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Moving Within

Moving Within

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A child walks through the forest on a snowy night to bring carrots to a hungry rabbit. This is an illustration from my children’s book, The Golden Rule (the first book of the Ardea Herodeas Books “Collected Wisdom” series).
Each morning, my husband and I start the day with a short reading and meditation. We cycle through books by Thich Nhat Hanh, Robin Wall Kimmerer, or other inspirational writers, and then we read from Coleman Bark’s A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings. Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī was a Sufi mystic and a prolific poet from the 13th century. Craig and I are often struck by how his words ring true in our current time. Here’s Rumi’s poem for today:
Move Within
Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within,
but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
Yes, it’s November 4th, election day. Fear has permeated our national and international politics. Rumi’s poem is a good reminder that we don’t know what the future will bring. Still, we keep putting one foot in front of the other. Get to the polls; cast our votes. But the poem resonated in other ways, as well.
Renovation-in-process. Panhandle Creek Press will be based in the area over the garage.

As many of you know, we have been living in a small cabin for over a year while we complete the addition to our cabin over Panhandle Creek. It’s taken much longer than we expected, but that’s the nature of most renovations (especially at 8725′). We had hoped to be in by the holidays, but yesterday we learned it will most likely be January or February before we can move back home. Disappointing, but we’re grateful to have a roof over head and plenty of firewood for the stove. My books will stay in boxes for a couple more months. In the grand scheme of things, this is a small setback. Do I sound convinced? I’m getting there!

The back of the cabin viewed from up the ravine.

Completing Denver Publishing Institute was the catalyst for tremendous movement within. I’ve known since Writing for Peace what kinds of books I wanted to publish. DPI gave me new tools and greater clarity of vision. To that end, we’ve added two new imprints:

Ardea Herodias Books which aims to cultivate unique voices in children’s literature and develop beautiful books that challenge young readers to grow their capacity for empathy.

North Fork Publishing will serve as the hybrid press, providing support from initial book concept to developmental, copy, and line editing, from book design and page layout to publishing and distribution. North Fork Publishing provides authors with the flexibility to design a program that best meets their publishing needs, and replaces our previous hybrid press, “Panhandle Creek Publishing.”

Both Panhandle Creek Press and Ardea Herodias Books will operate as a traditional press.

When Craig bought me watercolors last Christmas, they opened up a whole new world of possibilities. I began painting the natural world—my home in the Rocky Mountains, childhood memories of the Alaskan wilderness where I grew up.

With the increased hostility toward immigrants and cultures from around the world, the books being purged from schools and libraries, and the political move to remove empathy and compassion from faith, I knew I wanted to create a children’s book about “the golden rule.” My time at DPI also helped clarify my vision for the book and a “Collected Wisdom” series of children’s books written by authors from within many cultures—children’s stories that pass knowledge through the generations. I’ll be honest, the illustrations are a stretch for me. It’s taken much longer than I had planned!

The first book in the series, The Golden Rule, shares simple quotes from various faiths, cultures, and traditions. The illustrations tell a story of how one small kindness spreads on a wintry night. The book will release on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, November 25th.

And on Tuesday, December 2nd, we’ll celebrate another launch for author Nancy Johnson’s book, Essence of Our Humanity: Portraits of My Beloved Psychiatric Patients. It’s a small, beautiful, and very unique book. I’ll tell you about it next time!

Back to Rumi’s poem. Though so much is at stake now, and so many of the sign posts along the way are darkly foreboding, Rumi’s wisdom still holds true. Genuine strength is found in empathy and compassion. Without knowing the future, we resist fear and walk on, acknowledging kindnesses and adding our own where we can.

 

 

 

 

A Truing of Vision

A Truing of Vision

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways.  Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us — more range, more depth, more feeling: more associative freedom, more beauty.  More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstunted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our existence is also the existence of others. More capacity to be astonished. Art adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it. And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share.

~Jane Herschfield, from TEN WINDOWS: How Great Poems Transform the World

 

Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.

Another Modest Proposal, in memory of those lost

Another Modest Proposal, in memory of those lost

On Memorial Day, I hiked our property’s wildlife trail with Max and my three-year-old granddaughter. We descended the rocky path into the ravine, wove through aspens and the dense stand of lodgepole pine, then scaled the granite formation we call Moon Temple. There, she released my hand to climb from one boulder to the next.

“Are you going to be a mountain climber when you grow up?” I asked.

She nodded, her eyes fixed with fierce determination on her next hand-hold. Watching her climb, my heart ached with love and the knowledge that across the country other families were grieving the loss of their children.

Since the Uvalde shootings, when 19 children and two adults were murdered by an 18 year old with an assault weapon, the death tally continues to rise.

I know many on the right believe more guns in the hands of the “good guys” will protect the innocents that our trained police could not. Gun sales spike after every mass shooting, and we will never get real solutions from lawmakers funded by the National Rifle Association.

I believe in the power of the written word to change minds. I’ve ruminated over taking the approach Jonathon Swift did in his 1729 satirical essay, “A Modest Proposal.” During that time, Irish families couldn’t pay their high rents, let alone feed or cloth their offspring. Much like today, the propertied elite were indifferent to the suffering caused by their greed.

Jonathon Swift proposed that, rather than watch their children starve, the Irish should sell their babies to feed the wealthy. He goes so far as to suggest recipes for infant flesh, “a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.”

Swift’s proposal raised awareness and inspired activism. I thought something similar might shock both the left and right into working together to end this insanity. The parallel to Swift’s satire would be a gruesome scenario something like a “whack-a-mole” game at a county fair, but here the moles are school children cowering behind their desks. The exorbitant fees for this game would be paid directly to the 2nd Amendment-supporting representative of your choice.

But I couldn’t write it.

It was too horrible to imagine. If the facts of gun violence in this country aren’t shocking enough, my fiction never could be.

Are there words that could sway gun lovers, those who value their imagined personal safety (or sport, or collections) more than the lives of innocents?

I suppose this is the dilemma for all writers who hope to change the world through their words.  Reading fiction can increase empathy. Writing for Peace was based on that premise. We shouldn’t give up transporting readers to new understanding and compassion, but sometimes the best course is to write and call our legislators, opine in our local papers and on social media.

When our children’s safety is on the line, the most powerful writing we can do is register to vote, to show up at the polls, and to elect representation that will protect our democracy and human rights—representatives who refuse to accept money from the NRA or the gun lobby.

So here is my very modest proposal:

I challenge my writer friends to keep searching for the right words, and to keep working for change…

…for the sake of our dreamers and future mountain climbers.

 

 

Copyright © 2022 Carmel Mawle. All rights reserved.