I save the world by loving Her

Cabin in Sandy Mush

I save the world by loving Her.
April in Sandy Mush, the new green apple leaves,
so soft, each flutters a different way at the slightest breeze;
the butterfly, fresh out of the cocoon,
careening downhill, already a crackerjack
at navigating with her iridescent wings;
the blackberry blossoms, full of themselves,
wide open to the hungry and meticulous bees.
The air is filled with buzzing things, delirious with the sun’s warmth.
Even a cloud floating high seems to smile with delight.
It is true, I know, someone crouches somewhere in a room,
cut off from the world,
fervently praying that the next gunshot, the knock at the door
does not come his way.
I know somewhere, a mother walks miles for a jug of water
diverted from her village to sluice the mines.
I know the world will end, or so they say.
But Gaia exhorts me, “Look at me!  Take notice!
For you I have perched these roses on their stems,
for you I bring the striped grasshopper  to set beside you,
and the wild turkey walks, stately, through the woods.
Are you listening yet?   For you, four wide-eyed deer
come to gaze at your body while you sleep.”
I cannot ignore her, I cannot turn away.
It is my job to love Her, and She is vast,
and long, and wide, and huge;
I save the world by loving Her, and in this way, She saves me.

Annelinde Metzner 

Hawkscry  April 13, 2012

Many thanks to William Stanhope for allowing me to write at Hawkscry.

Listen to Annelinde reading "I save the world by loving Her":

Sandy Mush farm in April

Dogwoods at Hawkscry

Let It

Not just once but many times She surrenders,
the Wisteria, lusciously sweet,
royally purple, palest lavender,
clusters like Concord grapes
drooping, sprouting wild everywhere.
Leaves so new and tender-green,
I can’t even feel them to the touch.
Huge, heavy scent,
like a sultry liaison on a hot afternoon,
or like three Grandmas in church,
or like a little girl’s Christmas perfume.
Surrender!  says She,
and again She gives forth so big,
trees and roofs are dwarfed by Her energy.
Let it just fall, fall down,
give up, She shows us!
And why do you hold on so tight?
Fall, let fall!  and as you do,
your beauty, your perfect wholeness
falls open for all to see.


Annelinde Metzner   

Meher Baba Center

April 2009

A Madonna for Martin Luther

Early, early, on a Charleston Thursday, springtime on Anson Street,
full of surprises as only old Charleston can be,
I come upon the farthest corner of St. Johannes Lutheran Church.
I blink my eyes.  She is here!
Lovingly set against the whitewashed wall,
blue-robed Mary with her tender heart
glows among the roses.
Lutheran Church, church of my family,
church of no feminine image of God,
where our forebear Luther expunged
even patient, loving Mary
from our spirits, from our liturgy, from our prayers,
where in my girlhood, though at Easter we all carried flowers,
no women were imaged divine in the Protestant Church.
And here She is!
In the church’s far corner,
She smiles radiant against the whitewashed wall.
Someone has set two bluebirds,
blue birds of happiness at Her divine feet,
and a broad bubbling fountain nearby
reminds us of Her joyous abundance,
spilling over through all our days.
Here She is!   Martin Luther, do you rejoice,
do tears of redemption spill from your eyes,
our Divine One in Her place again?
She is here!  She is here!

Annelinde Metzner
Charleston, South Carolina

Guadalupe at Phoebe Pember House

Wake Robin

Blood-red trillium,
      with your sumptuous variegated leaf patterns,
      arising in big colonies early, so early in spring
      amid dry leaves and old twigs,
Triple Goddess, you sprout from the dry earth
      innocently, as if it were every day
      ancient knowledge comes forth into our sight.
You lie barely visible at our feet,
      one of the old ones, short and well-adapted
      to the forest floor, a gnome
      with a new red cap.
But no pretty pink here, nor lacy white.
      You are of the blood of the Earth Mother herself,
      and even Her rich warm blood has beauty,
      and she will not hide this, our Mother.
      She bleeds, and Her blood is beautiful.
Wake Robin, wake us to know
      where e’er we walk, She feels and knows.
      We kiss the Earth, but She bruises, too,
      in bloodroot, in trillium, in fracking, in clearcut, in war.
Wake, Robin, don’t be a fool!
      Here is Life’s own rich display, ineffable,
      the upward thrust, the very orgasm of Spring.
She is here today, for you, for us,
      crowding upward for us here,
      but once only.

Annelinde Metzner
March 23, 2012
Flat Creek North Carolina

  

   

Morning at the Sanctuary

The first morning light seeps in the diamond windows at the Bali House.
All night, accompanying my dreams, the river roars,
punctuated with her bass tones, under the boulders,
guiding me in a language I don’t speak.
“Weee-hooo,” says the first morning bird,
and “Thump!”, a half-eaten apple falls on the deck.
All around, the exuberant vines intertwine
with the butternut and the rhododendron of the woods.
“Safe here!”, they all seem to say,
even the three butterflies who fasten themselves to my shoe.
At three AM the stars blanket the night sky,
reaching their fiery fingers into our dreams.
This morning I gaze into the misted woods,
letting the visions speak to my shadows,
letting go, letting it be exactly what it is.
Barefoot, I feel the cool stones and the dewy grass.
A day on Earth.
The sun streaking through the walls by my bed,
a whisper of thanks unbidden.

Annelinde Metzner
Mountain Light Sanctuary

Garden of the Divine Feminine

Medicine Wheel

Connect

The shaman elder in Greenland weeps and sings into his wind drum
as his Mother, the Big Ice, sacred site of millennia,
shrinks away to dwarf Her former self.

We sing, we cry for Her loss.

In Bangla Desh, rice farmers build their homes on stilts
to avoid the big floods, the rising salty brine
leaving the ancient nourishment of the rice fields
unfit to farm, cakes of salt where rich humus once was.

“We did not cause this!” cry the people, at the extremes of the world,
and at Her center.
But the cause is here, the origin right here,
a gigantic failure of imagination
causing nuclear reactors of eleven billion dollars each
to arise where we might be catching the wind,
where we could be reaching for the sun.

Fukushima’s lessons are set aside,
as if “it couldn’t happen here,”
forging on blindly in a way we know just doesn’t work.

The shaman elder in Greenland weeps and sings into his wind drum.
Here, right here, is where the beautiful world tilts toward meltdown,
here where our children too
will one day scratch the soil and weep,
where we’ve gone too far, where She turns her back and goes,
where this one precious Home shrugs us off like pests,
and turns Her face once again to the rich beauty
we have forgotten to see.

Annelinde Metzner
Fukushima Memorial
March 8, 2012

Listen to Annelinde in a reading of "Connect:"

     Click here to hear and see the elder Angaangaq sing with his wind drum, accepting the wisdom of Mother Ocean beside the brilliant ice of Greenland.

The Forgiveness of Snow

Three days of deep snow.
A pillowy meringue has met each branch,
has had a dance with the meadow grass,
has floated into each niche, soft and hard,
until today in the final sun
all is brilliant, brilliant.
Walking, there’s an insulated hush
so in the cove, each argument, each compliment,
each complaint and daily praise
is gone now, as if never been.
A forgiveness in this, the starting anew.
Each white pillow says, “I’m forgetting the car crash,”
“I’m forgetting the toppling of trees,”
"I’m forgetting the soldier’s fire, and the theft of a village’s water.”
Each six-faceted flake encapsulated
something of those horrors,
something of the looming offensiveness of this life.
“I contain your great grief,” calls the brilliant snow,
“and don’t I make a pearl?”
Over there by my fence-post is some mother’s wailing moan.
Over there in the white-trimmed fir tree
is the diesel exhaust of a thousand semi trucks.
This morning in the quiet, quiet,
I know what forgiveness is.


Annelinde Metzner 

Phoenix Cove       

February 13, 2006

Phoenix Cove in winter

The Most Huge Yes

I must have been four years old, out for an armload of wildflowers
-daisies, mallow flowers, phlox.
Elsie and I sat on a rock  to rest in the shade of the gnarled apple tree.
“Oh World, I cannot hold thee close enough!” cried Elsie, my Tante,
and on and on, poems by memory,
astounding my young ears with the bigness, the width of life beyond my ken.
Dickinson, Heine, Goethe, Millay,
-all fair game to Elsie’s keen mind and deep delight.
What is the world? She answered for me,
just a hint of what was to come, what could be, beyond the now.
I gazed at her above me,
and walked home with her, my arms full of flowers,
my little hand in hers.
And now, many years have passed.
My Tante is ninety-seven, but still, poems sprout from her lips,
and she, with her searching mind, evokes them from me as well.
“Prithee, let no bird call!”
We happen into a field, wild with flowers,
daisies, phlox, a wild quilt of color.
Thrice we return, picking armloads of wildflowers,
holding, holding, ever loving this life, unwilling to let go.
This divine charge we accepted so long ago
just to love this, just to live this,
eyes wide as daisy petals, enveloped in earthly scents,
knee-deep in colors,
just this most huge Yes.

Annelinde Metzner

May 2011

Listen to Annelinde reading "The Most Huge Yes":

Tante Elsie at ninety-seven

Elsie’s garden

Drove up to Elsie’s garden, my head in the radio,
counting measures and checking forms.
I raise my eyes just to park and...
Jolted into Eden, an ecstasy of brilliant color, like a cold slap I’m awakened.
These Irises (the eyes?) are a queen’s purple, a ransom of gold,
fringed, bearded, double ruffled about their delicate mouths,
waiting lush as Sheba.
Lemon yellow bearded coral, glacier white fringed,
with a calligraphy of magenta.
Rust-red and egg-yolk yellow.
I gain my breath, and big tears, here at Elsie’s garden.
Tante, at ninety-two, fosters this ecstasy of color,
and scent of peony, double, triple, magenta, snow!
Knowing I must go knock and enter at the door,
I breathe deep, remembering, remembering the grace of my DNA,
the colors, the purple, saying “This is me,”
coming off the highway.  “This is also me”, my old Tante in her garden,
pulling a true miracle of flowers from the unsuspecting soil,
back in the dirt where we belong,
this is me, I weep, I love, I remember, I belong.



Annelinde Metzner
April 2006

Looking Toward Tibet

Samdo Kunga, Tibetan mother and daughter, photo by Phil Borges

Mindfulness brings compassion.
Looking out across the plains at seventeen thousand feet,
white clouds turning, turning into Tara, into Milarepa,
here on the plains where your people have crossed the icy turf
again and again throughout the ages,
welcomed with tea and kindness at every neighbor’s tent,
how do you bear to see trucks rolling in, laden with asphalt?
When you are four years old,
and you journey for days with Mother
to see a wonder, a sacred dance
on the monastery grounds,
monks in brilliant colors dazzling your young eyes,
music beyond imagination, the cymbals, the horns,
how could you ever live in a cement block house,
bored, tired, hungry and lost,
forgetful of all the nomad you ever were?
When one has arisen at dawn with the sound of the wind,
a thousand years of holy incarnations spinning madly in the cloud shadows,
mottling the faces of the high mountains nearby,
and you bundle up and say a prayer, giving thanks for all this,
your past, your people, your medicine, your sacredness,
how can there ever, ever come a machine to quarry the mountain down,
to beat the knowledge out of you, to herd you into silence?
Mindfulness brings compassion.
Tibet will never die.

Annelinde Metzner    

August 2008

See more of the Tibetan photography of Phil Borges here.

Experience a powerful Tibetan ceremony performed in Bodha Gaya, India.

Watch as Tibetan activists rappel off Arlington Bridge in Washington, DC, to hang a banner proclaiming, "Tibet Will Be Free" in February, 2012.

Southside Cemetery

Gravestones in Southside Cemetery

Here is a mottled chunk of rock, set upright.
Here is one a foot tall, miraculously erect
amid the ancient stones and helter-skelter mounds
of this hallowed place.
Who is buried here?
What dark-skinned family climbed the long, lamenting hill
into the woods
protected by Jesus, for just a moment left to themselves?
How did they steal an hour or two
for this hallowed day of farewell to the dead,
finding an unmolested path safe for their black skin?
One can hardly walk today, the ground is so jumbled,
where, one upon another, the generations
were welcomed upward to the holy realms.
Some came with enough for a name on a granite slab,
a date or an epitaph.
And who placed the ragged, natural stones,
proudly standing upright over centuries?
Here are those who came enslaved
and died servants still.
A farmer, a laborer, a maid,
beloved in the hearts of family and friends,
anonymous as these standing stones
in the unmoving world around, so hard, so cold.

Annelinde Metzner

March 2008

(Photos by Patty Levesque)

Click here to read about the work of China Galland in resurrecting "Love Cemetery" in Texas.   Watch the video exploring "our collective shadow."

Southside Cemetery in Asheville, NC

Dragon Mountain

Moving over the mountains,
          there are powers bright as dragons,
traveling, traveling, up and over.

The air is never still.
          The power flows.
We can only sense it.

Only a knowing, a sensing,
          a shining at the summit,
arching over us, unceasing.

The mountains are never still.
          Over her skin, the power is moving,
the dragon traveling, timeless, shining.

Annelinde Metzner

April 12, 2010

Sam's Knob near Black Balsam

Moon Child Moon

On the night of the Moon Child Moon,
a warm January light paints each grateful tree
and settles on the forest floor.
Gazing into the white-glazed night forest,
I must not breathe.
I pause to wait for the silvery Moon Child Moon
to paint me, too,  with loving light.
I’ve nowhere to go.
I wear winter’s soft gown.
I will stop and root into the ground, 
silent as the next long tree,
waiting, wondering, patient.

Annelinde Metzner

January 4, 1996

Being With What Is

I worried for months.
I couldn’t sleep.
I trusted no one.
I lived in fear.
And here today, this green,
the last green of September against the deep blue,
I am here, just here,
being with all that is.
Looking up, I love the leaves of the hazel,
the sourwood already going bare.
In all my loving,
I often forget
how much they are loving me!
My bare feet crunch in the new-fallen crackle
of brownness,
the ash leaves dropping like happy kids,
crying “Watch me!  Watch me!”
The tree frogs clickety-clack,
the chickadees hanging upside down
on the sourwood branches.
And here today, the breeze on my neck,
the green breathtaking as ever,
I am just here,
my feet on the Earth,
just me,
being with what is.

Annelinde Metzner

Light Center Labyrinth

September 6, 2010

Listen to Annelinde in a reading of "Being With What Is":

Black Dome, This Slowness

Join the natural world with your quietness and your slowness!
At this blessed pace, the wild raspberry
     can see you sitting nearby,
     slow as apples ripening.
At this blessed tempo,
     birds drift to the tops of trees,
     to gaze off miles and miles through the clouds.
In this sacred slowness,
    the bees take their time to choose
    this blossom, then that,
    then that one, and maybe the next.
This is how slowly the clouds creep,
     white and bulbous,
     all of us present here
     in the same breath,
     slow, inaudible, eternal.
I breathe, I fill my lungs with air.
This is all we have, all of us,
     from now until the end of the world.


Annelinde Metzner
August 6, 2010

The Vine Basket

I come for the wind.
At the high edge of Craggy Mountain I stand,
leaning in and rocking back as the wind rolls upward,
tender jewelweed and high nettles all around,
high ridges beyond and beyond.
Today on the mountain, looking west,
away from words and clash of minds,
away from the confounded jangle of yay or nay,
of human will forever at odds,
the wind rises miles and miles up the hollow.
I stand with no questions, with only my self.
I am four years old and someone is washing me.
There is nothing here but the wind,
and I stand naked as I’m able.
Faithfully She bathes me, Her touch firm and tender, 

thorough with years of practice,                                                                                                 until naught is left but the hum, the drone
of Mother God and Her vine basket,
leaning toward me
with Her absentminded lullaby.

Annelinde Metzner

February 4, 1990

"The Vine Basket" performed at "In the Mother Grove" 2009

    Listen to "The Vine Basket" read by Deb Scott and Becky Stone at the performance, "In the Mother Grove", 2009.   Dance by Helen Hollifield.

      You may purchase "In the Mother Grove" as a CD or DVD on the "Buy" page of this blog.   Thank you for supporting the work of Annelinde Metzner.

My vine basket

Santeetlah Creek

In winter, under crowns of curved ice,
you trade liquid for solid in the cold, cold air.
In warm summer, you’re the laughing white water,
tickler of toes, leaping home of speckled trout.
Rushing, cleansing, each place a small volcano of water                                                      within shape of stone and rush of air.
Deep cold waters from the quiet Earth,
the source a cavern of crystals akin to this white creek.
Santeetlah, you pour down on us from forever,
white jets long to the finale at Santeetlah Lake.
You are a carrier.  You carry leaves of autumn, gold and blood-red,
pine needles, galax, speckled trout,
fragrant mushrooms, eggs of all kinds, rhododendron blooms in spring.
Babies of yours lodge here and there, wedged along the shore,
changing your shape as you change theirs.
Cold and white, the rushes sweep the stones below, and me above.
I’m but a stone here beside you.
In my hair is swift spray, smelling of ice water, galax and laurel.
Crawdads and minnows play “hide and seek” between my fingers.
My spine is the long stone of your vitality,
icy fluid whose leaps make me dance.

     

Annelinde Metzner

   

The Darkness

Coming together here, we warm each other’s hearts in the darkness.

The Sun, far away, yearns to embrace us in Her warmth once again.

But this is our time to journey into the depths of the darkness.

This is the time to surrender and listen deep to our souls.

This is the time to close our eyes, slow down and be lulled by the darkness.

Our blessed Mother Gaia dwells within the darkness.

Inhale the song of Her soul, Her soil, Her dark caves, Her rich dark humus.

Mother Earth welcomes you into the darkness.

Walk with confidence, all people, walk safely into the darkness.

Let us love the night, the moon, the stars, the planets, the Seven Sisters high above.

Revel in this other half of our lives, the darkness.

The beauty of the dark earth, the darkness of skin, the dark curves of mountain roads,

The Seven Sister Mountains in their powerful darkness, presiding over Black Mountain,

Our dark blood, our Earth, our deepest selves, the darkness.



Annelinde Metzner
November 16, 2010

Purchase Knob double rainbows caught on webcam!

Listen to Annelinde in a reading of "The Darkness":

Blindsiding into Baghdad

I putter along the highway, in my own world,
and squeak! an eighteen-year-old hotshot with his dad’s Camaro
whips in front of me with an inch to spare.
I dare to pull into the left lane and in an instant
an SUV wide as a freighter, higher than my rooftop,
plants itself at my rear bumper
as though I had trespassed on its private turf.
It’s as if they didn’t know the car’s sides
are solid as Origami puffballs,
mostly plastic, a few thin supports,
just enough frame to get the car off the lot.
You’ve got your wheels, and off you go,
weaving and straining for speed,
thinking of Dale and some boss who cursed you,
never the masses of twisted metal,
the strewn and extruded body parts
you’ve seen lying by the side of the road.

High school recruiters know this.
The tender-faced boys of seventeen, barely shaving yet,
Moms still patting their shrugging shoulders
as they leave home with a bag lunch,
seventeen but already bored,
bored to tears with life as it is, the same girls, the same books,
the same horizon as flat as the future,
the same parents, the same nothing-to-do, forever and forever.
The almost-little boys at the recruiting table,
soft inside as Easter chocolate,
eye the M-16 rifles and the Hum-Vees, seeing the future there,
anywhere but here,
forgetting what they’ve heard of ambushes, booby traps,
amputees waiting hours for treatment,
mustard gas, nerve gas, depleted uranium.
You careen down the highway in your gossamer Camaro
and suddenly the day comes, you’re off the plane,
heat smacks you in the face, dust rolls in,
and a weapon’s on your shoulder, your little piece of power.
Boredom and terror, boredom and terror.
One hundred a week wounded in action,
home again with no health coverage, or no home at all.
You sit for hours playing cards
with guys from some other godforsaken town like yours,
loud rock and hip-hop to remind you of who you were.
Long after the uranium exposure, babies are born
anophthalmic, no eyes at all.
Napalm, another WMD, melts human skin in Fallujah.
But everybody run!  You’re out on the streets,
kicking down doors with one hard boot.
You aim past women with babes in arms,
grandmas and grandpas cowering in corners,
and back outside through terror-lined streets. 
Your buddies holler you back, and it's quiet,              
a retreat. Music plays, supper comes.
You have no idea where you are.
This is not Kansas and your best buddy is gone.
Careening through Baghdad, they fold like Jettas.
No one asked; never a frame for this.
You were heading for what?                                                                                                      The screaming women?  The blood?  The mangled babes?
The spitting rage?  The broken and endless days?
The tender flesh, once so shiny, fresh as dew,
blindsides into Baghdad, wishing you knew.

Annelinde Metzner
March 2005

In 2010, 468 active duty and reserve troops committed suicide while 462 died in combat, marking the second year in a row that more US soldiers killed themselves than died at war, according to Congressional Quarterly's John Donnelly.









 

The Falling Away

December, the biting cold creeps under our shirts and stays.
All of us have given away whatever we could spare.
Brown and crackling leaves, sheets of bark,
molted feathers, old skins,
To the Earth they go!  and we
pull the thick covers around us, and wait.
It’s decaying time, the winter of the year,
the dry and the old falling away to our beloved Earth.
Time to wait, time to gaze,
fix the eyes in the far distance,
fall inward, and dream.
The cypress, old and long dead,
resonates hollow to my knuckles.
She gives away, layer upon layer,
falling down and reaching up with pointed fingers of  bark,
falling more beautifully with each wind, each snow and rain.
And what am I left with when the rain and snow
tear away at me, leaving only what She will?
What fingers do I use to point with grace to the blue cold of the sky,
as to each thing I bid farewell?
When the Earth herself is pure, deep, black ice down to the roots,
have I what it takes to hold, to wait,
to dream of the deep, and to dream of the turning,
to know what comes next, to hold back, to inhale, watch and wait,
let the falling away and the icy stillness
make me more simple, more pure, more austere,  more beautiful every day?
In the long stillness, seemingly endless,
is there a cell in me somewhere reveling in the new spring rain,
the moisture of someday,
the lush rich humus waiting to open beneath our feet?

Annelinde Metzner
December 2008
Meher Baba Center, SC


Listen to Annelinde reading "The Falling Away":

The Holy City

Grandmother Mountain, my Holy City

                                                           

“This is the Holy City,” said Jouad, "Horse," our guide,

in Moulay Idriss, sparkling ancient citadel

climbing the Atlas Mountains.

“The Holy City,” and She is, my Grandmother,

vast, ancient, singing.

Oldest mountain,

what populations whir in your ethers,

unseen to ordinary eyes?

‘’All here is holy,” said Jouad.

All here is holy!

All is of Her, each rhododendron bloom,

each fire pink,

Holy! the lichen and the moss in the rock.

Holy! the cohosh with its spiked bloom.

Holy! the whippoorwill, the thrush,

the no-see-ums buzzing up my nose.

All who live here are of Her holy being.

All are one with Her.

No need for lies or self-deceit,

no need for bargains or slight-of-hand tricks.

You, fortunate one, have stumbled into

the Holy City.

You don’t need to wear a hat,

sew cushions, or even kneel.

Here with the worms, the creaking old oaks,

the star magnolias and the blueberries,

being themselves,

you are Holy too, like it or not,

whatever time it may be on your Blackberry or your Nook,

you’re in Her time now, as old as it gets.

Welcome to the Holy City.

In the powerful wind of Solstice, everything changes,

limbs fall from trees, inessentials vanish,

you may lose a limb too,

or parts of your ego you don’t need.

This is the Holy City.

This is your birthplace, you and the bending oak,

you and the ladybug and the black snake.

Around Her jagged outcroppings,  a thousand births wail through time.

Some ascend, some descend the winding paths of the Holy City.

She breathes on, undaunted,

gathering infrasound from all the directions.

This is the Holy City, and we Her inhabitants,

why yes, the Holy Planet it is,

all of us holy, the clear of vision,

the jaded, the obsessed,

the wounded and the whole.

All of us live in the Holy City.

Rest your bare soles on her rich Earth,

wind your toes into her sweet-smelling grass.

Prostrate your bare Soul on Her holy ground,

many times, inchworm.

She is the Mother of us all.

Annelinde Metzner

Grandmother Mountain, North Carolina

Moulay Idriss, holy city of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco

Grandmother Mountain (or "Grandfather") of North Carolina