If I Would've Known by Sarah Huckabay

IF I WOULD’VE KNOWN
by Sarah Huckabay

If I would’ve known what I know today,
Things would’ve been different.
That day being the last time,
The last image of her in my mind.
The most recent.
The way she roamed around
Gathering her her clothes and getting ready to leave.


If I would’ve known.
I would’ve hugged her a little longer.
And told her I loved her a few more times.
I wouldn’t have said what I said that morning,
If I would’ve known.


I know she forgives me
Just as I said I forgave her
Here’s the thing though,
I’m holding a grudge inside
But trying to let go.
I love her, I hate her.
She said she wouldn’t leave me
She said she’d stay strong.
Maybe this will be easier when I know later,
What I don’t know now.


In the author's own words...
In eleventh grade, my English class was blessed to have a poet from Seattle come work with our class for 8 weeks. Those were the 8 weeks that changed my life. I realized I love writing~ She opened my eyes to see that it was my calling. Recently, I have had to grow up faster that I wanted to. Last year was the year for hardships. The only way I was able to get through it was by expressing how I felt through my writings... The poem " If I would've known" does exactly that.

Three poems from Phil Lane

Half-Life
by Phil Lane
For J.A.L.

The first half:
the flourish, the lion
among the lambs,
the verdant dawn,
the early-laurelled head
then the atoms freeze
and the physics of loss:
in the metabolic failure
you become a report
in death’s filing cabinet,
being carbon-dated
while a number is tied
to your horny feet
in a lab of cold stone
and slabs and silence
inside the refrigerator
of the corpse collector
on the coast
of the megalopolis
you traversed
only last week.

……………………

In the thick of the quarter-century,
in the maelstrom of youth,
after working hard
and being well-behaved,
you left with resilient permanence;
you were young and you were old
but in the sun and in the rain,
you are officially, infinitely gone.


On the night you left, I slept
curled up, carefree.  Awaking to death
is like sleeping above a fault:
the shock, the stroke of destruction,
the haze of what must not, could not
have happened, then the void
that even alcohol and flowers and the dog
cannot fill, the freeze of fear,
the blur of time, the loss of flesh and blood,
confusion, denial.  So much has already been
taken away, why should this hurt?


Because death is old but it’s always new.
Because somewhere else,
people are being born, twins,
because somewhere else there are
weddings, wages, bread and babies.
But here in your old room,
there are only the boxes, hastily packed,
the trinkets wrapped in last month’s newspapers
and the things you saved wedged
into the closet with this half-life
you could not quite complete—


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Bones
by Phil Lane

The promised light fades,
a ring of smoke
blown concentric
from bitter lips,
a bells tolls
through the broken night,
the dog barks
at the tectonic shift
above which
we accumulate things
to compensate
for the things
we’ve lost.


Sometimes all we can do
is shut off the light,
watch it splinter
to embers
behind the
burning barn
which releases
a view of the moon,
and even though it is early,
sleep before the open window
even though it is cold
and even the young bones
shiver like roses upon
flagstone graves—


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Of Time and Weather
by Phil Lane

The inconsequence
     of time:
  disorder, disaster
fall across each
  fraction of a second,
  across our best
          laid plans
 like limbs
    shattered back to
       earth by a storm,
  things change
        like seasons,
   then fall apart.


The space-time vacuum
     between summer
          and winter,
that autumn smell
       of death and embers,
     the end of things,
 the winds
  of a new quarter,
     erratic, unpredictable
          as the storm
  we never expected
    to be born into.


Even here beneath
    the summer sun
there is plunder
      and pestilence;
  we are plunged
         into despair
  even under the
     best of weather—  

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About the Author
Phil Lane is an English teacher living in Northern New Jersey, and has had poems published in various magazines over the past five years. 

Creative prompt: exploring body + kota enews...

click image to see full size...

If you subscribe to our KOTA eZine, then you will have had this delivered right to your inbox!
For those who don't subscribe that way, we are posting on the blogs:

~an ezine of creative ideas, news, and support~

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Body Map 
creative prompt from Coach & heARTist Kara LC Jones
inspired by Arts For Social Change by Beverly Naidus

When my son died at birth, I quickly checked out of my body.  There was so much disappointment, so much grief, and feelings of how my body betrayed me and him entirely.  Later on when talking with a local law maker about getting a state law changed for stillbirth documentation, I was told to my face that I did not give birth to a child.  I was told I had a fetus and *it* was dead.  The law makers were trying to intimidate and shame me -- and other mothers like me -- into being quiet, leaving them alone, to cease our efforts in the fight for women's rights.  While I knew intellectually what they were doing, it was hard on me emotionally because I was still in a crisis of faith about how my body failed me.  With time, conscious processing, and art making, I've been able to explore these issues and try to find ways back into my Power.

So today's prompt is a share for you to explore your relationship with body.  Of course this could work for anyone, but I'm also offering this specifically to women who've had pregnancy or infant death losses.  Just seems to me that this kind of loss complicates our relationships with our bodies, and however empowered we felt prior to the death, there is some shake up with our bodies in grief's wake.  So here's how you can creatively explore this:

•     The first thing you need is the outline of your body or a body shape you feel represents you.  You can either:
  
   -Get large sheets of butcher paper on which you outline your real body, full size.  This can be a very powerful way to work because you are looking at your actual body shape.
  
   -OR you can do line drawings in a more representative shape -- click the image at the top of this post to see full size version.  You'll see that I used a very simple outline.  For me, this worked to show the plump, roundness of my body - and it also showed how dis-empowered I felt in my arms.  Empty arms idea.
  
  
•     Once you have your body shape, duplicate it three times.
  
  
•     Then consider how you feel/felt in your body
  
        1) at the moment of trauma,
        2) when in an unsafe environment, and
        3) when you feel like you are in a safe environment
  
  
•     Ask yourself what color represents each of these times?  Consider how your body felt in each of these times?  Are there areas that felt achy or soothed?  Are there words to represent various parts of your body?  What did the areas surrounding your body feel like?

If you look at the full size version of the image I included at the top, you can see how I played with the areas of my body that felt most affected to me.  The head, the heart, the stomach, and the womb.  You can see how the story of each of those areas changed over time.  You can see how the coloring and lighting changes from version to version.  You could optionally do a fourth body version to explore intentions you'd like to set for your body relationship going into the future.  All of this is just a way to map the story of body with which you are living, to make conscious, the things you may not have realized are at play.  Just try it and see what you discover.

If you do blog post to show results, please feel free to post comment here or on the Mother Henna blog, or the MISS Creation Station Forum to share with us!

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Want to explore Grief and Creativity with a Coach?

See the Mother Henna site for full Coaching information.

Tele-session and in- person session are now available for $95/hour for those wanting to work one on one with Coach Kara.  With booking of 2 or 3 one-hour sessions, a 15% discount is now available.  Please see the site for information and follow up with Kara to schedule your session today.

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Blog Give-Away!!!

For the 2010 One World, One heART give-away, we are giving away card readings with Madame Zolda!  All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on the give-way blog entry - click here to see it.  And then on February 15th, we'll announce the winner(s).  When you click thru to leave your comment for our give-away, make sure you also click thru to the main OWOH site, too.  There are already 500+ bloggers giving away some amazing things.  Handmade dolls, stamp sets, ephemera, handcrafted scarves, and more.  I even saw someone giving away a binding machine!!  Have fun getting to know your blog neighbors!

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GRRRLS Series...
original watercolors now online at Etsy

Last summer, the GRRRRLS Series of image was on exhibit for a month at Cafe Luna on Vashon.  Now a few of the original watercolor GRRRRLS pieces are available via Mother Henna's Etsy Shop [quick correction because my original post didn't make pricing clear - the *prints* are $25/each; the watercolor/illustration originals are $45/each; we've updated the etsy shop to host specific store sections/departments to separate the prints from the originals- see right side bar menu]:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/MotherHenna

Take a surf over and look at all the pieces available.  We also have the Jizo notecards available there.  And if you are interested in a 3-card reading by Madame Zolda, using the 1,000 Faces deck, you can book your session from the shop, too.

NOTE:  The photos here and on our etsy shop are water marked for copyright purposes.  The print or original work you purchase will NOT have the website address draped across it like that!

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Grief and Creativity Offerings

Looks like Hawk and I will be in the Pittsburgh area at the end of April.  If you or anyone you know in that area would like to host a workshop, presentation, or training on Grief and Creativity, please see our site for details on our offerings, and then contact us!

http://www.motherhenna.com/speaking.htm

We also host several Home Workshops, so that regardless of your geographic location, you can explore sessions like "heART of the Hero" or "Grief: Finding Our Way."  See the site for full session details and registration:

http://www.motherhenna.com/events_registration.htm

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If you are on Facebook, you can become a Fan of the Mother Henna blog. Or you can join our Grief and Creativity Discussion Group which is a mix of caregivers, artists, and people looking for support in their own processes.

We twitter tweets most days, too! Click here to fly over and follow!

Thanks and do your best to foster patience with yourselves in this most impatient world!

Reiki to all who come across this:
HON SHA ZE SHO NEN
HON SHA ZE SHO NEN
HON SHA ZE SHO NEN

Miracles to each of you...k-

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Excerpt from latest Issue of the KOTA eZine...scribble to self assess

If you subscribe to our KOTA eZine, then you will have had this delivered right to your inbox along with all the other news in this issue!

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Scribble to Self Assess
creative prompt from 
Coach and heARTist Kara LC Jones
adapted from Cathy A. Malchiodi's  Art Therapy Sourcebook

Sometimes grief and loss are so overwhelming that we just scramble to find a way and get from moment to moment without ever finding the words to express our experiences.  People may ask us how we are doing, and it might be difficult to do more than sigh and say, "Fine."  As we self-reflect, too, it can be a challenge to be honest about the abyss that seems to span between the moment of trauma and learning to live life again.  One deceptively simple creative tool can be to scribble to self assess.  Here's how:

1) Ask yourself what color you feel like just now.  Get a marker of that color.

2) Use your non-dominate hand, close your eyes, and scribble away on a piece of paper.  I find that it helps to have a larger piece of paper - maybe with an even larger piece of butcher paper underneath - so that you can really keep your eyes closed and scribble away in as large and flowing a pattern as you like.  Sometimes it also helps me flow to put on a piece of music that speaks to my current emotional state.  And then I let the scribble flow to the beat of the music.

3) When the scribble feels done to you, open your eyes and look at the paper.  Turn it sideways and upside down and sideways again.  See if there are any shapes or images that seem to pop out to you.  Enhance them.

4) Look at the empty spaces of the scribble and think again about how you feel this moment.  Fill in the spaces with different colors to represent how you feel.  Or fill in words here and there or other shapes.  If you like to draw, make drawings in the spaces.  Or do small scribbles in the spaces in various colors.

5) Try this for several days in a row.  After a few days, look at all the pieces together.  Does the progress of the scribble assessments tell any kind of story about your experiences?  Do you see any themes playing out?

It is often surprising what emerges for us when we take this kind of askew, creative look at our journey.  If you decide to try this and want to share your experiences with us, please do.  Feel free to post photos or share blog post, email us or post reply comments here on the KOTA blog, Mother Henna blog, or on the MISS Creation Station board.

Addendum: Christine graciously shared her experiments with scribbling with us.  Please surf over to see her results!


Thanks and  Be gentle with yourselves!

Reiki to all who come across this:
HON SHA ZE SHO NEN
HON SHA ZE SHO NEN
HON SHA ZE SHO NEN

Miracles to each of you...
k-

still life 365

From still life 365

Angie has started a wonderful new project over at still life 365, for and by bereaved parents.  So honored that she's included my own heARTwork, an excerpt from the collection "The Good Wife" posted at: http://stilllife365.blogspot.com/2010/01/after-life.html

See the site for information on how you can contribute, too.  Or just surf over for a respite, a bit of heART, a safe and sacred space to find community and support.

Miracles,
k-