This Is My Body: Praying for Earth, Prayers from the Heart

By Alla Renée Bozarth

O Earth, wrap me
in your leaves-
heal me.

Let me fall
on your Earthbreast-
feed me.

Sing to me
under the round nests
in your cedar trees. . .

Let my wounds
open
and empty

Into your wonderful
compost heap. . .

Let my wounds
become fertile
gardens and

Let me be.
Let me live
again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 13, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595754649

Book preview

© 2004 by Alla Renée Bozarth

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Contents

This Is My Body-Praying For Earth, Prayers From The Heart

Ecoprayer

Prolegomenon

Celebration

Part One:

The People Who Live in My Body

At Birth

Birth is a Movable Feast

The World Within the Mirror of Morning

Morning Prayer

My Body’s Wood is Bone

The Way Things Are

The Language of God

Listen—

Autobiography of Joy—Continuity

How I Live and Why

Do You Live Alone?

Buddha, which means Awakened One—

I Love Being Here

My Body’s Mystery

We Make God out of Me

Before Jesus

Hands and Eyes with Heart

Ministry

Spirit Eye—How God Speaks Through My Face

I Am Perfectly Imperfect

Conscientious Objection

The Healing of the Woman with an Issue of Blood

I Am Changing

Molting

Aging

Well Being

The Power of the Crone

Pilgrimage

Journey Blessing

Shekinah

Prayerdance

Pilgrimage

Return

Moonroot

Winter Trio

Medicine Bear

At the End of This Road

Bakerwoman God

Mama Sea and Mama Rock

Chambered Nautilus

Through Death

Leaving the Premises

Visiting the Old Folks’ Home

Flight into Opposites

Angel Falls

After a Year, Only Bones

Bone Cradle

Journey

Prayer for old Age

Past Tense

Imagine

Biodance

Into Life

Away

Sing Me Up

How Dying Works

Evolution/Resolution

Four Proofs of the Existence of God

Is the Universe a Friendly Place?

Three Little Words

Faith

Communion

The Soul is Polyphonous

Part Two:

Befriending the Body

Host

Who Is this Man?

The Woman at the Well

Magdalene

Song of the Magdalene

Transfiguration

Each Time We Make Love Is the Most Important Time

With My Body I Thee Worship

The Light Around Your Bones

Sacrament

Virginal

Wedding Gifts

In a Burst Beyond Ecstasy

You Are My Body

This Mortal Marriage

Suttee

Cygnus X-1

Photography: Light-writing

Be Thou Consecrated to Me

Part Three:

O Earth, Wrap Me

God Is a Verb

The Body of Christ

Creation

Incarnation

Christ

Cosmic Child

Cosmic Child

Braids

Indigo Mirror

Interdependence Day Celebration

Five Billion Years of Bliss

Where Life Begins

Precession of the Perihelion

Just the Right Tilt

Are We In the Right Universe?

The Way We Are

Grunion Run

Chinook

Salmon Return

Home Coming

The Creative Feminine:

Shekinah

Invocation

Sanctus

In the Name of the Bee & the Bear & the Butterfly

The Black Madonna

The Body of Christ

Oracle

You Need to Know

The Woman Who Became the Ocean

Wind Woman

Sabbath Light

Something More

Pentecost Again

Egg Energy

Glastonbury Goddess

Easter Bear

Nobel Woman

The Green

Easter Wisdom Rite

Coasting

Hymn to Gaea

Flowers are the bodies

What We Can Bear

Blessed Sacrament

It Is Enough

When the Well Runs Dry

My Yoga Teacher

Blessing of the Stew Pot

Blackberry Zen

My Solitude Means Plenitude

Anthropomorphism?

On Being a Mammal

An Ant

The Amber Bears

Coyote

Five Trees

Nobody Owns the Land

Cosmic Eye-con

Volcano

Novaya Zemlya

Nagwalagwatsi

I Am

Burning Bush

Be

Live in Your Bliss

Soul Covenant

The Union of Heaven and Earth

Eden Revisited

My Summa Theologica

Summary

Some of the poems in This is My Body, are reprinted from the following books or audiotapes by Alla Renee Bozarth:

Books

A Journey through Grief 

 Accidental Wisdom 

 At the Foot of the Mountain 

 Gynergy 

 In the Name of the Bee & the Bear & the Butterfly 

 Life is Goodbye/Life is Hello 

 Lifelines 

 Love’s Prism 

 Moving to the Edge of the World 

 Soulfire 

 Sparrow Songs 

 Stars in Your Bones 

 The Book of Bliss 

 This Mortal Marriage 

 Wintefire 

 Wisdom and Wonderment 

 Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey

Audiotapes

All Shall Be Well/All Shall Be One 

 Dance for Me When I Die 

 Reading Out Loud to God 

 Water Women

Blessing of the Stew Pot first appeared in Earth Prayers, ed. Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, HarperSanFrancisco, 1990.

Before Jesus first appeared in Life Prayers, ed. Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.

Front cover photograph by Melody DeLay

Back cover photograph by Alla Renee Bozarth (of the golden walnut tree in her backyard)

Back cover photograph by John Jarman (of the poet, with reflections of Mt. Hood, Oregon)

"Evolution is a copiously branching bush, not a ladder of progress, and although certain broad features are repeated from time to time (all flying verte- brates have wings of similar aerodynamic form, despite the separate evolution of wings in birds, bats, and pterosaurs), when and where individual twigs appear is quite unpredictable in our highly contingent world. We simply have to get one item of hubris-breaking, arrogance-smashing truth into our big heads. Homo sapiens is one of the little twigs, not one of the grand, overarching predictabilities.

Here Eve could perhaps help us. She plucked the fruit from the right object to secure our proper understanding of evolution—a tree. Perhaps the search for knowledge she thus initiated might also help us to obtain that even greater goal, wisdom, which Eve’s author rendered by the same image: ‘She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her, and happy is every one that retaineth her’ (Proverbs 3:18).

Stephen Jay Gould, Eve and Her Tree in Discover, July 1992

This Is My Body-Praying For 

 Earth, Prayers From The Heart

by Alla Renée Bozarth

Prayer is the longing of the heart—poetry is my way of praying. The Greek word, poiesis, means to make a new creation. Earth poetry is the deep prayer for Earth’s renewal, the means of her healing and ours.

We human beings are a part of Nature, not apart from Nature. We make tiny tracks on the vast body of cosmos as we move through its blood, mere cells of its essence. Human nature means humus-nature—Earth-nature. Earth is home, and more. Earth is who we are.

Recognition of who we are begins redemption: getting back the lost integrity, lost health, of this living being, Earth, and knowing ourselves as part of her body. The work necessary for the task is holy, for holiness means healing, recovering, reclaiming our essential nature, remembering the natural morality of good Earth- animals.

I pray and work as a woman reincarnating herself, reweaving her sexuality and her spirituality severed in the past by the same cultural poisons that have hurt our Earth’s body and spirit. Re-inhabiting my body is the re-creation of my soul, my source of celebration as well as sweat and sorrow for the past damage done, not only to me, but to all Earth-beings. I remember what my bones know though my brain had forgotten. I am sister to the sea and the stone, the sparrow and the air, all fire and song are my own true kin, for we all live.

This is the Christ-consciousness, God-in-me aware of the gift of being, and God-in-Nature, alive, loving, limited, suffering in humility with all humus- beings. Limitation gives focus. Focus from the Latin means hearth. And here, Earth calls on our hearts’ opening. To watch and work at the hearth, to tend the fire, to bake the loaf (the activity from which our word lady derives), to prepare the sacraments, to suffer the gifts of darkness, to wait on the light. This work requires unselfish courage and self-shaping power. To make the last first, to redeem. To take the last letter of Earth’s name and put it first is to give heart to our presence here. To take the mid-letter of ego and put it first is to surrender our ego-centric way for a geo-centric way.

I do this as a woman who knows the miracle of her bodily being in its power to give birth, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Loving creativity is my woman’s way of knowing God as Creator—in, with, and through the body: my own, my mother’s, my lover’s, my child’s, and the body of Earth, the body of God in the cosmos. I am a woman with core (corps) knowledge of a Creator God who gives birth to creation and says That’s good. A God of infinite complexity and elegant simplicity, Creator of the visible galaxies and the invisible grace notes of the atoms in stars’ bodies and ours; Creator of stories and dreams, Weaver of lives and of souls. These poems are prayers for our healing, our tender welcome-home reunion songs; our passionate, deep communion hymns, sung alone and together all-one, as we work, play, and pray for peace on our planet, peace in ourselves.

Ecoprayer

for Techne (Weaver), whose name 

 was stolen in the guise of progress

Weaver of Heaven 

 we live in your house, 

 holy and one—

Superstring webs 

 delicate and thin 

 in the underneath 

 of vision woven 

 in ten dimensions.

Weaver of Earth 

 our Mother, you are 

 our only home—

Your humus our bone. 

 In human bodies you weave 

 an animal glory of systems 

 working as one: nerves and 

 vessels our branches and roots, 

 linking deep in long circles 

 along common forms, the means 

 by which we know.

Let us now know 

 in our core that 

 Geocide is matricide, 

 is suicide, is kin-killing, 

 the horror we’ve become, 

 cut off from our truth 

 and the whole—

Great Weaver 

 forgive us, 

 receive us again, 

 teach us again 

 who we are.

Mother, reweave us back, 

 unfray us and save us 

 so we, unafraid, can save you 

 from ourselves.

By our seventh sense of wonder 

 we offer again our tender praise. 

 May our prayerweaving here 

 be an echo of love in the eco of life 

 we call home.

Prolegomenon

In former times human imagination conceived the vision of Creation as the Creator’s spirit slowing itself into a matter that yields itself to the senses, also part of this matter. Nature knowing itself exists because spirit slowed. What is spirit but energy dancing at great speed? Even the human hand can move fast enough to seem invisible. Think of a cosmic dance played at such intense joy or concen- tration that it moves in the spaces between the atoms, escaping the fix of any eyes. But eyes long to see! Hands long to hold! The ears to hear and tongue to taste! So the dance slows and gives itself over to the confinement of space and time. It becomes material—the form of the world which we also are. And this material is the body of creation, the Creator’s compassionate taking-shape before our eyes. And matter matters. Flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. So the energies of God declare in the poetry of genesis: the divine One giving birth to All-That-Is.

What follows is an act of thanks. With my body, born of cosmos, born of the Great Dance, I give back music, the living mystery of my own molecular life. My spirit becomes this body of words, and more than that, my body pours itself into the spirit of this book. For so I experience the wholeness of Life—the wholeness of creation—through the miracle of my bodily being, the pathways into essence that my senses are.

In the human body, often called a temple, spirit is not limited to the intercra- nial complex where brain makes mind. Spirit thrives within each atom of the body and in all the spaces between. From sacrum to temple, from the sole to the crown, all the body is holy—whole. Experiencing its integrity dynamically, it keeps itself well even as it obeys the law of life which moves toward physical death and then beyond. And what we call illness or disease, and even injury, become part of the continuous process of our well-being, making a place in our whole-ness.

This book celebrates the body in its mortal glory, in its brief sweetness, in its inevitable decay, in all its changes. The body—new and vulnerable, shy and afraid, and sometimes brazen and capable of impossible heroism when inspired by love or survival, and also subject to unspeakable evil—but always limited, bound, and temporary. The body—mystified by itself, the inner frontier of the universe as yet unexplored and unexplorable but relentless in its insistence on being here for as long as it can.

The integrity of the complex union of spirit and body which I call soul allows for no false split between its parts. The head is not in opposition to the rest of the body—especially to heart and gut. The nerves which control these organs reside in the head! And all emotion also, in that ancient, most primitive part of the human body, the brain stem, sometimes called the reptilian brain to remind us of our integral link with our ancestors. In the heart of the brain live the stem of emotion and the root of all senses.

Cut off the head and destroy the senses completely! The head contains nerve centers for all bodily sensations and provides seven sensing openings, including the tactile, orgasmic tongue! More than thought goes on here. Just as every part of the body thinks, the whole brain is the feeling organ of the body.

I celebrate the head as part of the body and the heart as hearth of the mind. I celebrate spirit in both and their indivisibility in the soul. This celebration is not necessarily in keeping with all of my tradition. I speak of four thousand years of denial of the body, in cultures both east and west, for varying reasons. Denial it is, and denial must end. Our precious planet’s well-being depends on our recognition of her holiness and our response to her sacred need, as to the life-needs of our particular bodies which form parts of Earth’s body. A woman scientist spoke on American public radio within a month of this writing, warning us that humankind has four-thousand days to determine a way to repair the chemical damage which our species alone has done to the Earth, our own Body, before that damage becomes irreversible.