Maple Leaves
Shades of crimson, gold, burgundy…You delight me as I watch you silently dive and float.
Beautiful, bright maple leaves, you fall so gracefully.
How do you rest so contently when it is clear you have fallen?
When I fall, I am disappointed.
When I fall, I resist.
When I fall, I think I need to get up.
Fallen leaves in a silent courtyard, teachers of grace.
~Gail Warner
In 2017 I published Weaving Myself Awake: Voicing the Sacred through Poetry. Each month I will share a different image and a poem from the book as a way of telling the story of my unfolding journey. As I say in the book:
“Weaving Myself Awake is a written weaving of my life. The unexpected part of writing these poems been the discovery of the ways in which this weavings woken me up. I have come home to myself over the course of working on this collection, and it’s given me an appreciation of the immensity my own being, as well as this same potential in others. I’ve experienced true expansion through my own inquiry into what “sacred” means to me, through creative processes, including SoulCollage®, Sand Tray and through sacred listening.”
This first share is the poem Maple Leaves. Creating or collaborating on images for each poem was a delightful part of putting the book together. Most of the poems are written with no intention of publishing which allowed a freedom of exploration in my writing. This poem is in the chapter named “Grace”. I wrote this poem while attending a poetry retreat at Santa Sabina in San Rafael, California in November of 2016. I was sitting in the courtyard and these beautiful maple leaves were falling from a large Maple tree. I was captivated by the ease in which they fell and landed. I took the picture of the leaves right at that time, sitting under the tree.
Later I blended the photo of maple leaves with “the handless maiden” as my sand tray group has come to name her. She is a figure in my sand tray collection at my office. It is hard to detect in the photo, but here hands are broken off. I love the blending of these two images. The leaves gracefully falling and the maiden, “handless”, sitting in the midst of a sand tray transported into the midst of the falling leaves. There can be many ways to see and interpret the handless maiden,but in this context I experienced her as at ease in being, not driven by doing, doing, doing. She seems to take time to sit and connect with life. So perfect for my experience at the poetry retreat with Jane Hirshfield, where we wrote and read poems, but all meals and in between times were housed in silence. The silence allowed me to dive deep into a simple presence of connecting. As I share this I can sense the sweet connection with grace that I voice in the poem.