For a Dancer ( by Jackson Browne)
https://www.facebook.com/OfficialJacksonBrowne/
https://www.gofundme.com/saving-janavi
paypal.me/pools/c/87lRidKXWt
Category: Photography
Book Giveaway
❣️BOOK GIVE AWAY!!!❣️
❣️Dear Friends, We are giving away a hardcover copy of Janavi’s beautiful book of poetry and photography to draw attention to the fundraiser. She is seriously ill and needs your help. To enter please give a donation of any amount or if you are unable, please share this post with as many friends as you can.
https://www.gofundme.com/saving-janavi
❣️After you’ve donated or shared please click this link to enter. You’ll be asked to watch a book trailer with a review by Catherine Schweig and poem read by Janavi Held
https://www.amazon.com/ga/p/d87d82713d695b19…
Thank you friends❣️ We are grateful for your help
I’m Still Here
EDITOR’S NOTE:
(re-posted from: https://womenspiritualpoetry.blogspot.com/2018/06/i-am-still-here-by-janavi-held.html)
This was composed by a very gifted and beautiful soul: a regular contributor to our poetry project, and dear friend of mine, Janavi Held, whose life is gradually being taken from us by an incurable illness. She has been suffering from Complex Regional Pain Syndrome and Internal Adhesions for six painful years now, and neither her insurance nor the government healthcare will help her. She reaches out to us, her sisters, as a last plea. This is a poem she wrote yesterday on her birthday, in which she offers us the gift of her friendship. May it touch your generous hearts and inspire you to reach out to her in her plight.
Dear Friends,
The last time I was able to leave the house was by ambulance on my way to the hospital. After many long hours in the emergency room I was admitted and taken upstairs. After everyone left I sat on the hospital bed, knees to chest, bracing my body against the pain and trembling.
The light of this cold day was fading. I turned my eyes to the large window, a window I hadn’t seen before, as it seems I’ve been looking out the same window for years; at the same trees and sky and flowers, the seasons changing and rolling by, folding into each other. But, this evening as I gazed out this new window I tried to look beyond the gray of the hospital roof in front of me, I looked as far as I could see out at a bit of sky and the dimming, blue, winter light. In the distance the I saw the ever-faithful view of the Rocky Mountains also dressed in blue sparkling lights, and white sparks of snow and ice glimmered in the the fading light. Now –in this quiet moment– wet, warm tears rolled down my face as I remembered a line from a poem a by a dear friend:
“Unveil yourself of your flesh shield/and let your spirit out into the dance.”
I cast my glance into the wind, chasing after it, and the beauty of the fading light, as I felt the dingy walls of the hospital collapse. And for a moment I was free. Weeping sweet tears I feel asleep.
When I was nineteen and took up the practice of Bhakti-Yoga, I was told by a dear friend that in ancient Vedic times gifts where given to others’ on one’s birthday. So, today I give you the gift of a poem about friendship.
I AM STILL HERE
Life speaks in turns
and listens
love comes out of season
even unbidden
and I find in you
a love that stays
long after
the light has gone away
and flowers have closed
their precious eyes
I am still here alive
listening to the sounds
and sometimes the cries
and visions of your life
you’ve shared
with me they drench
my eyes
with your sweet smile
in you I see the heart of
mother earth
as you have loved her
from your birth
she sings through your eyes
and dances in your heart
as you write and paint and
dance your life into art
to you my friend I lend my heart
for life
for I treasure Yours
and keep her safe
where time does not decay
and love never falls away.
~
(I wish I could write more, but I can’t type well anymore; these words were dictated).
My Sister Sue, my God-mother, Marcia, and my cousin Erica, have started a fundraiser. If you are inclined please share the link widely, we are dependent on all of you to spread it around, as our resources are limited. Click this link to help. We would be most grateful.
Wishing you all peace & much love
Janavi Held started writing poetry and wandering around with her father’s camera as a child. At the age of nineteen, she began practicing Bhakti yoga. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Goddard College where she studied poetry, photography, and media studies. She is author of Letters to my Oldest Friend: A Book of Poetry and Photography and in 2017 two of hers poems were shortlisted for the prestigious Hamilton House International Poetry prize and were included in a book titled Eternity. Her poetry also appears in several anthologies that emerged from the Journey of the Heart Poetry Project, to which she has been a regular contributor, and is featured in the Bhakti Blossoms anthology on poetry by contemporary women in the Bhakti tradition.
*For submission guidelines, click here.*
Review by Anita Neilson
Letters to My Oldest Friend
by Janavi Held (Goodreads Author)
Anita Neilson‘s review
Nov 04, 2017
This is simply glorious. The words flow gently across the page in a waterfall of despair and hope, grief and faith, pain and joy. Together with beautifully crafted photographs of the natural world, it is a wonderful, precious undertaking. The poems will resonate strongly with anyone afflicted by a chronic illness or spiritual malaise. Quite breathtakingly haunting in their longing for God. The pull between enjoying the delights of this Earth and the soul crying for greater meaning is much in evidence. For example, in the poem “Eternity”, the poet says, “in this world of change I am longing for You yet I am drawn again and again to the shiny fortunes of this shallow world.” This reduced me to tears, so near was it to my experience of life. These are the sweetest, most poetic, most haunting of verses, to be savoured again and again. Buy a copy and keep it close to you, so that each time you feel sorry for yourself, or angry at someone (even God), open it and read a verse or two. Your spirits will be lifted!
“Letters to My Oldest Friend” now available as an ePub
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/letters-to-my-oldest-friend/id1273048675?mt=11
For Wholesale Inquires, review copies and author interview please contact:
letterstomyoldestfriend@laflor.dk
Watch the book trailer:
The Land
The land-
she does not
know ownership
nor boundaries
languages
nor skin
moving where she will
inside or out
of our impositions
she takes
the sun
from all corners
and the rain
from all directions.
~ Janavi Held © 2017
Time Unhinged
Video with spoken poetry below
Time Unhinged
Dreamt of exterminated images,
and forgotten doubts,
of unhinged time
with the hollow
of silent bones
thundering
in the wake of restless flowers.
Blinded by
a vigilant morning
I enter the mists of loneliness
seeking laughter and daydreams
(to counter the emptiness)
too long for counting
these days
press down
on my chest
cementing the architecture
of my sad inheritance.
I establish hope
burying her under
the obliging tree
in my back yard.
Excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr. Nobel speech
“Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.”
-Martin Luther King Jr. Nobel speech
Review of “Letters to My Oldest Friend”
Review of “Letters to My Oldest Friend: a book of poetry and photography by Janavi Held
How many of us have had or taken the chance to dialogue with our soul, our maker, the deep slope of annihilation? Every poem and photograph in “Letters to My Oldest Friend” is such a dialogue. Inspired by her own devastating illness, Janavi Held, long a spiritual devotee, cuts through veils of hope to directly address her God: “the heart inquires–answers blur en route to thoughts.” The intensity of her passionate seeking allows the reader to share the moments of transcendence as well as the pain. Her questions are our answers.
Marcia Newfeild
Poet, teacher, and author of books for children
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2085836692?book_show_action=false
“Letters to My Oldest Friend” is now available on Amazon
In praise of Letters to My Oldest Friend
Like many God-inspired poets of India’s Bhakti or devotional past (Mirabai and Chandidas come easily to mind), Janavi Held—writer, photographer, cineaste, observer of small miracles—chronicles the arrhythmia of a heart in love with Divinity. Letters to My Oldest Friend is a revelation. In elegant, spare verse and contemplative visual imagery, she gently cautions that we are victims of speeding postmodernism at risk of losing our souls, and that we will find the tools of our salvation in the quiet, unassuming details of everyday life. Here is a much needed roadmap to our inner geography, chartered by a gifted voice of conscience and our own better selves. Read, look, savor, and be inspired.
Joshua M. Greene
author, Swami in a Strange Land: How Krishna Came to the West 2016
In her beautiful debut collection of poems, Janavi Held takes us on a journey of awakening, as she explores the ways in which her relationships with struggle, time, nature and beauty in this world, relate to her burgeoning relationship with the divine. From a restless: “there are so many stories in my lost heart” to the epilogue’s triumphant: “the heart speaks softly now,” her poems and photographs artistically chart the course of a soul moving gracefully through existential angst, as revealed to us in this prayerful dialogue with her “oldest friend”.
Catherine L. Schweig
Founder of Journey of the Heart Poetry Project Editor of Poetry as a Spiritual Practice (Golden Dragonfly Press, 2016)
“Letters to My Oldest Friend” is a classic spiritual journey, starting with the anguish of her losses – of mobility, of mind (she says, but the poem belies it), “wrapped in a blanket of thorns”, then to the longing for the spirit, the Friend, and finally a joyous reunion with spirit through nature. I read these poems almost with tears. I also thought of how poems like these, especially the opening ones, could create compassion in the reader for all the sick and disabled from whom we tend to avert our gaze. Janavi Held’s language is beautiful and evocative, as when she writes, “remembering is a lost art/in the mind of these misshapen times.” The book is, quite simply, a gem.
Nina Mermey Klippel
author,”Tricks of The Light and Other Poems”, 2010
editor, The Village Zendo Bulletin
Monsoon Dreams
Monsoon Dreams
Bleached and tattered
bark of tree
leaves mired in wild wind
endless sights
of fragrant meadows
transparence filtering
flying pollen
and wet laden clouds
with white
and gray
monsoon dreams
inside atoms
resides the
restless
Master
playing
in a forest
of His
own making.
Janavi Held © 2017
My book of poetry is now available for pre-order:
on Amazon
Divine Names
Divine Names
Your divine
Names wander
into my words
my open mouth
drinking that
temptation is
utterly fed here
sitting under another
spring sky.
We have been
together for so long
yet, during the cold,
wet winter
I forgot to be happy
forgot the feeling
of Your warm air
on my skin
and how
Your flowers
make me laugh.
And today
I can’t remember
why I left You
forsaking the
authenticity
of our eternal
friendship.
Janavi Held © 2017
Flooding
Flooding
Within the
shadowy waters
of illusion
I built thick
castle walls
sunken deep
in those hazy waters
my heart froze
and slept for eons.
Awakened from this
deep sleep of ignorance
by a flood of
Your liberating
monsoon rain
You’ve opened the sky
in my heart
and the
walls of my fortress
are a sunken wreck
I have floated
to the surface
waves
crushed my body
as I rose You
carefully collected
all the lost parts
and knitted me
together with
Your lovely hands
saturated with
eternal love.
~ Janavi Held © 2017
Out on This Natural limb
Out on This Natural limb
On the ends
of wind-waving branches
I build my residence
watching all manner
of creatures grow into living
the fragrance of the wind
carrying pollen and ozone
feeds my inner ocean
as long fingers of sunlight reach
the vast expanse of my seeing.
Out on this natural limb
I wait for morning
clinging to the inside
of the earth’s desires.
~Janavi Held © 2017
Soaked
Soaked
A dead sea soaks
in memory
its form
now shapeless
has far to go
to be lost to
the little bits of
thought still
swimming its
dry banks.
My thoughts swell
memories tremble there
old incomplete sentences
structured in timeless
yawning, titanic clouds
blocking the realness of
now.
Janavi Held © 2017
Horizon
Horizon
I move too
as the waves
pierce the horizon
that distance
unattainable
longs for me as well
to embellish my ears
with wind
to swallow my eyes
inside that insatiable horizon.
Janavi Held © 2017
Letters to My Oldest Friend 