How Many Days

How many days I lived and had never used

the holy words.

Tenderly I began them when it came to me

to want to, oh mystery irrefutable!

Then I went out of that place

and into a field and lay down

among the weeds and the grasses,

whispering to them, fast, in order to keep

that world also.

I have been on leave from my home congregation as I shift from parish ministry to my community multispecies ministry.  I don't know how many days exactly it has been since I was part of the Sunday morning ritual, but it will have been nearly a year by the time I return.  Yet I wonder if I have ever left.

Aren't we in this blog exchanging holy words?

And what about the red-winged blackbirds by the sinkhole  who squealed at me yesterday so that I wouldn't miss their fine red epaulets? 

And the red-shouldered hawks who coupled on the telephone pole during last week's morning walk?  He flew off, I hope satisfied. She remained, all fluffed and still, unashamedly content.

Their world is our world.  May we treat it holy, to keep it whole.

How do you keep the world whole? Yourself whole?

The Singular and Cheerful Life

The singular and cheerful life

of any flower

in anyone's garden

or any still unowned field-

if there are any-

catches me

by the heart,

by its color

by its obedience

to the holiest of laws:

be alive

until you are not...

those princes of everything green-

the grasses

of which there are truly

an uncountable company,

each on its singular stem

striving

to rise and ripen.

What, in the earth world,

is there not to be amazed by

and to be steadied by

and to cherish?

Oh, my dear heart,

my own dear heart,

full of hesitations,

questions, choice of directions,

look at the world.

Behold the morning glory,

the meanest flower, the ragweed, the thistle.

Look at the grass.

What in the earth is there not to cherish?

The meanest human - Hitler?  The drug dealer?  The psychopath?

The full moon, with all its bright welcome in the dark night is down now and the owls are silent.  Danger roams the woods, at least I know it's possible, so I hesitate to go for a walk alone in the black pre-dawn.

There is gore and glory before me this day.

May my dear heart know of both, and remember to look at both...

The flowers boastful upon the tulip tree..

The surprised bones half buried in the back woods

But I think I will always hesitate, waiting for just a little more light before risking knowing the world, loving the world. 

Oh how my souls strives to rise up and my heart to open!

What in this earth do you cherish? Not cherish?

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?

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?

The Kitten

More amazed than anything 
I took the perfectly black 
stillborn kitten 
with the one large eye 
in the center of its small forehead 
from the house cat's bed 
and buried it in a field 
behind the house. 

I suppose I could have given it 
to a museum, 
I could have called the local 
newspaper. 

But instead I took it out into the field 
and opened the earth 
and put it back 
saying, it was real, 
saying, life is infinitely inventive, 
saying, what other amazements 
lie in the dark seed of the earth, yes, 

I think I did right to go out alone 
and give it back peacefully, and cover the place 
with the reckless blossoms of weeds.

I just read a critique of Mary Oliver's poems where the author concluded that Mary is giving up too much information to the reader.   "...She takes her poems too far by giving the reader the answer to a puzzle and not letting them try for themselves.  Poetry is meant to make the reader think, wondering what the author was talking about or what they meant.  Instead, she leads the reader through explanation within her work, or flatly states a meaning.  By doing so, her poems read as though she’s talking, taking the musicality out of them."

Well, I've been on Mary myself over this near year of rising with her. Sometimes I fuss that she gives not enough of an answer, and at other times I am relieved that I hear her wisdom, her actions, and her account of her actions.  I spend enough time alone in my thoughts every day. What a pleasure to hear what someone else is doing out in the fields that are beyond "wrongdoing and rightdoing" as Rumi pens.  In some ways, her poems are stories and not poems. This is more evident in her books where the selections move in and out of prose.

I admit too to at times disagreeing with her conclusion, her thoughts, her bearings.  But what am I disagreeing with? Am I saying she is wrong to conclude this way or that, and to pass on to those readers what is right and good for her?  Or am I saying that I mourn that she is separate from me and has her own way about her?  She's got 20 years on me, is from New England, and is a very different creature than me.  Is this what I wish to argue with as I raise my fist to the sun's first rays on the mornings when Mary disturb me?  I think not.  My beef (and belief) is this, "I am not alone in this world, and refuse to carry on as if it were so."  

Mary's poems, with a conclusion or not, and whether they feel right or wrong to me, challenge me to use all that I have to see our interdependence, and to have faith that so much love and compassion is still to be born.




What is still to be born in you?

Of Goodness

How good

That the clouds travel, as they do,

Like the long dresses of the angels

Of our imagination,

Or gather in storm masses, then break

With their gifts of replenishment,

And how good

That the trees shelter the patient birds

In their thick leaves,

And how good that that in the field

The next morning

Red bird frolics again, his throat full of song,

 And how good

That the dark ponds, refreshed,

Are holding the white cups of the lilies

So that each is an eye that can look upward,

And how good that the little blue-winged teal

Comes paddling among them, as cheerful as ever

And so on, and so on.

How good it is that we travel from one side of the family to the other

On this Thanksgiving weekend

Disappearing fathers on one wing and diminishing mothers on the other

We soar down Interstate 20 and 95

Like an eagle, seeing, and taking in all

Cheer, yes, there is some to replenish the spirit

But what I would give to see a teal to deal

With the heartache and the loss

And so on and so on.

What would you see today to replenish your life?

Visiting the Graveyard

When I think of death

It is a bright enough city,

And every year more faces there

Are familiar

But not a single one

Notices me,

Though I long for it,

And when they talk together,

Which they do

Very quietly,

It’s in an unknowable language-

I can catch the tone

But understand not a single word-

And when I open my eyes

There’s the mysterious field, the beautiful trees.

There are the stones.

In the silence of this retreat I hear death speaking to me. There’s the creak in my knees as I unfold my legs again and again, rising and falling into the sitting cushion. The wind in the Spanish Moss whispers of times past and times yet to come. The clank of dishes, the cough, the sigh, the bell, the clapper, and my own urine splash and tinkle in the bathroom, all these death and life. The chickadee, perky with her dark cap, won’t be alive in a few more years, so short this species’ span of life. But now I hear her high in the oak, already dead before she hatched. I wish I could speak this language. So I sit, I strain, I listen. After each mediation I open my eyes. I see the beautiful tree, a grave marker on my heart, breaking it open, weighing me down with stones, until I am so deep in the earth that I am one with all.

Where and how does the language of death come to you?

The Beautiful, Stripped Sparrow

in the afternoons,
in the almost empty fields,
i hum the hymns
i used to sing

in church.
they could not tame me,
so they would not keep me,
alas,

and how that feels,
the weight of it,
i will not tell
any of you,

not ever.
still, as they promised,
God, once he is in your heart,
is everywhere -

so even here
among the weeds
and the brisk trees.
how long does it take

to hum a hymn? strolling
one or two acres
of the sweetness
of the world,

not counting
a lapse, now and again,
of sheer emptiness.
once a deer

stood quietly at my side.
and sometimes the wind
has touched my cheek
like a spirit.

am i lonely?
the beautiful, striped sparrow,
serenely, on the tallest weed in his kingdom,
also sings without words.

I do not know how to properly analyze another's poem or another's heart. It doesn't seem the proper thing to do. So let me be improper. In this poem I do wonder if Mary regrets her years away from the church. Perhaps instead it is the years away from God, though I could have sworn she saw God everywhere in bird, tree, and flower. Maybe the difference was that her heart had not broken enough to let even more love and light in. Now it has. So she moves beyond words and poem. Her old ways of thinking don't capture the reality of the love, the entirety of it, and the humility of it. I too have walked in those lonely fields, singing "How Great Thou Art" feeling God as well as sparrow and tall grass.

Who or what comes to you in your loneliness?

Six Recognitions of the Lord

1.

I know a lot of fancy words.

I tear them from my heart and my tongue.

Then I pray…..

3
I lounge on the grass, that's all. So
simple. Then I lie back until I am
inside the cloud that is just above me
but very high, and shaped like a fish.
Or, perhaps not. Then I enter the place
of not-thinking, not-remembering, not-
wanting. When the blue jay cries out his
riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always
near. Over and back, over and back. Then
I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I
have been asleep. But I have not been
asleep. I have been, as I say, inside
the cloud, or, perhaps, the lily floating
on the water. Then I go back to town
to my own house, my own life, which has
now become brighter and simpler, some-where I have never been before….

4.

Of course I have always known you

Are present in the clouds, and the

Black oak I especially adore, and the

Wings of birds. But you are present

Too in the body, listening to the body,

Teaching it to live, instead of all

That touching, with disembodied joy.

We do not do this easily….

6.

Every summer the lilies rise
and open their white hands until they almost
cover the black waters of the pond. And I give
thanks but it does not seem like adequate thanks,
it doesn't seem
festive enough or constant enough, nor does the
name of the Lord or the words of thanksgiving come
into it often enough Everywhere I go I am
treated like royalty, which I am not. I thirst and
am given water. My eyes thirst and I am given
the white lilies on the black water. My heart
sings but the apparatus of singing doesn't convey
half what it feels and means. In spring there's hope,
in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, in
winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its
leafy cave, but in summer there is
everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,
the hospitality of the Lord and my
inadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body
through this water-lily world.

Harold Bloom in American Religious Poems says that there is a particular powerful theme in American poetry, especially the poetry that relates to nature. In these poems there appears over and over again the idea of humans as the risen Christ. We each are divinity, and this is reflected back to us from trees, birds, mountains, lakes, and flowers around us. Harold Bloom only briefly mentions Mary Oliver, but he wrote his volume before Thirst came out. If he had seen this poem I believe that he would have said, “I told you so.” In these astonishing lands through which I have travelled aplenty, we dissolve the self and yet build up the self at the same time. We humans are glorious only because we are everything else (and perhaps more depending on your theology), including the offspring of God, or God herself. I don’t know if this is a shift for Mary in her older years and after loss of loved ones, or if pain, confusion, love, and beauty has peeled back a layer that was always there behind her previous poems. As I turn the page to go on to the next poem, it is as if I am helping Mary peel back the layers in these leaves of poems, praying that I might do the same until there is nothing left but everything.

Where do you recognize divinity?

Meanwhile

Lord, my body is not yet a temple,

But only one of your fair fields.

An empty field that nobody wants, at least not yet.

But even here the lily is somewhere,

Sometimes it lifts its head above the grasses,

The daises, the milkweed, the mallow.

And sometimes, like us, it sleeps, or at least

Leans below the blades of the grasses.

Lord, I live as you have made me to live.

I bite hungrily into the peach and the turnip.

I bite, with sorrow, into the calf and the lamb.

I drink the tears of the clouds.

I praise the leaves of the shrub oaks

And the pine trees in their bold coats.

I listen and give thanks to the catbird and the thrush.

Meanwhile, the fox knows where you are.

The bees leave the swamp azalea and fly straight

To the shadow of your face.

Meanwhile my body is rustic and brash.

The world I live in is hedges, and small blossoms.

Lord, consider me, and my earnest work.

A hut I have made, out of the grasses.

Now I build the door, out of all things brash and rustic.

Day and night it is open.

Have you seen it yet, among the grasses?

How it longs for you?

How it tries to shine, like gold?

The very first sermon I ever preached in a Unitarian Universalist church was based on the Christian reading “Consider the Lilies.” In Luke 12: Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!

Mary’s words speak of her doubts, her questioning faith, or perhaps your doubts and mine? Is it possible to work hard enough that we might be accepted, or better said, that we accept that we are not separate from the glorious whole? We are as noble as the lilies, the grasses, the ravens. Perhaps it is not a matter of work, but faith to live as best we can and know underneath our daily paths, or perhaps to the side, is a field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. What are we waiting for? Let’s go lie down in the grass and let the fire of love consume us.

The Poet With His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines of rocks and water to the place where the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that jubilation and water-fun and you can stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can drip with despair all afternoon and still, on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush, puffing out its spotted breast, will sing of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

I am reminded by this poem of a goodly number of years which I spent with my face in hands, sobbing with regrets and loss. I tried to stifle the sound, for indeed, who wants to hear any more of that sound? I had seen such senseless tragedy in Guatemala when I lived there - forests burned, people murdered, children abandoned to disease and ignorance, parrot nests felled, and birds poached to approaching extinction. Some days it seemed that if I even heard the word Guatemala, conservation, or parrot my throat would get tight and I would be altered in a downward decline for the rest of the day. Part of what brought me out of that dark time was to go ahead and let the despair take me to where it would, however, I would remind myself that I was going through such pain because of the beautiful song of the people and the Yellow-naped Amazon parrots of Central America. It was that perfect, stone-hard beauty which allowed me to hold the tragic as well.

What helps you hold the tragic?