The deepest sound is the sound of myself,
the sound that has no words,
a writer without the written word,
a singer with no lyrics to sing.
That is who I am, a wordless one,
lost in the echoes of silence
reverberating from the depths of myself
out into a universe of sound.
Meteors rush, galaxies rise, stars implode.
In this space, I lie silent.
My soul intact, my spirit high,
I reach to the sky and sing.
My song of silence embraces all, encircles all.
Being inside the sound of life,
creation, chaos, and order,
I, soundless one, hear.
The Music of You
O You, who blew the notes of my being into existence,
trumpet into my ear and teach me.
Blow Your word into my brain, into my body,
until I become suffused
with divine energy,
with the music of Your being.
I hear Your syncopated jazz rendition.
It reaches out from quiet house to noisy street.
I stand on the sidewalk and listen.
The tune is You. I want it to be me.
O make of me that rendition of Your love,
that creates music here.
Trilled, thrilled, spilled and filled,
willed, the music wafts from me.
I hear its sound and stand in awe.
Can this be me?
Of course, it can be.
You are the master music maker.
The Music of Myself
The music of myself sings.
There is no rest.
Note—upon note—upon note,
there is no rest.
Myself sings.
I sing,
You sing,
we sing,
the music of ourself,
the music of You,
O universal self,
the music of You.
…now appreciates the peace and silence of the rural Wisconsin woods after living in California’s busy Silicon Valley for many years. The trees provide an inspiring environment for her writing and reflection. Nature images appear frequently in her writing. Her poetry and prose have been published in many journals, anthologies, and other publications.
Each day is so long,
a little eternity in itself,
but an eternity of disbelief and nearing despair,
of forlorn hope and lack of loveliness,
a long night when my face is shut,
and my mind is involved,
and no one knows,
nor can I say,
what this is,
borne within me,
a new self,
uncreated,
belonging to You,
a stranger here.
No Explaining
Here, where there is no explanation,
I exist.
Here, in silence,
I am.
Here, before you,
I stand.
Here, I bow.
I am.
Opening
Breaking the hermit door was fun,
pulling down the wood,
wearing away the hearth,
hurling myself against its strength.
The door held for a long time.
Then, a crack appeared.
It became a chasm,
letting in light, and openness, and hope.
I waited patiently.
The door shuddered.
It died.
I lived.
It has brought us here
to this point,
to this time –
This filling of self
to Self –
Thou.
The Road Unmarked
The eagle is screaming.
The night is here, and I am lost,
lost on a mountain I may not touch nor approach.
hearing the green wood roar grow,
swollen by tears in a road unmarked.
Whither You
We are alone,
You and I,
alone,
alone in a vastness
of space
and time
and Being.
The energetic wave of Being
rests on us,
rests in us.
We are sign and symbol
of that enduring wave,
that particle of time,
Life’s own energy.
We participate,
patch upon patch,
in Life’s own energetic Self.
P.C. MOOREHEAD moved to rural Wisconsin from California’s Silicon Valley. She appreciates the beauty and peace of the woods and the inspirational environment that they provide for her writing and reflection. Her poetry and prose have been published in many journals, anthologies, and other publications.
“Walk with the dreamers, the believers, the courageous, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground. Let their spirit ignite a fire within you to leave this world better than when you found it…” The Art of Living, Wilfred Peterson
December 15, 2018
A Life of the Spirit is a many-faceted jewel. Some of our contributors interpreted the theme for this month as Spirit (Being, the Ineffable, the Divine) and others more as spirited, strong. Some find Spirit and courage in the great love of their life or in their art, in their religion or spiritual practice. Others find it in an inspiring parent or grandparent. You will see that nature plays a role for nearly everyone.
I don’t think I’ve ever used as many hankies in pulling together an issue of The BeZine as I have with this issue. Contributors this quarter speak intimately from both joy and heartbreak, which is perhaps not surprising given the theme.
Our contributors have also rallied their spirits to speak out against gun violence and to speak up for the LGBTQ community. Violence and cruelty are not an absence of Spirit but a lack of awareness.
c 2018, Anjum Wasim Dar
My country – America – has a gun violence history that is notorious but firearms are ubiquitous on this Earth and complicit in wars and conflicts, hate crimes, terrorism, suicide and accidental shootings. Death by fire arms is grotesquely common in South American countries, Jamaica, and Swaziland.
Gun-suicides: I’ve taken the liberty of including a poem about my big sister, Teresa Margaret, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. She was twenty-seven. I was fourteen. Fifty-four years later, the trauma remains. The questions remain: Why? Where did the gun come from? Who taught her how to use it?
“Although the USA ranked fourth in the world with 12,400 firearm-related homicides, that figure pales in comparison with its 23,800 gun suicides. None of the other 194 nations and territories [ … ] came close; India ranked second at 13,400.” USA Today HERE
Easy access to firearms is cited by experts as one reason for the prevalence of their use in suicide. Another may be that guns offer an effective means of suicide.
Since there is history, culture, identity, and ethic involved in gun ownership and use, attempts at doing away with guns are not feasible at this time. Complicated core issues need to be defined and addressed first. Will we ever come to a unified place where we agree that murder and torture are not options? How then would Spirit play in the garden of material life?
Thanks to The Bardo Group Bequines team and to our guest writers for helping us put together an issue that is honest, artful, and inspiring, one that walks “with the dreamers, the believers, the courageous, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground.”
As you read, we hope that you will leave your “Likes” and comments behind to let each contributor know they were read and appreciated and to enrich the experience for others.
In the spirit of love (respect) and community,
and on behalf of The Bardo Group Bequines, Jamie Dedes Founding and Managing Editor
TABLE OF CONTENTS
How to read this issue of THE BeZINE:You can read each piece individually by clicking the links in the Table of Contents.
To learn more about our guests contributors, please link HERE.
To learn more about our core team members, please link HERE.
What a year 2020 has been: global pandemic, international instabilities, U.S. election turmoil. So much. We here at The BeZine have suffered a personal loss, as well, with the passing of G Jamie Dedes, our Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief emerita. Jamie led us with light, gentleness, and love.
Jamie may be gone, but her light shines on in her influence and inspiration, which we at The BeZine honor and mark. John Anstie, one of our core team of contributors, has curated a collection of tributes, eulogies, and elegies for this issue, in a section “for Jamie…”, where writers and artists from all over the world have joined us in remembering Jamie. This section also includes some of her writing and artwork.
Some of her photographs are also sprinkled throughout the rest of the issue, as well, as we continue the project that is The BeZine in Jamie’s name and spirit. The theme for this month, Life of the Spirit, chosen for this issue by her over a year ago, was especially close to her heart. She wanted to be sure that each year The BeZine would focus on this important aspect of our lives, activism, and work. Spirituality is the linchpin that holds together the other three themes of the year: Peace, Sustainability, and Social Justice.
So, read about and be inspired by Jamie and by Life of the Spirit as interpreted by artists and writers around the world.
What a year 2020 has been: global pandemic, international instabilities, U.S. election turmoil. So much. We here at The BeZine have suffered a personal loss, as well, with the passing of G Jamie Dedes, our Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief emerita. Jamie led us with light, gentleness, and love.
Jamie may be gone, but her light shines on in her influence and inspiration, which we at The BeZine honor and mark. John Anstie, one of our core team of contributors, has curated a collection of tributes, eulogies, and elegies for this issue, in a section “for Jamie…”, where writers and artists from all over the world have joined us in remembering Jamie. This section also includes some of her writing and artwork.
Some of her photographs are also sprinkled throughout the rest of the issue, as well, as we continue the project that is The BeZine in Jamie’s name and spirit. The theme for this month, Life of the Spirit, chosen for this issue by her over a year ago, was especially close to her heart. She wanted to be sure that each year The BeZine would focus on this important aspect of our lives, activism, and work. Spirituality is the linchpin that holds together the other three themes of the year: Peace, Sustainability, and Social Justice.
So, read about and be inspired by Jamie and by Life of the Spirit as interpreted by artists and writers around the world.
I passed the land of questions.
There were no answers.
There was no love.
What would release me wasn’t there.
I was alone again.
I was alone still.
You were there.
The answer came.
The Evanescent
I was born out of the infinite.
I will disappear into the infinite,
an evanescent drop of Your being.
I thank you for this place,
this drop, this spot,
the evanescent self
that is You.
P. C. Moorehead moved to rural Wisconsin from California’s Silicon Valley. She appreciates the beauty and peace of the woods and the inspirational environment that they provide for her writing and reflection. Nature images appear frequently in her writing. Her poetry and prose have been published in many journals, anthologies, and other publications.
The cave beyond the edge
lies in the land beyond attachment.
I didn’t know that the cave beyond the edge
lay in the land beyond attachment.
I didn’t know that the cave beyond the edge
lies in God’s Heart.
How little I knew.
I didn’t know that the swimming
would be so rigorous,
the need for fitness so great.
I swam there.
I climbed there.
I didn’t know that the cave beyond the edge
would require so much vigor.
I stayed there.
I prayed there.
I waited there
in all the silence.
Now, how glad I am
to have swam and climbed there,
to have stayed and prayed there,
to have waited there,
in all the silence,
for amidst it all,
I am glad,
to be in the cave beyond the edge,
in the land beyond attachment.
O Gracious God, how glad I am
to be here, where You are,
in my heart, here.
For I hear,O Gracious God, I hear
Your Voice rising from the silence.
“Thank You,” I respond, “Thank You
for the freedom, the choice,
of entering here, with You,
into this deepest chamber,
this deepest living space
of my heart, Your Heart,
where together we live in peace,
in the joy and jubilation of knowing one another
and all others, heartfelt, in harmony,
together, in LOVE.
“There is a LIGHT in this world. A healing spirit more powerful than any darkness we may encounter. We sometimes lose sight of this force when there is suffering, and too much pain. Then suddenly, the spirit will emerge through the lives of ordinary people who hear a call and answer in extraordinary ways.” Richard Attenborough
I find it heartening that what preoccupies me at present is clearly reflected in most if not all the submissions for this issue, which are filled with the kind of spirit that has no physical form, cannot be measured, cannot be physically embodied and, perhaps most important of all, cannot be contained or imprisoned. Human history provides us with a litany of evidence of how the spirit of the most oppressed, the most downtrodden and enslaved, even those groups of people, whom others have tried to exterminate in the most awful expressions of human behaviour, genocide, cannot and will never be vanquished.
We are surrounded by evidence of the power of the human spirit even in these times when, all around us, the leaders of the World seem to be pulling us into dark and uncertain places and there seems to be no clarity, no escape from the fire and smoke that chokes us. It is difficult to see past the debt we are creating.
The collective works of our contributors in this edition of The BeZine represent a response to Hope and Light. They seem to have taken in the many facets of the human spirit as a universal word that could be slotted into every sentence ever written. Along with compassion, “spirit” makes a worthwhile contribution to human life, to humane life. The Life of the Spirit is truly embodied in this issue of the Zine.
We now hear the voices of those writers and poets who have embraced December’s theme in many diverse ways. I thank them all, especially those who have found their submissions published here for the first time, but also thanks to those who are returning and consistently help to make this publication special.
John Anstie
Associate Editor
Much thanks to John Anstie for the intro to this quarter’s Zine. We keep the intro’s short, which may make it seem an easy assignment. It’s not. All of the work must be read in order to ensure that the through-line is evident and the intro consistent with the spirit of the contributions. That’s quite a bit of reading and analysis, though entirely pleasurable.
Thanks to Michael Dickel for putting together the Memoriam for Reuben Woolley who died earlier this month and to whom this issue is dedicated.
This edition of The BeZine is our most heterogeneous in terms of literary forms and national, racial, and religious diversity. We have perhaps finally arrived at the fulfillment of the original vision. We couldn’t have done it without you, our contributors, readers, and stalwart supporters for whom we have so much appreciation. And with this we close an eventful year with our gratitude and best wishes. We hope we’ve contributed some modicum of hope and healing.
In the spirit of love (respect) and community
and on behalf of The Bardo Group Beguines, Jamie Dedes
Founding and Managing Editor
Table of Contents
This issue of The BeZine is dedicated to Reuben Woolley, “I am not a silent poet”
“We can’t afford to have our nations sinking into dungeons of banditry cabals and corruption cartels. We are indebted to use this official language of resistance, poetry. Even under all these depressing challenges of imprisonment, exile and intimidation, poets remain the people’s commissars and their poems are weapons of mass instruction.” Mbizo Chirasha, Zimbabwean Poet in Exhile
“There is a LIGHT in this world. A healing spirit more powerful than any darkness we may encounter. We sometimes lose sight of this force when there is suffering, and too much pain. Then suddenly, the spirit will emerge through the lives of ordinary people who hear a call and answer in extraordinary ways.” Richard Attenborough
The BeZine
The BeZine 