Archive | Introduction

Sometimes, more than cola. . . of course with hot tea. . . .

By Veronica Hallissey on January 6, 2020 in Introduction, Poetry, Touchstone

With all that is happening on our national scene and our global scenes, we all need something that will settle the dyspepsia. It seems I have run out of tonic water and cola so a good stiff drink of something we should find, with hot tea, of course.

I was again reminded that heavy thought like continued heavy dinner fare soon brings on cardiac problems to the neophyte. Those in my peer group have time given in survival techniques using some long tested straight shots of oblivion.

I scribed the following in 2016 and the requests have been heartwarming. Even the Sages took issue with my discipline of ‘serious business’ as you see with the poem’s tone. But are we not again in the midst of serious business and needing a touch of levity?

And this soul of no fun at all. . . had to laugh.

Around The Bend. . .

I was told you have stretched
your boundaries as far as you can and the rest
will require another world.

You work too hard at this, he said.
Break the pattern, because you do not need
more information to underscore what you already know.

What good to understand worm holes and
black holes, white holes and time warps.
You work with them every night when
you flutter in and out of worlds, and
know your way around the bends of light.
You don’t need anything more.

You need a good stiff drink of more than cola.
Love, take a bender. You need rye, straight.

I say, around the bend
there will be a hand;
someone to pull me up. . .

around the bend will be a someone
to pull me up. . . . .I know.

A Meditation. . . does the world stand still for you?. . . .

By Veronica Hallissey on September 23, 2019 in Introduction, Poetry, Touchstone

Come with me to this place
I visit often, hidden behind an eyelash;
where it is Easter all the time and
rebirth is not a sometime thing; where
gods cavort in joyous abandon.

Come, we dance. . . .

Today the world stood still. In the
bright afternoon sun I saw a butterfly
dart into a spider’s web woven between
the power lines and lift it up and carry
it with him.

In the silence I heard the question.
How heavy is a spider’s web on a butterfly’s wing?
Since everything is balanced,
the question is proportional.
A friend said to me, ‘only you had eyes to see it.’

Does the world stand still for you? Ever?

It sometimes has seemed as if my life has been lived under a premise of ‘hurry, we are late already’. And I’ve wanted to say like the phrase I learned. . . I am dancing as fast as I can. . . I am taking time to reread things I have written and learning to thank who I was for finding the time when my half of the world slept, to leave a memo of hundreds of thousands of feelings. Veronica, I hardly got to know you. . . . this was the first post 8 years ago on fromanupperfloor.com . . . a gift from me to my new readers. . . .

I Don’t Know How To Be Deaf. . .

By Veronica Hallissey on August 11, 2019 in Introduction, Poetry

I had been struggling with the newer hearing aids for over two years. And the audiologists kept saying they are the state of the art but my ears were itching and my brain hurt. It was irritated, my brain was. With the new hearing test, the audiologist said you work very hard at hearing, don’t you? I could have wept with no reserve, I was so relieved someone noticed.

There was more loss in hearing, but he said I can do nothing for your brain. It is not registering always the switch necessary for human voices. And because I focus so deeply on thought to shut out head noises, it is tiring and aging does not have much energy in reserve.

So to engage in conversation with more than one person is very hard work. It is not because I am not paying attention. And when you call and I give someone the phone to talk to you, it is because I do not hear. Not that I don’t want to talk.

I am grateful for the people in my life who help me. Especially family. They allow me space to work my work as long as I draw breath. I hope I am worth my keep.

I Don’t Know How To Be Deaf. . .

I am among you whom I love,
and try to understand your words.
I read your gestures, your body language
and your eyes telling me again
what you wish me to know.

I am desperate to understand.
Your impatience runs through your body
and into mine. Shackled am I
with emotions as mine tumble
with yours and consume me.

We have shared our histories
through decades but now you run ahead of me
and I take my silent world and retreat.
I piece your words, the ones I hear
with a history I secured in mind.

What I have learned to read
by eyes that speak, are words that run
like rivers into each other to form
a crash against walls I hope I did not build.

Aged now, rubbed raw, there is nothing left
to flex against, to tell me how to assuage the deficit.
There is little energy at the end of Now
to make it work. . . no lessons offered
along the way but to be left dumb. . . .

I just don’t know how to be deaf.

One World At A Time . . .is enough?

By Veronica Hallissey on July 30, 2019 in Earth, Introduction, Poetry

Our focus is a small world. . .

When I read this poem I take on another perspective. It is a small world that we focus on here. Never aware that there is another world to the left and one to the right and beneath . Vast. . . I see me holding tight to the frame of thought simply to get through. Still conscious of too many things. I feel like a stick figure when taking on this perspective. And yet my head feels ‘out there.’

I wish we were in class so I could hear your thinking.

We Trod The Path . . .

We trod the path, hunched
and pull our faces in.
We bend our heads. The wind
is strong when you walk into it.

But I take your hand
and we struggle against
the icy rain pelting our faces.

We’ve walked this route
in centuries past, guarding ourselves
from saying too much.

We were different then.
Simple, direct and not fashionable.
We were honest in our appraisal.

We’ve become alien to our prior selves.
And I can’t say it improves us much.

What do you think?

October, 2012

photo by Joe Hallissey Sr.

Conference With the Sages. . .

By Veronica Hallissey on May 19, 2019 in Introduction, Poetry

As a good friend kept telling me, circumstances alter things. And as birthdays gather behind one, one seeks the comfort places. And at the keyboard with the mind in long conversations with compatriots, companions, in conference and in prayer, it is a comfortable place for me.

I asked Jon Katz of BedlamFarm.com to recommend a book on Kabbalah since he quoted the religion often. What I did not remember ever reading and did not know was that Kabbalah was the religion or practice long before the conforming Jews were praying.

It was a form where what we call Sages were gathering and chasing down their thoughts and giving gratitude for life. One sees the connection in the first chapter of Genesis. Upon their death they were able then to enter what was home.

The Sages when they died would be thought to be as in the next room. They were as close as thinking could be and were visited. Part of the Sages’ knowledge was that they could be visited in graves and could be spoken to and they would answer.

And I too, now sit and converse and religions call it praying as easily as I do right now. The Divine Within is the I Am of the each. We are in conference.

The Road to Damascus. . .

And Paul,
on the road to Damascus, unaware
of forces pulling at his thought,
was none the less surprised.

In the privacy of mind, how could
an invasion of thought not his own
be in conference?
So it is, in the wars of the visible

and invisible worlds, the
supremacy for power does not stop.
Our worlds! Claim the gods. . .
My world! Claims the pilgrim. . .

One in partnership till man
tasted the lust for power.
Lest we lose this,
the best of all classrooms,

brotherhood is still the dream
and our hearts still too unripe
to embrace its benevolence.
But its power of magnetism

still attracts
what prompted this dream,
that catapults us
to give search to the meaning

to the why of us. . . .

And Sunday Comes. . .

By Veronica Hallissey on March 28, 2019 in Introduction, Observations

Sometimes there sweeps over one a feeling saying ‘that’s how I always felt’ whatever prompts a memory. It could be a scent or sunlight or something triggering a wave awakening response long dormant. Often one knows where it originates but often the ‘always’ has no beginning at least in this lifetime.

This following feeling is a comforting one and a loving one to me. Whenever it comes upon me the memories are good and I wear them like a stretched sweater . We are our memories and if this day we look upon our lives as surviving triumphantly in spite of a hazardous journey, bless all memories because you have overcome and are the victory.

I started this entry years ago when waiting for guests and family to arrive for dinner. This is as far as I got with it but coming upon it now the feeling was fresh. You have these incidents also, perhaps never thinking them special. But they are. . . . and so makes you special.

This is a Sunday morning at almost noon and I sit here at my window in my beloved study and look out at the snow piled on the evergreen boughs albeit like sagging angel wings. The sun comes through the opposite window and the brightness bespeaks somehow a Sunday morning.

Why is there always a different look to the world on a Sunday? Everything looks somehow different, almost as if there was a visible sign on the day saying, this is Sunday!

As a child on The Farm, with the inside door open, leaving only the storm door with its weeping windows and the sun streaming through, there was the smell of chicken soup or whatever the stove was cooking signifying that this, even this, smelled different because it was Sunday.

So my Sunday in this house smells like Sunday with the beef roast and baked potatoes, as I await the family and our guests. It will be a good dinner and this is what Sundays are all about for me.

It Is Enough. . .

It is enough. . . just breathing and feeling
the north wind coming through the night.

It is enough. . . to stir my senses,
to lift me from my bed to get on with life.

It is enough. . . to raise the dust
out of the corners too long neglected.

It is enough. . . to lift the dirty and sweaty labors
and point out that in these are the gifts of life.

These are the beautiful,
along with the first snow and the harvest intact and sealed.

And to find a reflection
of what I hold dear in the eyes of an Other.

It is enough.

Every Day Is A Beginning. . .

By Veronica Hallissey on March 6, 2019 in Excerpts, Introduction

I was asked to go back to the first journals to throw some light onto the path I had taken. When approaching the last decade of almost a century it is hard to imagine me ever being young. Coming into the world with an open head, meaning one with vivid memories, it was an old head to begin with.

So when I speak of how it was, I kept journals and speak from my written word. Lost somewhere was the first journal handwritten in 1963. The poetry survived two floods and I began the 1973 journal with the following poem written in the 60’s. I was a mother of three sons and in my late 20’s.

The mist that sustains me
sustains my images also.
Perhaps I am the illusion.
Perhaps I will find myself
greater than my images.

How many of me are there? I always knew this intuitively but when I wrote the entry, I knew intellectually the meaning. I edit for space concerns the following written in January 1973:

‘Would it be possible to meet another me somewhere in this time? I know I am ‘locked in time’ and nothing is ever lost. We are so attuned to linear measure with past, present and future, and yet everything is in the NOW. There is nothing in eternity that is not contained in this present instant.’

Since I started blogging in 2011, I have mentioned many incidents and experiences to introduce my readers to why my thinking is perhaps unorthodox. I have related that in a convention held in Europe I was confronted by a man who worked for the Government of the host country with why I did not mention I would be coming to Munich when we talked the previous week in Paris?

I have never been to Paris as I wrote and he was incensed that I would question his veracity because he was upheld as excellent in his ability to remember people and where he saw them last. It was a high level position because tourism was becoming important to the economy. And our talk was a delight to him.

It was in 2015 that I read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. I learned that I lived the quantum theory all my life. The premise of quantum physics is the past is still happening, the future has already happened and we in the present are racing to catch up. All time is simultaneous.

Every day is a beginning. We don’t necessarily need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some things are meant to be saved. It is up to us to know the difference.

artwork by Claudia Hallissey

Camelot Moment. . . .eternity practicing. . . .

By Veronica Hallissey on January 31, 2019 in Introduction, Poetry

When given and we are present in heart and mind, it is a rare gift. I call it a Camelot Moment because it was perfect in itself and yet a confirmation to a philosophy in process. It met with great appreciation when first published and now approaching Valentine’s Day, for new readers, I wish you a Camelot Moment.

Camelot Moment. . .

The words we chose to speak
could not be construed to be words
of great love, but they were.
It was with gaiety that we chatted
about the commonplace and laughed a lot.
We were happy.

I sat in my chair at the dining room table
and watched with joy a moment rare in our shared history.
My coffee cup had been refilled so many times.
Its taste was cutting sweet.

You had risen from the table and in the space
that was the middle of the kitchen,
were moved by some unnamed force to do a jig.

In the fragmented second it took to blink away
a laughing tear, your form transformed and
there we were and yet not.

With feet doing your ancestral dance in mid-air,
your solid body was no longer solid.
A maze of dancing atoms and molecules took your shape.
Your color took on their transparency
and I thought how fragile you are!

It was just a moment but eternity practicing and
you were back into the time frame
we both knew as you. I could not tell you what I saw.
The rules of this let’s pretend world are hard to break.

I sit at this desk with magically moving molecules,
drinking coffee from a supposedly solid white cup and saucer
and holding tight to a yellow pencil at a time
when the rest of the world sleeps and weeps.

Knowing the mountain is only a thought form
and with a little faith in my ability to move it, I could.
With our prejudices we mightily construct a world
to please or not, as our self image directs.

But in this brief Camelot moment,
I know that in that sacred space
I saw you so utterly defenseless,

I never loved you more, nor me.

Full Circle. . . .

By Veronica Hallissey on October 23, 2018 in Introduction, Poetry

I at first thought that everyone can do anything. But later realized that somewhere, someone has to show by example something that strikes home with another. A something that is meaningful to another.

That will be of value to him or her. Then when something comes up there will be an instant where there will be only one course of action and it will be the correct one for them. And that will be the beginning of a value system that will guide all action.

And then you will have the beginning of a philosophy being built. And then we go for home.

The Farm Woman. . .

Woman of the Earth, you are loved.
You gather the fruits of your labors
to your bosom and feed the children.

You’ve inched your way along the dusty path
with back bent in great fatigue
and cultivated the rows yielding wise fruit.

You would feed out of your mouth
those you think hungry and then beyond measure.
The fruits are the heart of your labors,
the harvest of your mind’s philosophy,
spilling indiscriminately.

Who is left to feed you, farm woman?
What commissary is left open
to feed your hungry soul after hours?

What bookstall will house the words
between stiff covers to increase your harvest?
Labor, till the sun closes its blinds on the day.
Restless legs will speed you through the night

to find the bins ever full.

Great Songs Will Be Sung. . . .

By Veronica Hallissey on October 13, 2018 in Introduction, Poetry

We need to come to a place now and again when it is necessary to find a mind matched to ours so we can for all purposes say all that is heavy on our hearts. With no explanation necessary because our route has been followed step by step; to hear the words, I held your heart in my hand for safekeeping and here it is, whole.

And in a whisper would come the words, I thought it fractured beyond repair! We are embraced knowing instantly that we were not abandoned to do it alone.

We prepare then to venture another time to come with the sweet knowledge that great songs will be sung again.

Great Songs Will Be Sung. . .

Should you find the need
to tell your story in words,
think mightily on them and
they will be caught up
in the air’s currents and carried
on the birds’ wings.

They will reach the ears
they were designed for. You will find
that you are not alone in this universe
and you will be heard.

And when the thoughts reach
the places in the heart of an Other

great songs will be sung again.

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