The First Time Percy Came Back

The First Time Percy Came Back

The first time Percy came back

he was sailing on a cloud...

"Percy," I cried out, and reached to him-

those white curls-

but he was unreachable. As music

is present yet you can't touch it...

When I first read the poem, my sister had died only a few weeks earlier.  She had come back to us in dreams, first to my niece, and then to me, young, healthy, and thin.  She lived through a long illness, as did both my parents, and my father- and mother-in-law.  They are all gone, yet they keep coming back to me, sometimes more frequently and vividly than they did when they first died. Heck, even more than when they were alive.  My wish to have them with me also grows stronger.

Why couldn't I see their music, their beauty, more when they were alive?  Why does it seem so hard to touch that inescapable wonder in each and every one of us, and in each and every moment?

We live through such depths of pain, misery, and loss, all which hollow us out. But there, in that pit, an orchestra made up of all whom we have known, know, and will know, sounds loudly, "wake up!"

Questions for Reflection

Whom do you wish would come back? What would you say to them? Do?

Do those who have died or gone away ever really leave us?

Who can you find, today, to tell a story of loss, and of a coming back to life?

When

When it's over, it's over, and we don't know any of us, what happens then.

So I try not to miss anything.

I think, in my whole life, I have never missed the full moon

or the slipper of it's coming back.

Or, a kiss.

Well, yes, especially a kiss.

Just yesterday I was shopping in the food market store, wondering about so many different things, some of them worrisome.  Then I started looking around at what was there in front of me - bright large oranges, people with so very many interesting delicacies in their carts, and a baker decorating a cake.

If I could live with that presence all the time, then perhaps I would not have missed so much in my life - the neglected full moons as well as the chance to give and receive love. 

Mary's poems leads me to wonder...

Is life worth living if you aren't ready to kiss everything and everyone?

How Heron Comes

It is a negligence of the mind

not to notice how at dusk

heron comes to the pond and

stands there in his death robes, perfect

servant of the system, hungry, his eyes

full of attention, his wings

pure light.

I think how often I have been negligent in my mind.

I watch the juvenile young men gather on the sidewalk at sun set, suspecting their every thought and action as reproachable and full of danger. I cross the street to the other side to avoid any close association with them or to put myself in harm's way.

Oh you say, that is prudent, you know how young men are. There is too much testosterone pumping in their veins to trust them.

Well then what about the person in the car ahead of me who flings trash?  The hunter?  The drug dealer?  The addict?  The wily politician?  My slow moving self this morning who almost forgot to bow to the moon high in the lightening sky?

Are we not all perfect servants of the system?

Our hunger brings us life, our knowing of this brings us light.

May you have such illumination this morning, this day.

For what are you hungry?

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?

Imagine

I don't care for adjectives, yet the world fills me with them.

And even beyond what I see, I imagine more.

Seeing, for example, with understanding,

or with acceptance and humility and

without understanding,

into the heart of the bristly, locked-in worm

just as it's becoming what we call the luna,

that green tissue-winged, strange, graceful,

fluttering thing.

Will death allow such transportation of the eye?...

Well, we will all find out, each of us.

And what would we be, beyond the yardstick,

beyond supper and dollars,

if we were not filled with such wondering?

To be human, is to wonder what waits for us in death.

Is it uber-human to wait patiently for what is developing into life, or decaying into death?

To see without seeing?

I see for instance, without understanding the behavior of myself and those around me.  We're a despicable lot, aren't we?  Bristly worms, locked into our narrow outlooks and self interests.

Then, when grace comes upon me, I see the beauty within.  I still don't understand.

So what is left to do?

Ah, yes.

Look

Laugh

Bow in humility

I wonder what you ponder?

Schubert

He takes such small steps

to express our longings.

Thank you, Schubert.

How many hours

do I sit here

aching to do

what I do not do

when, suddenly,

he throws a single note

higher than the others

so that I feel the green field of hope,

and the descending

all this world's sorrow

so deadly, so beautiful

I know almost nothing of Schubert. As a child my fingers stumbled over his concertos during piano practice, but that was decades ago.  Heck, my radio station on www.pandora.com the last few weeks has been country gospel songs.  I guess I'm a regular philistine when it comes to music.

Except I know how deadly sorrow can be and too, how beautiful.  And I know that almost anything in my world can remind me of beauty, and the ache that comes with it. 

I just have to be open to hearing the daily low notes, and the surprising high notes that are always there waiting to break through to my consciousness.

So today, in this grey, rainy morning light, let me turn my station to Schubert and see what I might hear today.  It's a short step for the longing heart.

What strikes a note for you today to know sorrow and beauty?

Evidence

I.

Where do I live? If I had no address, as many people
do not, I could nevertheless say that I lived in the
same town as the lilies of the field, and the still
waters.

Spring, and all through the neighborhood now there are
strong men tending flowers.

Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But
all beautiful things, inherently, have this function -
to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory
to the world, that good teacher.

Among the swans there is none called the least, or
the greatest.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in
singing, especially when singing is not necessarily
prescribed.

As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

2.

There are many ways to perish, or to flourish.

How old pain, for example, can stall us at the threshold of function….

Still friends, consider stone, that is without the fret of gravity, and water that is without anxiety. 

And the pine trees that never forget their recipe for renewal. 

And the female wood duck who is looking this way and that way for her children. And the snapping turtle who is looking this way and that way also. This is the world. 

And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles. 

3. 

I ask you again: if you have not been enchanted by this adventure--your life--what would do for you? 

And, where are you, with your ears bagged down as if with packets of sand? Listen. We all have much more listening to do. Tear the sand away. And listen. The river is singing. …

For myself, I have walked in these woods for

More than forty years, and I am the only

thing, it seems, that is about to be used up.

Or, to be less extravagant, will, in the

Foreseeable future, be used up.

First, though, I want to step out into some

fresh morning and look around and hear myself

crying out:  "The house of money is falling! The house of money is falling! The weeds are rising! The weeds are rising!"

In this day today, do you imagine there will be much evidence? Evidence for what?

Consider the lilies then and the birds as Mary does.  She's been reading the Christian Scriptures that one! (Matthew 6:25-34)

I read it much like she does.  There is so much contradiction in the passage, which points to the opposed tensions in life, we are left to turn to the infallible, but which can be hidden. So we go through our days as sleuths to discover. What you ask?  More importantly, how,  when we know that we are marching towards the point of being used up?  Or like the ducklings, hunted by pain for the good of the world?

I don't have the answer of how we listen for the evidence all around us.  

I only know that beauty is everywhere. It's my job to find it and praise the world accordingly, and to respond to the glory of every being with in the world, which are also within me.

What evidence do you long for today?

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?

If You Say It Right, It Helps the Heart to Bear It

The comforts of language are true and deep;

In a cemetery, in the South, so many stones and so many

So small.  Sometimes three or four in a row….

Can you imagine the condition of the heart of a mother

Or a father watching these plantings?  I cannot.  But I try.

“God taketh  his young lambs home.” It’s is carved there.  A few words

Like water on a stone. Cool and beautiful like water on a stone.

Several years ago I journeyed north from Mobile, Alabama to visit the place where my grandfather was born. As I approached this place, more and more of the cemeteries held stones with the name “Joyner” on them.  When I arrived at the country church, deep in the pines on a dirt road, the cemetery was full of my ancestors.  There, after a morning’s rain, I found the markers of my great grandparents.  With the sun reflecting off the water atop the time smoothed stones, I could just make out these words, “He served while he lived.”

Today I give a workshop on Compassionate Communication.  I will hold these words from the past as I offer people the chance to learn ever greater how the language we use can comfort, if not in the immediate, at least into the future if our intentions are to love while we speak truth.  If we can use our language, thought, and action as a means to practice compassion in every moment, maybe our cemeteries will be not quite so full of lost lambs who had succumbed to the jackal of our natures.

Where might you use words of comfort today for another?

Thinking of the Swirler

One day I went out into a wonderful ongoing afternoon, in was fall,

the pine trees were brushing themselves against the sky as though they were painting it, and Swirler,

who was alive then, was walking slowly through the green bog, his neck

as thick as an ox, his antlers brushing against the trees,

his three good feet tapping

the softness beneath him and the fourth, from an old wound, swirling. I know he saw me

for he gave me a long look which was as precious as a few good words, since his eyes

were without terror  What do the creatures know? What in this world can we be certain about?  How did he know I was nothing

but a harmless mumbler of words, some of which would be about him

and this wind-whipped day?  In a week he would be dead,

arrowed down by a young man I like, though with some difficulty.

In my house there are a hundred half-done poems.  Each of us leaves an unfinished life.

My son recently returned home from a month's visit to his native country, Honduras.  He and his brother had been down at the river swimming, and growing bored, his brother raised his slingshot and killed two birds.  My son showed me pictures of the dead birds, one of which I could see was  a brightly colored "Mountain Trogon."  My son said he and his brother had never seen such a bird near their home before.  I wonder if they ever will again.

At the end of December, 3 Whooping Cranes were shot in Georgia.  These were young birds that had been raised in Wisconsin and this was their first migration south.    I wonder if hunters had gotten bored.

When I was 21 I visited a night club and sitting at a table full of locals, we told each other of our lives.  He asked what I did and I answered that I was a bird veterinarian.  He then said, "Shucks. I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I shoot hawks. Sometimes when I'm waiting for a deer or a duck, I get so bored. I just have to empty my gun into something."  I wonder what ever happened to that man.

What is it that pulls our kind to finish off another before their time?  Boredom?  Anxiety and despair mixed with feelings of being overwhelmed and perhaps mental incoherence?  Why did the shooter fire into the crowd, killing six and severely wounding Representative Gaby Gifford in Arizona a few days ago?

 I have hundreds of unanswered questions swirling around in my head, the fog of this morning echoing the murkiness in so many minds.  I wonder what we shall make of all these unfinished lives.

Is there something you wish to finish, or leave unfinished in your life?       

Li Po and the Moon

There is the story of the old Chinese poet:

At night in his boat he went drinking and dreaming

And singing

Then drowned as he reached for the moon’s reflection.

Well, probably each of us, at some time, has been

As desperate.

Not the moon, though.

Let me just be cantankerous this one day.  I can’t help it, or so I say. When I hear or sense a separation between myself from the rest of existence, I want to balk and say, “it’s not so!”  In this case, moons have been known to fall into their earth’s gravitational pull and lose themselves as they explode into planetary merger.  They become one heavenly body or trillions upon trillions of particles swirling about in the universe’s ocean.  Either way, it’s the end of their separate selves for they cannot deny the pull of the other.  Moons swoon as much as do we.

For whom or what shall you swoon today?

Prince Buzzard - January 9, 2010

Prince Buzzard,

I took you, so high in the air,

For a narrow boat and two black sails.

You were drifting

In the depths of the air

Wherever you wanted to go,

And when you came down

With your spoony mouth

And your read head

And your creaking wings

To the lamb

Dead, dead, dead

In the fields of spring

I knew it was hunger

That brought you’

Yet you went about it

So slowly,

Settling with hunched wings

And silent

As the grass itself

Over the lambs’s white body-

It seemed

a ceremony,

A pause

As though something

In the quick of your own body

Had come out

To give thanks

For the dark work

That was yours,

Which wasn’t to be done easily or quickly,

But thoroughly-

And indeed by time summer

Opened its green harbors

The fields was nothing but flower, flowers, flowers,

From shore to shore.

I am out on the edge of water this morning, the sun barely awake.  Over the Calooshatcee River in Ft. Myers the first Turkey Vultures begin to sail by around 9 a.m.  It’s cool, perhaps this is why .They await the heating of the day to form the thermals that bare them aloft. Or maybe, there just isn’t that much death so early in the day.

This is probably just another human delusion.  Beings and dreams have died all through the night, we just can’t see it.  Migrants of all kinds won’t make it to the next morning, whether it is blackbirds and doves falling from the sky or humans  from Mesoamerica, seeking a better life.  I am reminded of them as I went out this morning to buy coffee, finding it in a convenience store where I was the only non-native Spanish speaker.  They are here, and how many thousands are not, or will never know a life that flowers into full possibility? 

If I were brave, I would go out into the darkness with my flashlight and look for death to remind me that it all around, happening constantly though I sit here comfortable and pleasured, sipping coffee, on a deck of a house with a pool, Jacuzzi, multiple couches, and an HDTV.  No wait a minute. If I were truly brave, I would go out in the darkness with no light at all, and give myself over to death, so that there would be even more flowers on the morrow.  If I, if we, did this, then we might return to a world where the spattering of ducks and coots now on this river near me would cover this river from shore to shore?

This Too

There was the body of the fawn, in the leaves,

under the tall oaks.

There was the face, the succulent mouth,

the pink, extruded tongue.

There were the eyes.

There was its dark dress, half pulled off.

There were its little hooves.

There was the smell of change, which was

stink.

There was my dog's nose, reading the silence

like a book.

No one spoke, not the Creator, not the Preserver, not the Destroyer.

There was the sound of wind in the leaves,

in the tall oaks.

There was the terrible excitement

of the flies.

Two nights ago I saw the movie, "All the Little Animals" that is about, in part, a man who dedicates his life to burying dead animals he finds along the side of the road. He considers this his lifelong work and takes on an apprentice to carry on after he too lies in the ground.  At one point in the movie the apprentice, Bobby, silently digs what might be his own grave. As he ponders his own death, he suddenly feels lighter and more whole than he ever has.  He notices everything, and in this clarity he grows excited as his life and death give him meaning.   

Death, this too, must we not only notice in every detail, but love?

Whose death do you remember in detail, and how does this add to your life today?

Moles

Under the leaves, under

the first loose

levels of earth

they're there -- quick

as beetles, blind

as bats, shy

as hares but seen

less than these --

traveling

among the pale girders

of appleroot,

rockshelf, nests

of insects and black

pastures of bulbs

peppery and packed full

of the sweetest food:

spring flowers.

Field after field

you can see the traceries

of their long

lonely walks, then

the rains blur

even this frail hint of them --

so excitable,

so plush,

so willing to continue

generation after generation

accomplishing nothing

but their brief physical lives

as they live and die,

pushing and shoving

with their stubborn muzzles against

the whole earth,

finding it

delicious.

Last week I saw a gopher, this illusive creature. She had died, and was on the sandy road leading to our home. I do not know if she had been run over by a car before or after her death. I picked her up and marveled at her being - she was made to live underground and to thrive there.  She seemed so different from me as I lay her under the leaves covering the roots of a roadside tree.

Is she really so different?  Are we here to do anything more than live and die, and to sing that song on days of joy and of despair, ultimately finding it all delicious?

How do you stubbornly exist?