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?

Meadowlark Sings and I Greet Him In Return

Meadowlark, when you sing it’s as if

You lay your yellow breast upon mine and say

Hello, hello, and are we not

Of one family, in our delight of life?

You sing, I listen.

Both are necessary

If the world is to continue going around

Night-heavy then light –laden, though not

Everyone knows this or at least

Not yet,

Or, perhaps, has forgotten it

In the torn fields,

In the terrible debris of progress

I am at my mother’s where because of her cognition level and inability to walk has care takers who come into the home 15 hours a day.  The caretaker is late so I take the “baby monitor” into my room so I can detect if my mother awakes and needs help.  I hear her breathe through the monitor as I do my daily meditation.  It is hard to concentrate on my breathe as her breathe is so close to my ear, as are her occasional snores.  After a while we breathe together, one family in our respiratory cycle if barely in waking hours.  Her slipping away into a world of silence I suppose I must admit is part and parcel of the cycle of life. I am not enlightened enough to be at peace with this. It seems terrible debris of the circumstances of living that brings her to this.  My heart is torn, yet in that opening I find that the bird held close to my breast and the unheard song is every more dear.

What do you struggle to accept as part of the way of life, of reality?

Crow Says

There is corn in the field,

what should I think of else?

Anyway, my thoughts are all feathery.

I prefer simple beak talk.

Maybe it's having wings.

It does make a difference.

As for that business about brothers,

of course I'm concerned that we

share the corn, to the extent

that I get my plenty.

As for later, how can "later" exist?

When old crows die I don't cry,

I peck at their silly, staring eyes

and open my wings and fly to

wherever I want to. I've forgotten

both father and mother,

even the pile of sticks

in which I was born. Well, maybe

now and again, and mostly in winter,

I have strange, even painful ruminations.

When you're hungry and cold

it's hard to be bold, so I sulk,

and I have dreams sometimes, in which

I remember the corn will come again,

and vaguely then I feel that I am almost feeling

grateful, to something or other.

Just yesterday I read about the emotional and social lives of crows and ravens.  They are quite smart.  They express complex emotions to others through voice and feather, use tools, and recognize human faces perhaps better than we can.  In addition, writes William Hagmen, "They play, communicate, and have the capacity to deceive.  They're smarter than any cat and most children.  They have strong family values.  Johan McGowan, (author of In the Company of Crows and Ravens") equates it with our society, saying crows come closer to man than any other species studied, including primates. Crow society is family-based, he said. There's a single breeding pair that has offspring that don't leave right away and help raise the next batch of offspring, just like people. Relationships are maintained and individuals can join up with each other years later. Like us, crows have territories and they gather in communal places. When you see a number of crows gathering, he said, 'those aren't gangs of crows, they're typically family groups that are helping each other make a living.'"

So, if I am to take Mary literally here in her understanding of crows, she is off the mark.  Yet, is she really speaking of crows?  Maybe she means me, and you.  We think we are somehow different than other beings. We may not have wings, but we've got something especially primate about us that sets us apart.  We hoard the harvests from fields and forget about our brothers and sisters.  Sometimes, when hard times come our way we let go of control and give in to dreams of interdependence and even touch gratitude.

Winter is coming - our first day below 40 degrees and I'm bundled up writing this.  Outside my window a fish crow calls, telling me that there is beauty in the chaotic and bountiful field of our existence, if not in benefit directly coming my way but in loving and compassionate thoughts I share with all beings.

Why today should I think of anything else?

Why should you?

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

On cold evenings

My grandmother,

With ownership of half her mind-

The other half having flown back to Bohemia

Spread newspapers over the porch floor

So, she said, the garden ants could crawl

As under a blanket, and keep warm,

And what shall I wish for myself,

But, being so struck by the lightning of years,

To be like her with what is left, that loving.

My mother has dementia. My father-in-law does too. In their crazy Alzheimer’s world it’s hard for me to share reality with them. Okay, it’s hard for anyone I believe to have shared realities, but even more so when the mind turns inward on itself, creating cognitive loops that by pass experience and learning. Given that it is in our family, my spouse and I wonder what our fading years will look like. Will we be who’ve we always have been, but even more so? For instance, will we be more loving and caring, or more angry and afraid? When we have so little left, will we be willing to give it to others? I don’t know the answer to that, and I imagine I will end up being a mix of outward and inward focusing just like I am now. What if, though, I do all I can to rewire my brain and lay down those pathways of compassion and interconnection so that they might endure through dementia? What if I did so now so that pathways of love could endure in the hard times of stress and not getting my needs met that will surely arise as does the sun now as I write? Today I will pick up a newspaper and as usual read it and play the jumble to ward off dementia. When I finish, may I bow deeply as I lay the paper down in gratitude, as if I were giving it to the ants and to the least of these. I may not ward off dementia or stay out of the crazy ward, but I might just see the whole world as my ward, my love.

Do you have any older mentors who have show you the way forward?

Moss

Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn’t a tribal memory or an archetypal memory, but something far older-a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

To perceive of the earth as round needed something else – standing up!-that hadn’t yet happened.

What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of course .But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don’t frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

Sweet cousin.

Key words: family, wild, insect, season, fear, stone, animal, plant, world, evolution

In our congregation we often say that we are a community of memory and hope. We lift up values, stories, and science to remind us of what we already know – the deeper wisdom underneath the quotidian events of our lives. What is that wisdom? It seems that deep within our psyche is the knowing that we are all family. And let be me frank here. We have the just as deep knowing that we’d like to be done with this family – a family that brings pain, suffering, war, disease, broken relationships, and death. So we leave the trees for the savannah, stand up, run, chase, fly, and enter in space. One day I imagine we will leave this planet, some remembering in the millennia to come that it was round, a circle of life unbroken with connections, and others thinking it was flat, empty of depth and full of death and misery. The moss sees level beauty, and we humans can see into multidimensional universes. God of glory, god of wisdom, may we never forget either!

How do you see the world?

Aunt Leaf - February 18, 2010

Aunt Leaf - February 18, 2010

Needing one, I invented her-..

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,

and she'd rise up,..

...and whisper in a language only the two of us knew

the world that meant follow,..

and we'd travel

as cheerful as birds

out of the dusty town and into the trees

where she would change us both into something quicker.

At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door

with the rest of my family,...

...this bone dream,

this friend I had to have,

this old woman made out of leaves.

The friends that I conjured up as a child were always birds. I'd walk in the woods and talk with them, and make up songs for their ears only. I longed that they would talk or sing back just for me. And they did. They came to me in dreams and gave me visions and flew me around the world upon their backs, showing me beauty and wonder, and death and suffering too. In my young adult hood the birds usually came to me as an albatross, who would land next to me on some island paradise, and hold me in his or her arms. I'd cry and be comforted by this great beauty that knew my worth and who watched the world from up high and knew the worth of all my kind. It is only in recent years that I have become the albatross in my dreams and on days full of grace, I am also the fish or some detritus scattered over the ocean's surface upon which I feed.

Which nonhuman form do you long to be? Why?

The Family - January 30, 2010

The dark things of the wood

Are coming from their caves...

...We remember the cave.

In our dreams we go back

Or they come to visit.

They also like music,

We eat leaves together.

They are our brothers.

They are the family

We have run away from.

In the movie "Avatar" there is much running, and the overwhelming public response that echoes too in my heart is a running back towards the family of all things. Last night I saw the 1988 war movie, "The Thin Red Line," and it too has lots of running, fearful running away from "the bad guys," running from who we are and the darkness within. The last lines in that movie are "everything shining." In the dark cave of our inner being, everything shinning.

What are you running away from? Towards? How might this running fuel your sense of separation from the family that is this earth and her beings, and yes, human beings?