Author: margotvansluytman

I am an award-winning Poet and award-winning Therapeutic Writing Mentor, and Justice Activist. I teach Global Citizenship in the framework of Sawbonna at Centennial College in Toronto, Canada. My books include: Birthing the Celibate Soul; Sing My Spine-A Response to the Song of Songs; Dance with Your Healing-Tears Let Me Begin to Speak; Breathe Me: Why Poetry Works; Hope is: The Pandemic Poems; Wild Self Real Self: Surrender Not Control; and, How Mining Meaning Leaves its Mark. I am the Poet Laureate of Roncesvalles United Church in Toronto, Canada. I was nominated for Ontario’s First Poet Laureate. In the year 2000 I was gifted with the Spirit Name: Raven Speaks.

The Perfection of Our Imperfection by Margot Van Sluytman/Raven Speaks. Heyoka

Prufrock Again

In this our divine
Comedy of delight
Of destruction
Troubled waters
Calm. Quenching
Us yet again
For in
Our penchant
For beauty
We remake
Over and over again
The tale that tries to
Tame us. Gathering
In circles of hope
Once more we remember
How we remember

Divining Goddess: Tattooed Sawbonna & Serpent by Margot Van Sluytman/Raven Speaks/Heyoka

Tattooed upon my body. Residing in my soul. Sawbonna. Serpent. Snake. SHE who is. Was. Always will be. Like waking from a solemn sleep. I walked with the intention of heading to my home where I have been building houses. Papier-mâché mansions and tiny, tiny shacks. Sheds too, that speak of shelter. Of warmth. Of community.

After time with Jess and Benn in Emma’s office, heading in the direction of my cozy cave of light. My sanctuary. Where silence rarely slumbers. I looked up. Above me there, right there, blue, blue, sky. Fat potent clouds. One errant, silent-speaking breeze redolent with hope. Reeking of Sawbonna. I knew that the time had come.

I knew what I had do.
I did not return home.
I turned left on to Hunter Street.
Wended my way to Simcoe Street.

After conversation with Nelson at Henry’s Barber Shop, Riverside Tattoo and I became acquainted. It was mid-afternoon.

Time Dilates. Directs. Divines by Margot Van Sluytman/Raven Speaks

I am a pupil of this thing we call life. Swelling and swollen with the capacity to transform and to be transformed by language: Logos Incarnate=Word Made Flesh. Fleshy is this thing. And I am fully aware that Word sculpts me. Oft-times seeks an answer to the query: to what is my life tied? My response is bound with choice. I must forever remember choice. Choice that comes ever clearer the more mis-takes I have made, the sharper the dynamic degrees of un-learning weld my heart to my intellect in a new way. Age-ing and Sage-ing too, sturdy accomplices in this rollicking and rocky gavotte HERe on the body of Godde: Earth. Earth HERself ever evolving and unfolding. Mysteriously. Meticulously. With slow and un-seen purpose. Tied we are the HER and our choices. Each expressions of this vitally significant relationship.

On my way to the Keynote I was invited to share with the John Howard Society, I watched the summer heat and haze emboldened by the relentless forest fires in Western Canada, finger its way in Central Canada, brush strokes of clotted air painting the sky a raw grey, causing lungs to feel the squeeze, noting that the beauty of the vastness of the un-burning forests through which I was being driven, was in no way diminished, curtailed, or truncated. Trees. Roots down deep. Sipping moisture. Sharing, far below the Earth, millennia of silent stories. Of as yet un-tapped Wisdom. Breathing us. Beckoning us, who journey upon and with HER to listen. And listen closely. Ask. Listen. Do that.

Building Houses: Welcomed Here by Margot Van Sluytman

I have been building houses. Reducing. Reusing. Recycling. Recreating. Birthing homes from giant cardboard boxes, old newspapers, twigs, twine, flour paste, and joy. Joy for it is vital for me to nourish my days with meaning that strengthens my commitment to being. To belonging. heART that is offered to and for community because community and housing are siblings. With the sale of each finished piece, both funds and awareness are raised for the New Canadians Center Peterborough. Here in my city. A city which offers the heart of welcome. Newcomers to this city, to any city, to any country, yearn for home. To find, to create, and to be: welcomed home.

Home and welcome are an intricately and finely woven fabric.

The heART of home, the heARTh itself, is welcome and warmth.

The John Howard Society: Poetic Justness & Hope by Margot Van Sluytman

COMMUNITY

Unexpected comfort
Permeated raw, cold ache.
Warmth melted sorrow.
Embraced we are.
Once again
Knowing we are loved.
And loving too.
©Margot Van Sluytman

~~~
“Supporting neighbours. Protecting communities. Providing supports. Rebuilding lives.”
Donna De Jong, Executive Director of The John Howard Society, Hamilton-Burlington, Ontario, Canada.
~~~

I think often about why and how community matters. About joy and justice and hope and healing. And indeed, the importance of spaces such as our own here on FAR, this community of poets, writers, artists, activists, advocates, allies, academics. Each whose choice to put pen to page, affords light and life to throb and to thrive.

Blue Raven and Murmurations by Margot Van Sluytman/Raven Speaks

I have been fighting with myself to eradicate or somehow fit in the fact that I am in the throes of a profound transition. With “the new adventure’s” approach, death, roommates we have been for decades and decades, a new conversation between us is unfolding. Me and my compelling companion, daily and diligently, engage in what can sometimes feel a relentless row. Sculpting our symbiotic connection with meaning. Aligning dull and divine evocative evocations, as we share tea, toast, temerity, tempestuous alarm, sympathy, chagrin. Intermittent joy. Explorers we are. Searching out hope. Seeking sightings of simple strength. Seated at simple repasts. Inviting courage. Encouraging surrender. Crying out for creativity. Debating and discussing if Camus is correct in writing that suicide is disavowed because the meaningless of life, is, in fact, its very meaning.

Poetry, Plays, Pens, Persistence, Underpin Voice: Both Jean & Eleanor Live by Margot Van Sluytman

Stepping into the autumn season offers time to think about summer. Time to think about what happened during those hazy, lazy, crazy days. Digesting. Re-wording. Steeping one’s self in recent memories and drawing forth, indeed permitting to re-surface, what touched us most deeply. For me, The Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby, was conjured. That imagined woman. That fictional woman. And her voice and her voicing. Buried she was, in a church, along with her name. Nobody came.

What is it that invites this negation of voice? Voices? Voice-ing? Particularly those of womyn? No matter class, culture, creed. This question continues to journey with me, as I myself, note the accumulation of years. As I breathe the beauty of my Grand-Children’s energies. And with-ness their lives unfold. Unfold in a world that is slowly, ever so slowly, yet determinately, and with unceasing tenacity, resurrecting the lost voices of womyn. Too long buried and silenced.