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Newsletter #144: Winter Solstice

ROBERT MCDOWELL’S NEWSLETTER #144
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Winter Solstice Sale
December 2014
Winter Solstice Greetings and Blessings,

The days grow shorter, the nights longer. In the delicious dark, relax into the sweetness of your surprising, sullen, sad, snappy, sagacious, silly, shrill, snoozing self, and cut yourself all the slack in the world. Luna is patient; Venus is wise and forgiving. Where you fell short in 2014 is illusion; what you envision for 2015 is illusion. So, what’s real? Here, right now. This is the sum total of your life, precious. Be calm. Embrace. Serve. Live!

The moon neither laughs nor cries.
A fox curls up in its den.
The nights are so long you forget
Your name and where you were going.
Keep on. The road is familiar;
The road is haunted and intimate;
The road is where your foot falls,
You of a thousand names and faces,
You of the town and country bred,
You of promises kept and broken,
You forgetful and forgotten,
Breathe. You are here,
And now is eternal.

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In celebration of the winter solstice, I offer a unique sale. Email me at rmcdowell@mind.net to take advantage of it.

Details: Purchase a copy of Poetry as Spiritual Practice and/or The More We Get Together: The Sexual and Spiritual Language of Love for $15.00 (each); I will sign the copies and give you a one-hour writing consultation (normally $150.00) for free.

If you want to start writing, or move along a stuck writing project in prose or poetry, this session will help. Email rmcdowell@mind.net to procure your books and set up your special free session.

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NEW BOOK PUBLICATION

My fourth full-length collection of poetry, The World Next To This One, has been published by The Salmon in Ireland and is now available. http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=328&a=257 Order direct from Salmon Publishing, Orders over 20 Euro are shipped free worldwide! Please help us spread the word.

“Robert McDowell’s powerful narrative poems are among the best written over the last fifty years. His para-poems here extend the prose poem form with incisive, probing clarity and startling wit.”
–Ai, National Book Award, Poetry
May your long winter nights be delicious and cozy!
Robert
rmcdowell@mind.net
poetrymentor@mac.com
www.robertmcdowell.net
Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/McDowellRobert

Read A Friend’s Heart: Blog Post

Read a Friend’s Heart
Follow me on Twitter
www.twitter.com/McDowellRobert
November 17th, 2014
Leonard and Virginia Woolf
What are men to do?

In 1920, Virginia Woolf published a brilliant story, A Society, which concludes that war and brutality are distinctly male in origin, and that the world will never know peace until men have babies and so acquire through experience reverence for all life.

My puny masculinity and gender-enlightened, awakening self agree, yet Woolf’s declaration and my agreement beg the question: what are men to do?

There is no solution in having babies. I’ve had three, or rather, I was a spectator/participant at the birth of three, and though I saved my wife’s life during the third delivery, I’ve never had any doubt that she always performed the heroic, transformative journey, not I.

Having babies, even once removed, has made me more dovish than hawkish; I do revere life more than I did before. Yet, I’m keenly and poignantly aware that I lack what Woolf required of me—a visceral, experiential connection, through giving birth, to life itself.

There is in all men a precious fragility that perversely seeks to crush what is fragile in others. Call it a motor impulse that makes an aggressive male driver suddenly yank the wheel of his Cadillac to the left so that he can squash a pelican that has wandered onto the blacktop of Highway 1 near Monterey. It’s the impulse that coaches and teachers use to shame young men for their perceived weaknesses. It’s the madness that drives the rapist and passive-aggressive abuser of children, women and men. Call it the make-war impulse. Men possess it, or are, perhaps more accurately, possessed by it, than women.

So, I ask you: what are men, and women, to do about this? I welcome your thoughts, your wisdom, your anger, your insight.

Book recommendation:
Washing the Bones: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Transformation by Katherine Ingram http://www.amazon.com/Washing-Bones-Memoir-Love-Transformation
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Consider these books for your library, reading pleasure and gifts. Share them with friends, colleagues and loved ones!

Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions and The More We Get Together: The Sexual and Spiritual Language of Love and other collections are available at my website www.robertmcdowell.net, and at www.IndieBound.org, www.amazon.com, and www.b&n.com or by request at your local bookstore.