’t frighten us,

may comfort us in the dark

where we live our increasingly

isolated, stark and abstemious lives.

soon the spirit will so outgrow the body

that the body will yield it to heaven.

soon the body will no longer need

its spirit, and the soul will pour out of it

like warm honey from the hive.

can this every day life we live be proper practice for paradise?

this emptying, this recurring fall of day into night?

any day, night may spill its secret gifts before us,

with paradise full born, abloom and radiant in our souls.

Alla Renée Bozarth

Purgatory Papers

Moment of Grace

No matter the relationship

between beings—

Whether friend to friend

or stranger to stranger—

Whether teacher and student,

apprentice and master,

or both as equals and

beyond definition—

Whether one is hurt and

healed well enough to help

and the other is hurt and

yet to be healed,

each becomes both

teacher and healer—

Whether one is open

and the other wary—

Whether both are

of the same species or

of different species—

No matter how many languages

there are between them—

after the last sigh has been sighed

and the last note of the song

they are trying to find words

and melody for has been sung,

what follows that effort

is music ~

When they meet

soul to soul

and open their hearts,

without even knowing

or deciding to do so—

After the words—

after the sound,

after the movement—

there is a moment

of silence, and within

that moment all

that matters is the light

between beings ~

Where no more is needed

than to remember and cherish it

forever

Alla Renée Bozarth

The Frequencies of Sound

Between Beings

A thin scar reminds

the body and mind

of how they can mend

for the work they must do—

To live with integrity as much as possible,

to speak the truth prudently but clearly,

to tell the story they have lived,

to help others free themselves as well,

to discern right action and do it,

even if it leads to death—

to safeguard the helpless and

protect and help those in need.

One knows one’s purpose, to live

until one has helped as many whose lives

can be pulled from the fire as one can.

Wisdom regards this person with another

and smiles, revealing that between two beings

there is only the light.

Alla Renée Bozarth

Diamonds in a Stony Field

In the Beginning Was the Word and

comes the soaring

comes the shower of fire

the comet, the meteor, the wonder

to think~ that from a single ion of hydrogen

come the stars, come the waters, come us.

Alla Renée Bozarth

The Frequencies of Sound

The Compass Rose

All creatures suffer. Even the roses suffer.

All you have to do is observe them to see it.

If you want to learn com-passion

so that you feel with other beings and

your own soul without judging, exploiting,

dramatizing or attempting to control, but simply

to learn how to pour the light of heaven

into the wounds of time and space—

study the rose.

Learn the breath-giving beauty of a soul~

as the warm fleshy rose that lives and pulses

in the heart of time and a human being~

or in the essential body of another animal

or tree, or in a single cloud floating past your field of vision~

or perhaps in the heart of the storm, should dark clouds gather

and blow down thunderous breath over Earth~ or the heart

of a river or the great mother ocean, whose water-blue rose

welcomes the swimmer.

Learn its rhythms and moods, both calm and aroused—

the rose in a storm or basking in sunlight from rain.

Learn to discern between agony and ecstasy,

those extreme expressionists, those mirror twins.

Learn the rhythms and colors of implosive despair

and explosive anger and how they differ

from sorrow and joy.

Study the swirling shapes and the bundling coils,

the opening wings or self-containment of the rose—

and know your own heart also. Observe the thorns,

how with age, they increase and thicken.

To learn the compass points of compassion,

carefully follow the changes in each petal, leaf, branch and thorn

of several different kinds of roses throughout their separate seasonal life spans.

Learn each one’s vulnerability,

each one’s rhythms of movement toward Grace

from green bud to full bloom to browning petals, drying twigs,

pocked and curling leaves, through every assault of disease

and devouring invasion, all the way through to the bare branch,

old root falling-away, final losses of itself.

After traveling the east, south, west and true north completion

of the cycle of the rose, only the central core gift is left—

the life-laden rose hips with their potent nutrients, delicately

wrapped in rose-colored fibers that heal the body as tea,
and feed the songs of the birds to perfection.

October 5, sixth day

October 7, with Japanese maple

and silk mimosa's last gifts before sleep

First flowers of July . . .

and last flowers of now,

with seed pods for next summer~

and the dahlia's flashy beauty and beauty in shadows

This will be your lesson in compassion.

It will become your compass through life.

It will be the garment worn by your mind.

It will be the breath of your love song

to all suffering Creation.

Alla Renée Bozarth

The Wild Gardens of God in Quartet

O Earth, Wrap Me

O Earth, wrap me

in your leaves –

heal me.

Let me fall

on your Earthbreast —

feed me.

Sing to me

under the round nests

in your cedar trees.

Embrace me

when I sleep

in your shade.

Let your eye keep me

protected and cool –

hide me.

Warm me

with naked summer

kisses and

Cloister me

around

with wildflowers.

Refresh me

with springs

and living waters.

Draw me down

into your well

of rebirth and

Let my wounds

open

and empty

Into your wonderful

compost

heap.

Then fill me

with your fruit

and bread, start over—

Let my wounds

become fertile

gardens and

Let me be.

Let me live

again.

Alla Renée Bozarth

The Book of Bliss, iUniverse 2000,

and This is My Body~ Prayers for Earth,

Prayers from the Heart, iUniverse, 2004.

Liquid Amber (Sweet Gum Tree) Leaves

Biodance

Everything bears the property of Love~

Sitting on a rock in the Salmon River
watching first leaves fall.

From sunhigh mountain treetops
upstream the rapids carry
old branches to the sea,
their leaves landlocked already.

Why so soon?

Not soon at all —
your time is complete.
And so is mine.

You rest in sunlight
before transforming
into earth and air.

You dissolve your leafy form
and recompose into a thousand bodies.
Nothing ever ends.
Everything is always beginning.

Shall I find myself tomorrow
shining in a water drop
on a piece of moss
on the bark of a tree
that once was you?

Green into burntred,
old leaf, our biodance began
millennia ago, but today
I am glad to see you clearly
for the first time
with just these eyes,
my changing
partner!

Your bronze body turns
to powder
with a crack
beneath my foot.

Part of you has already become me.
You are on your new way.

You will be back.

And so will I.

So will I.

Alla Renée Bozarth

From Stars in Your Bones: Emerging Signposts on Our Spiritual Journeys, Alla Bozarth, Julia Barkley and Terri Hawthorne, North Star Press of St. Cloud 19990; and This Mortal Marriage: Poems of Love, Lament and Praise, Alla Renée Bozarth, iUniverse 2003.

Below: Two poems from Moving to the Edge of the World, iUniverse 2000

The Sandy River

From Here

From here

the river

is a ribbon

of light —

One rose,

the color

of bright

coral seashell,

blooms

in the autumn

yard

and the pasture

grass dazzles green

with new rain

and low sun

and October trees

find their true

color again

before death —

From here

the waterfall

roars

below me

and the brave sun

smells cool.

Sheppard's Dell Waterfall, Columbia Gorge

From here the river
is a ribbon of light

and the full moon

rests a moment

abreast the red summit

of White Mountain.

From here I almost know

the secret of the stars,

how small the Earth is,

my own way home.

Columbia River and Gorge with Crown Point and fog . . .
Sandy River Gorge with dragon's breath fog filling the canyon
and Mt. Hood at sunset . . .

At the End of this Road

The dream says wait
by not-waiting.
Enter fog fully,
give yourself
to the cloud
completely.

Go to the white summit
and then turn around,
not to go back but
to see the other side
of your self and the whole
path by which you brought
yourself here. Then hold
to the Mountain. Stay
until morning.

Drink what warmth
the dazzling gives.
Eat light like a leaf
and be transfigured.

Learn all the secrets
the snowy desert
can teach you in one
incarnation.

Do not think you are
waiting for another part
of your life to begin.

                                                            Be intrigued. Be overwhelmed
                                                            where you are, taking time
                                                            to note how everything comes
                                                            to you unbidden to meet your desire.

Cultivate not waiting.
Learn the new speech
that thin air makes.

Where you are is
nearly over and
is always. Wait
without waiting.

The Rose Window Mirror

Inspired by Lyndall Johnson

By day, the rose window from the outside

is nothing more than gray, flat geometric stones, Amiens Cathedral

too high to mirror the world or a soul. To see

its true colors one must go inside. In the interior,

wonders show themselves freely to those who
go there with open heart, mind and senses.

The rose window reveals its true colors

to the outside world only at night, and

then only when the interior is alive with

the presence of human beings at prayer,
candles lit and power on, drawing forth
{up, down, out or in} Divine Illumination.

When the world is wrapped in darkness

Artist: Stephen Wilson

and especially on starless nights~

the honest-to-God soul's receptive presence
invoking Divine Attention within becomes a beacon
by which to orient ourselves. Let all who see be attentive.

Choir window, St. John the Baptist Church, Whiting, IN

By this goodwilling presence within, the House of Prayer becomes a holding place
for yearning, a holy place for responsive thanksgiving, and a real Cathedral
for the primary and mixed colors of All Creation. . . and it also becomes
a lighthouse of assurance for those outside who are at sea in their lives.

As we lift up our eyes, the jeweled beauty of the window wakens our souls

to unnoticed beauty all around and within us, where Spirit also dwells.

The circle window works two ways with its inside and outside perspectives,

but only if there is a light source from the other side. Right vision through
a window, even of the most obvious beauty, depends on right backlighting

on the other side—from Outside for out-seeing, from Inside for in-sight.

From a lit room looking out on a dark exterior, the glass becomes a mirror.

From a lit exterior into a darkened room, a mirror again. Illuminated actors

on a stage must sense the unseen audience and be mirrors for humanity.

Overexposure obscures. Too much light on the other side washes out color

and blinds the eye, but good backlighting either way is revelatory.

The one in darkness will always see the one in light,

and the one in light will not see what the darkness is hiding.

Light is merciful toward darkness. Darkness sees but may not recognize.

This is why innocence must be protected.

The innocent assume innocence in others, the evil assume evil in all.

Darkness and light in themselves are merely themselves.

The use we make of each is what generates goodness or evil.

There is essential goodness in darkness, which renews and restores

through the divine gift of sleep. Clear images are developed in protective

dark rooms. There is essential goodness in light which reveals, teaches

and bequeaths beauty. Both darkness and light are innocent creatures

capable of being corrupted by unwise and unloving use,

capable of being transfused with true goodness.

Thus the window becomes the Tao, in which inside and outside are

mysteriously inseparable, empowering one another as do darkness and light.

The seed of each sleeps deeply and wakens in its time inside the other,

as the world sleeps in the soul and the soul wakes up in the world.

It reminds us that even here and now in space

and time, we live in Eternity always, and
Eternity reveals itself within us.

Therefore, as we become more transparent,
suffused with the light of Heaven, we become
beacons of hope for each other on Earth.

May the darkness that gives light at the turn
of the night and the light which gives darkness

at the turn of the day reveal together
the true colors of being.

And so the mystery of the Universe
can reveal itself to us

a little at a time.

Artist Elizabeth Devereaux
for St. Clare of Assisi Church, O'Fallon, IL

The Tao of Decision

To everything, balance.
Believe that life is
powerful and
mysterious.
Also believe
that human beings
seem more so
only because
you are one of them.

In each case it is
unique just how—
to every action
there is an equal
and opposite reaction,

and all things hold
their opposite within
their own core.

And the saying
as above, so below
may mean
that stars grow
in the garden and
flowers bloom
in the night sky.

Does this also
explain why
I so often say
a loud No
just before
I say
a big Yes?

Alla Renée Bozarth

The Frequencies of Sound
Copyright 2012

The circle rose window conveys balance, wholeness, integrity and joy.

It is described by one artist of sacred geometry in color and glass as "anti-gravitational."

First Presbyterian Church, Wilmington, NC

Lucky Poets

Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage,

an early success or the ability to do anything well. Charles Bukowski

What great luck I’ve had, right away, when the first stroke in the form of a cerebral
hemorrhage came upon me at the age of one minute and some seconds—
followed by a childhood of corrective eye surgeries and all the usual illnesses that hit
twice as hard and lasted longer than with other children.

The result finally was that I need all my senses to do everything
and still remain unable to do most things very well, and also
that I was able to read good books and watch good movies
to my mind's enrichment.

I have had the good luck of an array of broken-hearted love stories. Ho hum.
Marriage came when I was young, but it was difficult because it was important
to us both to love each other well, so after 15 years of hard work, we achieved it.
Then my Beloved died.

By these experiences, some poets would say I was abundantly blessed
in the tear-soggy field of poetry. Plenty of sensible people would say otherwise.

Still, I’m not as lucky as Renato Grbic who, while fishing with his brother
near a sixty-foot bridge over the Danube one day 15 years ago heard a splash,
and the two of them were able to save a man flailing in the river.
He said, "Look, it's a glorious day, and you want to kill yourself?"

He was so shaken that he decided to save as many others as he could,
for the bridge was favored by those wanting to end their lives, the only
high bridge in Belgrade over the one river of two that was cold enough
and deep enough with a strong undercurrent to carry people to their deaths.

Renato (whose name means reborn) kept vigil.
He would sit there under the bridge in his small motorboat,
fishing for the restaurant he owned, daydreaming and thinking
about the desperation of the people he'd brought back, wondering
if they got the help to live which they so obviously needed.

No one among the dozens he'd saved said thank you.
They said nothing, in fact, but later he sometimes found out
that some had cancer, some were too poor or too lonely to go on,
some did it for so-called love.

When a young woman of 22 told him she did it for her boyfriend,
Renato asked, "Would he do it for you?"

All of them, he said, wanted attention and love.
Of this he was sure, because they jumped in broad daylight to be seen.

Though as many died as Renato had saved through the years,
he became a complete expert at Danube diving and responding quickly
to human need, with blankets and tea and a call to the hospital after
following the water's alert system splash— to pull all those people
one by one back from their extreme baptism-by-immersion in the river—
which then to their astonishment insisted on rejecting them and
gave them rebirth instead— protesting, dripping and sputtering.

Some may have become ambivalent and were secretly grateful.
Imagine changing your mind while aiming head first and falling fast
toward rapidly moving dark water . . .

I would say that Renato and those he successfully saved by virtue of their lives
significantly improving after such crisis have had the best luck of all. They are already
fine poets, body poets of the soul's deep feeling, simply by being able to go on,
designing their lives in ways mutually inspired by one surprise after another.

Rosa Mystica

for Lyndall and Lora, after Paris and Chartres

For one, revelation came in the form

of a dead dove

being eaten by a cat—

communion on the lip

of the labyrinth cathedral

that houses the birthing gown

of the Mother of Christ, and the Holy Well.

For the other, a street person

dancing on a bridge near Notre Dame—

to music that comes

from a miniature house on wheels

which she draws along like a shadow

before or after her, with its colorful flowers,

like a dog on a leash—

dancing on the bridge between

heaven and hell

in beatific madness.

In perfect union

the mind returns

to its senses,

finds its voice

in the stillness of the Rose.

The Word is reborn in her words,

and the world breathes

with more ease, accepting what is.

Alla Renée Bozarth

The Night Sky that Loves Me in Quartet

Cathedral de Notre Dame, Reims

Rosa Mystica Garden, Wisdom House, Sandy, Oregon

Rumi graphic by Lora DeVore-Matz

Heirloom in three stages of life.

The Sandy River in the Mt. Hood National Forest

The River of Life flows on . . .

. . . toward sleep

. . . and as if from dreams, the promise of dawn.

Wy'East, also known as Mt. Hood, tucking in for the night.

Raphael the Archangel is regarded as the defender against nightmares; the patron saint
of the blind and those suffering from eye diseases and difficulties; of all who suffer from
physical or mental illness; of nurses, pharmacists, physicians; and is also regarded as
the helper of sheep and those who raise sheep; the protector and aid of travelers and
youth; the helper of lovers and guardian of happy meetings. Raphael is the angel who
stands at the portals between the seasons, especially those cardinal times of the light's
balance before leaving and before returning again. Though Raphael is honored among
the archangels, I always invoke the Seraphim with this masterful and blessed guardian,
resplendent wisdom of night~

Invocation to Raphael the Archangel

You who watch with us when Uriel your brother angel sets shivers

to our teeth with his thunder~ you who bless lovers and pilgrims,

who guide the blind and those who are mad from their losses~

you who bless the healers and those who have knowledge of herbs~

You who are kind to confusion and protect us, waking or sleeping,

from nightmares~ you who watch with the shepherd
and know each sheep by name~

Befriender of youth, guardian of those who suffer from any affliction of the eye~

See us through, O Raphael, see us through these precincts of discovery, these vast

lab-oratories, where experience would crush us except for protective wings,

your wings that nudge us with divine direction.

Remind us of that country of Joy from where we come and shall return again,

you who govern the pathways of the poor and the rich, the ill and the well,

the ignorant and knowing~ you who understand us through everything.

Bless us with the remembrance of those precious voices

we long have loved, now far, ever near, and teach us slowly

and faithfully in dreams to sing with them

as you ready the deep night for dawn~

O Raphael, Resplendent Angel of the dove and the raven,

you who instruct the eagle and ride on flaming wings of the Seraphim,

you who raise the cry of the hawk to warn small and weak animals below,

including brave and foolish us, quaking and bold as howling babies among them~

respect our resistance, even as you give us the blessings of patience and trust~

gently and powerfully free us from fear and open us to self-transcending insight.

And through all that time and tide might bring,

protect the Light of Our Souls any way and always,

though everything. Amen

Alla Renée Bozarth

The Frequency of Light

Nocturnal deer with night-blooming cosmos of Fall

Invocation to Night

Night, the daughter of Chaos

and beautiful mother of Sleep

and Death and the Day, of Doom

and Dreams and the Soul’s

Awakening—

Night, bring Hope, bring Splendor,

bring Stars~ Night, bring Comfort

and Safety from harm and protect

us from your dear dangers.

Night, let your wings hover over us,

their shadows holding the luminous,

tender portions of our lives,

the unprotected, the strong,

the breakable.

Night, bless us and keep us alive

to meet the New Day, and fashion it

now from the Best Visions of Angels

and not from our small, puny

and unlovely obsessions
nor our consuming nightmares.

Let us not waken trembling

and wet with cold, but

with even breath and rested,

ready for anything.

Bring Grace to our bedsides

to rouse us to our feet and set them

in good directions—

Bring Light to our words and deeds.

Then when Day hides again under your wings,

welcome us with kindness and soft songs.

Sweet Night, Good Night.
Good Night.

Alla Renée Bozarth

The Night Sky that Loves Me in Quartet

Listen to 5 minutes of pure bliss, music by Morten Lauridsen, words by James Agee,
Sure On this Shining Night:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWTVoAgO0jY

╬ ╬ ╬

The dahlias are from the garden of Julie Stephens and Butch Hattenberg,
dear friends who live down the road. The rose bower, horse, goat and cows
live in my neighbors' pastures and yards across Coalman Road, shown with
mama and papa trees flanking the paved hard way. The apple tree is on my
southern neighbors Melody and Don Delay's side of the long fence. The foxglove,
Turk's cap lilies, silk mimosa tree, black walnut tree, braided sunset trees, Pristine,
Heirloom (the lavender/mauve rose) and Fascination (the coral/magenta rose) live
with me. The pear tree is loaded with pears too high for me to reach, but they
are beginning to fall on the ground to be picked up. They are juicy and delicious,
fresh or in compote simmered with orange juice, cinnamon, cranberries and raisins
or currants. The purple Italian plums and Gravenstein apples are from my dwarf
fruit tree orchard also. The dwarf trees have not been pruned in ten years and are
turning into gnarly old giants.

Sunrise over trees is what I see before I go to bed sometimes, from my kitchen window
and veranda looking east toward the Cascade Mountains. Sunset over Mt. Hood used
to be the view from the top of the hill just off the highway. I was lucky to be able to
spend many beautiful twilight evenings there before developers ruined the immediate
landscape.

These meditation posts in poetry, stories and pictures began on All Saints and All Souls
Days last year and have come full circle to the Feast of All Angels, The Holy Guardian
Angels, and today, St. Francis of Assisi. The Cycle of the Year is nearly complete . . .

Sunday, September 30, 2012

We Are Welcomed Here by Nature and Grace