It is Early - March 7, 2011

It is early, still the darkest of the dark.

And already I have killed (in exasperation)

two mosquitoes and (inadvertently)

one spider.

All the same, the sun will rise

in its sweeps of pink and red clouds.

Not for me does it rise and not in haste does it rise

but step by step, neither

with exasperation nor inadvertently, and not with

any intended attention to

any one thing, but to all, like a god

That takes its instructions from another, even greater,

whose name, even, we do not know.  The one

that made the mosquito, and the spider; the one

that made me as I am:  easy to exasperation, then penitent.

I have recently been watching bit and pieces of various programs about the nature of the universe.  My spouse is doing a sermon series on this topic, so I join him in his musings.

Just last night we watched Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe," that shows us the universe through the lens of mathematics and physics.  Last week I saw bits part of the series, "Cosmos" starring Carl Sagan. I never watched it when it first came out in the 1980's. As I see it now, I marvel how the words spoken there reveal to our kind how much the suns are like gods.  They are such a miracle in a vast ocean of mystery, and they bring so much life.  We are so small compared to the billions and billions of stars in the universe.  Yet, knowing this, we grow large and beautiful, for we are made of star dust.  We are stars.

Carl Sagan produced a fictional movie and book, "Contact," which is about how humans are stars, and also so childlike and fallible.  In this mix, always, is the awe and wonder of existence.  It is in my top ten favorite movies because the beauty there and the possibility of healing calls me to my better self.  Towards the end of the movie when the main character is hurtling towards other galaxies, she looks out on the birth and death of stars and says, "They should have sent a poet."

Well, they did.  The universe sent us Mary.  She calls me to my better self this morning.

What is the universe to you?

Today

Today is a day of

dark clouds and slow rain.

The little blades of corn

are so happy

Today is a day of darkened homes amongst the  terrorized citizenry, 

slowing revolutions, and assassinations of the brave.

Dare we be happy in such a world?

Landscape in Winter

Upon the snow that says nothing,

that is endless brilliant,

there is something heaped, dark, and motionless.

then come the many wings, strong and bold.

"Death has happened," shout the carrion crows.

"And this is good for us."

Is it possible that we can know that death is good for us?

How about the death of an old woman whose name no one remembers and who has known nothing but pain in her last years...

When a drug pusher dies of an overdose

When a dictator is hung

When an armadillo chooses the wrong moment to cross the road

When a cow's blood spills on the slaughterhouse floor

When our sisters die of cancer

When our cat dies of kidney failure

When the parrot goes extinct in the wild

When the forest falls and the springs dry up

When humanity disappears from the earth

When our own breath fades?

When is it possible to  say

"Death is good for us?"

Is it possible?

What if it were?

There Are a Lot of Mockingbirds in this Book

Yes, there are many

of those wondrous creatures

who live in the thorns

and are musical all day...

but this isn't nature

in which such birds

want, each pair,

their own few acres-

this isn't nature

where the sweetest things,

being hidden in leaves

and thorn-thick bushes

reveal themselves rarely-

this is a book

of the heart's rapture,

of hearing and praising

and  never forgetting

so that the world

is what the world is

in a long lifetime:

singer after singer

bursts from the thorn bush,

now, and again, and again,

their songs in the mind forever.

  

Isn't that what each are - singers in thorn bushes?  Somehow, during the course of the day we manage to reveal our true, wondrous selves and this song builds the world as it is.

Which is a world where no acres belong to anyone

Where beauty and love are ever revealed

Where the day is full of hearing songs of wonder

And our responding praise   -

pulling thorns from those have burst forth

or have yet to escape.

What thorns might you remove today?

Snowy Egret - January 12, 2011

A late summer night and the snowy egret

Has come again to the shallows in front of my house

As he has for 40 years.

Don’t think he is a casual part of my life,

That white stroke in the dark.

Are there beings you take for granted­their regularity

A sign of stagnation and the spirit’s reluctance to rise to the occasion of sacred relationship?

I have two people with whom I share my house – a spouse and a young man we have called son for over 6 years.  There is nearly 30 years difference between their ages (as I suspect is the case for Mary’s first egret and the latest). 

Both came home last night in the dark after I had gone to bed.  Though there was no energetic welcome to either and no occasion other than routine days between us, I pray that they don’t think they are a casual part of my life.  May I pray this day with words and intention so that they know my being with them I consider a stroke  of gracious luck.

Are there casual relationships in your life you long to chage?

Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered

The darkest thing met me in the dark.

It was only a face and a brace of teeth

that held no words, though I felt a salty breath

sighing in my direction.

Once, in an autumn that is long gone,

I was down on my knees in the cranberry bog

and heard, in that lonely place,

two voices coming down the hill, and I was thrilled

to be granted this secret,

that the coyotes, walking together can talk together,

for I thought, what else could it be?

And even though what emerged

were two young women, two-legged for sure

and not at all aware of me,

their nimble, young women tongues

telling and answering, and though I knew

I have believed something probably not true,

yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

And it has stayed with me

as a present once given is forever given.

Easy and happy they sounded,

those two maidens of the wilderness

from which we have-

who knows to what furious, pitiful extent-

banished ourselves.

I have my whole life longed for animals to human speak through voice or thought transfer, such as seen in the movie Avitar.  What I would I give to be able to talk and walk with a nonhuman companion at my side!  In recent years this has lessened a bit as I learn more about behavior, interspecies neurobiology, and cognitive ethology, and apply all of this through conservation behavior.  What has shifted is that I am better at listening.

To me the Barred Owl laughs at the world in the night, well, maybe it's not laughing really, but no less clear for me.  For I feel the coolness and dark of the night, the feathered companion, competitor, or prey calling in the night, and I yearn to bring something good back to the three in the hollow of my nest tree.  As Owl perhaps I don't describe in this way, but as human my mirror neurons light up as I imagine myself staring at the blood red eclipsed moon.  I too fly silently in the night.  We have not left the wilderness.  It lives in us: our brains, our blood, our DNA, and in you. 

We walk and talk together - with words, or without words. In this space, may no beings be banished from our hearts or from this earth.

With whom will you walk and talk today?

Sometimes

1.

Something came up

out of the dark.

It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.

It wasn't an animal

or a flower,

unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,

a head the size of a cat

but muddy and without ears.

I don't know what God is.

I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them

some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometime

melancholy leaves me breathless...

3.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!

Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.

The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

but not everything.

Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and

thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in  my heart

and fortify me,

take away my hunger for answers,

let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.

Let the cathead appear again-

the smallest of your mysteries,

some wild cousin of my own blood probably-

some cousin of my own wild blood probably,

in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around

one corner or another.

This doesn't amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Step One: Question

What is it that comes out of the dark?

Is it God?

Is it death?

What is the necessary arrangement between the two?

Step Two: Answer

Love

Step Three: Action

Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

Listen

Be crazy

Laugh

Grow

Step Four:  Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary

I summarized Mary's poem with these 4 steps. How would you? What are your "4 steps" to life?

 

Summer Morning

Heart, I implore you,

it's time to come back from the dark,

it's morning, the hill are pink

and the roses whatever they felt

in the valley of night

are opening now

their soft dresses, their leaves

are shining. Why are you laggard?

Sure you have seen this a thousand times,

which isn't half enough. Let the world

have its way with you, luminous as it is

with mystery and pain-

graced as it is with the ordinary.

It is quite dark now. Election day has passed and soon I'll pick up the paper and wonder if we can ever have the kind of discourse that will bring peace and flourishing to our communities of mixed species. Compounding this I am reading a novel about the Columbine High School shootings. I wonder how we can move from blame and darkness when there is so much pain? My prayer in the graying dawn is for my heart to not give up and to stay engaged instead of painting the world with a brush laden with opaque and dull thoughts. I know of no way to guarantee the course of the heart in a day - except to give into the day where there will always be shadows and always be something illuminated, with a smile shining through it.

How has the ordinary graced your life?

The Chat

I wish

I were

the yellow chat

down in the thickets

who sings all night,

throwing

into the air

praises

and pandhandles,

plains,

in curly phrases,

half-rhymes,

free verse too,

with head-dipping

and wing-wringing,

with soft breast

rising into the air-

meek and sleek,

broadcasting,

with no time out

for pillow-rest,

everything-

pathos,

thanks-

Oh, Lord,

what a lesson

you send me

as I stand

listening

to your rattling, swamp-loving chat

singing

of his simple, leafy life-

how I would like to sing to you

all night

in the dark

just like that.

A brief song came to me in dreams last night. There were three solitary birds - a parrot companion long gone, a budgerigar (small parakeet) and a raven. They did not know each other, but upon seeing one another they would not leave each other's side. I had thought that they would hurt each other, so great their size differential. Instead, where one walked or flew, so went the other two - caring, loving, protective. The lasting feeling this morning is of eternal companionship. I awoke with no answers, just with a thirst to sing in the darkness of the pathos and tragedy of our world.

What song do you sing in the morning? In the night?

The Users of Sorrow (in my sleep I dreamed this poem) - and - Heavy

Someone I loved once gave me

A box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

That this , too, was a gift.

I am just over the time line in Auburn, Alabama. The sun rises earlier and there is less time of dark, or so it seems. The sky is already light and it’s not yet 6:30 a.m. One student who attends here told me that on campus sometimes his phone picks up Eastern Time, and other times, Central. This is a liminal place where dark and light meet and when the time before merges with the time to come.

Gifts too are indeterminate. Sometimes when a gift is offered to us, we pick it up and it seems heavy, and at other times it appears light. I do not know how to trust that everything that comes our way is a gift. Or how we might know when we should put the gift down and say that we have gotten all we can out of it. When is there too much clutter in our life, does our attention turn to the stuff and not to that which comes our way, or even to the Ultimate Givers themselves?

I for one know that in the dark, heavy sorrow I find the unexpected gift of love and wonder. Yet when it is offered me I would rather say, no thanks, not today. What a world of beauty and belonging I would have missed if I had a choice of life experiences. But perhaps we do have a choice, to keep opening gifts to look for the laughter and joy within and hear love echo back to us from the deep, opening box of possibility.

Heavy

That time

I thought I could not

Go any closer to grief

Without dying

I went closer,

And I did not die.

Surely God

Had his hand in this,

As well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

And my laughter,

As the poet said,

Was nowhere to be found.

Then say my friend Daniel

(brave even among lions),

“It’s not the weight you carry

But how you carry it-

Books, bricks, grief-

It’s all in the way

You embrace it, balance it, carry it

When you cannot, and would not,

Put it down.”

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

The laughter

That comes, now and again,

Out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

To admire, admire, admire

The things of this world

That are kind and maybe

Also troubled-

Roses in the wind,

The sea geese on the steep waves,

A love

To which there is no reply?