Charlene Langfur

Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2021

Practicing Peace

Charlene Langfur

Each day I think connecting with spirit matters, especially now in the world of the pandemic when loss and illness is everywhere around. I sit quietly to start this practice off for me, wish others well, breathe deep, breathe in and out and start over, counting breaths, a woman like myself living in the big heat of the Sonoran desert next to the fan palms and yucca and the century plants and the old oasis palms where the crows sit on the tree top to rest. I am doing the same, taking to the oasis in the middle of the day, bowing my head quietly as if it will avail kindness and compassion, stopping to smile at my 13-pound honey colored dog upside down on the couch, enthralled with time and space itself, balanced, at ease. Last night the pink roses on the kitchen table opened up so wide they fell over the edges of the glass, as if open armed, one petal above another and another. I know this is how it is now for many of us, opening up like a flower, practicing the same, one bud at a time

Charlene Langfur lives in Palm Springs, California, and is a southern Californian, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow. Her most recent publications include poems in Emrys, Inlandia, North Dakota Quarterly, and a series of poems forthcoming in Weber –The Contemporary West.