Night Poems - Creative Ritual and Your Heart's Voice

Night Poems – Creative Ritual & Your Heart’s Voice
By Ti Klingler

Who has more heart than the fearless and joyful Jumping Joy, otherwise known as Jenafer Owen? Jenafer and I share a love of poetry and creative ritual. When I read her collection of Night Poems, I was struck by how images and themes repeated. The one pattern that stood out most clearly for me was the movement from fear and constriction to open glee and celebration. It’s rare to have documentation of a heart’s unfolding. I’ve chosen three of Jenafer’s poems to share with you. “Guarding Nothing” is a perfect portrait of the moment when you realize you must open to both pain and joy if you want your heart to soar and sing.

When I asked Jenafer for her take on my reading of the poems as the journey from a tightly held to an open daring heart, she had this to say: “I wrote a poem from my dreams every morning for over 3 months (108 days) as an experiment of listening to what my dream world was trying to tell me.  Even the smallest fragment of a dream, when translated to poetry, holds up the information that your soul is whispering.  When I look back at the period of poems, written during a time when I was actively shaking loose of an old life and stepping boldly into a new life, all the threads are captured.  The constrained feeling of being held back in the land of “only stay,” the exhilaration of the future beckoning. Present tense, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. But looking back I can see so clearly the Scorpion’s stamp of dynamic transformation as the inevitable unfolded.”

I encourage you to set off on your own poetic journey. Perhaps it will be a series of dream poems or Lunch with the Muse poems or you might even write one line of a poem every single morning for a month. Here’s what I predict: your heart, which has never stopped speaking to you, will find a way to appear on the page. As Jenafer says, its message might not be clear now, but the poems you write can become your map to a life where your heart chooses the ecstatic YES.

LET ME GO

Let me go
Stop exposing me
I am trying to look
Good for
her and them.

I pinch, twisting
Until you release me
Then gather my things to
Put myself together

Angry and sad.

North Node (2009) by Jenafer Owen

GUARDING NOTHING

I find a live scorpion
in a drawer
and a crab drawn
on the height of my left foot

I wake up to the saying
clearly
“you are guarding nothing”

I’m not sure what it means
exactly
but it is true

CHOOSE YES

The government has declared
It illegal to believe what you & I believe
And they fill then empty from the house
Officials in Hazmat suits
Sealing items in vacuum packages
Watching us like we’re contagious
And when they’ve come & gone
I ask you if you still want to believe
What we believe
Yes, you throw your head back
Yes, you still choose
Yes, and ecstatic I do too

And truth spreads from us like ripples.

The delightful Jumping Joy Jenafer Owen

JENAFER OWEN

CCI Handle: Jumpin Joy

  Director of CCU and “Starbase Wrangler”

Known in the straight-faced world as Jenafer Owen, Jenafer Joy began her Art Career with dualing backgrounds in Alchemical Acupuncture & Chaos Transformation (otherwise known as Accounting). She is now convinced that Artista is the “A” career she was always looking for.

Jena has been in the healing and creative arts, and taught Inspired Inquiry courses on accessing your creative spirit since 2003. She believes passionately in individual genius, in the innate wisdom of the body, and in the transformative power of mythic context. Jenafer Joy is delighted to have joined the Cosmic Cowgirl Dream team as the Director of Cosmic Cowgirls University in 2010.

Away from the Cosmic Starbases, when she isn’t writing dream poems, admiring the chickens, or filling the cookie jar for those she loves, Jena enjoys being covered from head to toe in paint. You can see more of her current paintings at www.jenaferjoy.com Jenafer Joy lives and teaches in Mendocino County.

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Ti is on the lookout for Cosmic Cowgirl poetry she can feature in this column. Won’t you send her your poem?

Cosmic Cowgirls can submit poems and a brief bio directly to Ti at ti.cosmiccowgirls@gmail.com. (Submissions may be edited due to space constraints. Please limit submissions to 250 words.)

Ti Klingler is an Intrinsic Coach® and artist who lives in the East Bay. A graduate of Shiloh’s Legendary Life and Medicine Wheel mentorships, she has been writing a poem every day since April 1, 2009. Ti enjoys coaching others to find their best thinking and is passionate about women seeing their own beauty and trusting their desires.

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