More Evidence - Part 2

2.

Where are you when you’re not thinking?

Frightening, isn’t it?

Where are you when you’re not feeling anything?

Oh, worse!

Except for faith and imagination, nature is that hard fortress you can’t get out of.

Some person are captive to love, other would make the beloved a captive. Which one are you?

As we travel through Guyana, conversations frequently turn to experiencing birds in the wild that in our home countries are kept in cages, often with harm, suffering, and death as a consequence.  There is no doubt that humans love their birds, but in so doing, they make the beloved a captive. What would it look like if instead we were bound by love instead of being the binders?

Perhaps I would not even be here to hear the sound of the White Bell Bird.  I would not be using the earth’s resources to travel so far to behold beauty and to save it.  Instead I would be at home with a simple bell calling me to meditation, to awakening, and to liberation.  I would be swooning with every sunrise that lights the grandeur of the tall pines in the oak hammock.  Yet it is the beloved birds that bind me and bring me to these places in Latin America to be with them, and perhaps contribute if I can.  I am ever captive, and the captor.

We go through our days, with cages around us and the door open. 

We can step out into freedom, or we can lure others in with us.

Which will you do this day?

The Sea – March 12, 2010

Stroke by

Stroke my

Body remembers that life and cries for

The lost parts of itself-

Fins, gills

Opening like flowers into

The flesh…I swear I know

Just what the blue-gray scales

Shingling

The rest of me would

Feel like!

Paradise!

..the very bones! How

They long to give up the long trek inland, the brittle

Beauty of understanding,

And dive,

And simply

Become gain a flaming body

Of blind feeling…

Vanished like victory inside that

Insucking genesis, that

Roaring flamboyance, that

Perfect

Beginning and

Conclusion of our own.

In the last several poems Mary has written of the fire of union and here it is again. She is looking outside of being human, of her own body, to see the beauty without that lures her into melding into the great sea. She appears to look at being human as only a burden of love, of thinking as opposed to feeling and being. I am now on the lookout for any of her poems that are drawn to beauty from the existence of humanity, that surely has its own perfection beginning and conclusion of its own, because it is not separate from what we perceive as other, but which is ours to claim as ours. I want to be on the look out for human beauty in my own life, for it is my gift to see it, and my sin to not.

Do you resist accepting humans, either individually or as a whole, as perfect and belonging on this planet? What might you gain if you did accept and embody humans inherent worth and dignity?