More Evidence - Part 1

1.

The grosbeak sings with a completely cherishable roughness..

With what words can I convince you of the casualness with which the white swans fly..

Do you give a thought now and again to the essential sparrow, the necessary toad?

Just as truly as the earth is ours, we belong to it. The tissue of our minds is made of it, and the soles of our feet, as fully as the tiger’s claw, the branch of the whitebark pine, the voices of the bird, the dog-tooth violet and the tooth of the dog….

This morning I took a hike with our ectourist group in Guyana up to some caves with bats. Along the way we walked through a forest teaming with thousands of species biting, singing, crawling, hooting, growing, and photosynthesizing.  I love the tropical forest and after days and days in one, I begin to know I belong, as do all beings.  However, I am guessing that for you, like me, there are certain special places in your life that more clearly and strongly say, “You belong.”  For me it is swimming in natural body of water.

After this hike I mentioned I jumped off a bank of a forest river into clear cool water.  With fish swimming all around me, I circled round to see a Pygmy Kingfisher perched on a branch and below him, my species washing their clothes.   Clothes, fur, feathers  no matter how roughly or finely we are clad, we are the skin of the earth emerging from the mixing of mud with water. 

Belonging is the first step, and a hard one to be sure. I believe there is more struggles before us all - knowing we are necessary, and also not.

Where do you gain your greatest sense of belonging?

More Evidence - Part 3

3.

It is salvation if one can step forth from the clutter of one’s mind into that open space-that almost holy space-called work.

Emerson: how the elegance of his language can make me weep over my own inadequacy…

Do you hear the rustle and outcry on the page?

Do you hear it’s longing?...

4. 

Let laugher come to you now and again, that sturdy friend.

The impulse to leap off the cliff, when the body falsely imagines it might fly, may be restrained by reason, also by modesty.  Of the two possibilities, take your choice, and live.

Refuse all cooperation with the heart’s death.

5.

 Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be musical inside yourself.

Yesterday I visited Kaieteur Falls in central Guyana.  Here is the tallest single drop falls in the world.  While there we saw a pair of Red and Green Macaws circle through the rising mist of the falls, their calls echoing down the canyons and down deep in our souls.   


At the head of the falls are immense cliffs, to which we were invited to crawl onto our stomachs and peer over.  In between dizzy spells, I watched the White-collared Swifts approach the falls and then in twos and threes dive straight down the vertical wall of water,  twittering amongst themselves as they left us behind on the cliffs.  I would not be exaggerating to say that we experienced an impulse to follow them, and perhaps we did.  Somehow watching them and the macaws it was as if we ourselves were flying as they, the rainbow rulers and aerobatic champions of the falls.

Let us choose not to be restrained by either modesty or reason, but jump over the edge of perceived separateness so that we may put to death our egos so our hearts may yet live and our spirits at last soar.

What might you choose to day so that your heart may live and your spirit soar?

In Your Hands

The dog, the donkey, surely they know they are alive.

Who would argue otherwise?...

What about the sunflowers?...

Listen, all you have to do is start and there'll be no stopping....

And, speaking of stones, what about the little ones you can

hold in your hands their heartbeats so secret

so hidden it make take years

before, finally you hear them?

In the recent interview with Mary Oliver, she was asked what she had done with her one wild and precious life. She responded, "I used up a lot of pencils...... What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy. And I learned to consider my life an amazing gift. Those are the things."

The subtext of what I believe she has done with her life,  as this poem suggests, is to listen so that she could see, hear, feel, and know love. 

If we listen hard enough I believe that not only will we find beauty everywhere, but also love.  I don't know which comes first or which might be causal, I only know that as I listen in the night, the barred owl asks, "Who loves for you?"

May I answer, "I do."  May we answer, "We do."  Loving is after all in our hands.

How do you listen to love?  

The Last Word Abut Fox (Maybe)

Where is the fox now?

Somewhere, doing his life's work, which is living his life....

How many rabbits has he caught so far?

Many, many, many...

This doesn't sound very important....

Have you never heard of the meek and what is t o become of them?

What's meek about eating rabbits?...

You know, there's only one thing to say.  I think

you're a little crazy.

I thank the Lord.

Where are you now?

Wherever you are, you are doing your life's work.

Maybe you don't think so as you get up and eat dull toast and do that exercise routine one more time, if at all.

Perhaps you think that today you'll do nothing important.

Whatever you do, I don't think there's anything meek about it.

Maybe I and others are crazy to think so, but your wild and precious life is astounding.

Be like the fox looking for something to catch.

Catch the spirit today!

Are there areas in your life that you do not hold in high regard?  

The Living Together

The spirit says:

What gorgeous clouds.

The body says: Good,

The crops need rain.

The spirit says:

Look at the lambs frolicking.

The body says:

When’s the feast?...

The spirit says:  Body,

How can we live together?

The body says:  Bricks and mortar

And a back door.

In Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, we see that the fundamental needs of protection, security and nuturturance are below the higher needs of spiritual development. If the people are not fed and safe, it is hard for them to ponder the beauty of the clouds and the inherent worth and dignity of others.  Notice I say hard, not impossible. 

It is a difficult task though to embody spirit in our daily lives. Aren’t we always in some ways, or at least perceiving so, under threat or at risk of not having enough?  So we look to the lambs to slaughter them, our relationships, our communities, and our earth.

May we look to this day, and not sneak out the back door to meet our desires and our fears, but go boldly through the front door, and leave the door to our hearts open as we journey forward together.

Do you have tension between your body and spirit?  What is spirit?

April

I wanted to speak at length about

The happiness of my body and the

Delight of my mind for it was

April, a night, a full moon and-

But something in myself for maybe

From somewhere other said: not too

Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

I am at the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach giving a workshop of Nonviolent Communication. In my presentation I encourage people to use as few words as possible to keep the chance for connection and understanding alive.  Perhaps our brains do best in about 40 word segments.  Mary’s poem today is 51 words, just about right. 

It doesn’t take many words really to say, “Look, there goes beauty.”  “Hey, beauty is dwindling.”  “My heart hurts.”  “Now let’s do something about it.” 

What will you do “about it” – sing?  Change?  Open yourself to death and suffering?

In Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama - March 15, 2011

Death taps his black wand and something vanishes.  Summer, winter…branch of an oak tree…three just hatched geese.  Many trees and thickets…violets…

Lambs that, only recently , were gamboling in the field. And old mule, in Alabama, that could take no more of anything.  And then, what follows?  Then spring again, summer, and the season of harvest.  …..

More lambs and new green grass in the field, for their happiness until.  And some kind of yellow flower whose name I don’t know (but what does that matter?) rising around and out of the half-buried, half-vulture-eaten, harness-galled, open-mouthed (its teeth long and blackened), breathless, holy mule.

Not only in Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama, but I imagine ever where we looked we would see life sprouting from the ghastly evidence of death.  Why then do we accept life so well, and not so death?

Except that I doubt, given the amount of resistance to death if we are any more accepting of life.

How can we be when we spend the earth’s resources to prolong our lives 6 months more, perhaps, when children, birds, peoples, and forests are dying from our extraction economies?

How can we be for life when we seal our hearts from others, just so we can be safe, just so we can live? 

Living is all well and good, but what if to be safe we kill relationships, possibility, justice, and flourishing for all?  Is that living?

Maybe we just need to do some more timely dying – of bodies, of egos, of assumptions, of separation.

May I this day let the stubborn mule of my ways die.

What is your stubborn mule?

The Poet Dreams of the Classroom

I dreamed

I stood up in class

and I said aloud:

Teacher,

why is algebra important?

Sit down, he said.....

Then I dreamed

I stood up once more and said:

Teacher, my heart is falling asleep

and it wants to wake up.

It needs to be outside.

Sit down, he said.

When in elementary school I was not much of a student.  I laughed as much as I could, ignored the teacher, and when at home, played the game to be the first one out of school clothes and outside, and the last one to come in after the sun fell. For my efforts, I technically did not pass fourth grade.  There ensued a major teacher-parent conference and I was read the riot act, "Shape up now or you won't ever amount to anything."

Well I shaped up, did well in school, and sat down through many years of college and degrees.

Today will be a day full of inside work to help those beings "outside."  I make myself sit down here at the computer.  There is great risk that my heart won't quicken today and will become sleepy and dull, for I need to be outside.

What about a compromise then?  I can be outside myself, and rise above ego concerns as just now the sun is rising over the tree tops in my back yard.

So my plan for the day if I get sleepy is this:

Sit down, let go, get up, let go.  Repeat as necessary.

How do you keep your heart awake?

The Riders

When the Pony Express needed riders, it advertised

a preference for orphans-

that way, no one was likely

to ask questions when the carriers

failed to arrive, or the frightened ponies

stumbled in with their dead

from the flanks of the prairies....

There were plenty of orphans and the point of course

was to get the mail through, so the theory was sound....

think of those rough, lean boys-

how light and hard they would rise

fleeing the great loneliness.

Some examples of sound theories:

There are plenty of chickens, so what if by the billions they lead lives of suffering?

There are plenty of trees, so what if we lose the remaining forests?

There are plenty of cats and dogs, so what if we euthanize them by the millions?

There are plenty of people, so what if 2 billion of them live with inadequate shelter, food, or water?

In trying to flee a great loneliness, we have become lean and hard towards others.   

My theory, how does it sound?

More of the Unfinishable Fox Story

Dear Readers,

I have been in touch with Beacon Press and I learned that by printing so much of the poem I might be infringing on copyright issues.  So from here until the end, I shall write only a few lines of each poem and encourage you to get the book.  It's so hard for me to only include such a small portion, because the poems in their entirety are so complete. I have loved to type each line  as a form of prayer - so instead let us whisper the words to one another through the ethernet. 

Today's Poem

And what did the fox look like?...

He was rough and smelled of skunk.

But he was beautiful,

and beauty is not to be taken lightly....

Mary is still on to that fox she saw. She doesn't remember where she was going and cannot imagine what the fox is doing on the road, but she does know what beauty is and for.  First and foremost we are to remember beauty. 

We are to remember that beauty exists.

We are to remember that it is all around us.

We are to remember that it is in us, is us, is everyone, is every being.

We are to remember that the story of beauty ever continues and never ends, so that our days may be finished in beauty.

What story do you have that is unfinished, or unfinishable?

Tom Dancers Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone

You never know what opportunity is going to travel to you, or through  you.

Once a friend game me a small pine cone-one of a few he found in the scat

of a grizzly in Utah maybe, or Wyoming. I took it home

and did what I supposed he was sure I would do-

I ate it, thinking

how it had traveled through that rough and holy body.  It was crisp and sweet.

It was almost a prayer without words.  My gratitude to you, Tom Dancer,

 for this gift of the world I adore so much and want to belong to.  And thank you too, great bear.

I often aspire to be like Mary Oliver, but in today's poem she surpasses who I ever imagined myself to be. She ate seeds from bear scat.

Really?  Did she really?  Does she really do this and all the other things in her poems, or does she write poems from her imagination?

Who knows the truth of magic in our modern day shamans, but surely her power comes from somewhere. So why not through the leavings of bears?

As a veterinarian I think of disease transmission and imagine her boiling the heck out of that pine cone before ingesting it.

But perhaps I over estimate the need for sterility in this procedure, or in any other I undertake today. 

Maybe, just maybe, I will roll around in some shit today left behind from some wild being in the woods, smelling like I belong to the family of things, smiling like I know it.

What would you take in from the wild as food for your soul?

A Fox in the Dark

A Fox in the Dark

February 26, 2010

A fox goes by in the headlights like an electric shock.

A fox goes by in the headlights like an electric shock.


Then he pauses at the edge of the road
and the heart, if it is still alive,


feels something--a yearning for which we have no name


but which we may remember, years later, in the darkness,


upon some other empty road.

Feels something-a yearning for which we have no name

But which we may remember, years later, in the darkness

One time upon a blizzard impacted remote road in Alaska a fox stopped dead center in the road ahead of my van.  It was hard at first to see who it was given the blowing snow, but as the fox did not move I was able to get quite close.  Almost upon the wild one, I wondered if he or she had been hit by a car or was sick, or like the rest of us on this journey, sticking to the road like a prayer that would keep us out of ditch and doom.  The fox began to trot and moved with me for a while down the road.  It felt a loss when the beauty finally decided to pause by the side of the road, and as I went on my way north, I could see the fox staring at me through the rear view mirror.

Looking back now, I still see those eyes, whispering through snow dusted whiskers  - I am with you, you do not journey alone. 

Who journeys with you?

How I Got to the Woods

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.

I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run my unconcerned. I can hear the almost unbearable sound of the roses singing.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

I tell you I’d like to pray with Mary. 

I’d like to go on a hadj to her part of the world and bow down near the pond in humility and adoration.

I’d like to offer confessions to the ducks and trees that knew how to listen in their feathered and barked way.

I’d like to meditate in the fields, and perhaps share a smile with Mary as the hawk flies over with something still and furry.

I have gone to the woods for years as my church and temple, but so much of it is alone. 

Once when I was sitting on a hilltop in Guatemala, a jararundi (small wild cat) approached me from the trees and bounded by me only a few feet away.

Sometimes it helps to have the prayers answered, to know you are lovable and loving.

How do you pray?

Mysteries, Yes - February 14, 2011

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of lambs...

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

Ah, my spiritual practice for the day...

Look

Laugh

Lower my self

What will you practice today so that you may live the questions?

Philip’s Birthday

I gave,

To a friend that I care for deeply,

Something that I loved.

It was only a small

Extremely shapely bone

That come from the ear

Of a whale.

It hurt a little

To give it away.

The next morning

I went out, as usual,

At sunrise

And there, in the harbor,

Was a swan.

I don’t know

What he or she was doing there,

But the beauty of it

Was gift.

Do you see what I mean?

You give, and you are given.

I have always liked the idea of a potlatch – an indigenous custom of North America where a family gives away possessions in celebration and in gratitude. So too I have heard of people who on their own birthdays, give gifts to others.  One day when I came up to a national park entrance the car ahead of me, whose passengers were strangers to me, paid for the entrance. Another time a car ahead of me in a toll both paid for me.  Wow.   What if any time we felt gratitude or some good news came our way, we started looking for multiple possessions we might offer to others?  Or maybe every day we made it a goal to give something away?  What gifts indeed might come to us and our world.

What will you gift today?  Or be gifted with?

Almost a Conversation

I have not really, not yet, talked with otter about his life.

He has so many teeth, he has trouble with vowels.

Wherefore our understanding is all body expression-

he swims like the sleekest fish,

he dives and exhales and lifts a trail of bubbles.

Little by little he trusts my eyes

and my curious body sitting on the shore.

Sometimes he comes close.

I admire his whiskers and his dark fur which I would rather die than wear.

He has no words, still what he tells about his life is clear.

He does not own a computer.

He imagines the river will last forever.

He does not envy the dry house I live in.

He does not wonder who or what it is that I worship.

He wonders, morning after morning, that the river is so cold and fresh and alive, and still

I don't jump in.

I have spoken often of the Ichetucknee, a spring fed river that in the summer is so cold that you have to clamp down on all fear and just jump in.  If one does so, there are great rewards.

Under the surface there are the sleek fish that with grace, you can sometimes touch.

At the surface are the croaking limpkins and the murmuring wood ducks who do not startle as you swim by them, listening.

Above the surface the Osprey look at you and you imagine you might fool them into thinking that you are a fish, so wondrous it feels to be part of the river for hour after hour.  Or perhaps the eagle could mistake you for a bird and take you away from all your trouble with firm talons.

Finally near the last bend is where the otters can be seen.  Yes, there is awe and gratitude, but I admit to discontent.  For I want to dive with them, root around for mussels with them, play with them, touch them, and be them.  It will not happen and soon one must exit the river at the end of the run.

It's all I can do to not drive back up to the entry point and jump in again. But what good would that accomplish?  For at least another two hours I could do  more than imagine that I am one with this world, my body would confirm that I am.

With this knowing, would not this river last forever?  If all humans could shed their clothes and join our brothers and sisters - in form or in dream - might we just forget our envy  and our religions? 

What a site - middle aged naked women recognizing each otter individually and seeing themselves.  How the people would marvel.

Go ahead and look, I've got whiskers too!

Where don't you jump in?