poetry – Giants & Pilgrims

January 2022 Free Wallpaper

January 1, 2022/0 Comments/in Art, Desktop Backgrounds, Downloads, Monthly Themes /by Betony Coons

For the desktop, click on the image above to view the large size image

It’s a new year!!

A friend shared this poem from Lucille Clifton yesterday and it spoke to me.

i am running into a new year

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

—Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

I appreciate the part where the poet speaks to her past ages. We are each full of so many versions of our own selves. How can we get to know and understand others when we are such vast mysteries to our own minds sometimes? Do the work friends. Clear the clutter. Wake up early and climb the mountain. It takes the time it takes.

By the end of a year, I often fill bogged down by too much everything. But it’s the excess of the holidays that makes the contrast of January feel like crisp clear air. We get to start anew. Clear the table and begin fresh.

Happy New Year friends!

For the iphone wallpaper, navigate to this page on your phone and then click and hold on the image you want. Select ‘Save image to camera roll’. Then from your camera roll set your home screen/lock screen or both. I make a couple different versions so that you can use what works best for your device.

January 2018 Free Desktop and iPhone Wallpaper

January 1, 2018/1 Comment/in Art, Creative Process, Desktop Backgrounds, Downloads, Monthly Themes, Writing /by Betony Coons

Happy New Year friends! It’s a new day. A whole new year. Everything is waiting for you.

I am going to try something a little different this year for my desktop wallpapers. The theme of “MIGRATION” keeps coming back to me, so I am going to try out having a connecting thread for the wallpaper artwork. I love this idea of movement from one place to another, of traveling great distances, of coming back home. Each desktop this year will be exploring that theme.

Secondly, I want to include a poem/writing that inspires the artwork – a centering writing to reflect on for the month. We heard this piece by David Whyte on the On Being podcast. It is a beautiful piece for a new year. “Or the window latch grants you freedom” is the line that inspired my artwork.

For the desktop, click on the image below to view the large size image.

“Everything Is Waiting for You”

BY DAVID WHYTE

 Your great mistake is to act the drama
 as if you were alone. As if life
 were a progressive and cunning crime
 with no witness to the tiny hidden
 transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
 the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
 even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
 the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
 out your solo voice. You must note
 the way the soap dish enables you,
 or the window latch grants you freedom.
 Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
 The stairs are your mentor of things
 to come, the doors have always been there
 to frighten you and invite you,
 and the tiny speaker in the phone
 is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
 conversation. The kettle is singing
 even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
 have left their arrogant aloofness and
 seen the good in you at last. All the birds
 and creatures of the world are unutterably
 themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

For the iphone wallpaper, navigate to this page on your phone and then click and hold on the image you want. Select ‘Save image to camera roll’. Then from your camera roll set your home screen/lock screen or both.

iphone wallpapers:

February’s Adventures in Homeschooling

March 10, 2017/0 Comments/in Abacus, Bellwether, Creative Process, Family, Homeschooling, Monthly Themes, Online, Poetry, Writing /by Betony Coons

This year we began homeschooling Lucy (7), Hattie (5), and Beatrice (2). We’re including this on our Giants & Pilgrims blog as all our family adventures seem to impact our art & music so much! Also, we just like sharing the stories. So we’ll be sharing posts on the themes we’ve been covering each month and calling the adventure “ABACUS”! Our hope is that these posts will help spark creative direction and inspiration for your family as well as giving us somewhere to be document and record our experiences.

February has been a month filled with lots of preparations and travel. We went to KS to wrap up some projects and visit family. As for our homeschool activities, they all had this wonderful literary bent to them. Colorado (and KS) are mostly very unpleasant in February – not much snow, just wind and cold. So it has been a perfect month to get lost in stories. Here is our homeschool photo journal for February.

Valentines Celebrations:

We had a wonderful Valentines tea party in Kansas with grandmas and cousins. Pretty wonderful. Lots of Valentines makings…

Lucy’s valentines – little origami boxes, with Washi tape ribbons, filled with heart garlands she made.

Harriet’s wonderful gigantic heart.

Woodworking:

Early in the month, we all drove out to Kansas to spend some time with family and for me to do a book signing for the Bravest Adventure and to build frames for my new series of paintings with my dad. We started Arlo out young on his woodworking skills.

Since we had access to my dad’s wonderful workshop and tools, we slipped another tiny project into the mix – making a toy tabletop theater! Here is Lucy helping with the construction (learning from the best!).

Fables & Theater:

Thanks to the inspiration from Read Aloud Revival, one of our themes for February was Fables. Here are some of the books we enjoyed. I hadn’t realized what an illustrative force Paul Galdone was until now!

The girls picked “The Teeny Tiny Woman” as our first fable to perform. Here we are working on the backdrops.

And here is a photo of our debut show in our newly dubbed “Fable Theater”.

My little theater painter helper…

And the ever dramatic Lucy presenting the newly painted facade! Pretty cool, right!?

Later in the month, we also put on a show of Peter Pan! More on that in a moment….

Story Telling:

Alongside exploring the wonderful worlds of fables and poetry this month, I wanted to jump into crafting more of our own stories. So we invested in a few fun new story telling games. Story cubes – (which I will be honest, I was a little skeptical about, but the girls LOVE. So simple, with endless creative possibilities.)

And this really charming fairytale story telling puzzle I found on Amazon. The pieces can be rearranged in any order to tell different stories. The illustrations are lovely and the story possibilities surprisingly diverse.

Nature Study:

We really haven’t done much Nature study this month (February… blech). But, I couldn’t not mention how much we are LOVING the new Planet Earth II series. Takes my breath away every time.

Robotics:

The fun little surprise exploration this month was into robotics. Lucy desperately wants to build a real robot, so we are digging into the worlds of electronics and computer programming. Giving this artsy mama a run for her money….

Deconstructing an old VCR for parts…

Building “Brush Bots” (like hexbugs) thanks to YouTube… (we also made straw light sabers, but forgot to photograph)

Poetry:

February being the cold blustery month it is, and as an ode to love poems everywhere 🙂 we did a little focus on Poetry this month. I put together this basket near our breakfast table of all of our favorite poetry books and a few new ones from the library (we fell in love with this one in particular). Each morning we took turns picking poems to read out loud as a family.

Here is the little basket graphic I made. Feel free to use it if you want to make your own poetry basket…

We also enjoyed this kids illustrated biography of the poet e.e.cummings. Look how beautiful that sky poem is…

Tried our hand at writing some typewriter poems…

As well as rhyming poems, shape poems, and acrostic poems!

Physical Eduction:

Along with our normal dance classes and as many park trips as we could manage,

we practiced a little circus arts… 🙂

Gymnastics at Grandmama and Grandpapa’s house…

Ice skating…

and Arlo and Dad watching the superbowl… Does this really count as Physical Education?

Literature:

Our classic we read this month was J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (beautifully illustrated/interactive version by Minalima). The girls LOVED it. Lucy bawled at the end and Harriet right away wanted to read the entire book again (we did not, ha).

As a finale to finishing the book, the girls and I put together our own production of Peter Pan performed on our tiny theater.

Paris:

Attempting to build Eiffel towers out of toothpicks and marshmallows while learning about all sorts of 3D structures.

Coloring France on our world map

Eiffel tower drawings

Homemade crepes and french pastries for French food sampling…so….yummy….

So many fun Paris books. We really loved all of these.

But especially Paris Up Up and Away. It is filled with intricate silhouette papercuts!

Speaking of papercuts, we also made one more of these FREE printable paper structures to add to our growing collection of famous monuments.

Art:

One of the Paris books we read – Painting Pepette – is about a little girl who takes her stuffed bunny to several different famous artists to have his portrait painted (Picasso, Dali, Matisse, and Chagall). Each artist paints Pepette in his unique style. We took inspiration from the book and did our own series of bunny portraits inspired by the greats.

Speaking of bunnies… Lucy also (probably inspired by the Butter sculptures at the Kansas State Fair) made her own butter, and sculpted it into this fierce bunny.

That’s all for now folks! March is going to be all about Egypt, Passover, St. Patricks Day, Colors, and Coding… I am excited already….

April Practice & Process: “Converse”

April 12, 2016/0 Comments/in Bellwether, Creative Process, Family, Lists, Monthly Themes /by Betony Coons

In creating our new project, Bellwether (an art series and album due winter 2016) we’ve decided to share what we’re doing each month before it’s released.
We’re calling these posts “practice and process“.

They will detail the spiritual/life practice we’re doing,
give a look at our in-process art that we’re creating in response,
and then include a whole host of resources and activities! (like the new desktop wallpaper, book/music/movie lists, recipes, explorations for kids, etc. This is so as an entire family we can engage in this year’s exploration of “belief” we’re calling Bellwether.

APRIL Theme: CONVERSE

March was actually a difficult month (and we weren’t very good at doing our “practice & process”)! A lot is going on that’s going to bring change in the coming year. So Betony and I have chosen the theme of “converse” for April. (I started the week after Easter “conversing” with God with some rhythmic daily prayers, just needing recovery!)

So, Betony and I hope to get away a little bit and find some spaces to talk about everything- life, spirituality, future, etc!

Practice:

This month we are

Getting babysitting once a week and going out to talk about life!
For our Table Alter this month we’re continuing to set up little pots and planting seeds – we’ll water and watch the slow progression of growth, again hitting on the death and resurrection truths we find in the world around us. This is an ongoing conversation we hope to have with our kids.

Process:

Betony has hit some big finish lines last month regarding ongoing art projects. Then Tim is song-writing this month with Charla Bultman, continuing to add some more songs to the Bellwether project.

The other process is going to be exploring this big idea: there seems to be spiritual archetypes that happen all over our favorite stories. In movies, books, all sorts of art, you’ll find baptism scenes, out-to-the-desert scenarios, resurrection pictures… Betony and I are looking in to these universals to better inform our own belief.

Resources for “April”:

APRIL Dates to Take Note of:

April = National Poetry Month
April 1st – April Fools Day (we love to freeze our girl’s breakfast cereal…)
April 22nd – Earth Day (which if you happen to live near a Ben & Jerry’s is also Free Cone Day)
April 29th – Arbor Day
April 30th – International Jazz Day

Local: Greeley, CO events:

April 10th – Handel’s Water Music UCCC
April 23rd – Arbor Day Celebration at Lincoln Park, 9:00 am
April 27th – Greeley Children’s Chorale Spring Sing (at Northridge H.S.)
April 27th – Ballet West at UCCC, 7:00pm
April 30th – Copelia at Niwot High School

Let me know if you have other fun Greeley events I should add to this calendar!

RESOURCES/EXPLORATIONS :
(from Betony…)

POETRY:

April is National Poetry Month so this works perfectly with our theme “converse”! We hope to read some poems with the girls and work on writing too!
For kids, we LOVE this book –
Outside Your Window by Nikola Davies. The Illustrations by Mark Herald are just gorgeous.

Speaking of Mark Herald, I have been drooling over this wallpaper of his. I’m thinking I might need to dive into wallpaper design some time soon.

For myself for poetry month, I am going to read Felicity by Mary Oliver. I bought it a few months ago at our favorite book shop in Hutchinson, KS and I have been saving it just for this occasion.

READING LISTS:

How to talk so your kids will listen by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish

What we talk about when we talk about God by Rob Bell

LANGUAGE:

We felt like with this theme it would also be a great month to explore different languages. Lucy has loved this app that teaches Spanish.

This Frida ap also looks pretty great –

What language learning programs have you used? Any fun games language games for kids that you would recommend?

THE ARTS:

Conversing does not always have to be verbal. I am planning on taking the girls to several ballet productions this month.

MAKE:

My front door is needing a new spring wreath. I am thinking I will make something simple like this twig flower beauty.

I also like this Square one from Megan Brooke Handmade

MUSIC:

Curate a Tree themed Arbor Day playlist

Poem for December: “Mend”

December 10, 2014/0 Comments/in Almanac, Poetry /by Betony Coons

Welcome to the December Almanac. Our theme this month is MEND. All our posts will center around that theme in some way. Below is a poem written by Giants & Pilgrims own Tim Coons, all about this month.

“Mend”

by Tim Coons

December is an old quilt

a warm blanket near the hearth-
the home’s foundational fire

We tuck in after feasts and toasts
and carols around the table

We cozy in as the snow blankets
all corners of our city

Amidst the joy of the tree and holly,
sweet nativities,
and lights
inside and out

a Great New birth stirs in our hearts
And we are put together, mended
in this shelter
and home

November Theme: Table

November 12, 2014/0 Comments/in Almanac, Poetry, Writing /by Betony Coons

November is a set table

Harvest is here
and the fruits of our labor,
the results of our efforts,
the long months of digging in the dirt,
all produces great fruit

worth celebrating

Friends, families, and neighbors
gather around with smiles
while words like thankfulness and gratitude
are kept present on our tongues

We break bread and pour the cup
We taste, we eat

And our bodies and hearts together
are full

October Theme: Remember

October 9, 2014/0 Comments/in Almanac, Poetry, Writing /by Betony Coons

A poem for October. “Remember” is our theme for the month and all our posts here will play on that theme, for the most part. Fall is my favorite time of year and October my favorite month… so this should be a good time!

REMEMBER

October is a swan song

A last grand gesture of earth color and twilight
before everything sustained by light and warmth
fades into winter

The beautiful funeral is felt in
gray skies, falling leaves, and shorter hours

In the face of the Great Sleep
It’s best to

hope
and
Remember

to keep account of the memories of days
filled with vibrant greens and full hours

So we head forward
into the dark with a candle

and a recollection

Poem: The Day the Bravery Parted Ways

October 3, 2014/0 Comments/in Almanac, Poetry, Writing /by Betony Coons

The Day The Bravery Parted Ways
By Mariah Foster

You couldn’t rise from your bed after such a dead sleep,
Straightjacket sheets holding you together
So you don’t spill your guts;
Not that it’d be enough to fill the skeletons in your closet-
You can’t poach new pieces from the elephants in the room.
You’ve got to foster new growth,

Pull nutrients from the suck you are stuck in the tarpit of.
My love, it will always be too soon.
You won’t feel ready, but you need to
Grab life by the horns as you brace for more bucks.

Get up. Get up.

Get up on your day, on your feet,
On your desk- for perspective, yes, but also to
Prove you can still climb and find reasons to fall,
Fear of heights dulled by the pull of faith you leap with.
Skin to the wind, you finally got that shirt off your back.
Opportunity keeps knocking until your shell finally cracks.
Your wings are spreading, feathers full of glitter blood and ink,
Your razors are waiting, ready to cut your puppet strings.

You’re remembering:
All the right things are where you left them, and
You’ve been holy this whole time. There’s no more need for digging.
Cry just enough to clean your hands, the shovels;
Stop before you have to drop anchor.
Success is not sedimentary,
Satisfaction never achieved by settling.
Complacency is the enemy, and
Your strongest muscle has been strength training,
Drumming out war beats.
Your courage can no longer be caged by the ghosts of your sheets.

You are ready.
You are ready.
You’ve always been

Ready.

You’re up.

Poem: Good Morning on a Monday

September 22, 2014/0 Comments/in Almanac, Poetry, Writing /by Betony Coons

Mariah Foster is an amazing spoken-word poet in Greeley, CO.
Giants & Pilgrims requested to print one of the poems we’d heard her do on “bravery”. She sent the requested poem along with an original piece just for this Almanac as well! Enjoy these two poems here.<

GOOD MORNING ON A MONDAY
By Mariah Foster
You are beautiful.

I hope you know.
You are beautiful like renaissance paintings
Hung crookedly,
like silence in the morning,
up to blueberry coffee and harmony,
Sunsets falling east.
I’m talking beautiful like bad dancing, horrible dancing,
But you’re smiling and laughing…
It’s just beautiful.
And yes, I am talking to each and every one of you,
So little girl, don’t stop listening, I know
You’re preoccupied, trying
To rebuild broken bits of self-esteem,
But little girl, you are beautiful,
Don’t stop listening,

And little boy, don’t stop listening,
Don’t stop listening
Even if you’re afraid to be beautiful.
I promise you have the strength to be vulnerable.
I know
Because I know you.
Don’t you remember?
I was the star that shone the night you were born,
I was the heart worn on your sleeve.
I’ve been your love muddying convictions,
I’ve been the earth that washed you clean.
Little girl, don’t stop listening,
Little boy, don’t stop listening,
I’ve been the wind whipping,
Trees clawing at your window,
But don’t let it be so frightening.
Don’t let me be so frightening;
I was just reminding,
Just reminding,
I hope you know.
Don’t let it be so frightening,
And don’t question me when I tell you that you’re beautiful,
I know.
Don’t question you when you tell you that you’re beautiful.
I hope you know.

Little girl, I will mold your shattered self-esteem,
making a mirror, reflecting,
making a mirror, you’ll see,
You’ll see.
You’ll see, and I won’t need to say anything.
We won’t need to say anything.

Little boy, I will place the world on your shoulders
So you will realize you are strong enough to be vulnerable
You will realize you are strong enough to be beautiful.
Little girl, don’t stop listening,
Little boy, don’t stop listening
The world is whispering,
I am whispering
You are beautiful, You are beautiful.
We need to keep listening,
Always listening,
Keep teaching each other that we are beautiful,
Telling shouting screaming
We are strong enough to be vulnerable.
We are are strong enough to be beautiful.
We are strong enough to be beautiful,
To be beautiful,

To be beautiful.

To be beautiful is to be you.
I hope you know

September Poetic Intro: Brave

September 11, 2014/0 Comments/in Almanac, Poetry, Writing /by Betony Coons

Our Almanac theme for this month is “brave”. Since September holds beginning of the fall and school and new projects after summer it lends itself to a need for courage.

BRAVE

September is a courageous leap

into the trial,
the unknown,
the new
all the unexpected that

demands an answer

of courage
and bravery

After this harvest, this last run
the days will begin to shorten

And the adventure of fast days and darker hours
found in this crisp autumn
will require your best energies

Just remember

that which quickens your pulse
reminds you best
of how alive you truly are

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