Alysse Aallyn

Tag: #Poetry

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Winter – Dormancy –

    If This Card Chooses You – You are torpid. What’s happening when nothing’s happening? Your dreams should remain lively. Do you dream of endless sleep? Deep snows? Hibernation? Do you identify with the drowsy bear and the sleepy sloth?

    Now’s the Time – This is the sacred moment before a burst of Warrior Creativity. You are gathering your forces. Compare it to a pregnancy. Things are happening, but so slowly and deeply you are not aware of them, with the result that you may feel confused and frustrated. Instead, revel in this burgeoning becoming in the midst of sleepy peace.

    Warriors Can Hibernate
    Sometimes a plan isn’t ready. Sometimes you’re not ready. Timing is everything.
    It’s a long wait sometimes, as anyone who’s ever been through eighteen years of schooling or a seemingly endless winter can tell you. But it comes faster if you turn your attention to other things.

    Waiting for Peak –– We cultivate our dreams without pushing or extracting them. We curate our sensations. Spin through pictures of animals – what jumps out? Who is speaking to you? What are they saying? What are you afraid of and why? Make notes and collect images. A collage creates a deeper, more resonant picture. Sometimes it’s all in the eyes.

    Warrior Danger – In sleep we are entirely vulnerable and we have cultural and historic reason to fear that state. Guard yourself with supportive beings, with sleep music, with healing rituals. The triple-locked doors, the blackout-curtained windows, the silenced devices protect us in our chosen nest. Don a bracelet of “worry beads”, summon your happiest memories and tell them by touch, eyes closed, one by one. Send every ounce of your remembered love and joy out into the universe with a command to come back to you a hundred times. A thousand times so that your love can spill over and be shared with all you touch, near and far.

    Warrior Opportunity – You are creating yourself. The fetus of this pregnancy is YOU. In every dreamy hibernation second you are rebuilding yourself, adding visions, promoting fresh understandings and positive interpretations. Life offers us the chances of joy and misery – use your conscious awareness to accept these tools and allow dream-time and prep-time to penetrate ever deeper into your subconscious, (sometimes called the “preconscious”) to the unconscious, and down down down, deepest of all, to the collective unconscious where we recall in our bones and teeth and cells everything that has ever happened to every living thing as if it happened to us. This is the source of all imagination and creativity, accessible to you in the dream state.

    Be Patient. A Watched Pot Never Boils. The mouse is a whole lot likelier to come out of the mouse-hole if the cat isn’t waiting on the other side. Free your mind to imagine what it feels like to be everyone, anyone, in your constructed scenarios.

    Over-thinking is bad for your brain – Ever heard the expression “Sleep on it!” The only time you shouldn’t sleep on it is in the heat of battle, and the clever warrior AVOIDS battles. ALWAYS sleep on it! Ask your dreams to send insight, bubbling up from the pre-conscious. Participate in artistic pursuits, allowing metaphor and symbol to work it’s magic in your subconscious. Do something completely different. Refresh yourself.

    Models & Mentors – “To lose patience is to lose the battle.” – Mahatma Gandhi

    “Grow in patience when you meet great wrongs and they will be powerless to vex your mind” – Leonardo da Vinci

    “Patience is not simply the ability to wait but how we behave when we are waiting” – Joyce Meyer

    “Patience and Time do more than strength and passion” – Jean de la Fontaine

    #Haiku: Ghosts

    Ghosts
    Enable, unmask
    All our
    Dormant selves
    We could not
    Would not
    Be.

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Creativity – The Artist –

      When This Card Chooses You – YOU ARE AN ARTIST ! You possess the warrior power of making Something out of Nothing. Think. Feel. Look at the tactile world around you and reach out your hands.

      Warriors and Artists immortalize themselves. Sometimes their works are so intriguingly beautiful that we are drawn in and our critical senses – our fear – is tranquillized while we allow the artist to work magic upon us. Artists aspire to be magicians of the mind and soul.

      Warrior Challenge – You create something unforgettable because you do not want to be forgotten. You want to open hearts, minds and brains just as yours were first opened, long ago, when you looked upon this amazing world for the first time and felt the power & potential of what you saw. Warriors feel the same thing. We march to a different drummer we feel inside ourselves. We are inner, not outer directed.

      Warrior Danger – There is possibility here for such overweening pride that you place your own psyche above Creation in importance. If you seek to divert worship of creation to yourself your own soul will harden unto death, and your creative powers will be extinguished.

      Warrior Opportunity – Join the goddess in creating something entirely new that the world will not want to live without. The joy of sharing, the rapture of being known, the ecstasy of expression, of gratitude of being understood, will be yours.

      Are you an artist because you say you are or because they say you are? Well, are you a warrior because you say you are or because they say you are? I think it should be obvious that is TOTALLY NOT UP TO THEM. You MUST decide you are a warrior, you have to FEEL like a warrior and they can NEVER “tell” you what you are. It’s exactly that way for artists, too. It’s a temperament, a way of viewing the world, and because it’s in harmony with Creation all around us, it’s enormously satisfying. Really gets those alpha waves going.
      The warrior in you needs to protect your creativity. It is always under threat.

      Hustle Culture – Art can’t hustle but the merchandisers and the monetizers hasten to tell you: “Close enough – let’s get this thing to market.” But you need to find out what’s there – why this subject, these tools are drawing you. You need to think, to explore, to experiment, to start the process of 10,000 “failures” Edison said are the steps to success.

      The Creative Warrior – If you’re not a creative warrior, you’re someone else’s warrior and that’s a living death. Strategize. Speculate. Get out that Training Journal. Dream. Speak to your soul. Allow it to shine.

      Models & Mentors – “Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.” – Albert Einstein

      “Creativity can’t get used up. The more you use the more you have.” – Maya Angelou


      “Creativity is just connecting things.” – Steve Jobs

      “There is no innovation, no creativity, without failure.” – Brené Brown

      “What’s so fascinating about life is the constant creativity of the soul.” – Deepak Chopra

      #Haiku: “The more neurosis, the more wisdom”

      Difficulties create
      Enlightenment;
      Recognize,
      Participate.

    1. Secrets of the Self -how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

      The Rose – Vulnerability –

        Sharing poetry is the most painful vulnerability. That was when I realized for the first time that pursuing life of art requires the warrior sensibility. You have to keep going, no matter what other people say and what they recommend. Some advice is good and some isn’t. We all need to develop our warrior instincts and our warrior sensibilities.

        Poetry is a language it takes a lifetime to learn to speak. Luckily, other people speak it! Back when I was a new mother for the first time, I advertised for poets and assembled a book of over 50 poems, representing over 40 poets from 26 states, writing about the experience of being female, and called it The Feathered Violin. We printed 450 copies and shared it widely, all around the country.

        In terms of sheer daring, this may have been one of the most daring things I’ve ever done!

        POETRY

        The world that seems to us so still


        And echoes no reflection of our will


        Somehow produced the seed that in us all


        Resurrected us from worm to fish, to crawl


        Upon the earth, to stand and then


        Return a child to creep and crawl again


        In some unending pattern, sane or not


        Judging by the brain that this same seed begot


        And yet within our every cell lies curled


        A revolutionary flag to be unfurled


        And lead us on to who knows what potential end


        Beyond the reach of enemy or friend?


        Can it be that simple balls of spinning glass


        Possess the strength to lift from this morass


        All that we are; though we don’t understand


        This torch we pass so tenderly from hand to hand?

      1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Wisdom –

          What is the difference between an old soul and a new soul? So many times, I saw the people around me choose suffering. I made a lot of idiotic choices in my life, but I never chose suffering. I graduated from suffering to sadness, and now I’m trying to graduate to compassion.

          Wisdom means seeing suffering coming and trying to get out of its way. It’s not always possible, and sometimes we just have to blast through it.

          A lot of my poems and stories are about ghosts. Ghosts describe the edge between the comprehensible and the impossible, between sadness and suffering, between guilt and gratitude.

          The deaths of pets are always traumatic for children, and I could even participate in the sadness of roadkill. I once tried to carry our cat Beautiful out to the road to see a dead cat, but, being an old soul, she did not want to come.

          When our family moved to Africa, I was eleven and had to leave our dog Four-Eyes, behind. I was haunted by his eyes for years and years. Every time I read the book The Cat That Went to Heaven I was in floods of tears.

          I asked a wise old man if animals went to heaven and he said, “Think how disappointed St. Francis would be if they don’t.” With a gush of relief I realized he was right – that wouldn’t be heaven for St. Francis. Or me.

          STICKS

          My dog
          Went on fetching sticks
          Long after it was dead.
          We’d find them on the stoop
          Arranged in patterns.
          Monk would sigh and say
          Poor old Four-Eyes
          Missing us. Still
          Playing people games

        1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

          The Sun – Truth –

            High school for me was a religious boarding school whose faculty asserted their monopoly on truth. I considered myself an honorable person and despised lies. So when asked straightforward questions, I told the truth and accepted my punishment. However, I gradually discovered that they reserved the right to lie to us and in fact, considered that “parental” and pedagogical. Was there any point telling “the truth” to such people? Apparently, truth was a scarce resource that I, at age 14, possessed. The hypocrisy was huge. My father loved the Society of Friends because creed was optional, attendance at meeting was voluntary and silent. No one spoke unless moved by the Holy Spirit. But at our school, religious attendance (we even had Vespers!) was mandatory and our captive audience was lectured from the Facing Bench (where the Important People sit.)

            In such a world, is truth possible? Is it even findable? Above all, is it communicable? I was naturally artistic, a bent which was discouraged because it was “self-indulgent”. And poetry (it’s poetry if the poet says it is) is the most self-indulgent of all. So that’s what I chose.

            PREPPY

            Corseted with verbs
            The French teacher sweeps
            The cherry blossoms from the tennis court
            As she would like to sweep
            The cherries, squelching them soundly
            Beneath soccer-spiked shoes

            While the headmistress
            Cello-breasted
            Polishes graffiti carved upon her coffin
            In Chaucerian High English
            And the girls –
            Nun-white, nun-blue

            Soar above hockey fields like
            Foul-mouthed angels, anticipated ecstasy locked
            In narrow hope chests ripened on
            Amphetamines
            Free Love
            Bad dreams.

          1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            Synchronicity

            You could say I was a “success” at Circle in the Square, because I got the coveted ingénue part in the student production of Anouilh’s The Enchanted at The New Yorker Theatre. But I wasn’t happy. I thought I was as bad an actress as a dancer and it wasn’t gratifying because I wanted the story to be different. I wanted to be a writer! In fact, I felt I already WAS a writer. But I had absolutely nothing intelligent to say.

            How to get my inner development synchronized with my outer existence? In other words, develop a professional life. I did realize I needed a string of degrees – how coordinate that with my abhorrence of Higher Ed? Enroll at one of the Antioch College experimental schools – the one in Columbia, Md, for a degree in Creative Writing.

            Peacock Pavement: The Poet on her walk

            Femininity’s  Everests

            I climb them daily. Envy the crow’s

            wombless contentment

            As I stroll 

            among the old

            wrappers used

            condoms; joints rolled like French

            Letters used abused discarded.

            What the crow envies is my

            Zircon hair; a lunar map of freedom

            Battering-ram jaw 

            baroque nose, the

             Greek depths through which

            My eyes record their wanderings

            Outside the convent wall,

            The stalls, the chained-up lambs,

            The  leaf-clogged swimming pools.

            First act, second act, third act

            Epilogue. 

            Number days by seeking out

            Life’s taproot;

            Marking ages not my own;

            Investing in some future;

            All unknowing what anyone will make

            Of these

            Portentous Pleiades:

            disparate sisters

            Me, myself and I.

          2. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            Inspiration –

            The desire to participate in the world of art hit me early. As a young teen, I was fascinated by the internecine struggles of the Trojan War and the Wars of the Roses. History was a family story, history was a crime story. Books for children – the Narnia stories, for example, couldn’t match the explosive, desperate sweep of historical intrigue. I had a facility with English that allowed me to “opt out” of language drills – I read the encyclopedia instead, which was full of improbable information. I loved reading to the class, and the class loved to have me read to them.

            When I entered boarding school at age 14 I really began to write in earnest. But the faculty did not like what I wrote. Moby Dick and the writings of John Steinbeck were seriously offered to me as models. This was the first moment I chose the Warrior Path. I complained that we were not reading any female authors and in fact, made a resolve never to read male authors again (I broke it for the Russians, who were feminine enough for me – especially Turgenev.) I liked Colette, so I read Francoise Sagan. I modeled myself on them – they were literally anathema at my school to such an extent that I decided not to go to college and pursued acting school instead.

            That was a dumb decision literally no one helped me with but by that time I had discarded The Appropriate Path to such an extent I don’t know if anyone could have reasoned me out of it since Adult World seemed so desperately stupid to me. What I chose – I thought – was the world of inspiration where magic could be created, second by second.

            PLAYING HIDE & SEEK IN THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

            Life class is

            My game – you started it.

            Now I’m too obvious –

            Resembling

            This swollen storehouse where

            nothing is explained.

            We are all

            Open to interpretation.

            Outside the tiny window a single tree

            Flowers in its smug

            Delusion.

            This whiteness weights

            my soul. I long for the whick

            of teeth on lip; and bite

            the bended elbow where the blood 

            lies gathered. Take responsibility 

            For unfinished work.

            Unsignatured because

            It never finished school. 

            No blood here, lady


            You must have

             Imagined it – a

             Powder burn without 

            A bullet.

          3. Testimony: a poem by Alysse Aallyn

            TESTIMONY

            In 1979 I borrowed a dime
            And stepped out in my party-dress
            To make a call.
            I’d need a cell phone now.
            A careless man said,
            “Find your own way home.”

            St Theresa cut in on our line –
            A sixteenth century nun pierced by light
            Reminded me while kneeling there
            To cut my anger with the sword of bliss
            And revel in the sacred music
            Anchor-less.

            I still seek among the faces
            Grief unstrung, listen to their emptiness
            Of joy undone
            Amidst the rage, the blindness and the fear;
            Recognize magnificence
            She told me would be there.

          4. The Controversy: a poem by Alysse Aallyn

            The Controversy

            In the bar we argue
            You drink gin and I drink bourbon
            You admit there’s something out there but
            God and Christ have been discredited
            You prefer the snake-faced aliens.

            Can pedagogues discredit learning
            I demand -Do rapists disgrace sex?
            Outside the blank-faced soldiers
            Breathing on the glass of history
            Await their time.

            They are glad to lend their bones
            As lumber. They’re afraid to live.
            Rebel children seize the city
            Experimenting on the damned.
            We’re trapped inside the hourglass

            Moving not in circles but in spirals –
            Moving somewhere.
            You order a stronger round
            I look inside my wallet
            To see what’s left.

          5. Constellations: Berenice’s Hair – a poem by Alysse Aallyn

            Constellations: Berenice’s Hair

            Meteoric dust drips ash
            Into my upturned mouth;
            I taste stars;
            What manner of being are you?
            I only know you’re something
            That I need. Your

            Mirrored endlessness partakes of
            Nothing human, yet suggests
            Completion. Your shadow arches
            Over everything, a lover who
            Won’t give satisfaction. I’ll take
            The expert titillation

            Of your neglect.
            Hunger burns so purely in
            This atmosphere. Without you
            I might be myself; with you
            I am nothing. But
            Deflation is a lover’s privilege.