The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Musings on Being and Becoming Human
COMING UP! ISSUE 23
Follow this link to read our invitation to join us in framing and filling Issue 23 as A Time of Harvest. We invite all our readers, and especially those who have contributed articles, poems, stories, photos, interviews, reflections, and reviews to begin now to review, reflect, and interview yourselves for the next several weeks and to submit thoughts about your own lives to our meeting of minds and hearts in this soulmaking salon setting. As you can imagine, going back to 2005, that includes a lot of creative people who have continued toward their own maturity as The Grapevine has worked and played its way toward Issue 23.
Issue 22
Soul Talk
Some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul-making. John Keats
What is the soul? You may ask.
Can you see it? Yes, in the attentive gleam of another pair of eyes.
Can you smell it? Yes, in woodswalking and in petrichor, the fragrance of dry earth as it becomes soaked by rain.
Can you taste it? Yes, in honey from the hive and the ancestral mix of cooking spices and in the knowledge that much of the world is edible.
Can you hear it? Yes, in the howl of a single wolf or a symphony of cricket chirps or in words spoken by lovers and poets.
Can you feel it? Yes, in the throbbing touch of one love body with another and in the movement of sympathy, the grace of empathy.
Soul creates a force field that holds conditions for compassion and harmony.
Soul pays attention, responds with connection, savors meeting and making love.
Soul moves hands to shape gestures of love and creativity.
Soul renders lead into gold, coal into diamond, oysters into pearl but does not value money as an abstraction.
Soul drives heart and mind toward perception of meaning and into meaningful action.
Above all, soul flowers. To make soul is to cultivate the garden of our life's experiences in such a way that we flower into all that we can be as we live and love and work in this world.
The unique "privilege"of human beings, in poet David Whyte's perspective, is that we can refuse to flower.
Most people have an intuitive understanding of what is meant by a "person without soul." Many writers today have notions of what "loss of soul" refers to: the absence of or diminishment of those traits that support the individual in a quest for wholeness. What happens when a culture experiences loss of soul on a large scale and becomes dominated by exploitation, cruelty, chaos?
We call our journal an art and soul salon. In this issue, we want to consider some insights for living in such a world and for kissing it, as we once taught our children to do by kissing their wounds, whether on the skin or in the emotional layer of the heart, to make it all better.
For more Soul Talk, see Barbara Knott's "Conversation in Quotations" in ENTERTAINING IDEAS, along with her elaboration "Soul as an Agent of Yearning," where she explores James Hillman's answer to the question, "What does the soul want?" Soul poets to explore: Rumi, Rilke, Keats, Yeats, Mary Oliver, David Whyte and so many others, some of whom are represented in this issue of The Grapevine.
Issue 22 of The Grapevine features a variety of written pieces. Barbara's work includes reviews of Diane Ackerman's I Praise My Destroyer and David Whyte's The House of Belonging in VIEWS AND REVIEWS and her own praise poem in PRESENTATIONS, where you will also see the work of Dianne Seaman, Bam Dev Sharma, and Jonathan Knott. In the PRAISE POEMS column you will meet Asiimwe Simon, Collins Hillz, Saviour Onyewuchi, and Collins Emeghara, all of whom we discovered in the international writers group, Motivational Strips, on Facebook. You will also be introduced to its founder Shiju Pallithazheth and his new book Katashi Tales. Enjoy our new focus on praise poems and their role in enlarging the worth of creation in its eachness, from ancient to modern times, among all humans everywhere.
Charles Knott is now hosting the REFLECTIONS column, a chamber for personal reminiscences and reflections on learning and teaching while living a long life. He has a particularly interesting take on the importance of theater in his own individuation. The WHY WE LOVE ATLANTA column showcases our personal gratitude for the opportunities and challenges that come from the Atlanta Writers Club. TRACKING HISTORY turns up a poem from the past by Jonathan Knott who, in a few strokes of his pen, brings to life his maternal ancestors who are the subject of his mother's much longer ruminations in a novel manuscript mentioned in her AUTHOR PAGE. WORLD VOICES brings back Ravi Kumar's piece on fending off vultures in a wild jet plane flight in India.
Nancy Law, in AROUND TOWN WITH NANCY ROSE, once again goes out of town and across the Atlantic (to Shetland Island) for a travel feature. MUSEUM revisits a tribute to Leonard Cohen whose death nearly three years ago came just as our government was changing to its present configuration, a synchronicity we are still thinking about. In DUBLIN DIARY, our "romantic poet" photo of Noel Duffy becomes more real in the presence of one of his poems from his collection On Light and Carbon. We have changed our CONTRIBUTING WRITERS column to CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS so that we can more properly recognize two people whose contributions can't be contained in the word writing, since most of what they contribute is visual art. Now we have put them together with a new writer, and we are presenting them as our Three Graces. We would like to thank Sandy Mason (who prefers to be identified as sandy mason) for her vibrant photo contributions, including the closeup of an emerging flower above. See her new page as one of our three graces, along with Kathy Miller and Laurie Ann, who also have pages here.May you as readers feel the richness of embodied expression we have worked to assemble and create for this issue!
See this link to The Grapevine, Issue 21 for David Whyte's poem and a related discussion of flowering as a central metaphor given by nature to all of life.
Sources
The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958, pp. 100-104).
Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft (Novato, California: New World Library, 2003, p. 43).
Attention: We now have a Facebook page on which we are posting photos, videos, and evocative quotations as well as questions or comments from the writing staff, along with featured articles. Our plans are to include a roundtable group for comments that are not simply reactive but are also thoughtful and heartfelt, comments that may generate real conversation among readers of The Grapevine. Our intention is transition away from publishing separate issues to an ongoing publication of the journal.
NOTES ON NEGOTIATING THE WEBSITE: If you are a new reader of The Grapevine, WELCOME! Please click on our open door below and read introductory material. If you are a returning reader, we welcome you back. You may wish to go directly to the buttons on the left and begin exploring pieces assembled for this issue.
Some of the links inside articles will take you into the archives. You will need to return to "Home" at the top of the page to get out of archives and back into current material.
Spreading the Word
Please help us reach potentially interested readers by sending out The Grapevine link to family, friends, colleagues and, where appropriate, to any mailing list accessible to you. Who knows how many conversations we can start? We won't count, but we count on you to spread some words. Thanks!
THE DOOR IS OPEN. Come in....
The SALON presents a variety of writers and image makers, from promising beginners to seasoned artists. Anyone who wishes to submit a piece for our consideration can send it as a rich text format document (rtf file) through e-mail to associate editor Jonathan Knott: jknott@grapevineartandsoulsalon.com.
The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon welcomes comments from visitors. General inquiries can be sent to webmaster@grapevineartandsoulsalon.com. All our regular contributing writers can be e-mailed directly (click on Contributing Artists and open specific pages for e-mail addresses).
Editor and Host: Barbara KnottAssociate Editor: Jonathan Knott
Image Design: Bill Kennedy
Regular Contributing Writers: Ravi Kumar, Bill Kennedy, Nancy Law, Charles Knott, Jonathan Knott, and Barbara Knott.
Opinions expressed on this site are the opinions of the authors themselves, not necessarily of The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon. Each page on the website should be read in conjunction with this disclaimer.
Copyright 2019 Barbara Knott, All Rights Reserved