Month: October 2010

Noticing–Purple Profundity: Poetry by Elisabeth Connelley

/ Elisa / 2 Comments

Smooth sheets caressing naked calves and feet

The soft grunted intake of air

Upon bumping a familiar round belly

A sigh and change of position

To spoon one back into sleep

Hands on breast and thigh

Soft sleep warmed lips brushing fur

Smiling

Relaxing into

Familiarity

Significant non-quickening

Careful languishing sighs

Sheer curtains move

As always they move

In winter

From blowing heat.

A door creaks open

Something wanders in

Stares intently,

Observer of a chrysalis

Eyes rub

Feet flex

Toes wriggle

Sheets move

Feet hit the floor

Born again

Noticing

 

–by elisabeth connelley

When I am here–Purple Profundity: Poetry by Elisabeth Connelley

/ Elisa / 7 Comments

When I am here
what part of me do you love
do you fantasize about
without knowing
me
understanding you
smiling at
who
you can paint
yourself
when you feel
near
me
myself
who are you
do you ask
do you dream
illusions and puffy things
you wake up
you think me gone
eye
was never here
missing the view
of the image
in the mirror
smoke
wisps of air
curling away

–by elisabeth connelley

Morning Trip (40)

/ Elisa / 3 Comments


“We are so in love with our words and ideas that we forget the direct experience from which they arise. We build concept upon concept. In the end we have abstracted our contact with life into the rote regurgitation of thought-bound ideology.
We have fallen victim to the great curse of human existence of the tendency to misconstrue language (words, thoughts, ideas) for actuality. We are entombed in our brains.
We are thinking our lives, not living them.

Think about the problems all this thought is creating. We pick up a self-help book, a book of spiritual advice, a religious book, thinking it might help with our thought-bound world. We read. We think it quite interesting. We think we will read more. We are not sure where all of this is going, but we think we will read more and find out.
It is not going anywhere.

Thought has nowhere to go but its own isolated, endless fragmented repetition.

Without the obsession of thought we are the recognition and the expression of the energy of consciousness and space in which we and others coexist in such profound contact that there is nothing that definitively divides us.
We search for this relationship of profound openness, without guile or armor, vulnerable, trusting, and at the same time, intimate, intertwined, boundaryless – but this transcendental relationship constantly slips from us as we experience it and then try to institutionalize it.
When our minds are absolutely quiet, when thought is still, this relationship is the natural state of our being. Then thought, the ego-center, enters immediately to catalog, analyze, and capture the beauty of the vision.
We seek the rare butterfly. Upon glimpsing its beauty we stalk it, catch it, drive a pin through its head to mount it, and put it on our wall with its Latin name. We trade the moment of beauty for the endless stultification of a dead symbol, an artifact, a word, a concept.

We can use language to approach that which is beyond language. We can use language to amuse ourselves. We can use language as poetry, as music. But we forget that these words, any words, bring us nowhere in actuality, only somewhere in the mind, in thought. We are in a bubble. We are staring in the pond admiring the reflection of our own thoughts.”
– Steven Harrison