“Mining the Bright Birds: Poems” by Jody Lee Collins

In her first poetry collection, Living the Season Well, Jody Lee Collins challenged readers to consider the season of Christmas in a different way. Her second collection, Hearts on Pilgrimage, used the four seasons as metaphors for living a faithful life.  

In her third and new collection, Mining the Bright Birds, Collins considers the eternal. You reach an age when the rush and tumult of marriage-job-children-career calm down, or at least move into more serene waters. And the eternal, because it’s the eternal that’s drawing closer, becomes more important. 

 

She divides the collections 45 poems into four sections: Waiting Spaces, Tuning, Seasons, and Wayfinding. She uses the physical, the seasonal, the natural world, the everyday, and the spiritual as metaphors or guideposts to point the way. 

 

The poems reflect the time of life when most (if not all) of the shouting is over. They’re less about what you want to do with your life and more about reflection of a life lived and what lies ahead. She’s connecting, or re-connecting, to the natural world, looking to it as a compass for thinking and moving forward. And like the collection’s title indicates, the birds have much to tell us.

 

Avian Chorus

 

This shady place, shrouded

with the shushing of trees,

cathedral of water-sounds

borne on leaves.

Here is worship in the wind

bending carillon chimes,

blowing clouds, leaving blue.

Praises lift in birdsong

echoing, asking

Do you hear him?

Is He not wonderful,

our Creator God?

I concur and continue to

catch the small cacophony—

an anthem to His presence—

without any words, save those

written within me. 

 

Jody Lee Collins

These poems are a joy to read. They’ll resonate if you’re more along in years. They’ll encourage if you’re younger. No matter age you might be, they’ll still your spirit and your soul.

 

Collins retired from elementary education after a 25-year career and has written non-fiction and poetry for numerous online sites, including Altarwork, Jennifer Dukes-Lee, Grace Table, and (in)courage. She serves on the worship team at her church, and she and her family live in the Seattle area. What she has included in this compact book has been distilled from lessons she learned from her students, her children, and her grandchildren.

 

Related:

 

Living the Season Well by Jody Collins.

Some Monday Readings

 

East End Women at Work – Spitalfields Life.

 

Wind turbines may be killing whales. Why won’t Greenpeace admit it? – Matt Ridley at The Spectator.

 

Yesterday – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

“Living the Season Well” by Jody Collins

We all complain about it. The Christmas season is too busy, too hectic, too commercial, too non-religious. As soon as Halloween ends, sometimes as soon as midnight, up go the store decorations for Christmas. And some stores start their Christmas decorations before Halloween.

Christmas has become about money. We want to take it back, but the usual suggestions for doing that look like even more work for people who already have crazy schedules.

Writer Jody Collins has a different idea, and a different approach. Living the Season Well: Reclaiming Christmas describes what that is. And it begins with understanding that “living the season well” may be as much about rest as it is about activities.

Observe the seasons, she says – Advent, Christmas, the 12 days between Christmas and Epiphany, and Epiphany. Help your family, and especially your children (and grandchildren) what those seasons means and where they come from.

Consider liturgy as a gift, she writes, a gift that explains, uplifts, and provides meaning and context to the Christmas season. Advent is a time of waiting and expectation, so build that idea into your celebrations with simple things and ideas. Don’t go all out on decorations – scale them back to focus precious time and resources on the people in your relationships – family, friends, acquaintances, and church. And completely rethink the idea of Christmas presents (I particularly like what Collins has to say about presents and “presence”).

Jody Collins

Each chapter has sections with a history lesson, word play, learning opportunities, and action ideas. These are tools designed to encourage you to reflect, consider, and possibly adopt – and preferably adopt in the place of something else. The idea is to reduce and simplify, not add to.

Collins retired from elementary education after a 25-year career, and has written non-fiction and poetry for a number of online sites, including Altarwork, Jennifer Dukes-Lee, Grace Table, and (in)courage. She serves on the worship team at her church, and she and her family live in the Seattle area. What she has included in this compact book has been distilled from lessons she learned from her students, her children, and her grandchildren.

Living the Season Well is a guide, but it’s more than that. Collins wants you to think about the Christmas season in all of its meaning and glory, and all of its core simplicity.

Top photograph by Gareth Harper via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Book Discussion at Tweetspeak Poetry

The book discussion on my book Poetry at Work got underway today, with a post by Lyla Lindquist, “The Poetry of the Workspace.” Tweetspeak also posted an excerpt from the Introduction.

Today’s discussion covers chapters 1 through 7 (not as formidable as it sounds because the chapters are short). Here’s the schedule for the rest of the month:

January 15: Chapters 8 – 12
January 22: Chapters 13 – 20

As part of the discussion, Jody Lee Collins posted an article on Poetry at Work at her blog, Three Way Light.

And don’t forget, next Tuesday, Jan. 14, is Poetry at Work Day –here’s a cool infographic that tells you all about it, along with resources ideas for a table.