Elizabeth Oakley Weaver

Disconnected

Oxfam‘s new report, Inequality Inc., explores the disparity between the uber-wealthy and the rest of society.

Since 2020, five billion people have become poorer, while the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes—at a rate of $14 million per hour.

Jan 14, 2024

Soul

One of the most important discriminations we can make 
… is the difference between things that beckon to us 
and things that call from our souls.

              Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Goats!

Let’s hear it for the Goats!: preventing fires and saving lives.

Soaked

SOAKED

I want you in my home so I know you’re not alone 
in the shadows of those long halls paced by the lost— 
dementia scouring their last stains of memory

more than safe
I want you to feel safe
yet I’m drowning in this 
deep dank bog of lung

rain waterfalls from every leaf under a canopy-darkened sky
as distant shouts urge me to find my way back yet I’ve
unwrapped and dropped the safety rope from my waist 
so I could reach you, my cells having replicated yours 
when you were my cord to life—for that I worshipped 
you till the God Hormones descended

but now I stumble over elephantine roots, 
machete through plants so large dinosaurs 
must exist on this swampy earth—
my lungs matching each suck of mud, 
every breath like drowning yet I won’t 
release our taut line twined with ash and 
splotched with wine dark as our blood 
though your wit’s still quicker and
memory better for the inconsequential

years since I severed, burned, flung this rope over the 
cliff yet once more it’s seared to my palm and 
tangled as worry—I reach for you in dreams and wake,
unable to rest or breathe for want of you

Thank you to the editors of Melancholy Hyperbole for first publishing this poem.

Choose

sculpture by Jun Kaneko; photo by Elizabeth

Between stimulus and response 
                 there is a space.
  In that space is our power to
             choose our response.
    In our response lies our
         growth and our freedom.

   ~Viktor E. Frankl

Vida

They threw us away
but forgot
we are seeds.


                            ~Clarissa Pinkola Estes' friend~

Magic!

My favorite photographs have been unexpected: a double image, something I hadn’t seen when I took the shot, or a photo I didn’t intentionally take yet captured what I hadn’t seen.

The first shot is what I could see: a sun-drenched hiking trail with rocks and almost no vegetation. The washed out flower at the center of this shot is the same flower in the next, though it was hidden in plain sight till a fluke of light and perspective revealed its magnificence.

My only edit to the first photo was to reduce the light and slightly increase the definition so the vegetation in the center was visible. The second shot resulted a split second later due to an inadvertent twitch of my finger. I gasped when I saw the second photo, which is unedited, while the third photo is my edit of the second. For me the second shot is what makes photography magic!