Feature Poem from "The Return" Novella 2018
WHOSE VOICE IS IN YOUR HEAD?
I am here standing in our pain
Where all pains and paths converge
I hang my head feeling I am some object of shame
But who told me that this place was shameful?
To be reduced
Broken down to roots is a state of shame
Why?
Because I have a broken wing?
Because I can’t fly or find the strength I once knew and had
Others witnessed it too
Who will witness now to my being broken through?
Who is brave enough to stand here with me?
To look me in the face
Eye to eye
Stare into the mirror of truth
That we all know this place or will do one day
We all live in dread of our passage through this malaise
But why?
Who said this was a place of dread and disfigurement?
Who said? Who said?
Whose voice is ringing in my head?
Whose voice warns you to look away and take ten paces back?
Whose voice has turned you into a coward and me the terror that must be fled?
Where is the alchemist among you and within you?
Where have the healing arts gone?
You think banishment is the remedy?
You think bittersweet sadness of soul song the enemy?
Who said? Who said?
Whose voice is in your head?
And what does your own brave voice say?
When you look with courageous eyes at broken wings
What beautiful truth does this confronting reality inspire?
Should it not evoke compassion rather than shame?
Should not broken wings recover the empathic intimate knowing we are tender things?
Made up of common fragile flesh, blood, bones and wings
A soul in which all things can mend or be forged anew
With kind touch and gentle healing hands and eyes soft enough to receive you as you
A tender fragile thing
Who said broken wings is a state of shame?
Who said? Who said?
Whose voice is in your head?
Poetry and Prose
"Consenting to Lose Sight of the Shore"
"Consenting to Lose Sight of the Shore"
"Consenting to Lose Sight of the Shore"
This poem was written for the Adelaide College of Divinity address 6th May 2019.
Where it all begins it too ends
You forgot this as we all do
One day you were climbing a holy hill
Innocently taking in the scenery
When you stumbled into a thin place
Found yourself in the grip of an alteration
Awakened to the wide vista spread before you
Compelled by the blazing vision of the new
The new - whose sparks would burn down the memory house of yesterday
On the “no exit” road called “do not change”...
(Read the full poem by pushing the button below)
"The First Lesson of 'Return'"
"Consenting to Lose Sight of the Shore"
"Consenting to Lose Sight of the Shore"
This poem was written for "The Return Story" Doctor of Ministry thesis - Adelaide College of Divinity 2018.
To return is not to go back
'Back' shifted the day you left
The day you moved it became inaccessible
It was like a trail of leaves once carefully placed that got chased away by the wind
Dislodged, scattered and spread like disordered fragments
Of what was and what had been...
(Read the full poem by pushing the button below)
"I Need an Odyssey"
"Consenting to Lose Sight of the Shore"
"I Need an Odyssey"
This poem opens the Letters to a Missing Woman Novella - written 2014.
I need an Odyssey
They came and said to me
You must change
Here is what you must do
Here is what you must be
I said in return
Change?
You want me to change?
I don’t need change
I need an Odyssey
Can’t you see the derelict house in me?
These patterns and shadows, which blueprinted my being?
And can’t you see these tattered wings called my soul?
Fly you say – how should I do that when they are torn to shreds
How do I change my wings and make the holes mend?
Have you got a change plan for that?...
(Read the full poem by pushing the button below)
"Moonflower"
"90 Miles of Falling Sky"
"I Need an Odyssey"
This poem was written during a road trip in the Far North of New Zealand visiting some sacred places during the early summer, December 2013. It is part of a series called "Northland Soulscape".
And when it is time to leave this place
Will I finally pass by that tree that stubbornly clings to the rock?
Defying death surviving enough to live but never to flower
So it is said, so the legend goes
Though human eye saw not the buds burst
Perhaps they opened in secret and offered their adoration to the moon?
During the dark night of the soul they unfolded, shimmering, pale and luminous
Love knew the offering buried deep in tree limbs
I implore you Love
Beyond this edge of weather beaten existence
Will I finally find entrance to a long awaited season of bursting into bloom?...
(Read the full poem by pushing the button below)
"90 Miles of Falling Sky"
"90 Miles of Falling Sky"
"90 Miles of Falling Sky"
This poem was written during a road trip in the Far North of New Zealand visiting some sacred places during the early summer, December 2013. It is part of a series called "Northland Soulscape".
I reached you just on dark
It was not the night falling but the sky
As the firmament gave way
Light exploded when the fixtures separating sky from sea saturated land collapsed
I watched the heavenly sphere fall into it’s own reflection
A colourless prism, a spectrum of iridescent lights with unknown names
Until the illusion could no longer sustain
The instability of such an arrangement
But oh the beauty before the light was lost...
(Read the full poem by pushing the button below)
"Give My History Over"
"90 Miles of Falling Sky"
"90 Miles of Falling Sky"
This poem was written during a road trip in the Far North of New Zealand visiting some sacred places during the early summer, December 2013. It is part of a series called "Northland Soulscape".
When I die, when I give my history over and depart
Meet me on that shore and see if you can catch my spirit
In the essence of all spoken and unspoken, my breath, the light and shadow of my eyes
The tones and inflections of my expressions
Where murmuring memory drawn by the winds flies like the wisps’ off the top of rolling waves
Meet me on that shore and see if something of my spirit surrenders and stays...
(Read the full poem by pushing the button below)
"Mad, Sad and Bad"
"The Question of Our Time"
"Mad, Sad and Bad"
This poem was written in 2012 -
the following prose was based on my observation and listening in a social service context. This was written particularly for the plight of women finding themselves marginalised, pushed to the edges of our society and often punished for their lack of ‘change’. What I can see clearly is the beginnings of a response that found its fuller form in “Letters to a Missing Woman”.
Consequently this poem features in the introduction to "Letters to a Missing Woman" e-book currently being compiled to be ready for publication by the end of 2019.
‘Mad, sad and bad’ is next to my name on the screen. I might as well wear a bag over my head because you can’t see my true identity. You say I am no glamour girl and I know that’s true. Mad, sad and bad is the pattern you attribute me to.
“She must have grown up on this street where those people live”, the headlines say. “It doesn’t matter where she grew up, now her home will be the cage where ‘mad, sad and bad’ gets locked away.”
It doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter that the heart was torn out of home so long ago? Or it doesn’t matter that I’m in a cage? It doesn’t matter that I’m missing? That I’m forgotten?...
(Read the full poem by pushing the button below)
"Water's Edge"
"The Question of Our Time"
"Mad, Sad and Bad"
This poem was written in 2012 for an installation called "Thresholds of Alteration". The photos for the art piece were taken at Lake Taupo, and the driftwood/pumice/shells were collected at various beaches. The collection of poems/prose, mixed media art and installed shoreline using materials from both west and east coasts conveyed the feeling of being poised to cross a threshold, which John O'Donohue describes as more than "a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different
territories, rhythms, and atmospheres."
Come and meet me at the water’s edge
We stand before the threshold of alteration
Bring with you in stark honesty all your stains and pains
Be a vulnerable child, in the sacred there is no place for pretense
Unload there upon the shores your suffering sadness
Remove your travel weary and worn through shoes
Let the water lap your bruised and bloody feet and soul
Shed your bitter shroud of ashes
Spit out the distasteful bile of angry disdain
Take my hand, or venture alone – it matters not
But let us wade into the great deep’s waiting welcoming embrace
A gently murmured song beckons our entrance
Lullaby-ing away all fears and resistance...
(Read the full poem by pushing the button below)
"The Question of Our Time"
"The Question of Our Time"
"The Question of Our Time"
The words to this poem developed slowly. In 2010 some of the words made their way onto 5 canvases which were created to depict the cycles of life/death/renewed life in the form of the rite of full immersion baptism. However, the final poem was completed in 2012 and used for the first time as a reflection for a circle of people considering the ways of justice-making. Both the images and the poem were another indicator in 2012 that I was seeking a larger conversation about transformation/metamorphosis within the context of social services.
I face the question of our time
In all this mess how can we be reborn?
It is spoken… “Turn, turn, turn — there is a time to die”
Time for TUKU — “let go, let go”
A journey that releases my clinging fingers to life as I have known it
Time for KENOSIS
The journey of descent into the great deep
The mystery of creation
Wind hovering over the water
The invisible moving the visible
It is spoken… “turn, turn, turn — there is a time to be born”
Time for PUTA — “come out, come out”
Though I died I live again
A return journey from the great death and deep...
(Read the full poem by pushing the button below)
Poems May 2019
CONSENTING TO LOSE SIGHT OF THE SHORE
Where it all begins it too ends
You forgot this as we all do
One day you were climbing a holy hill
Innocently taking in the scenery
When you stumbled into a thin place
Found yourself in the grip of an alteration
Awakened to the wide vista spread before you
Compelled by the blazing vision of the new
The new - whose sparks would burn down the memory house of yesterday
On the “no exit” road called “do not change”
Now here you are at the edge upon your knees
Slain by the reality that you must leave
There is a vast ocean waiting for you
Departure is the threshold at your feet
Danger and opportunity are your companions
Not for tourists, not for fame and not for hearts of fiction
Throw yourself on the mercy that cannot be bought only petitioned
No escape route either unless you can make the ashes your home
This is where you give consent to lose sight of the shore
It will disappear from your view
For unnumbered days
And you too will become hidden to that familiar gaze
As all novices bound on this course must be lost to
Bargaining to stay will do no good for
Now all mentors are here to help prepare you to let go
Push your boat out to find your way
Tuck the image of who you have been
Into your pocket
A memento to look upon fondly
Reminders of some other time
The unknown ahead is a wild sea and will teach you
You are more than a faded depiction once captured
You are more than an epitaph waiting to be written
You are meant to outgrow all images and descriptions
Leave clinging to those acquisitions of knowledge and identity behind
Look wistfully toward the horizon’s edge
This is the homesickness that guides us all to this passage and rite
Of hearing a voice, a voice that is your own, though unfamiliar it may be
Saying “let me be born again and again”
Summoning you to cross over
Urging you to be shaken free from shelters too small
Your knee prints remain in the sand waiting for the incoming tide
Washing away traces you were here holding your quest bittersweet
Will you walk on the new land you seek?
The one you saw up upon that holy hill
No one can say
First, sail straight into your unknowing
Let your old life sink down under the waves
Trust what is given back to you in time is not by your design
But birthed by Spirit from within the void shapeless and deep
A yet unnamed destiny
As you embark of your own choice upon the sea
Consenting to lose sight of the shore
By Maree Aldridge May 2019
Subtext
"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
Andre Gide
This poem is specifically focused on the idea of 'departure' as part of a set of cyclical movements - 'departure', 'returning' and the messy in between of 'liminality'. The imagery here is drawn from the story of St Brendan "the Voyager" (born 484 AD Ireland), and the threshold of where sea meets the shore being a place of entrance to a new phase. It was written as an ode to brave explorers like St Brendan and the more who inspired me to fling myself out beyond the "no exit" road that I grew up on.
The photos above and below are taken by Maree Aldridge.
Poems 2018 - "The Return"
THE FIRST LESSON OF 'RETURN'
To return is not to go back
'Back' shifted the day you left
The day you moved it became inaccessible
It was like a trail of leaves once carefully placed that got chased away by the wind
Dislodged, scattered and spread like disordered fragments
Of what was and what had been
It was like footprints left upon the shore
Whose indentations were evened out
As little walls of defined shape
Were hardly noticed by each advancing wave
And then were no more - erased
Back is not where you put it down
A suitcase full of past nostalgias you could no longer hold
It has been rummaged through by plunderers who have since gone to ground
Piece by piece taken apart and away
By scavenging hands that hover around the lost and found
Even if you could march right back to the spot you once stood
The house you once inhabited
And reinvent the people - rendered exactly as they were with whom you once lived
You would merely be an actor in a play rehashing old tired lines
Living in a theatre set upon an artificially lit stage trapped in time
Back is when you were breathing on the inside of a thing
And now you are the outsider exhaling as you look in
Everything is familiar and yet estranged like the spent breath of yesterday
And to crawl back inside feels too tight and confined for your lungs to expand
When your outsider awakening, that first born inhalation has flooded you with the oxygen of another land
To return
Is not to go back from where you have come
Or even passed through
You are not there and you are not the same you
On the road from 'back' to 'here' you have been irrevocably changed
And this is the first lesson of 'return'
The first firm step upon the way
To find the true North on the compass
Is to recognise that
'Return' and 'back' are not one and the same
By Maree Aldridge March 2016
Subtext
"All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you're in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either or staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold onto it as you move back into your social world again. That's not an easy thing to do."
Joseph Campbell
I began writing my doctoral thesis in 2016. It was at a time when one major thing in my life was coming to an end and a new focus of completing my doctorate began. The theme of my thesis, 'returning', is drawn from the movements within ritual culture - separation, liminality and reintegration. These are the great movements in life that we will go through more many times across the span of our years. Joseph Campbell called his three phases - departure, initiation and return.
The first challenge I needed to tackle was what is the difference between 'going back' and 'returning'? This question was answered in part by the first poem I wrote for the thesis.
The photos above and below are taken by Maree Aldridge.
Poems 2014 - "letters to a Missing Woman"
I NEED AN ODYSSEY
I need an Odyssey
They came and said to me
You must change
Here is what you must do
Here is what you must be
I said in return
Change?
You want me to change?
I don’t need change
I need an Odyssey
Can’t you see the derelict house in me?
These patterns and shadows, which blueprinted my being?
And can’t you see these tattered wings called my soul?
Fly you say – how should I do that when they are torn to shreds
How do I change my wings and make the holes mend?
Have you got a change plan for that?
Can’t you hear the howling orphans I don’t know how to mother
The banished exiled women I have fled across wastelands to evade
That I don’t know how to turn and face
And I haven’t got a clue how to save
How will your change help me make the turn of a 180 degrees?
Don’t you know it’s no good if I can’t love who I see
You don’t know how many lifeless stones
Which I’ve clung to promising life
Which in turn have clung to me like a parasite?
Don’t you see?
I’ll have to pull out every fibrous root
From lifeless things
Tearing up roots that strips me of dependency
How do I know the change you propose
Isn’t just another lifeless blood sucking stone?
You think that word change
Somehow fills this internal cavity
That gnaws forever hungry but empty
Don’t you understand?
This abyss is just a container for my own alchemy
Don’t you know I’ll have to pass
From this life through the deep waters of death
That I’ll drown until I can kick free
Before I can even live a changed life
From the core inside of my essentialuality
That I’ll bury the dead when I can see
What is actually the assassin trying to kill me?
I’ll have to have my night of fiery rage
Let the depth and darkness of my story out of its cage
And suffer the singeing
The ritual burning and cleansing of old tired things
When wisdom like a seed erupts after an inferno sweeps through
That’s more than change that’s a painful breaking open of the new
It’s not change but profound radical revolution I crave
An epic homecoming to be made
The great homecoming of belonging to me
Don’t you see?
What you’re asking for is far too small
I don’t need change
I need an Odyssey
By Maree Aldridge 2014
Subtext
This was the second to last poem written for the Letters to a Missing Woman novella. I wrote it once the scope of the story was clear and the conclusion had been written.
At the time I was working with women in a residence, "change" was a word I wanted to challenge. Because often the change asked of clients was surface at best, and surface change can only be sustained by authentic inner change. Although I'd rather say 'transformation' because 'change' seems like a word too small to describe the 180 degree difference being required. It was frustrating to witness.
The digital artwork above and below is created by Maree Aldridge.
Poems 2013/14 - NORTHLAND SOULSCAPE
MOONFLOWER
And when it is time to leave this place
Will I finally pass by that tree that stubbornly clings to the rock?
Defying death surviving enough to live but never to flower
So it is said, so the legend goes
Though human eye saw not the buds burst
Perhaps they opened in secret and offered their adoration to the moon?
During the dark night of the soul they unfolded, shimmering, pale and luminous
Love knew the offering buried deep in tree limbs
I implore you Love
Beyond this edge of weather beaten existence
Will I finally find entrance to a long awaited season of bursting into bloom?
When the hidden beauty rushes to the surface in glorious song
The generous appearance of an extravagant delicacy
In the flowering of this woman’s soul surfaced translucent without fear of shame
That I should desire to reveal the tenderness within feminine form
Filling the eye with sheer pleasure and the air with fragrant scent
For it is never too late to thrive where the barrenness of life gives up its most whispered desires
In the season of moonflowers where the shadow of Love drew out this shy and gentle flame
And will anyone but the spirits who pass by witness the sight
To see with wonder this impassioned beauty
Word and spirit willingly made flesh
Soul in all its sensuality willingly given as generous gift
Will I be beheld lovely when the dark surrenders?
And I am found unfolded in the dawn that grows frame by frame
By Maree Aldridge 2014
Subtext
This was my first solo exploring road trip that I'd taken for over 20 years. It became something of a pilgrimage. The words poured out of me into my journal and the photographs drew out of me poetry. The three poems "Moonflower", "90 Miles of Falling Sky" and "Give My History Over" are part of a collection of twelve written during and after those five days of visiting significant sites in the Northland region.
Annie Dillard’s words inspired me to write with the generosity of offering my emotional vulnerability.
“The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
“Write, as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. This is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you were to die soon? What would you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
That is what I sought to do – to give what I have learned about myself so that it would not be lost to me and become ashes and so that it might in the sharing benefit others. I have shared words I would want to say with other fellow sojourners about the journey of the soul, life, change and challenge.
After my time in Cape Reinga I penned these words in reflection. “There are things I will need to say in the meeting of waves. Said from a place of my own compass bearings, my own solitude’ my own truth, my own ground. If I take yesterday’s moving metaphor at the Cape to heart, as the female sea I can only flow in the direction gravity pulls me towards and offer the gift of turbulence, of disturbance, of the dance of whirlpools and waves gently clashing and colliding. My heart and mind murmurs in conversation about all the things I want to say, need to say. The murmuring is the murmur of sea as if I am having the conversation – it is live, it is alive in me. Is this my undivided truth?”
The photos above and below are taken by Maree Aldridge.
90 MILES OF FALLING SKY
I reached you just on dark
It was not the night falling but the sky
As the firmament gave way
Light exploded when the fixtures separating sky from sea saturated land collapsed
I watched the heavenly sphere fall into it’s own reflection
A colourless prism, a spectrum of iridescent lights with unknown names
Until the illusion could no longer sustain
The instability of such an arrangement
But oh the beauty before the light was lost
How it held me in rapt attention for days, weeks and months on end
For time it seemed was suspended
Or was it splintered between real time and the intangible unrestricted by schedules, deadlines and clocks
For a while I was beyond care of which time I inhabited
My eyes only drawn to the reflections and refractions of constantly altering streams and shafts
And how they danced in the glassy residue as the sea pulled gently away
Moving my soul with each pulse as it broke through the cloudy aperture
Did it matter that sky was falling and the rain driven toward the shore was bearing down
To erase that particular atmosphere in reality but not from my memory
No the sky must fall and be broken to pieces, the illusion must give way
Wiser so much wiser I am for it in my own witnessing
In respite during the long journey home that rapturous day
By Maree Aldridge 2014
GIVE MY HISTORY OVER
When I die, when I give my history over and depart
Meet me on that shore and see if you can catch my spirit
In the essence of all spoken and unspoken, my breath, the light and shadow of my eyes
The tones and inflections of my expressions
Where murmuring memory drawn by the winds flies like the wisps’ off the top of rolling waves
Meet me on that shore and see if something of my spirit surrenders and stays
Here the many watchers watch and so I walk carefully and in quiet
And the receding water mirrors the density of a cloud laden sky
Mirrors a soul in which the clouds clustered and mourned till their burdens were laid aside
Yet now the blue is all the richer as I soak in the stillness of presence
And imagine the pictures I am snapping with less attention than perhaps I should
For really I wanted to lay my camera aside
Not unlike the overwhelming desire in me to lay aside the many snap shots that covered the floor of my mind
You cannot capture a spirit with your lens; you only hope to see it clearly with your spiritual eyes
So I spoke the story in summary one last time for I doubt I will tell it again as I have
I reviewed it for such a long time in the detail from all its edges and angles
Till it was broken down into tiny fragments and lay like this beautiful carpet of flush rose shell upon the sand
In its crushing there is something terrible and beautiful to behold but not to be walked again
The story dies, and gives over its history to depart
And I intend to let it go so as to lift the clouds into the firmament of cerulean hue
But I met it on that shore to catch the slightest wisp of spirit for that is all I needed to carry with me henceforth
Just an essence of all spoken and unspoken, the intake and release of breath
The light and shadow that has passed before my eyes
Tones, inflections, expressions like old home movies faded and scratched that kept me looking back
They were screened one final time that day on the shore, my eyes tired of seeing the replay
My voice now tired in the telling and I felt the pull of that life needing to depart
As I said farewell to what was that which had tethered my soul in guilt and shame
I left the mantle of blame on the shore and picked up no shell
No treasure, no memento in return as in such times I often had
In walking away I held only the invisible reality of knowing intimately what had passed
And a longing to return one day to a place quiet and beautifully solemn
Where the goodbyes gather and the stillness swallows in its keep what need not be held onto any longer
Yet what should remain is recovered and claimed
By Maree Aldridge 2014
Poems 2012
MAD, SAD AND BAD
‘Mad, sad and bad’ is next to my name on the screen. I might as well wear a bag over my head because you can’t see my true identity. You say I am no glamour girl and I know that’s true. Mad, sad and bad is the pattern you attribute me to.
“She must have grown up on this street where those people live”, the headlines say. “It doesn’t matter where she grew up, now her home will be the cage where ‘mad, sad and bad’ gets locked away.”
It doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter that the heart was torn out of home so long ago? Or it doesn’t matter that I’m in a cage? It doesn’t matter that I’m missing? That I’m forgotten? It doesn’t matter that I am the daughter, sister, and mother, missing from every family scene? I am remembered by how mad I must have been, how sad I was to have reached those extremes, or how bad I became and will be.
“Now 'mad, sad and bad' you must change, all eyes are on you.” Yes all eyes are on me.
And so, I pass through attempting a change, but will you? Change leaves you shattered and tangled. The light bulbs have all blown, time is broken, and lit candles and prayers are exhausted. Not even a smoulder. With all this shredding you demand change, but will you? And could you fix all these broken things in a day, a week, a month or a year?
I plunge deeper into change and go down to the rocky foundations. Am I really what you say I am? Am I really ‘mad, sad and bad’? In the cage I began to believe this was true. I sit in the rubble left after the heart was torn out of home. You demand change, but will you sit here with me? You demand change, but will you change too?
Or is that too messy? Is it better you chant ‘mad, sad and bad’ at me? Those words spew out of every bit of baggage I’m trying to sort through. You demand change and as I sit under the weight of these words. Now I see it’s just a dead withered tree. You demand change but will you change with me?
For the water to run clear, which is the change you demand, for all the madness and sadness and badness to disappear, it must run clear not just in my mind but yours too. If it were clean and clear we could gather it up and give it away, and it would still overflow all night and all day.
By Maree Aldridge 2012
Subtext
These poems reflect that my trajectory towards writing "Letters to a Missing Woman" was well underway. In 2012 the stew of art as alchemy was simmering slowly. Each piece of art I made or poem/prose/short story I wrote were like raw ingredients being added. A dash of an image here, a finely ground fresh word offering there, another reflective process poured into the pot. All in all I kept circling around the themes of transformation, life/death/renewed life, mining the inner depths, finding voice, and asking penetrating questions. A full blown thriving creative life within social services was the crucible and by 2014 it had all reached the right temperature, and with the many pieces added to the container everything began to combine, boil and were transmuted into one story.
All of the artwork and photos are created/taken by Maree Aldridge
WATER'S EDGE
Come and meet me at the water’s edge
We stand before the threshold of alteration
Bring with you in stark honesty all your stains and pains
Be a vulnerable child, in the sacred there is no place for pretense
Unload there upon the shores your suffering sadness
Remove your travel weary and worn through shoes
Let the water lap your bruised and bloody feet and soul
Shed your bitter shroud of ashes
Spit out the distasteful bile of angry disdain
Take my hand, or venture alone – it matters not
But let us wade into the great deep’s waiting welcoming embrace
A gently murmured song beckons our entrance
Lullaby-ing away all fears and resistance
“Come child into my waiting arms
Come all you wary ones, have no fear
Your weariness will be washed away
Come all who are burdened down with trouble
Your dark crushing lamentations I lift and gift you light
Come all stained and pained with betrayal and unfaithful friends
Your abused and broken being will be soothed, cleansed and mended
All violations and violators of your soul are in my hands
Come all who are in need of restful refreshment
Your parched souls and tormented minds
Will be nourished, your thirsts fulfilled
Come and find your way through to the other side
Your enslaving enemies will not dare pass to find you there”
We are beckoned so, an invitation hard to resist
At water’s edge we choose a sacred surrender to the lullaby of love
A baptism, passing through death’s door, to be pulled toward life anew
An escape from the confining grip of the toll of our dis-eases
To find ourselves more beloved and beheld than we dared dreamed
Or we can choose to remain upon the shore unchanged
We can enter together or alone – it matters not
But I hate to leave you here if you choose to stay
Stuck in indecision, clinging to the decay in hesitation upon the shore
Clinging to the life that will inevitably devour your beautiful soul
And with such affliction torture and twist your noble mind
You were not lovingly created by gentle hands for such an end
Nor was I, nor was I, no – nor was I
By Maree Aldridge 2012
THE QUESTION OF OUR TIME
I face the question of our time
In all this mess how can we be reborn?
It is spoken… “Turn, turn, turn — there is a time to die”
Time for TUKU — “let go, let go”
A journey that releases my clinging fingers to life as I have known it
Time for KENOSIS
The journey of descent into the great deep
The mystery of creation
Wind hovering over the water
The invisible moving the visible
It is spoken… “turn, turn, turn — there is a time to be born”
Time for PUTA — “come out, come out”
Though I died I live again
A return journey from the great death and deep
What is this that comes into view?
A living spirit ‘becomes’
Taking shape within
It is spoken… “turn, turn, turn — this is time to cry for the beloved country”
WAIRUA!
My spirit finds home within
It fills the space tenderly
The passage of the soul is from womb to tomb
Awakening the Spirit
It is spoken… ‘turn, turn, turn — it is time to stand”
The dead will live recreated shedding their tombs
They will find their
TURANGAWAEWAE
See them coming
They sing “We are coming home to inhabit the place made for us to stand”
A pregnant creation is
released
It is spoken… “turn, turn, turn — now is the time to make peace”
RANGIMARIE
Peace to restless inner violence
Rest from clinging to life
Making peace with God
Whom you fought and resisted — do you hear, my soul?
Making peace with the earth
Which you plundered and
ravaged — do you see, my soul?
Making peace with the people
Whom you once hurt and who hurt you — whom you avoided and
excluded, who were once invisible to you — do you know, my soul?
Tangata — Peace between you and I
Whenua — Peace between you and I
Atua — Peace between you and I
By Maree Aldridge 2010 - 2012
