Category: Tenneson Woolf Poetry

What a treat
to remember stillness.

What a treat
to remember and create balance.

What a treat
to remember path of old friendship, pointed to new.

What a treat
to refresh in these ways.

It is nearing the one year mark since I published Most Mornings. I find myself attentive today to how those poems from a year ago are now living in me. It’s one of the things that I love about poetry — it can evolve meaning and presence over time.

For this particular poem, Splitting Wood, I’m also attentive to the good work that men can do together, and need to do together over time. I’m headed to a men’s retreat this weekend, a version of which from a few years ago helped to create the content for Spitting Wood. It was such a beautiful thing to be with kind men in friendship and journey. It was the last line about “stacking friendship” that helped get the poem going in my imagination.

Most Mornings is available for purchase on Amazon. Thank you for purchases, shares, gifts to others.

Splitting Wood
Tenneson Woolf

They split the wood,
these five men working together.

One man, with long grayed beard and kind eyes,
operated the wood splitter.

Two men lifted large tree stumps,
to place just so under the chop of the modern axe.

Two men collected the split wood in wheelbarrow
to transport and stack neatly in covered shed.

This was not hard work, these five men splitting wood
that would warm many a winter morning.

This was good work, these five men helping each other,
stacking friendship, warmth, and memory.

I’m grateful again to Michael Meade for his posts and shares. I’m drawn to this one above that points toward being from a deep center.

For many of us in facilitation work, it is the deep center that we try to cultivate. To grow. To animate. To center the work of the day or the season.

There’s a poem that I included in Most Mornings, which is now coming up on a one year anniversary of publication. It was that last line — “You’re being wishes to know you, just as you are.” — that was compelling me in this poem. It was a time of trying to remember that my relationship with the deeply inner helps to clarify so much of what I do in the outer. It was a time of trying to remember the utter fruitfulness of stillness.

The poem is called Start Here.

Start Here
Tenneson Woolf

Generally,
don’t start with noise.

A program,
a podcast,
music.

Email,
an article,
a book.

Start instead
with stillness.

Breath,
emptiness,
feeling.

Pause
that honors
new day.

Your being wishes to know you
just as you are.

Much of my work continues these days, helping to bring being and the deeply inner. Helping to cultivate such sustained orientations in learning and leadership. I’m beginning to recreate, expand, and nuance some of the work that I love — facilitating, speaking, teaching, sharing poetry, coaching, and guiding — that brings more fulfilling ways of being in work and community. Perhaps some of this also calls to you and your being, in your work and in your community. The first step is always a call to begin the possibility.

A bow.