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| Peace activist Mandy Kahn hosts Deep Dive Poetry at prs.org |
WHAT HAPPENED?
More than 40 people showed up, so many that we ran out of chairs. But there's a gallery to the side, and a few folding chairs later, Mandy Kahn got up to read. A new poem about being a "Kahn" (German Jewish Cohen) delighted readers. But the one about Mara (Death) really caught our attention:
I Do Not Fear Death, Yet Go On Living
I do not fear death, yet go on living.
I know choirs wait for me to finish,
waiting to paint this clear air with their singing,
wait in gauzy figures, just past seeing.
I know what will greet me is more vibrant
than a field of poppies in the morning
widening their petals for the daylight.
I know what is waiting, past my seeing,
know its luster. Still, I go on living,
chopping, boiling, eating, scrubbing, sweeping,
writing sonnets seen by just my ceiling,
stacking up old bills--paying, not paying,
then a bath, a walk, and it is evening.
Choirs wait to stir the air with feeling.
Angels wait to steer me towards a drawbridge
made of lighted crystal. I keep living- Mandy Kahn, Holy Doors
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| WQ's Priestess of Peace Mandy |
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| Am I pretty? (Callie Siskel) |
Tracing the duality of grief as it reverberates through a family, she wrestles with questions of identity and inheritance in precise, lucid language. Her book of poetry, Two Minds, indulges and therefore exposes the vanity of turning private pain into art and the pursuit of self-revelation.
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| Two Minds (Callie Siskel) |
"Narcissus"
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| You. (Time Person of the Year) |
I was a sophomore in college. I held the mirror up to my friend.
Outside a fraternity, I stood in a circle of women telling each other how pretty they were.
On the walk back to my room, I passed a monument: water running over granite.
The man I loved wanted me in his bed, so I could tell him he was exceptional.
There is a difference between Echo and the spring: one repeats, one colludes. More
"The Concept of Immediacy"
I fell asleep with an idea, but when I woke up, I’d lost it,
as when, approaching the rabbit on the trail,
it took off into the brush.
I followed, clearing the warblers,
fixing their gaze.
Ruining something felt like a reason to proceed.
Looking out at the view—
dense swaths of pine, the bay, all three bridges
half-submerged—
I waited for a sign to go back, the mind saying enough
or what next or there’s nothing here... More
- Callie Siskel, "Parentheses" – Vandal Poem of the Day
- "Intention to Return" | The New York Review of Books
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| Enough with all the words! Maybe we should meditate now (Ramón García) |
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| Second Tuesday Poetry ft. Ramón García |
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| Strange Signatures |
At the origin of the Other is a queer Bluebeard, an emblem of imperialist violence and savage injustice. Resisting the patriarchy and its colonizing powers are Bluebeard's feminist phantom brides, a "bride brotherhood," the guerrilla-muses of solidarity and revolution. In poems that open the secret chambers of individual and collective histories, Bluebeard's survivors continue a phantom afterlife by way of dislocated avatars: modernist artists, estranged Latin American poets, pop stars, a taxidermized parrot and a Peruvian mummy.
This book is an international, cinematic montage of the phantasmatic and the all-too-real, locating social transformation in memory, crime and the allegorical biographies of celebrated artists and poets. More
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| Who could write a whole poem about a commonplace mirror? Sylvia Plath did. |
Then two veteran poets and friends came to the podium, the well-known Gail Wronsky and David St. John. While her readings were the highlight of a very uplifting night, he did more explaining and prefacing, bringing us into the interior life of a poet. Then he went to a touching early piece, "From a Bridge."
"From a Bridge"
I saw my mother standing there below me
On the narrow bank just looking out over the river
Looking at something just beyond the taut middle rope
Of the braided swirling currents
Then she looked up quite suddenly to the far bank
Where the densely twined limbs of the cypress
Twisted violently toward the storm-struck sky
There are some things we know before we know
Also some things we wish we would not ever know
Even if as children we already knew & so
Standing above her on that bridge that shuddered
Each time the river ripped at its wooden pilings
I knew I could never even fate willing ever
Get to her in time
Loving Boundaries
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| Walking, I looked up and saw myself. |
As an aspect of this project of learning to choose peace, all will eventually learn how to share metta or universal love-without-end while still maintaining boundaries that honor self.
Only the lower mind thinks that one must choose between honoring others and honoring oneself.
Only the lower mind thinks, “Should I take an action that benefits me or one that benefits others?”
From the perspective of the higher mind, the Peace Mind, one can see that there is always an action (karma) available that both honors the self and all others.
When we are operating from the Peace Mind, we see with the Peace Mind's faculties. The Peace Mind is the place of infinite options, infinite opportunities.
Only someone outside of the Peace Mind could believe that a choice between self and others could be required.
Only someone outside of the Peace Mind could believe that a choice between self and others could be required.
Often, the options that honor both self and others will look like kindness with loving boundaries, or unconditional love with loving boundaries.
Now, these boundaries are not limits on the amount of love expressed; one can express love-without-end, love-without-condition, and still engage loving boundaries.
These are boundaries that protect the individual even as s/he shares love-without-end, universal, limitless love.
What does it look like? Imagine a cottage surrounded by a tall garden wall with a locked gate.
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| The gate that guards my garden of loving |
These are boundaries that protect the individual even as s/he shares love-without-end, universal, limitless love.
What does it look like? Imagine a cottage surrounded by a tall garden wall with a locked gate.
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| Can I be safe in my garden AND share it? |
All day, every day, we can flow our love over the wall. It can flow from us without ceasing, and it can be a love without judgment, a love that surrounds and supports everyone equally, a love that enriches and heals and purifies all who are touched by it.
Our love can heal others, support others, care for others, and can still keep this boundary in place.
Because we are a part of others, it never honors others when we dishonor ourselves or give of ourselves in a way that does not serve us as we serve them. Over-giving harms others, even as it harms us.
Regardless of how others react to our boundaries in the moment, know that our lack-of-boundaries never serves others in the long run. Why? It hinders our ability to be of service to them and to everyone, and to ourselves in the future.
Service to self and service to others are aspects of the same thing. One's highest action always serves both self and others simultaneously.
Participating in service to others that does not honor self is simply a phase that many will pass through before choosing forms of service that also honor self.
Serving others feels so good to us, so right to us, that sometimes we experience “service rapture.” That selfless “service rapture” can be a kind of high. We can love the joy of serving so much that we over-give and burn out. This is simply a lesson to be learned.
When we give from grace, from strength, from fullness, we refill even as we give, and burnout is not reached. We give, fill, give, fill, give, in a harmonic flow—and when we do, we can feel when it is time to rest, and we can feel when it is time to act, and we naturally do what is called for, knowing that serving self by resting is also an aspect of serving others.
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| What was I doing way up there? |
Honoring self and honoring others is one. We are one. We are one in separate bodies. When we realize this, we begin to serve all parts of self—the self that appears to be us as well as the self that appears to be others—in harmonic flow.
When we learn this flow, when this flow becomes natural to us, we are of highest service.
Different situations and different relationships require different forms of loving boundaries from us.
The easiest way to see what kind of boundaries are required in any situation is to gaze at it from the place of our Peace Mind. From here, it is clear how to both honor ourselves with boundaries and to send love-without-end over our garden walls.
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| Even in a private magic garden, I love everyone |
Now we live in a society that maintains a penal system that attempts to “scare people straight”—to use punishment, fear, cruelty, and harshness to build fear into an individual in an attempt to reform that penitent.
This system is based on the belief that fear could ever inspire inmates in such a system to choose more loving actions. It will not. It cannot.
Fear-based reform tactics build fear, hatred, resentment, anger, and frustration in an inmate, and those things flow back toward all of us in the collective, where such things affect everyone to our detriment.
One cannot build fear in another and not also build fear into the collective. We are all part of the collective consciousness.
But a separated mind believes, “As I punish this person, I make myself safe from punishment.” That can never be true. We are too connected for that to be possible.
That which we put into others we put into ourselves and into all whom we love and hope to protect.
When we understand this, it becomes natural for us to treat all people, even those who have acted in ways that are less than loving, with love. But we learn to do this while maintaining loving boundaries.
This is what we will learn to express in our penal system.
When we have learned this completely, when we have treated all inmates with love, while maintaining needed physical boundaries, we will have evolved to a place wherein no penal system is needed.
On the way to the experience of no penal system being required, we must first learn how to share love and maintain boundaries. That is the next lesson for us to learn.
Yes, high, thick walls may be required to create general safety. But cruelty and torture behind those walls is never required. We can have those walls, and we can send love over them. We are never safe from our own cruelty.
When there is a place within our town or our state or our country or our world where people are treated with cruelty, aspects of that cruelty affect us and those we love most.
Once we understand this, we can begin to look at the penal system as a place of opportunity. Our opportunity is to consider this question: "How can I express my love-without-end here while still maintaining needed boundaries?"
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| Four Divine Ways to Be |
- loving-kindness-without-end,
- compassion-without-end,
- joy-in-others'-joy-without-end,
- unbiased-looking-on-in-others'-equanimity-without-end.
True transformation is inspired by the Peace Mind witnessing acts of peace.
If our goal is to see fewer unloving acts taking place in our society, we can only reach that goal by modeling acts of peace: acts of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
If our goal is to see fewer unloving acts taking place in our society, we can only reach that goal by modeling acts of peace: acts of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
If our penal systems become places in which acts of true peace can be observed, they will become places of true and permanent transformation.
Transformation must be chosen by the individual; it cannot be enforced. After witnessing acts of peace, some will choose transformation.
Our job, then, is to give people the opportunity to witness acts of peace.
We can give people these opportunities, and we can treat them with respect, honoring and love, and we can still create needed boundaries that protect others, and ourselves.
Fear-based “reform” tactics do not only affect those who find themselves on the receiving end of them. They also build guilt, shame, regret, and resentment in their practitioners because these practitioners will always, on some level, recognize that actions of cruelty towards others are not their highest actions.
Love-based tactics heal. They heal those who carry them out, and they heal those who are on the receiving end of them.
They heal the relationship between practitioner and recipient in the moment, and they begin to heal the resentment, anger, and sadness that centuries of cruelty-based reform tactics have built up in our collective consciousness.
One act of love-based interaction in this format heals many levels of trauma left over from old cruelty-based strategies. As they heal old trauma, these love-based tactics create new possibilities of peace-on-earth for all beings.
Our penal systems are wonderful places to practice kindness-without-end with loving boundaries. Our lives are also wonderful places to practice this.
Where is life giving us the opportunity to both share unconditional love and to honor—and enforce—the space, the protection, and the boundaries that we require?
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| Special thx to Seven for helping me express this! |
In brief, the better our boundaries, the more fully we can be an instrument of pure and ever-flowing metta and grace.
- Zoom link to join Peace Class:
- us02web.zoom.us/j/82150472713
- Meeting ID: 821 5047 2713
- Mandy Kahn, Peace Class, May 19, 2026, with glow up and editing by Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly
