Intuitive Eating Principles: Taking the “Die” Out of Diet

UPDATE: Check out this new article from Oprah herself that directly relates to what you are about to read!!!

Step off the scales and quit counting every single thing

calories & lbs

screen time & likes

sleep scores & silent minutes

ounces & scoops

reps & steps

carbs & crunches

hurts & offenses 

every single 

heartbeat…

For whatever reason, a million in fact, our diets have become problematic and at times even lethal. There are approximately 20 million girls and women and 10 million boys and men in America with eating disorders, according to the Cleveland Clinic. By any account, it is far too many, which doesn’t even account for the millions left unreported or all the other food-related obsessions and distortions we deal with daily. It is almost impossible to eat anything without a red flag going up.

This is not a question of being healthy or fit. We all know those are ways to love ourselves and live our best lives. However, a false narrative sometimes derails the longing for those things. Because Oprah is a big contributor to that narrative, I first became concerned when she became a spokesperson for Weight Watchers, thinking we/she didn’t need to spend any more time watching (obsessing) over our weight. However, her newest TV special on weight loss was one more far-reaching reminder of how deeply this issue penetrates our lives. While I don’t want to believe that Oprah has sold out, I could barely watch. As much as I sympathized with her story of living a life of shame and being ridiculed about her weight in public, it felt like she succumbed to the shame by making herself into precisely what the shamers were saying she should be: thin at all costs. Maybe I missed the part where she talked about what extreme diet culture is doing to us. Still, the only part I heard was how the new weight loss drugs were being held up as the newest lifelong answer to all her prayers to become what the shamers told her to be. Being raised by television (atinylight.com/blog, 8/31/20 “Say Who You Are”), I watched her every day at 4:00pm and remember when she pulled out the wagon of fat she paraded around showing how much she lost at one point only to hear her admit in the special that as soon as the NEXT DAY she started gaining it back very consciously (since it turns out, her body was in fact starving). That is disordered eating. AND, it is something most everyone has done in one form or another. Not just women and girls but men and boys, too. As my husband’s doctor pointed out, all these drugs do at their core is suppress appetite. It is put forward as something we cannot control on our own. No mention is made of how we’ve lost touch with our own most basic, protective, life-saving, internal monitor: our hunger cues. 

Disordered eating has become the norm.

That should be the actual headline.

What, if anything, has Oprah learned as she puts herself out there again with such a massive following? I don’t doubt that she and so many others may be feeling better physically and actually are in better “shape” according to some list of numbers (and we know this is a lifesaver for certain folks with ailments like diabetes). She is obviously having fun wearing new clothes! Still, it is ironic to hear her talk about things like “food noise” (that constant obsession with food) like it is anything but a clear product of the disordered eating we all have been desensitized to accepting as normal. To tell millions that they can be proud of whatever body they have after that seems disingenuous. If we only had the health care and the funds to swallow a pill for an “answer” to whatever irks us, why would we ever need to love who we naturally are? And, by the way, who are we…naturally? Do we have a set point for weight that feels best for our bodies, and are we constantly overriding that? How would we ever know??

Instead:

gulp

go

chew

savor

pardon

absolve

merge

settle

wonder

wander 

consider

muse

exist…

And so, after watching the special, I spent time listening to two intriguing podcasts about something called “intuitive eating” that I wish more people would hear. Dieticians Bonnie Roney and Mallory Page do a much better job than I in addressing what is wrong with diet culture. The first is an episode that specifically addresses points brought up in this recent TV special in specific detail (both the positive and the negative):

The Diet Culture Rebel Podcast with Bonnie Roney April 2, 2024: My Reaction to Oprah’s Special: Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-reaction-to-oprahs-special-shame-blame-and-the/id1534443115?i=1000651268037

The Diet Culture Rebel Podcast with Bonnie Roney March 19: Quiet the Food Noise: 3 Ways Intuitive Eating Can Help

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/quiet-the-food-noise-3-ways-intuitive-eating-can-help/id1534443115?i=1000649818288

Seems Like Diet Culture With Mallory Page, February 29, #98 Weight Loss Injections & Weight Loss Journeys

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/98-we-need-to-talk-weight-loss-injections-weight-loss/id1618612441?i=1000647497181

So why is a poet writing about dieting? Because my poetry is about resilience and self-love. I have been mortified to realize I swallowed the lie that we can’t control ourselves, which dissociates us from our bodies and our hunger. It has made food an obsession and either “good” or “bad” rather than nourishing or enjoyable. It has stood in the way of my health and is taking a long time to unlearn and let food be only what it is rather than something to fear or worship. I don’t blame Oprah for that. The hard truth is she is struggling like all the rest of us, even though we want to put her on a pedestal and have her help us out of it. Maybe she needs our help. If she won’t call it out, we need to help each other by calling it out together. Our kids are watching us, and there is no telling how far this will seep into their lives any more than it already has, wreaking more havoc on their minds and bodies. Otherwise, we will never be able to tell them that food is meant for nourishment and pleasure, that our bodies are meant to be different sizes and shapes, or that we are not meant to let food (or the lack thereof) dominate our every thought. Whatever the current trend in dieting is, it doesn’t matter as long as we keep striving for bodies that would keep shamers at bay. In Bonnie Roney’s words, we need a “diet culture revolution”!

Step off the treadmill of tedious tracking

and sing your way through 

a stroll or skip your way 

through a sandwich

licking up every

single note

“Note to Self” by dena parker duke

Of course, there are things we need to count, monitor, and/or adjust. However, when we lose touch with our hunger, we should be afraid of things going off the rails. What is healing anyway? If we are healing only to be met with lies about how to nourish and care for ourselves, have we really accomplished anything?? There is no deep-down love, down in our bones, muscles, and, yes, even our fat, if we can’t look in the mirror and honestly love all of what’s there. We deserve to say and hear the words we need; we also deserve to honestly believe in our bodies and treat them with the utmost love and respect. I don’t blame Oprah. I truly hope someday, even Oprah will be able to have that in her life. I wish for us all to find peace inside our bodies and souls that can be passed to our children. Let’s fill our cups full. May our bodies never have to rebel because we are starving them, but may they also relax because we are not over stuffing them.

May we feed ourselves well and plenty so we can know we have been fed.

May it, please, be so.

The Wonder of Purple

I'm Here - Fantasia Barrino-Taylor (Official Lyric Video) #TheColorPurple #Fantasia

“I’m Here” - Fantasia (The Color Purple 2023, Rehearsal)

Take yourself as you find yourself; start from that. —Dom Chapman

I found myself alone in a theater on a Tuesday morning to see The Color Purple. I was apprehensive because of how hard the last version was for me to watch. I avoid anything that portrays abuse even when it’s made in service to healing. I have always leaned toward poetic and imaginative paths to heal, and perhaps to insulate me from brutality. But, I hoped the music in this version might make it different.

So I tried to prepare myself to stand back and see a new version of this sad story.

Unfortunately we are all becoming more acquainted with cruelty, but there is nothing like experiencing it first hand, especially coming from those we are torn to love and are supposed to be our caretakers. It is something you never fully heal from. It impacts your trust in the world. But, even more, there is nothing like the deep historical and cultural context that somehow separated me from claiming any healing in this story as my own. Who was I, a little old white lady from Idaho, to look to this story for anything for myself? But I have also learned that there is a lot of power in seeing the commonalities we have in what it takes to heal. 

“Poetry and music are sister arts…It’s as if the eye and the ear were related through poetry...”  

—How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch

From the first note of music I knew a mystical experience was on its way. It was like a 2 dimensional poem flat on a page breaking into the 3 dimensional world of music. It led to an unknown place that I didn’t even know was still in need of healing. I felt myself being taught at the feet of Celie how to heal more and love in spite of massive efforts to deny one’s personhood. I was not only able to feel and absorb her resilience, but I was able to internalize her strength even though I find myself cloaked in privilege by comparison. Not to minimize the depths of her repression and/or the denial of her spirit, still I found myself rising along with her hope that basic human rights can transcend our colors, genders, or positions of power. From Sophie’s refusal to be struck, to Celie’s unending love for children she had never been given the privilege to raise, these women acted out what it means to be humane and powerful. Did I connect to every single scene and/or character? Of course not. Healing is never so neat and prepackaged. But Fantasia Barino, who plays Celie, said that the movie was for anyone “who has been through something” and the focus on radical forgiveness was universal…

…and being alone in the theater I found myself freely crying my way through it.

However, in the days since I have read about some who did not feel inside this circle of healing and who, perhaps, refused to embrace it or even give it a viewing. My heart goes out to them, because I have often felt outside many potentially or prescribed healing moments. I also know that more trauma often takes place on the road to healing, and, of course that road is full of twists and sometimes even its own abuses. I also used to idolize Oprah but in growing up I’ve learned better. All I know is that healing has come for me in a string of events that are intensely personal, that I have had to open up to, bit by bit, to somehow piece myself back together again, and often come from the most unexpected places.

All I know is that this moment was one of those for me. 

Here it was. Here I was.

“Life can never break your soul”

The Color Purple (2023) | Keep It Movin' | Warner Bros. Entertainment

#powerofmusic #thecolorpurple #healingjourney #letmusichealyou #musicheals

Fantasia explains how she learned the power of forgiveness through her role and why she believes women, men and families will be healed by watching The Color Purple. To watch the Oprah and Fantasia interview visit https://www.oprah.com/own-thecolorpur...

The Color Purple | Official Trailer 3

NOW STREAMING

Bucket List Bonanza: Tiny Light's "Top Ten" Bucket List

For all the dreams that rise up 

to get caught in your throat 

and turn into wishes, 

Dare to drop each one onto 

the bucket list of your lifetime.

Let them be your lighthouse,

Streetlights to guide your 

way home.

–Dena Parker Duke, "The History of the Future"

 atinylight.com/poems 

Everyone has a bucket list, meaning everyone has things they are longing to do or experience. You might not realize it or call it that, especially since that term comes from what one hopes to do before they "kick the bucket" (or die, in the fashion of animals who were slaughtered in the 16th century). But even if we go after them passionately or don't dare to wish them out loud, they are there. 

What we do with them is our unique journey.

The keynote speaker's first words were, "Don't let teaching eat you up," and I still remember how wonderful that sounded. After six years as a play therapist working with homicidal and suicidal preschoolers, I fantasized about devoting myself to the "fun" of teaching, wanting nothing more than to be eaten up by it. I then found myself at one of my husband's work parties surrounded by biologists, most of whom had cross-country skied to the party, next to a small research lab deep in the woods. After being less than impressed with my being a teacher, they were curious about how I spent my summers off, suggesting that it had to be the only reason anyone would ever teach. Instead, they got the story of how I couldn't wait to put on my clothes in the morning because I wanted to jump straight into the car and get to work. They got the biggest kick out of that and asked me to repeat it to a growing audience. Like them, my husband was off on many outdoor adventures, and we had no children yet, so I was primed and ready for teaching to eat me up. 

Poet Mary Oliver, when asked 

how she was able to build a life around poetry said, 

"I was very careful never to take an interesting job…"

Along with the sheer joy and complete exhaustion of finding ways to inspire students, I fell increasingly in love with the written word. Remembering how I had secretly written lyrics and poetry to survive while growing up, I became inspired by the rawness of 2nd-grade poetry and determined to make a space for writing somehow. Around this time, I participated in a Summer Writing Institute for teachers. Many walked out the door on hearing that we'd be expected to write (like so many students wish they could), but I returned for three summers, and my life as a real writing teacher and full-fledged writer/poet began. I learned to cultivate authentic audiences, create a safe writing community in my classroom, and wove it into every subject as a means of thinking, learning, and expression. However, during that chaotic time, I was constantly reminded that writing requires space to breathe, process, and reflect, which was my life's antithesis. No matter how hard I worked for over 30 years, I never once felt calm or caught up. And so I found myself just as the keynote speaker had predicted: burned up and completely eaten up. Retirement held the hope of rebuilding a life around my dreams. So, I started a few years early to construct the ultimate bucket list to address all the things I had put off, neglected, and denied were important and was longing for. I could share the list with those who would gather 'round to ask why I had not yet left on my travels (which did not even garner a place on my list). Please consider this an invitation to think about your own list. If you start yours even sooner, you may avoid the ones that involve basic self-care, just sayin'…

So here is my TOP TEN Bonanza Bucket List (and an invitation for you to think about your own): 

1. To Take a Long Leisurely Breath (Contemplation 1.0)

If you rush, you can lose yourself. But if you are too used to hurrying, 

you may not even notice the loss.

–Day by Day: Meditations on Mindfulness by Sister Stan

After a lifetime of trying to "hurry up and reflect," I wanted to take an untimed look back at my life. Perhaps jumping from childhood trauma into being a workaholic in the midst of starting the delicate dance of creating a family made the perfect conditions for what can only be described as an inner crisis. I found myself almost desperate to stay put to revisit old haunts, old relationships, old experiences, buried feelings, and unfinished business that surfaced on quiet walks, in journal entries, in old poems, and in vivid dreams. After decades of interruptions, I sat with myself feeling my one breath and listening to my one heart. Although I had done this in short stints, I never developed a regular practice, so it never had a chance to nurture or fully enlighten me. With the best of intentions, I had spent far too much time trying to emulate, educate, protect, and encourage others without giving myself the same considerations.

Stabilitas Loci is an ancient practice of remaining in one place in retreat until reaching a realization or completing an inner task. 

(While some can only do so while exploring new places, some of us need to stay put to concentrate our energies.)

2. To Deal with My "Savings"

While others were saving up money for retirement, I was saving piles of things to address at a later time. There became towering stacks of poems mixed in with urgent receipts, lists of important unread books, unheeded health reports, untasted time-saving recipes, yoga poses never held, emails important enough to have been hard copied, and thousands of photos:

Remember free duplicate copies from the drugstore taking every picture, including the bad ones, and doubling them for you? Trust me, they were bound to end up stacked, piled, and fallen over on the floor. 

All these things together signaled a life that felt like a tangled drawer of cords. While many things earned a long overdue place in the trash (and throwing away even bad photos feels like throwing away parts of your life forever), others called out to be sorted, filed, analyzed, organized, heeded, tasted, completed, and, most of all, shared. But asking myself why I had saved each thing helped me separate out treasures and clean the clutter out of my mind and heart.

3. To Acknowledge, Own, and Define Healing for Myself 

While working simultaneously on the items on this top ten list, I began to untangle things and move forward in life. Dealing with the mountain of poetry sorted into multiple mounds was like deep diving into my subconscious. I could see myself slowly healing my way through childhood and into and through my adult life. Poetry was a train that took me to places inside to acknowledge and heal, so I made reading and writing it into a daily sacred practice. But it was time to bring those old poems and healing into the conscious light of day. Although some were troubling and full of joy, I knew they all deserved more than to lay in those piles on the floor. A good friend asked if I'd prefer to burn up at least the troubling ones, and I knew if I did, they would be lost to me forever. I also had a sense that there was magic in the poems as a collection, and I couldn't wait to see where they would lead. It was an anthropological dig through my own life. I stopped trying so hard to control how it looked and let it be messy and beautiful all at once. As it turned out, laying dormant in those piles was a first book that was raw and unfiltered that turned into a service project, two more books of healing poetry, a children's book (the book I need- even now), and a website that grew into a place to promote healing (atinylight.com) along with an unexpected online presence. Publishing was indeed an unexpected turn along the way. Following my dreams put me in the right place at the right time with the right pile of poems in my hand when that opportunity presented itself. While some might wonder how those things were healing, they were the reality of every meme or quote that swears that bottling things up will eat you up (worse than a demanding job), and getting them out in the safest way possible is essential to real authentic fulfillment.  

A burro once, sent by express, His shipping ticket on his bridle,

Ate up his name and his address, And in some warehouse, standing idle,

He waited till he like to died. The moral hardly needs the showing:

Don’t keep things locked up deep inside- Say who you are and where you’re going.

Walker Gibson, “Advice to Travelers”

Don't ever let anyone tell you how to heal.

By the time they do you will have already started anyway.

The minute a knife dips into your heart your body will have been put

on alert

   alarm sounded

   soul set on guard.

You will be on the path with a clear destination…

They will say to leave your couch 

travel, look happy

and you will know that your look will 

never tell the story

   of where you are or 

   where you've been or 

   where you're going or even

bother to give an estimated time of arrival.

–Dena Parker Duke, "ETA",  When You Know

"Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage." — Brené Brown

4.   To Own My Health… it's Wealth, Right? (This included a separate bucket list of medical needs & annoyances)

I am always looking for a savior, especially in my doctors. Around the time of my retirement, my longtime doctor left, and I blindly signed up for her replacement. Luckily, this new doctor took a look at my health bucket list, and we began going down it together with a plan of action for each item. We started with the story of my heart:

Many years ago, I was persuaded to take my 2-year-old to a chiropractor for an ear infection right before he was scheduled to have tubes placed in his ears. The treatment worked almost instantaneously, which convinced me to undergo a screening X-ray for pain in my neck (on an ancient machine that looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s). The doctor then, forced by Idaho law, disclosed that he inadvertently saw some hardening of the arteries in the X-ray. I didn't know what to do with that information but shared it with my old doctor, who promptly put me on a statin drug (based on the x-ray and family history of my father and all his brothers dying of heart disease), and I took it blindly for decades. Over time, several ultrasounds were done that possibly detected a microscopic thickening, but the medication was never fully discussed. Every year, when I had my cholesterol checked, this doctor would remark how well the statin was at keeping my numbers low while I kept reminding her that they had always been low and that was not why I was allegedly taking the drug. Being a rule follower, I kept taking it. Thank goodness my new doctor finally joined me in trying to decipher if that was the best course of action. That took me to a lipidologist specializing in people with low cholesterol whose bodies still manufacture plaque. After a heart scan (to determine once and for all if there was actually a significant progression), a stress test, and extensive blood analysis, he determined that I was not getting any benefit by being on this drug and that my heart was in good shape (and set up a five-year plan to monitor it). It felt so good to check that off my list in red. But it was there I also learned that I was carrying a substantial cardiac risk in my sleeplessness…

5. To Learn How to Sleep Again 

I slept like a baby until I had a baby. Being in baby bliss, I didn't pay much attention to it. In fact, I took pride in doing more with less and less sleep. However, the constant interruptions of my sleep seemed to put it in jeopardy of going away altogether. I began to let unhealthy sleep habits accumulate. For the first time, I desperately needed coffee and was put on a sleep aid that lasted for 25 years. It was not supposed to be physically addictive, but I became psychologically addicted to it. A sleep doctor ordered a sleep study where I discovered that even though I didn't fit the stereotype, I had 17 obstructions to my breathing in one night and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. I was referred to sleep therapy, but due to the sheer volume of people with sleep disorders in my town, my only choice was to attend group therapy. I sat in the back of a room crowded with military personnel with support dogs, older men with breathing problems, and a multitude of other sleep-deprived women (each sharing something in common with me). Together with them, I battled through this with increasing urgency on top of the addiction, school projects, report cards, sub plans, planning playdates, trying to remember dreams or poems, and, by that time, that sweet baby who had become a teenager in the throes of puberty (which makes it doubly hard for a mom to sleep). I was now not only in a battle with sleep but, eventually, with menopause, too. The years had piled up until I had a rubber band ball too big to unwind easily. I made some drastic changes to save my sleep, but I knew I wouldn't totally get through this until that baby was fully grown and I was in full retirement. It took a full two years after retiring to break the addiction, find the proper treatment for my sleep apnea, and make sleep the comfort it's meant to be. But slowly I began to cultivate hours of REM and deep sleep into 5-6 hours a night, which I learned may just be enough for some of us.

Sweet sleep syrup

I want to suck

you down in slurps

and swallows not

stopping to burp

back or savor. 

–Dena Parker Duke, "Sleep", In Your Bones

6. To Get "In Shape"

I didn't know how much I needed to heal my relationship with food and my body until I tried to get "into shape" for the first time in my life. As someone who never struggled a lot with weight, I didn't truly understand how destructive the pull in our culture is for all things related to diet and exercise. It is pervasive, mostly unquestioned, and runs deep. Like most people in America, I was always on a diet of some sort, even if it was nothing more than having a growing list of taboo foods. It was a surprise when I did what always worked before but started to gain weight. In a panic, I went on a "reset" diet and eventually lost 15 lbs. I was feeling very cocky while slowly realizing I had gained another obsession, another addiction. I was already counting and calculating every single minute of sleep and meditation, yet I began to viciously count calories, carbs, my heart rate, and zone minutes. I was counting everything with more brain power than the things that actually counted. It became clear that I was headed down the wrong path. 

     Step off the scales and quit counting 

   every single thing

          calories & lbs

screen time & likes

sleep scores & silent minutes

     ounces & scoops

    reps & steps

   carbs & crunches 

     every single heartbeat         

Instead

breathe

move

eat

connect

sit 

meditate

listen

live

–Dena Parker Duke, "Note to Self", atinylight.com/poems 

I found a deep, hungry longing inside to honor myself just as I had by being assertive about my healing and growth and seeing it all as interrelated. I began to use that same approach to what went in my mouth and how I chose to move, vowing to take charge of this and do it my way. So, this goal became the big "unlearning" before I could even begin learning to listen to the hunger I had silenced. I realized I was addicted to dieting as a way of life rather than living. I gained back some weight and then stopped tracking it. However, over time (and some weight training), I lost an osteoporosis diagnosis and went off another drug!! But, getting "in shape" has taken on a new meaning and is more about trusting myself on all fronts. Intuitive eating has helped me regain an appreciation of the diversity of food around us and use it to nourish my body rather than as a tool to constantly manipulate.

Our addictions will honestly be the death of us,

left unchecked becoming a drip that eats 

away at our power and strips our rock hard 

resolve rendering it powerless and pitted.

They take something we once loved and set it so 

high on a pedestal that it can't possibly satisfy and 

all we can do is bite, snort, chug, and buy more  

until we are consumed by our own ruthless cravings.

It's when we habitually go past the point of full that we 

lose touch with enough, or when we ignore our own 

pangs of hunger or thirsting for all that nourishes and 

quenches and completes us that we lose 

our clock, our compass, our captain.

If we let them reign we are saying 

it's done, impossible, finished.

If we don't, then maybe we can get on 

with the raw satisfaction of living.

–Dena Parker Duke, "How to Live", When You Know

7. To Own My Style and My Stuff 

There was a time when creating fabrics and clothing to dress your body was necessary and considered an art. Now, the idea of personal style seems trivial, but deserves to be acknowledged because it was such a surprising outcome of owning my own life. One of my many "aha moments" was realizing I was trying to hold onto many potential lives in my closet. I had accumulated all types of personas that I could put on. One of the joys of being young is tapping into the realization that you get to create yourself and your life. Part of growing up is settling into who you really are, which requires you not to keep trying on other possibilities every day. While having an eclectic style is fine, having full wardrobes for all possibilities is too much, especially when many are stiff and don't fit who you are. I started divesting myself of the many clothes (and things) that didn't feel right. It was much more than just getting rid of my teacher's wardrobe. The more my clothes fit my life, the more I let loose a multitude of options. I also indulged in wearing things I didn't feel I should at my age (i.e. welcome back to overalls and chunky earrings). It felt good to let so many things go to people who could use them and, in doing so, get my closet into "shape," narrowing it down to what mattered most and learning to value my opinion and choices. I also slowly broke myself of the habit of using piles and stacks to put things that mattered in amongst things that didn't or using the floor as a work surface or storage space. 

"I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, 

I…watch my reaction to it…" –Father Richard Rohr

I also learned that doing laundry is a spiritual practice with the best of them…

Look after your laundry, and your soul will look after itself.

–W. Somerset Maugham, How to Love Your Laundry by Patric Richardson

8. To Undergo a Relationship Inventory: Let Go, Claim, and Reclaim Relationships 

It had been dawning on me for a long time that I had many judgments but didn't know myself. So, my first order of business was to get to know myself on a deeper, more compassionate level. The best tool for me was the Enneagram (an in-depth system of analysis for personality types), which taught me that the Golden Rule was not enough. The first thing said about it was that it could bring peace on Earth because it could help us transform the golden rule into: Treat others the way they need to be treated (vs. treating others the way I want to be treated). It helped me gain a profound understanding of my natural tendencies and recognize others', thus providing me with much-needed insight. It stopped me from expecting others to recognize I was trying so hard to treat them well when they might even be triggered by what I generously offered. From there, I began to focus on those closest to me, even though that meant facing some cold, hard truths, regrets, and changes. It was painful and powerful. Our most important relationships are by far the hardest to maintain. Those are the folks we are plowing through life with, the easiest to take for granted, the ones that we have to keep changing with through the years, requiring us to adjust and recalibrate. Next began the work of looking at all my connections and determining how to disconnect and reconnect to rebuild a renewed circle of support and love. The beautiful thing about this goal is that it was more of a by-product of everything I did to build a more authentic life. It was a natural pulling closer to those ties that were real and a falling away from those that weren't. As certain clothes felt more comfortable, so did relationships. I became more intentional about what I needed and more realistic about what was right in front of me. I joined some new groups and left others behind that weren't serving me well. Consequently, I enjoyed relationships more and felt their natural give and take. I also enjoyed making more new connections than ever. It was one more way of getting myself "in shape." 

9. Inner Sight (Insight- Contemplation 2.0)

All my life, I've been told what to believe. It was so forcefully imposed that I had to suspend all belief to find one true thought about it for myself. I also saw this happening all around me and found it to be preposterous, violent, arrogant, and ignorant. I resented feeling like I couldn't have a spiritual life because of it. So, after a couple of decades of only being open to a Mystery (agnostic), I set out to see for myself if I could have a personal relationship with a higher power that could enhance my life. I wondered if, rather than threatening or embarrassing me, it could include calming daily spiritual practices rich with meaningful rituals and sustaining inner peace. In doing so, I discovered that my early longing to be a nun (not even knowing what that meant) was a deep longing for a spiritually whole interior life that would include contemplation and the profound reflections of a writer's life.   

Contemplation allows us to see the truth of things in their wholeness…

 [it’s a] gift that detaches us…from our addiction to our habitual way of thinking…

And that takes a lot of practice–in fact, our whole life becomes one continual practice.

  –Richard Rohr, Just This: Prompts & Practices for Contemplation 

I got serious about this when I signed up for an 18-month spiritual quest program complete with my own "spiritual companion," whom I met with monthly. It involved six retreats focusing on forgiveness, healing, and various practices, engaging me in deep spiritual topics that touched on meaning and service. I was introduced to a smorgasbord of spiritual practices to try out. While I assumed meditation would draw me in, I found it challenging not knowing how to deal with my constant inner chatter. Centering prayer was the thing I most avoided as prayer felt tainted, but it eventually became the most intriguing once the leader pulled out a poem to center on. It was the perfect portal to draw me into meditation. That led me to directly explore the trauma I had around religion and realize all that was standing in the way of love. I felt like a spiritual refugee because I had let someone else's cruel God not only limit me, but also define who I was. I started to develop my inner sight (insight) into how to make the inside of me match the outside. It was then that I became acquainted with the wisdom of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was surprised that some of my Top Ten were tried and true practices of The 12-Step program (i.e., the relationship inventory). From there, I found that AA had a whole section devoted to those recovering from life in severely dysfunctional families, and this offered some structure to help me heal. Through the years, I also found therapy, hypnosis, and energy work helpful, and it was delightful to discover so much support in the world everywhere once I opened up to it. This was by far my most significant and fulfilling accomplishment yet. The healed, contemplative, spiritual writer's life all started to feel just right (of course, all of those became aspirations of my daily practices). 

      There are times we get called into blinding 

darkness 

like a seed

     to smell rich dirt and

       feel moisture filling our cracks

     To learn the invisible art of absorption to 

      slip us out of our stiff coatings

      to experience the adventure of 

     naked roots plunging deep 

    down below the surface into 

new sights

insights

-–Dena Parker Duke, "Insights", atinylight.com/poems 

10. Outer Sight 

I placed what I feared the most at the end of my list. Even though my Father passed on in 2013, he generously bestowed on me a genetic eye condition with one treatment: corneal transplants. For 12 years, I waited to go blind so I could face this treatment. In those years, the treatment became more refined and accessible, even in my hometown. The timing coincided with Medicare coverage, which helped cover it all in full. So the most significant thing on my list ended up being, if not a breeze, at least manageable. Over the last year, making it through two corneal transplants made me ready to forge ahead with seeing my way through the rest of my life. What felt like the biggest challenge I would have to face turned into the quickest (only 11 months compared to the other things on my list, some of which are ongoing). This ends in a whimper because the thing I feared most was not to be feared at all. Yes, I had a brush with tissue rejection and will probably use eye drops forever, not to mention it only lasts for around 15 years, but I made it. It's behind me. My eyes are now "in shape". I can see. 

And in closing, I want you to know that before those surgeries, 

I took a delightful trip to France 

with old friends!

And since I haven't yet "kicked the bucket" 

I get to start on a whole new list… ~dpd :)

What’s on your list today??

Tiny Lights (Souls I am Grateful for)

Someone recently asked “Why did you write a children’s book?”

That question made me take a look back at the work I’ve done in my life. Way before I began my teaching career I worked for 6 years as a play therapist with preschool kids who were homicidal and suicidal. Before that I spent six months working nights in a residential treatment program for teen girls. That was before the 30+ years as an elementary school teacher with kids of all sizes, delights, and heartaches.

Although I planned to save them each in one way or another, they instead taught me what it really means to be resilient and to heal and grow from the inside out.

This poem is dedicated to them all, and so is Your Tiny Light: The Divine Light you Carry.

Thank Goodness

I once knew a 5-year-old who maintained a catatonic state in public.

On a surprise visit to his home, he ran head-on into me, coming around a corner screaming. 

At that moment, his worlds collided, and he knew I knew. Thank Goodness I could now pop bubbles

over my face and understand that while peeling them off with great

fanfare, he might be able to crack into the smallest of smiles.

I once knew a 4-year-old who was never spanked but held off an overpass when he was naughty. 

I eventually understood that he often had to be restrained with his back 

to me to accept any arms ever going around him. 

Thank Goodness we found a way to turn that into a secret

hug while the havoc he kept reliving was painstakingly chipped away at.

I once knew a 6-year-old who covered herself in warm saliva and hid when

told she’d be turned over to her father, a stranger, rather than the

safe new family who had already inscribed her name in gold on the wall.

I thought I could write an affidavit to the court to save her, but thank Goodness

the stranger’s 5 a.m. shootout with police that day saved her, if not him.

I once testified in court against a man chained to a table who wanted his

daughter back. Thank Goodness she didn’t have to be there because

my bones went soft as I told him, along with the whole court, how her healing mattered

more than any of us, while he sat growling and

rattling his chains at me.

I once worked from 11pm-9am in a home for teen girls. 

I was told my #1 job was to get the laundry done while they slept. 

Thank Goodness I learned quickly the real job was to be on nightmare watch every night, 

which required me to sit scared for hours in the dark and 

listen more carefully than I ever had before in my life.

I once knew a 16-year-old who ran away and was found two weeks later living

under a porch with some cats. She came back, but she missed it. 

Thank Goodness she finally aged out of required care so she could begin the hunt

in earnest to find a better place to miss and, 

maybe someday, to belong.

I once knew of an 8-year-old who hid in a pile of bodies to remain undetected

by soldiers. My heart broke for us both because even if I couldn’t fathom

why that had to happen, I somehow understood how he could do it.

Thank Goodness he lived to tell his story.

In my social work days, I thought that I would take kids with “disturbing”

behaviors and somehow make them “normal.” Thank Goodness I learned that

by the time I reacted to their reactions, I had already missed that they may

be having the right reaction to disturbing situations.

The best I could do was to bear witness to the trauma they were forced to

witness, suffer, and endure. We learned together to follow their reactions

to find the specific definitions of their “normal,” and it was always clear how,

while pushed to the brink, their spirits worked overtime to devise creative

plans to save their souls. I worked overtime to make my

required “treatment plans” reflect that.

But I never saved anyone. Any saving that happened came from inside them. 

I only hoped to never get in the way. 

Thank Goodness these young saints saved me from thinking that I was anything but 

normal for how I’d faced the hands dealt to me that had drawn me into this work in the first place. 

They proved to me how inner wounds go to miraculous extremes on our behalf, even in our dreams,

 to point us toward healing if only we have the stamina, luxury, and opportunity

to follow their lead.

dena parker duke @tinylightswrites A tiny light

Listen Up

Put Your Hand Down

You are lucky if you can be quiet

when someone else speaks but

that does not guarantee you are 

listening

Listening means paying attention

especially when you don’t hear

what you want to.

If you’re not careful you’ll miss

the truth and without that you’ll

never know what your next step

should be if any

Listening is not passive

It’s the only way to choreograph

your dance with grace compassion

and most of all with power especially 

if what you hear leaves you weak 

in the knees

Listen to yourself with the same divine precision

and you will always know

what’s next

@denaparkerduke @tinylightswrites @atinylight

There are certainly plenty of things that we don’t need to listen to.

But we have to listen closely to know which ones those are.

Having surgery on my eyes has turned my attention to listening. When one sense fails you, or simply needs a rest, you keenly appreciate all the others. While endlessly listening to books on tape and podcasts I have been amazed at how listening often just lulls me to sleep. At least with a book you can pretty quickly find your spot again. With listening alone you don’t search for the spot where you fell asleep but the spot where you stopped listening, which is never the same place. Trust me, this often leads to having to listen again to large portions of text you don’t remember hearing. Unfortunately, as in life, a lot of words slip past that we fail to hear.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how much we need to listen to each other, especially if we disagree, and how, perhaps that is a lost art, or completely gone. But I wonder: How do we truly listen and then respond especially when what we hear is threatening, alarming, or just simply in dire need of a counter response? We certainly can’t do it very well if we haven’t first listened well, but it still may require a dire response or action on our part. We simply better make sure we were awake enough to have first listened well.

May our best listening come hand in hand with the best of our attentions. 

Insights

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. ~Marcel Proust

When teaching, if I dared to remove my glasses to wipe them or rub my eyes, my 2nd graders called out for me to put them back on quick!

They were not having it even after explaining to them that this was what I genuinely looked like. I had betrayed them by suddenly not looking like the person they recognized and trusted. I didn’t take it too personally, but I did have dreams (starting in 7th grade) of what life might be like to not need to wear equipment to correct this handicap.
 
I remember how my mother and her siblings fought over whether my grandma should wear her glasses in the coffin. She had firmly said that she had “worn those damn things her whole life” and she didn’t want them on her face for another minute.

Still, in the end, the living won out because, just like the 2nd graders, they didn’t recognize her without them.

When I learned about 12 years ago that I had inherited an eye condition that would eventually lead to blindness, I pushed that reality aside to deal with until it became unavoidable. That day is here. What that means, besides my vision is starting to go so I can’t even depend on my glasses, is that I have had a laser bore a hole in my eye to relieve pressure so that I can undergo a corneal transplant with natural tissue from a generous donor which includes having an air bubble inserted in my eye to hold everything in place (which means lying horizontal for at least 24 hours after surgery), enjoy a 1-3 month recovery using drops to discourage a rejection of the tissue, then update the lens in my glasses to match what I will then see (or not), then start all over on the other eye…both of which may last for 15 years or so, if I’m lucky.

This has got me thinking about seeing: what we see, how we see, other ways to “see”, and who we really are when even someone else’s tissue can not offer up (or rejects) a new lease on these windows to our world.

Saying “I see” is often another way of saying we understand. But what do we “see” when we can’t actually see? Can we still understand? What I do know is I will come to appreciate these glasses that I have broken, cursed, and maligned for so long. I will also be grateful and amazed for being gifted someone else’s tissue to “see” me through. I also hope to gain a small understanding of those who have no choice in the matter and live rich lives every day without any visual aid.

Insights

Like a piercing light into our eyes that forces
us to see too much,
    There are times we get called into blind darkness,
like a seed,
to smell rich dirt and
feel moisture fill our cracks
          To learn the invisible art of absorption to
slip us out of our stiff coatings
            to experience the adventure of
naked roots plunging deep down
below the surface into new sights,
in sights.

dena parker duke

check out poems page

Express Yourself!

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather,

the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

– Glenn Gould

In college, I had to be videotaped while conducting an interview, and I was overly petrified. I had been raised to be seen and not heard and was far too comfortable with that. Surprisingly, when we watched the videos back, the professor used mine as the best example of calm composure. While others sang my praises, I was consumed by just how big of a difference there was between looking cool and collected from the outside and the flood of turmoil swirling around on the inside of me. It is ironic that I now find myself encouraging people to express themselves when I have mastered the art of suppressing so much, so very well. However, I have seen and felt the crushing effects of what repeated repression can do to a soul, both personally and in my working life. 

My first job out of college was working from 11pm-9am in a treatment center for “wayward” girls. Although my job description was centered on getting the laundry done, I found out soon enough that I was really on nightmare watch for teens who could only face their realities when they were unconscious. Through them, I learned to pay attention to what was buried deep inside, longing for a way out. It was there I first discovered that creativity lives in our dreams as our minds use sleep to sort through the endless dilemmas we face and that even in our nightmares, there are glimmers of a universal propensity to heal. No wonder so many great works of art center on the dream world.

I went on to work with young kids who were considered emotionally disturbed. One was suspended over an overpass as punishment, another was so paralyzed with fear he couldn’t move or speak in public, one had been so neglected in her crib that her eyes and head were misshapen, one only knew violence and was homicidal, another suicidal, to name only a few of their challenges. I saw firsthand how deep disturbances can sometimes be normal reactions to crazy circumstances. Some were not even speaking yet, so their trauma had to be addressed on a nonverbal level. The arts became essential to open their hearts to the harsh realities they were forced to face at no fault of their own. It was too hard to bear the starkness of their problems without something to put their hands deep into to ease them toward healing. Art therapy became the means for finding them just the right medium. I spent more time up to my elbows in playdoh, paint, bubbles, and mud trying to see a spark go off in their eyes. Some needed healing words, some needed color, texture, music, movement, to be building things, speaking the truth, crafting…or some other creative endeavor or combination thereof. It was a momentous day when the boy who couldn’t move finally tilted his head enough to make the block I’d placed there fall off. Over time, he used blocks to build and build his way back into the world. Every time a creative spark is ignited and something “speaks” to us, there is a reason we might not even be able to articulate. It isn’t always just in the service of healing, but part of the natural wonder of creativity with its amazing healing effects, like spreading aloe vera all over what ails you. Let’s face it, even Hallmark movies have the repeated plot of repressed and unhappy people finally doing what they knew all along they wanted to but just couldn’t express.

It’s no surprise that poetry and lyrics were where I started taking baby steps toward expressing myself since they allowed a little distance between me and my own vulnerability. Creativity was a safe buffer for beginning to turn myself inside out. And for someone of few words, playing with words seemed like the best elixir for me.

...creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to [an] audience…

–Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Unfortunately, we can see all around us the havoc repression is wrecking on the world way beyond Hallmark. We are constantly looking for why mass shootings occur, why people are arming and/or harming themselves, and why mental illness and isolation are on the rise. Perhaps we are getting too good at denial. I am not saying we all should be enraged, but I am saying that we are all capable of heartbreak and despair in the right circumstances, and they can be instantly thrust upon us at no fault of our own. And it can become much worse by not finding an outlet for expressing our despair. Think of the Ukrainian people and how so many of their lives were shattered instantly. Many became refugees from one minute to the next. We are all vulnerable. We are all capable of repressing things, especially those we don’t dare utter or expose, atrocities we just as soon leave buried in the rubble.

Thanks for Bricks 

thanks for bricks that hold the sun’s rays to 

warm backs even while the concrete

sidewalk freezes beneath them

thanks for those who let their mouths bend 

into smiles though their 

bodies can’t comply

thanks for clouds that provide a place for mist

to huddle until drops form to fall 

and quench a dry earth

thanks for empty riverbanks and holes to 

cradle water that wants to seep 

into every crack

thanks for safe refuge from hate, weather,

gaslighting, cold, judgment, corruption,

hunger, superiority, and all the rest

thanks for the reminder that we are refugees,

all, each waiting our turn

at safety

dpd

I was afraid to open up because I didn’t know how to handle conflict. If I didn’t trust myself with my anger, I certainly couldn’t trust others. But I also saw that there was no healing or forgiveness without it. That little boy who’d been held over the overpass would often lose control and I’d find myself needing to restrain him so he wouldn’t hurt something. The restraint involved putting my legs out in a V and sitting behind him, holding his arms across his chest until he calmed down. Sometimes I’d have to even gently lay one on my legs over his. Over time I understood that this was his chance to work out his rage safely. I took to talking in his ear as he struggled, letting him know it was okay to be angry, that he had some good reasons to be, and that I wouldn’t let him hurt himself or anyone while he let it out. There even came a time when he’d seek out that spot when he was calm and we’d rock back and forth, both of us holding ourselves and each other at the same time. He taught me a lot about how to get to the other side of anger so that healing, if not forgiveness, might someday be possible.    

Forgiveness I

Don’t you ever let anyone tell you how to forgive.

Go right ahead and hold on to those hurts until

they have taught you every single thing you need

to know. They’re yours and nobody tells you when

or where to let them go. Don’t let anyone say you 

will love yourself more if you drop them and then 

to hurry up and get along with things.

No. No, no. Forgiveness is letting your fury rise;

letting it rise up inside so high you can finally see

that it wasn’t all your fault. Anger is the sword

to scrape away denial letting the cold acceptance of

what has happened settle in your heart like a sunken 

ship. That is the only thing that will protect you from

saying ridiculous things like No problem or It’s no 

big deal or That’s fine…

excerpt from In Your Bones

Is simply expressing yourself the answer to all our traumas? Of course not! And we often can’t do it thoroughly or very well, all alone. There is no shame in using help to get there. There is also no shame in trusting ourselves more. But, we can do a lot of damage by stuffing it down and hiding it away. We are the only ones who know what creative spark we need to grow, heal, and truly be at peace. Whatever way we find to be who we are all the way through to our bones, our own truest divine expression will ultimately be the end result. It’s a lot messier than a Hallmark movie, but it has the potential to have an even more satisfying ending. 

And so, may we all find ways to express what is most unspeakable in our lives. May we learn how to offer support to ourselves and reach for help when we need it. May we see more of the pain that we or those around us carry, sometimes without even being aware of it. May we hold our children through both their spoken and unspoken heartaches. May we know when to let go. May we listen better.

Here’s to finding more ways to love ourselves better, and all those around us, on this spinning planet we share.

The Irony of Healing: Laughter is Good Medicine

Ironic: happening in the opposite way to what is expected, 

typically causing amusement. ~Siri

"Having a good laugh is like putting down a heavy load and sighing with relief at how

 light you feel." Day by Day: A Treasury of Meditations on Mindfulness

"I have seen what a laugh can do. It can transform almost unbearable tears into something bearable, even hopeful." ~Bob Hope

I'm not gonna lie, but I am bothered by how much it irks some people that I want to share very personal things. However, it is ironic to be bothered by other people being bothered. Humor allows for a loosening of the reins and lightening up, which is why it is a great companion on the healing path. Even the act of baltering (as illustrated above) points to the joy found in dancing "gracelessly" for pure amusement, which is the opposite of what's expected and exactly why enjoying dance and music are also great companions on the healing path. 

To see the irony in life is a great gift, a survival skill you will want to teach your kids. It means that you can take a step back and let loose: laugh, awkwardly dance, step out of yourself for just a moment, and let in that crack of light or breath of air. While it is really irritating to hear someone tell you to "chill" or "relax", when you embrace irony those things will come to you naturally of your own choosing. Inviting it in just might lighten your load filling your weary mind with levity, new direction, and renewed purpose. The beauty of finding what makes us laugh is personal and you get to customize it to what resonates for you. If you've ever found someone in your life that "gets" your sense of humor, you know how much of a connection that gives you. It's not just a personal connection but a connection to a whole point of view that can be shared through books, music, movies, knowing glances, and so on. Just like you can sing love songs to yourself, it's pretty great to find a humorous connection to yourself (I've been known to throw myself a knowing glance when I find just the right joke)! For example, although this eventually turns into a more serious poem, I loved the irony of questioning whether we have to always honor the old adage of the fruit falling far from the tree:

The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree

but let’s hope

that’s not all true.

Let me pick which

parts or how 

far to fall.

If the tree could only

respect this unnatural 

selection, I would 

be grateful.

Let me hold on to the straight

teeth and curly hair, and

order up his legs and 

her green thumb.

Cut the freckled skin,

bitter tongue, and…

excerpt from "The Fruit Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree…", In Your Bones

While I have talked a LOT about the things that get in the way of healing (addictions, negativity, fear, noise, etc.), not having a sense of humor might be one of our biggest roadblocks. In nurturing your own sense of humor you are encouraged to not take anything too seriously and get a greater understanding of what matters most being able to laugh everything else away. Laughing, or even just smiling, does something magical. I guess that's why thousands have been lining up on social media to watch the Earl of Dad Jokes, Lucas Alifano, who can't get through a stupid joke without his own giggling getting in the way while many of us get the biggest kick out of just watching him laugh. He is living proof that sometimes humor for humor’s sake is exactly what we need. Healing and humor don’t have to go hand in hand, and yet, it is amazing how many times they are intertwined. I haven't seen anyone marry the power of humor in healing more masterfully than comedian Hannah Gadsby in her 2018 comedy special Nanette and in her own take on comedy. I recently attended a beautiful memorial service where I was also reminded how close comedy sits to tragedy. Somehow holding them together makes each more poignant. For almost two hours we laughed and cried our way through the memories of a beautiful life and it seemed like it was meant to be that way, at least sometimes. Often at the most important times. 

The bottom line is we need humor to accompany us on this rocky journey of life, no matter what state we find ourselves in.

If you catch me on FB or IG you will see that I often post jokes, cartoons, and music of all sorts. I'm not trying to convince you that I can be fun (although that would be nice, ha!). I'm doing it because humor has always been a part of my healing, as much as writing poetry. It's also amazing that, like poetry, there is music of every kind and jokes for every taste. Finding something that soothes or humors you is as healing as creating a customized playlist of all your favorite "hits". In other words, the sounds, rhythms, and ironies that resonate with you are yours alone. It's all about knowing what makes your divine self tick and building your healing, and your life, around that. That fits right in with my belief in customizing your healing journey (i.e. The Forgiveness Poems, "ETA" from When You Know). And I love the irony of taking a trait and giving it human characteristics like in this poem:

Pity Full

Pity is a poor excuse for a friend.

It is the one who always has to be seen sitting beside 

you but won’t stay for the whole time.

It is the vice principal who may be on the lookout to 

save you from your vices but doesn’t want you to show 

up in the office on Friday afternoon after 3. 

They are all the ones who want you to think 

they always know better:

The surgeon who left a pair of scissors in you 

The chef who won’t shut up and let you chew

The masseuse who leaves you tense

The teacher who leaves you dense

The stylist who won’t listen and says you look great 

The virgin who doesn’t even know why she’s late

The dog who doesn’t need a walk

The extrovert refusing to talk

The predictable cat 

The unwelcome mat

The ones who provide you with an 800 number 

that’s been disconnected that you can’t

even remember.

When You Know

May it all be so (in unexpected ways causing you some amusement)!

Honoring Your Hungers: The Secret to Satisfaction

The worst secrets 

are the ones 

you don’t know

you’re keeping

that settle

in your 

bones and 

seep into

those hard 

white spaces 

that are alive 

with growing 

and breaking.

–dena parker duke

excerpt from “It Is”, In Your Bones 

Secrets go hand in hand with hungers. Hungers often come with shame because we are compelled to hide them, which is how they become our secrets. Labeling our hungers as addictions seems almost unspeakable, yet there is a lot to be learned by what we find most unspeakable, by what we are ashamed of. I will always be grateful for poetry and lyrics because they helped me put into words what I couldn’t otherwise utter. They were also the only things anchoring me to deep goodness underneath all that was dark and painful. However, it took decades for me to share my poetry. After In Your Bones came out, I had to work through a lot of shame over sharing my deep, dark secrets. I described shame personified like dogs we feel compelled to carry around in bags. We often don’t realize we can set shame down and get it “out of the bag” like the old saying about cats, which also applies to our secrets. Freeing our secrets, listening to our hungers, and setting down our shame allows us to find legitimate ways to get our needs met. This can lead us to real satisfaction.

Shame

Big eyes that stare and lips that 

pout and whine all through

the night keeping the 

gaslight lit.

But, it can be set down; 

not fed; ignored 

and tuned out;  

ties cut; flames 

blown.

–dena parker duke

excerpt from “Shame”, In Your Bones  

What are you deeply hungry for? So hungry, in fact, that you might be tempted to hide that fact away in shame? Let’s liberate our secrets and hungers, setting them free. Here are some of mine:

• I am hungry to enjoy food, but not let food own me. The Diet Culture Rebel blog inspired me to connect eating to my actual hunger instead of what other people think of my body. It’s so sad that so many of our secrets and shames are tied to food when it is simply there to sustain and nourish us. How many other things in our lives are there to serve us, yet we become servants to them?

• I am hungry to dance. I have lived with a great big rubber band ball of emotions for a long time. It’s taken almost a lifetime to pull it apart and feel what I’m feeling. That’s why I love to dance. Dancing feels like unrolling and dropping everything standing in the way of joy.  

A woman may…feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm [and] return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon stained. 

–Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Women Who Run With Wolves

• I’ve had family hunger for as long as I can remember, complete with the fantasy of myself surrounded by the perfect family. After almost a lifetime of hiding that hunger, I am happy to report that I recently got plugged into the famed 12-Step Program AA uses. Not much of a drinker, I have used the program to learn how to reparent myself with a safe space for all the various parts of me, my “inner family.” It’s never too late to reparent yourself and to know there are fellow travelers and guides along the way. As a result, my dreams for having a happy family are being born out inside me. As my brother-in-law always says, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”! This has been a game changer, and even though it would make a perfect “secret,” I am happy to share it with anyone who will listen.

We are standing on the precipice of disaster if we

don’t embrace the fact that we are truly

surrounded by a new, improved definition 

of what it means to be related.

–dena parker duke

excerpt from “Facebook Family”, When You Know

• I’m hungry for family and dancing, at the same time! I had a deep longing to dance at my son’s wedding party. Between Covid-19, cancellations, hard feelings, new plans, and a mushroom trek that turned into a week's stay in the hospital for my husband, it never happened. Someone said they were sorry I didn’t have an audience to dance for, but the truth was, I longed for the presence of this new family to dance with. And I longed to celebrate this new, bigger safety net of family ties, especially with my sweet son. I got obsessed with envisioning us dancing to LunchMoney Lewis - Mama (Lyric Video), having everything melt away, leaving nothing but love and belonging. But as it got closer, I felt myself pick up that bag of shame. The shame of trying to impose a song that on the surface sounded like it was just about me and one, that on top of that, was tied to my hungers, my secrets. However, when I heard in the lyrics that this is for all the mamas, I was reminded how tied we all are to a network of mamas, a network of hungers to be nurtured, fed, and protected. When I saw a beautiful picture of my son with his new mama-in-law at the event, I felt blessed and relieved that he had other mamas to draw from when I couldn’t be or wouldn’t be there. I realized that he was going about the work to parent himself and place himself in the family of things, as beloved poet Mary Oliver states as a place available to us all. He gave me permission to let the day be about love even though we wouldn’t be with him. In doing so, he assured us that he was finding his own ways to be cared for in a world where our hungers often have to be fed in creative and innovative ways. As Thomas Moore says in Care of the Soul, we can all “mother” (and “father”) ourselves if we need to through music, literature and poetry, other relationships, learning to nurture ourselves, and so on. 

Whoever you are, no matter

  how lonely,

the world offers itself 

  to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese,

  harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing

  your place

in the family of things.

—Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

• I am hungry for my own mama-love. Being obsessed with that song and dancing to it alone made that clear. Trauma often involves something essential being taken from you. In my case, it was words. While many words were being thrown around growing up, mine were not among them. For years I thought that the remedy for this was, as Maya Angelou so eloquently states in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, to find my voice and speak up. Eventually I learned it was more complicated than that. I didn’t know until recently that there were even more secrets than I thought and that took a greater toll than I knew. Many things were kept from me. While others might have seen this as providing me with protection, I’m only beginning to unravel how damaging what is not said can be. All my childhood days were filled with fear, not because something terrible happened every day. It was fear of the unknown. It was an unnamed sense of dread. Fear of slipping up or something slipping out. It was hard straining to hear and to not hear, the fear of being the youngest and having to bear witness to everyone else’s traumas. The fear of unspoken truth was a heavy blanket laid over everything. Unfortunately, my mother was a great source of this silence. Although she was a sweet soul she just couldn’t bring herself to speak the unspeakable. I grew up screaming inside and asked her for help in every silent way I could. After my siblings were gone I couldn’t even make eye contact with her anymore. I longed for someone to track me down and loudly haul me out of danger. I lived for action and words. I chose to rail against anything even close to a secret. I found out that her parents decided early on to shield their children from hearing any arguments. If they had them (which surely they must have) they kept them secret. She was defenseless at 19 when she married without any problem solving skills. This made me hunger for something she could simply never give me, which I would have to find elsewhere and learn to give to myself. And, of course, my heart goes out to her and all the secret shame she had to bear on her own, the many hungers she, too, must have carried.

If we are lucky enough to be able to see our hungers for what they are they can point us directly to the things we need most. The problem is when they get veiled in secrecy and hidden it’s difficult to set them free and get them “out of the bags” we carry around, sometimes for a lifetime. But we can be free of them, and in doing so, expose them and find ways to feed them openly without hurting ourselves. It is something we have control over, with the help of our higher power as we know it (as AA teaches). We can find and be our [own] clock, our compass, our captain. Don’t ever lose that or hide it, but if you do, it is possible to find it again.

May it be so.

How to Live

Our addictions will honestly be the death of us,

left unchecked becoming a drip that eats 

away at our power and strips our rock hard 

resolve rendering it powerless and pitted.

They take something we once loved and set it so 

high on a pedestal that it can’t possibly satisfy and 

all we can do is bite, snort, chug, and buy more  

until we are consumed by our own ruthless cravings.

It’s when we habitually go past the point of full that we 

lose touch with enough, or when we ignore our own 

pangs of hunger or thirsting for all that nourishes and 

quenches and completes us that we lose 

our clock, our compass, our captain.

If we let them reign we are saying 

it’s done, impossible, finished.

If we don’t, then maybe we can get on 

with the raw satisfaction of living.

–dena parker duke, When You Know

You have everything inside 

that you need right 

now.

It has always been within you

from the very 

beginning.

It doesn’t have to take

a lifetime for you to 

know.

But it’s ok if it does because 

it’s not going

anywhere.

–dena parker duke, excerpt from “All the Time”, Tiny Lights

Getting Grounded: Finding a Vision

How to find your aura

Many years ago, I had someone read my aura. She held my hands and told me to close my eyes. I couldn't help opening one eye only to see her wincing. She eventually explained that while she expected my aura to be bright and strong, it was surprisingly wispy and slight. She said this was due to my need as a child to be safe by spending time on other planes rather than grounded and present on this earthly plane. If that weren't clear enough, the visual that came to her after that was one of a chrysalis fallen on the ground with the butterfly halfway out. She told me that the work of my adult life would be to decide if I wanted to come out and be here, and in doing that, I could reveal my authentic aura. She gave me exercises to ground myself, like going out into the yard in my bare feet and rubbing them against the earth every night before going to bed.  

While I still don't know what to think about auras, what she said about where I had been so far rang alarmingly true. Although I probably never did enough foot rubbing, my life's work has certainly centered around learning to be present in my life and not the life I saw in my head, which was firmly planted in the clouds. It was much safer up there, but it wasn't a place to build a real-life, so hearing this was helpful, at least for a time. After years of trying to visualize myself crawling out of that chrysalis and spreading some beautiful wings, I shared that vision with a counselor who saw me as more of a balloon that could use some tethering, or I just might float away (or fly away like a butterfly). 

Being grounded can be elusive but so worth it

In spite of whatever visual might fit at any given time, I have been on a long journey toward what it means to be grounded and whole. As much as I want to see myself as a butterfly (not stuck halfway out of a hollow shell, or needing to be tied down), one of the joys of maturing is you don't have to merely sneak a peek at what someone else determines fits for you in terms of a vision, a direction for your life, or anything else. And, even if a good visual helps you (or a good theme song) like it does me, like an avatar, you can change yours at any time in any way you see fit. And more importantly, at some point, we all have to be the captain of our own ships. The most valuable visuals and visions need to come from within. That's how we also know they will resonate.

So, if I were to pick a visual that suits me now, it would be the unglamorous fulcrum of a teeter-totter that sits at its grounded center, letting me move with the ups and downs of life, the balancing center of a scale. What keeps me on the fulcrum in my life? How do I keep that balance from tipping over or being flung constantly back and forth between wildly conflicting points?? 

Fulcrum: the point on which a lever rests while it "teeter-totters" up and down in response to the pressure on either side.

I find that every little bit, I need to stop and question where I now find myself and what the next grounded step will be. The longer I live, the more often that step includes living with more paradox than ever before. No wonder I have so many mixed feelings about being present. It's hard to be present with a constant bombardment of things that seem to cancel each other out, or at the very least seem, to be in conflict with one another.

Paradox: something with "contradictory features or qualities". 

No wonder life is hard. We walk one way only to be diverted another way. Every. Damn. Day.

Love yourself, but beware of being a narcissist; have an abundance of self-care, but no selfishness; heal, but always with a smile; let go, but hold on tight to every blessed thing; think the best of everyone, but don't bother with what anyone thinks of you; eat, drink, and be merry, but don't become an addict… 

But the question is, what really "grounds" me or you connecting us to what is here and real? How do we all keep coming back to be present instead of flying (or running) away? That centering, grounding, and balancing practice comes from inside. It no longer comes from what someone else sees or interprets for me. I now have the presence of mind to look and feel what only I can see and touch- my own experience. I am grateful for those who took the time to give me some perspective and food for thought along the way, but I'm especially grateful for stopping myself from a practice that protected me well as a child, but was no longer serving me. Even though others helped point me to it, it was mine to find and claim. Does that mean I no longer am bouncing around? Of course not, I live on a teeter-totter. But it does mean I don't go too far from home for my answers anymore. I stay closer to my own center. I'm clear now about closing my eyes to see, and I can assure you that when I do, I see my "aura" strong and bright. 

Poetic Healing: How Poetry Saved my Life

On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.

—Pablo Neruda 

Poetic Healing: How Poetry Saved my Life  

The day I discovered a slim volume of poetry called Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows by Rod McKuen, I realized that poems didn't have to rhyme. You can use them to talk about anything stripped of pretense or sentiment to say what's in your heart, and that can be amazing- in fact, it can save your life. If he could write the truth about waking up on Stanyan Street, then I could write the truth about waking up on Fairacres Drive. At about the same time, I started listening carefully to song lyrics and realized that they were all made up of poetry. And poems kept finding me like contemporary poet Naomi Shihab Nye says in an excerpt from her poem “A Valentine for Ernest Mann”:

You can't order a poem like you order a taco. Walk up to the counter, say, "I'll take two"

and expect it to be handed back to you on a shiny plate...

I'll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping.

They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up.

What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

Poems Have Been My Lessons From the Universe

In looking back over my life, I can now see that poems have been showing up for me, like messages in bottles washing up on my shores, at just the right times in the strangest places. I discovered my Grandma Claytie had not just ridden her 3 wheeler around Burrton, Kansas selling insurance. When she wasn't crashing into ditches with only a spinning wheel as a signal of where to find her, she had been a poet. She'd written a poetry column for the Burrton Graphic called Claytie's Corner back in the early '50s. Although her poems were filled with sentimentality forced into a rhyme scheme, the beauty of everyday life shone through them - the perils of not enough soap for boy's ears, crying children, sore and beautiful hands. They reminded me of an old picture of her hand holding mine up to the camera to show off my wedding ring. Later, the scene rang out in my poetry about how the spirit in her hands transformed my life. And then I stumbled upon retired insurance executive from Nebraska, Ted Kooser, who wrote these exotic lines about merely peeling a potato: "Pablo Casals should see me now, bowing this fat little cello, peeling off long white chords…". He later was named the US Poet Laureate in 2004 and 2005 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His poetic scenes of everyday existence included an elderly tattooed man's perspective at a yard sale, pantry shelves, and even the kitchen sink. My favorite was about giving a love poem he hoped was still warm from sitting in his back pocket. And these all made me look around and see the world differently. I began to see beauty and poetry all around. I saw love in how my husband handled roadkill, passion in a dirty hat, displaced grief for my mom in trying to love a cat, compassion for my Father's simple need for a comb in the ICU, and on it grew. 

Without studying poetry or learning about it, I found myself living within it. It opened my heart up to deeper sacred truths found in the most mundane things. The ordinariness of the poetry of McKuen, Grandma Claytie, and Kooser reflected the poetry in every movement and every moment: true mindfulness at its best. I could also feel a nurturing assurance that their words somehow watched over me. Thomas Moore explains that if our fathers can't father us, sometimes literature and art can, and poetry did that for me. As a primary school teacher, I rediscovered the legacy of nursery rhymes and made it my mission to make sure every 2nd grader I knew became intimately acquainted with them. I purchased a collection of 45 classic rhymes read by English children that I played repeatedly to ensure that my students could use them at night to put themselves to sleep. I knew that even with a free breakfast, lunch, snack, and weekend backpack program, some of my students would still be going to bed hungry. And yet, if poetry is like bread, as Neruda said, I wanted it to feed their souls like it fed mine. 

Reading Poetry Expanded my Wisdom About Unrelated Things

In 2009 I made a trek to Boston. Every day I walked from Beacon Street to downtown and curled up in front of floor-to-ceiling windows in the loft of the biggest Borders store I had ever seen. On the first day, I came upon a book entitled Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions by Robert McDowell, and it curled up with me. It spoke of poetry connecting us to the two most profound conversations possible- that which we have with ourselves and the one we have with the greater mystery out there -the divine. It talked of how reading poetry can make you into "…a tuning fork of the Divine". It spoke of how it can be used as an integral part of a daily spiritual practice that can lead to a stillness or calm center where we can be most open and alive. And it talked about poetry being that "collective celebration of the sacred" that I indeed had felt but didn't yet have words for. It talked of how "Our mother's rhythmic breathing, heartbeat and physical rhythms, which we know in the womb, are our earliest experiences of poetry" and how these "Shards of simple poetry…lodge in our physiology". I took comfort in knowing that with all my mother's shortcomings, she started me off with poetry as even the most broken mother does. We all come from rhythm and magic.  

The book also talked of how writing poetry "…opens windows, doors, and opportunities." I kept writing and reading each day. In doing all of this, I found myself amid a profound and nurturing conversation that put my heart in a holy place. It was healing, and poetry can open us up. When we write our words down, we get to live longer. I never tired of hearing my students' shock when I told them their words could live longer than they could. Showing them how my grandmother's voice is still alive even though she's been dead for over 30 years was amazing. The truth is, I didn't even get to fully know her until I discovered her writing, and that was long after her death.  

Imagine you have gone down to the shore and there, amidst the other debris- the seaweed and rotten wood, the crushed cans and dead fish- you find an unlikely looking bottle…. You bring it home and discover a message inside…thus it is for all of us who read poems.... I am at home in the middle of the night and suddenly hear myself being called, as if by name. I go over and take down the [poem]- the message in a bottle- because tonight I am its recipient…its heartland.  

–Edward Hirsch from How to Read a Poem, and Fall in Love with Poetry

Whether we write poetry, memoirs, or anything else, we can all read poetry- and there is poetry on every topic imaginable. Millions of messages in bottles are all around us waiting to be found washed up on the beaches of our lives. Everyone can take a poem, a lyric, or a sacred text and get out of it something they need. The range of magical, lyrical poetry with all its metaphoric images holds something for each of us in whatever form it takes. It simply means there are words we need to hear out there to counteract some that have merely been thrown our way. We can find them, craft them, and intentionally internalize them to build lives we choose full of purpose and love.

Poetry Even Helped me Connect with my Son

I often think of my son and how even in the days when our minds and hearts were miles apart, we shared an iTunes account, which meant our music was entangled. I found incredible delight in hearing that he would find himself at work with his hands elbow deep in hot water, and one of my English nursery rhymes would come blasting into his head and he would be helpless to hit the forward button. I am not sure if he understood that he used to play with those tunes like silly putty, turning Old King Cole into Old King Soul while throwing his head back in a belly laugh like only a 3-year-old can. I can see the threads of his love for those words into creating the lover of words that he is today and that I am so fiercely proud of and admire as a person and as a poet in his own right. 

I suppose it was poetic justice that I would find myself driving across town with B.J. Thomas blaring and suddenly be overcome by the earthy rhythm and lyrics of “Dear God 2.0” by The Roots:

Dear God, I'm trying hard to reach you

Dear God I see your face in all I do

Sometimes, it so hard to believe it…

But God, I know you have your reasons, too

We used to have these "face-offs" where we would try to understand each other by playing our best lyrics to see if the other could appreciate them, and that was my only glimpse into his heart for years. I didn't want to understand his lyrics. As cool as I wanted to be, I had trouble looking past the profanity, but I had to admit, they would slow me down by the side of the road to take in some of the most profound poetry I'd ever heard like a sharp gasp of breath. They broke my heart and broke me down. Then he wrote me a Mother's Day poem entitled “Deadline” that started off:
As time goes on, the ticker keeps tickin’,

The image of younger me in your mind is still stickin'

There is no replacing what you say to me,

And the truths that I get to see

Coming alive in front of me…

And I wrote back in my journal:

You are a sun, my son.

A ray spot of light.

Honing your blade with words…

In that silent exchange of words, we were partaking of bread together and meeting in a holy place; the windows and doors were opening. 

In this season of strife where unkind and even untrue words are like hammers pounding into our temples every day, don't we need more poetry? Don't we need more ways to reach across divides, to translate our love and longing into something we can see and feel; something real? Don’t we we need some magic and some healing? Then let their be more poetry in our lives.

May it please be so.

Love Thy Self: The Stories We Tell

Loving yourself is a divine thing to do.  

It can seem very complicated, especially when we are stuck inside our minds with secrets or stories we don’t understand, or that aren’t even ours. I was stuck there for a long time carrying so many secrets and so much shame. I circled round and round not feeling like I was going anywhere. Healing started when I started to understand that these were just stories and they weren’t even mine. It made me feel lost to let go of them, but it was a turning point.

It pushed me enough to quit circling ‘round so I could begin spiraling out of it which gave me some new found self respect.

Loving yourself starts in the shadows.

It’s easy to get stuck. Robert Johnson, author of Owning Your Own Shadow, says that refusing to own our shadows can get us into real trouble, not just as individuals, but cultures, as well. He says we can “store up or accumulate” things in the shadows that can show up as war, racial intolerance, chaos, and so on, in society, if we fail to address it. That chaos can end up inside us, too. But it is not the darkness that is the problem. The problem is in the avoidance. Although I moved slowly I began discovering great things like it wasn’t all my fault and I could set shame down and just leave it by the side of the road. There was a lot of value in learning to face those things with kindness because it led to self-compassion which is essential. It led to a place of peace within myself, and it led me to see a divine place inside where love lives, the part where we all matter.

In doing so I showed myself the greatest love and care I ever had or ever could. 

Learning to love yourself can be messy.

Self-love can be messy because it’s so easy to avoid and overlook ourselves. This puts us at risk because we forget what we know. We forget to listen to ourselves. We often feel selfish just considering what our souls are longing to say. Self-love is about making vows to ourselves and making space for others to do the same while respecting the boundaries. It takes self-compassion along with empathy while never losing touch with who we really are. It is more than stating an opinion or booking a massage, and it involves more than someone saying sorry or following someone else’s steps to heal, grieve, or know. Loving ourselves is about staying in touch with what we know deep down.

The good news is that it’s never too late to face what is hard to face, and it is worth the effort to move past it to get to what is divine. 

Move to loving your higher Self.

We can’t talk about self-love without talking about having more than one “self”. Instead of having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, maybe they’re both angels. Perhaps one is our small self, or ego, and the other is our higher Self (more likely sitting quietly at our core). The one is nervous and working overtime to make us look perfect, the other one knowing we can relax and let go. If we listen to our small self it will always tell us to fight for more, be easily offended, focus on “me” over “we”, and won’t be helpful when things get tough. If we listen instead to our divine Self (which is a lot quieter) it will always lead us back to a place of compassion, for ourselves and for others. So as we are trying to live lives of passion and meaning we may be side-stepping a bigger question of what it is we are listening to. We can go careening into the world without listening to what sits at our core. Or we can align our passion with compassion and give our higher Self a place at the table, give it a voice in our lives, ask for its direction and blessing. In doing so we will have less need to fight or take things personally, and it will always point toward what is best for us all.

Even better, it will be right there when things get hard or we get confused about what Self-love truly looks like.

The sooner we recognize and honor that presence, the sooner we can find greater love within and build a loving world to inhabit together. 

Let that sink in. Let that be enough.

The Meaning of Contemplation: A Fortress of Strength for Life's Challenges

Recently I’ve been thinking about how to define contemplation more fully because it has become such an important source of peace in my life. I always wanted to be a nun, which is odd because I'm not Catholic. I didn't know any nuns, and the only one I ever saw was Sally Field playing The Flying Nun on TV. It took many years to realize that I wanted to be a nun because that represented someone with a rich inner life reflected in a confident no-nonsense exterior, much like my sixth-grade teacher, Audrey Cutts. I didn't know her well enough to know about her inner life, but I could tell she was assertive and strong on the inside. I wanted to have that confidence and whatever it took to support it. Even though I often looked calm on the exterior, I grew up with a hurricane inside that often felt out of control. To find that calm became an important quest in my life which often looked like it was only taking place from one end of my couch to the other. It was inner work, but I somehow knew the challenge and adventure of finding and creating a contemplative life would be worth it.

Contemplation is something that can be developed over time through deliberate practices. The meaning of contemplation is being reflective to the point of having a direct experience with all that is "divine" inside you. It's an ancient and divine practice that is about the wholeness found in being "with yourself" and building up your capacity to get in touch with and appreciate the essence of who you really are. As such, it means using practices that allow that to happen regularly and increase the amount of silence and solitude to make space for that. They can be as simple as having frequent "phone off" times, going for quiet walks or seeking out silent retreats by learning to meditate through the use of guided meditations and/or centering prayer. Using your body through yoga or even mindful stretching can help you be more still and present. Walking meditations can bring the body and mind together to be swept off to a more mindful place. Meditative movement of any kind, and the beauty and balance that comes with it, can bring an overall sense of connectedness and well-being. Most importantly it means giving yourself the gift of time to carve out a place for contemplation in your life.

I, like so many of you, am on a journey to improve my consistency in practicing these kinds of exercises. Historically I have meditated or prayed with one eye open and have had to be carried out of yoga class for rushing a stretch and pulling a ligament. I have been one who was always hurrying up to reflect and not taking even a breath before I talked. However, that made me one who has needed this in my life most of all, if for no other reason than to protect myself against myself and calm down that hurricane. That still small voice inside always knew and has pointed me in this direction. Thank goodness all of these practices have helped keep my ego in check and my addictions, which we all have, from assuming a greater place of prominence in my life (more on that another day). I can testify that these practices have helped restore balance, perspective, and personal satisfaction with what "is", not how I wish things would be. In whatever form it takes, contemplative life can lead to that feeling of wholeness, which is defined as being in harmony, unity, and balance. If it can lead me there, I think it can lead anyone to that place we all seek and deserve, no matter what challenges may stand in our way. We can make it so by making space in our lives and by simply returning to that space, again and again. Let us make it so collectively, in the name of contemplation and the strength and wisdom that it brings.

Dena Parker Duke

Check out the poems Audrey and All the Time, found in Tiny Lights: Small Poems for Big Moments.

Roadkill: How to Retell Your Story and Reinvent Your Life

When someone asks me why I write, I think back to something that happened years ago that profoundly affected me and changed my life in an instant. Oftentimes, it’s the smallest moments in life that can have the biggest impact.

As a young married woman in a writing workshop, I was asked to pick a family treasure to write about. I was blank. Quickly I began thinking about what makes something a prize in a family, and I knew it had to represent some amount of love and evoke deep emotion. I scanned my brain for what might fit that bill and nothing but one ridiculous word kept swirling around. I dismissed it for being such a lame idea and blamed my family for not offering many treasures to choose from. Some people in the group were having trouble picking just one while I still sat blank. Is this what happens when a nuclear family sells everything off but a few resentments to leave Kansas* and strike out on their own with only a car full of kids and a Folger's coffee can to pee in? By now people were beginning to share. I had to confess to having nothing while trying to laugh off the crazy thought going through my mind. The instructor asked kindly if I would be willing to share, and I gulped. Under my breath I uttered the word roadkill, hoping he'd move on, but that stopped him dead in his tracks. With eyes cast down I noticed he had Danner boots on with a little bit of mud on the edge so perhaps he had some strange appreciation for roadkill, too? I tried to describe how I was perplexed watching my young husband's curious reaction to seeing roadkill on the highway. While I expected to be embarrassed by the instructor's response, he prodded me to continue. I explained that while I obviously knew my new husband was a nature-loving biologist, I was shocked by his fervent affinity for animals, both dead and alive. In order to truly understand him I needed to see the world differently which meant I had to look with new eyes at roadkill, and this was stopping me dead in my tracks.

The instructor chuckled with a delight that only a poet and outdoorsman himself could muster. He explained that being a country boy from Tennessee he knew all about using Borax to treat and preserve animals into “study skins” and understood the beauty of doing so. After being sent off to write, I attempted to piece together the vivid story now set in my mind and somehow form it into a poem. I jumped at the chance to have the instructor look at our writing before sharing thinking he could weed mine out or help me somehow. The next day he headed straight for me, paper in hand. Uh-oh. He held it out and said: Do you know you have written a love poem!? I had never written a poem on purpose before, let alone a love poem*. He handed me the prize and set me up on an empowering path. Sometimes we have to “unlearn” something in order to be open to a new way of thinking, a new way of loving. In that moment being open lead to both finding my unique voice and rewriting a story I didn’t even recognize as my own.

In hindsight I had a hunch that roadkill evoked the love and deep emotion of a family treasure even though I couldn’t tell you how or why. Yet, somehow this instructor knew and followed his own instincts to help me see that and voice it. He knew with the proper crafting of words I could even carve an heirloom out of it, and he trusted me to figure out how. He believed I had what I needed inside to do it. He also believed in the power of using the right words in the right way to tell your story, and, most importantly, of working with and honoring what you have. I’ve come to appreciate how much wisdom he passed on in offering that up to me. Much like he prodded me to speak my truth that day, I encourage you to give voice to who you are in spite of how it might look or sound from the outside. Find that story by befriending the deep thoughts that you keep coming back to. Let them speak to you. Let them surprise you. Be empowered.

Here are 10 practical ideas to empower you to tell the messy, beautiful story of your life, your way:

1. Don't rule anything out. The possibilities for how to tell your story are endless. Look everywhere. Be open.

2. Don't listen to anyone but the still small voice inside. You are the only one who knows if you are going the right way. Respect that voice. 

3. Learn to follow your gut. Sit with your Self (not your ego). Block out the noise so you can hear it. Train yourself to listen. 

4. Don't expect the way to be straight. It might feel like you're going in circles, but it will spiral into progress when you are ready. If you are circling back, there's something more to feel, heal, and/or reframe before you spiral on. That’s OK.

5. Don't blame anyone else for being lost or not handing you what you want. You aren't lost. You just have to step onto the path you are blazing with each step. Keep going.

6. Don't give up. You may have to start taking the step before you see where it lands. Be empowered. Do it anyway.

7. Have some faith in yourself. If you've lived long enough to have a story to tell, count yourself lucky enough to know which way to go. Then go there.

8. Don't push the river, flow with it. Let yourself be surprised by where it takes you. You might even be surprised at where you’ve been. Keep your mind full of wonder.

9. Don't be scared off. Fear can be there, but you can choose to walk right by it, or through it, or around it. Don’t be afraid of the mess or the beauty. Just tell the truth.

10. Don't be ashamed of your story. No matter how much you wish you were on someone else's path, you're not. Name it and claim it. Whatever it is, it's yours. 

*The poems referred to here, 1957 and Roadkill (a love poem), can both be found in Tiny Lights: Small Poems for Big Moments.

My Surprising Quest

Photo compliments of Dena Duke

“...awareness of...the friendly light inside, the tiny and usually ignored part that hasn’t been faked, cheapened, or exploited. It is an infinitesimally small point of light…”  --Anne Lamott Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage

In 1990 I came to the Boise Unitarian Church (BUUF) a religious refugee. I welcomed an environment that didn’t try to name what was holy or even expect that anything had to be Holy. I was living in liminal space (the great “in between”) for years, and BUUF was a safe place to land. I grew up with a gas lighting guru God who was exclusively male, judgmental and cruel. Unfortunately, he was also the first one I called on when I was suffering, and I felt more comfort in that than I wanted to admit. As I began to untangle that rubber band ball the healing journey became a spiritual one. 

With that kind of ambivalent attachment I couldn’t bring myself to become an atheist. There was great relief in learning that being agnostic meant that there still could be some kind of mystery out there, and that fit fine for a good long time. I healed myself through a couple of decades with that belief. When a friend recently said she had fired her Higher Power I realized I hadn’t quite done the same, but I certainly rejected the one originally forced upon me. 

In 2017 when I heard about the Quest program offered at BUUF, an 18 month spiritual quest, I was ready to understand more of that mysterious mystery. The biggest surprise during this time was having to admit to myself how little I was in contact with myself. Although I felt pretty darn woke (which should’ve been my first clue) I came to realize I was not centered on my True Self nearly enough. I had swallowed the lie that the God handed down to me, handed me, which gave me no power or value or strength. As a result I spent way more time reading and listening to others than listening to any Inner Teacher or nurturing any “small point of light”. I hadn’t spent nearly enough time in the deepest space inside where Anne Lamott suggests there is “relief from anxiety and self consciousness, where there is room to breathe, to settle in, settle down, mull things over without anyone’s hot breath on our neck.” 

When asked to cultivate a spiritual practice during Quest I immediately leaned toward yoga and meditation because I already used them both with some success. They were outward motions of what I longed to do better on the inside. I leaned away from centering prayer because it sounded like everything I was running from. It wasn’t until sampling it that I realized I was protesting too much because after establishing it as a practice (which Buddhist Jack Kornfield calls creating “inner art” and Fr. Thomas Keating “divine therapy”) I found a wide open door to that deep space, and others willing to go there with me. 

In that space I have learned many things. For example, if there was ever an entity that needed rebranding and new pronouns it was God. “He” was much bigger than a gender or a name. The ancient Jewish people didn’t want to limit “him” with a name so for a time they even removed the vowels from YahWeh making it Yh-Wh, becoming simply the sound of breath. With sacred breath I learned to more fully come out of what Lamott refers to as the “casino mind” that keeps most of us from hearing any still small voice, and I made “a conscious decision to begin listening harder [using key words from poetry and/or scripture to pull me further in]. Whether it’s [from] Mt. Sinai, a pasture, a library...or [wherever]...to have a feeling of at one-ish with the universe”. 

In this place of breath and contemplation I have not only been led to a great oneness but also a deep and abiding love that has made everything so simple. In doing so I learned that all my incongruent parts could be reunited. And I learned that wholeness leads to holiness because I didn’t feel like a traitor inside myself anymore. Everything got set right. Now when suffering comes it is not usually the result of my own superficial separation from that light inside of me, but can truly be experienced as compassion for the whole world, the way it was meant to. But the best thing is I’m no longer ashamed of praying to a monster God because I had never been talking to him in the first place. I’m grateful to have created the conditions to reimagine a familiar, vulnerable, and compassionate Presence that I now see has been with me all along.

May it be so.

"May we not neglect the silence

printed in the center of our being.

It will not fail us."

—Thomas Merton

—David Benner, author of Human Being and Becoming writes of the importance of embracing “wholeness” as a path to holiness, which recognizes and affirms the “oneness” of who we are, without needing to eliminate or perfect any part of ourselves. This generates the same goodwill towards others, leading to greater love.

You can find me at “A Tiny Light” (My Facebook Page).

Being “good” for all the wrong reasons

“Without knowing it, we…work hard at cutting a path to our deeper self that waits patiently for us to arrive, all tired, aching, and out of breath. Once that path is cleared and once the being at our center is discovered, we can return to the world in relationship with our soul. We can discover a deeper, more peaceful sense of home.” —Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Being a “goody two shoes” is not all it’s cracked up to be!

According to Wikipedia, “Goody Two-Shoes is a variation of the Cinderella story. The fable tells of Goody Two-Shoes, the nickname of a poor orphan girl named Margery Meanwell, who goes through life with only one shoe. When a rich gentleman gives her a complete pair, she is so happy that she lets everyone know that she now has two shoes. Later, Margery becomes a teacher and marries a rich widower. This earning of wealth serves as proof that her virtue has been rewarded.”

Now wait a minute, Margery! You certainly deserve two shoes, you should not be happy going through life with only one. That will surely ruin your gait. Going barefoot would be better than walking with one, or having two that are mismatched. This story is proof that meaning well and proving our own virtue, while both sound good and may make us look good, can sometimes lead us astray, and on to someone else’s path instead of our own.

There is something not right about being TOO good, or trying TOO hard, or being satisfied with TOO little. Sometimes we find virtue in crumbs and maybe wait around for empty rewards when really what we need to do is find and change our shoes for ourselves.

That may mean stepping into shoes that are stained and tattered, but if they fit right and are all ours there is some virtue in that. We should reach out to help each other, and we need to learn how to accept help at the right times, but sometimes you just have to dress yourself.

You can find me at “A Tiny Light” (My Facebook Page).

Thanks, 2020!

In Your Bones: Poems of Radical Forgiveness was published in May of 2020 in conjunction with Studio M Publications.

Copies of this book have been happily donated to the Women and Children’s Alliance (where they were included in graduation gift bags) and Faces of Hope in Boise, Idaho. Thank you to Carrie Prange, Carolyn Warner and the Southminster Presbyterian Women’s Association in Boise for help in this endeavor. Many copies can now be found in the library at the Willow Domestic Violence Center in Lawrence, Kansas, and some are being used for healing in the Idaho Women’s Prison.

This website, atinylight.com, was first published on September 1, 2020 in an attempt to explain and share the journey of making In Your Bones with the world and to spread more of the light and healing that it represents. Tiny Lights: Small Poems for Big Moments then followed in November of 2021 as another step in shining a light on healing and love.

I remember telling someone I had just retired and she said “Well what are you doing in Boise then?!?” And yet, although I didn’t have a name for it, I was already deep into an ancient tradition called stabilitas loci which is the practice of remaining in one place. Mystics of all kinds practiced this when they made a vow to not leave a place of retreat until they came to a certain realization or completed a spiritual task, much like the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree waiting for enlightenment. I’m no Buddha, but I had a task to complete. 

The year before my retirement in May of 2019 I began to gather together random poems from throughout my life and started to see how they told a story. It was a beautiful story, but it was a hard one. It was that same old story of vulnerable people held captive by a more powerful person’s ego. It was a story that ended with me trapped inside it because the one thing that makes that story work is a pact of silence. When I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou I was transfixed by her ability to not speak to anyone but her brother for 5 straight years after enduring a series of traumas, but when she did speak, we all know how she sang out loud and clear. The world would be more empty had she not found her voice again. I’m no Maya Angelou, either, but I could relate to that bird and to her story. Too many stories end in silence. But silence is no substitute for the outpouring of a heart into words. It can be an earthquake.

It took years for me to understand why I had always wanted to be a nun, not even being Catholic. It was the realization that I needed some peace and quiet to collect my thoughts and process the trauma of a challenging life. But at some point in that process there was a need to talk, to share, to defy the pact. And it’s hard to be traveling when an eruption is happening.

And so I stayed in one place (Caffeina coffee shop, to be exact) and began the exhilarating and terrifying task of pulling the poems of my life into one story. My goals became 1) to select and revise a group of these poems into a storytelling arc, 2) to figure out how to have them made into a physical book, 3) to donate as many of these books as I could to places where they might help someone else trapped in silence. What I did not expect was how much sheer joy all of this would bring me (please read the Prologue). When you live in a cult of silence there is only one dream you dream and that is to be free to express yourself. It’s a greater dream than any travel destination or prize award could give. It’s the ultimate dream. It is enlightenment. It is loud, explosive, and jam packed with words, even before you can voice them all. And from that, In Your Bones: Poems of Radical Forgiveness came pouring out (see books). 

But I was unprepared for people’s reactions to those words. While so many met them with understanding and encouragement, others met them with surprise, maybe even horror. These words brought comfort to some and disruption to others. Some worried for me not knowing how much I was celebrating, even singing. Others were challenged in their own ways maybe by having to think about what pacts they’d, perhaps unknowingly, agreed to. At first this made me want to try and defend this little book, or at least try to keep folks from pitying me. In the end I’ve had to return to just exactly why I wrote it. It was my intent to show a world that will always know gaslighting, oppression, and heartache how a heart lying dormant for decades can still erupt into something messy but totally and joyfully cleansing at the same time. Sometimes you have to stay in one place for all that to happen. Thanks to 2020, for being the year of my finally being able to make it all so…

https://youtu.be/8Lu41LulQos

You can find me at “A Tiny Light” (My Facebook Page).

Someday is Today

Oh the Places You’ll Go! —Dr. Seuss

Are we stuck in the dreaded “Waiting Place” that Dr. Seuss describes as “useless” because it is so easy to be stuck there “…waiting for a train to go, or a bus to come, or a plane to go, or the mail to come, or the rain to go, or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow, or waiting around for a Yes or No, or waiting for [your] hair to grow. Everyone…just waiting.”

Are we stuck? YES and NO. Of course, we’ve all been stuck waiting for a virus to run its course, but inside each of us we have had to decide what that really means. For some there hasn’t been as much deciding going on, just a daily putting one foot in front of the other trying to get by. For some it’s meant despair. For others it’s meant hours to wait and ponder leading some to radically change their lives. And for others it’s meant time to reaffirm and recommit to the path they’re on. For me, this time has made me even more certain of these 3 things:

1) Change is inevitable and constant, 2) We all carry some darkness that we need to acknowledge which just means we’re perfectly imperfect, and 3) There’s a light inside us all and in all that is around us…

These days have also meant more Facebook time where I recently noticed a line from the poem by 13th-century Persian poet, Rumi, that says: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” After people started going back and forth about all the problems we seem to be having knowing where that field is and how to get there, or even in believing such a field exists, let alone what to do when we get there, I added my two cents by writing “we are there”. I see us all standing in that cosmic field, right now, not waiting somewhere or planning to go there. We are already there with our “doings” in hand (both wrong and right) standing face to face. This looks very different than the Waiting Place. This is a Meeting Place. A place where we arrive with our imperfections and perfections, together. We are not simply waiting, we are ready to move on into the next iteration of change we are already and inevitably facing. New choices have to be made. New steps need to be stepped. New courage needs to be found.

Rumi experts say this “meeting place” line was probably not even in the original translation but instead referred to the opposites we are always balancing like darkness and light:  

“In the way Rumi has experienced these two thoughts, they are not in conflict. Each one is neither good nor bad, and instead are part of a unity, like the yin and yang symbol. One would not exist without the other. In the ‘field,’ the gathering place, love overcomes the apparent difference in these two aspects of human experience. In that place, differences no longer have their former distinction, and no longer have any value. [Like] a prism can split sunlight into different colors. When the colors are re-joined into one light, the former differences are of no importance.” —Quora

So, as we move from a waiting place to a gathering place let’s stand in that field, which is right where we live, and move through this new change together.

As Rob Thomas says in his song Someday -

“…when everything is over and done, You can shine a little light on everything around you, Man, it's good to be someone. And maybe someday we'll figure all this out, try to put an end to all our doubt, try to find a way to make things better now.

Maybe someday we'll live our lives out loud, we'll be better off somehow, Someday.”

Let’s make that day, Today.

We are in the field.

Let’s make it so.

tiny lights, don’t wear ‘em out

Image from Mumbai Mirror

It’s been a struggle to find inspiration. I want to blame the state of the world right now, but even without that there’s been plenty of personal heartache, loss, and grief all around me, and in me, to blame. But instead of waiting or blaming I decided to push something out now even if it’s small. Or better yet, because it’s small. There’s only so much we can take at times, and sometimes the best things are better digested in small pieces. I remember when I was pregnant and I couldn’t keep anything down. The doctor said I couldn’t eat until I stopped throwing up, which was not helpful and not happening. Luckily a kind and knowledgeable friend came over who fed me 1 tablespoon of water and 1 bite of a saltine every 15 minutes for hours until I could keep it down and deal with the fact that I was actually starving. We then raced to a place where I could get 2 meaty pieces of buttery grilled salmon and a large peach milkshake, and I licked up even the extra they brought in the frosty silver mixing cup on the side. And as long as I kept eating every 15 minutes for the next 9 months (once an entire party platter of shrimp without even sitting down) I was fine. 

I suppose that’s where we all are- having to find inspiration in pieces, or where it may be scarce, or buried, or small until we can gulp from a fuller cup again. So I went back to the roots of why I started this website. It came out of my wanting to see the light in myself and everyone else. That is what matters to me. It’s about something seemingly small that is such a big deal…

A Tiny Light

Tiny lights could easily dissolve into 

buzzwords full of hot air and smoke. 

But look at them bend trunks their way 

without a touch, glide silently through cracks 

smoother than water, coax a seed wedged 

under concrete to grow anyway, 

To flicker through blackouts easily missed

if we let our clouds overshadow them. 

What some might see as coming straight

from above some would label blasphemy 

which would either make us fan them or 

try to snuff them out.

The only thing left in our guts when 

everything else falls away, deserving

to shine greater than reflections in 

calendar collections, worthy of grand 

poems and babies’ night lights.

One pure narrow beam could make a 

wildfire or sparks to warm a heart.

The one thing illuminating our 

shadows. The presence waiting

deep inside us. The glow

in all our windows.

dena parker duke

from Tiny Lights (see books)

May we shine on in spite of everything.

You can find me at “A Tiny Light” (My Facebook Page).

Say Who You Are and Where You’re Going

Image from Travalanche-WordPress.com

I am the person who took every questionnaire in Glamour magazine to understand myself to no avail. When asked about favorite foods I could only answer what everyone else loved. I had no idea what I was hungry for. Maybe that’s because I was raised on the ridiculousness of Gilligan’s Island, the magic of I Dream of Jeannie & Bewitched and the wisdom of Mister Ed, the talking horse (of course). I remember the day that an argument was going on around me while I kept my eyes set on That Girl with Marlo Thomas. All I could think of was how perfect her smile and black flip were even in a catastrophe, while the world around me was not. But I was grateful for the company and there was much more of it. Lassie taught me how to cry. The Love Boat taught me how to love and The Addams Family taught me the complex art of family making. Church also played a part in my formative years, as both a refuge and a hammer, but I’ll save that story for another day.

I became a poet by accident when I got tired of all the TV words and decided to find my own. Writer’s write, and, to be more specific, poet’s write poems, and I have written a few hundred along with a handful of pretty lame songs. That doesn’t mean I’m a great poet or even a good one. Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the beauty of a poem is in the ear of the reader. But I had a captive audience of one, and so I wrote to hear what my voice sounded like. Over time reading and writing poetry became more comfortable than the other chatter. The thing I’ve loved most about poetry is I can now tell when a new poem wants to be born. Some small but significant moment will plant itself inside me and grow in the dark for a time before the waters break. I might be on a walk or in the bathtub or in the dead of night when suddenly the waters part and a fully formed poem presents itself. I learned if I didn’t somehow start recording immediately that it may be gone for good, but once it’s out it can be as sweet as a newborn. And, like a newborn, it needs to develop and grow and be tweaked in many ways to reach its full potential. But poetry became more than just better chatter. It became part of my bones and breath the way a new life fluttering inside you does. It gave birth to my voice, which sounds corny, but it was almost as much of a miracle as my sweet baby boy.

So, what do I know about life? I am a woman of a certain age, and both of those count for a lot. However, it took a long time before I realized it would take more than a twitch of my nose to change anything, or to know there were a lot more shocking things going on in the world than a white family of hillbillies trying to make it in Hollywood. In spite of all that, or, perhaps, because of the privilege afforded me on the couch, I survived that upbringing and was able to begin untangling a few of my own emotional rubber band balls. But that doesn't mean I can or need to do that for you. Even if I could I wouldn’t because what do I know about what you need? Maybe not much more than Mister Ed. You may be much further down that path than I am or on a completely different one. But you know, or you will figure it out. That’s why the forgiveness poem I wrote that starts with “Never let anyone tell you how to forgive…” applies here so well. In addition to that, never let anyone tell you how or when to heal or grow. You decide. But how nice for us all to have some real good company along the way.

Let’s make it so.

Check out the poem, Advice to Travelers by Walker Gibson (see“about”page).

You can find me at “A Tiny Light” (My Facebook Page).