Tom Dancers Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone

You never know what opportunity is going to travel to you, or through  you.

Once a friend game me a small pine cone-one of a few he found in the scat

of a grizzly in Utah maybe, or Wyoming. I took it home

and did what I supposed he was sure I would do-

I ate it, thinking

how it had traveled through that rough and holy body.  It was crisp and sweet.

It was almost a prayer without words.  My gratitude to you, Tom Dancer,

 for this gift of the world I adore so much and want to belong to.  And thank you too, great bear.

I often aspire to be like Mary Oliver, but in today's poem she surpasses who I ever imagined myself to be. She ate seeds from bear scat.

Really?  Did she really?  Does she really do this and all the other things in her poems, or does she write poems from her imagination?

Who knows the truth of magic in our modern day shamans, but surely her power comes from somewhere. So why not through the leavings of bears?

As a veterinarian I think of disease transmission and imagine her boiling the heck out of that pine cone before ingesting it.

But perhaps I over estimate the need for sterility in this procedure, or in any other I undertake today. 

Maybe, just maybe, I will roll around in some shit today left behind from some wild being in the woods, smelling like I belong to the family of things, smiling like I know it.

What would you take in from the wild as food for your soul?

Philip’s Birthday

I gave,

To a friend that I care for deeply,

Something that I loved.

It was only a small

Extremely shapely bone

That come from the ear

Of a whale.

It hurt a little

To give it away.

The next morning

I went out, as usual,

At sunrise

And there, in the harbor,

Was a swan.

I don’t know

What he or she was doing there,

But the beauty of it

Was gift.

Do you see what I mean?

You give, and you are given.

I have always liked the idea of a potlatch – an indigenous custom of North America where a family gives away possessions in celebration and in gratitude. So too I have heard of people who on their own birthdays, give gifts to others.  One day when I came up to a national park entrance the car ahead of me, whose passengers were strangers to me, paid for the entrance. Another time a car ahead of me in a toll both paid for me.  Wow.   What if any time we felt gratitude or some good news came our way, we started looking for multiple possessions we might offer to others?  Or maybe every day we made it a goal to give something away?  What gifts indeed might come to us and our world.

What will you gift today?  Or be gifted with?

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say - behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs….

4.

Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,

The dancer, the potter,

To make me a begging bowl

Which I believe

My soul needs.

And if I come to you,

To the door of your comfortable house

With unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,

Will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.

I would like to give you this chance.

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change.

Congratulations, if

You have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.

Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure-

Your life-

What would do for you?

7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
through with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself.  Then forget it.  Then, love the world.

Someday I feel like a child playing in the meadow, while bombs fly over head and digging parties put friends into the ground next to where I stare in wonder at the trees.  What do I mean by this?  Some days I grow weary of fighting – I just want to love the world. 

For instance I am at a bird conference now.  Many of these people, if not most, have wild parrots as companions in their home, or raise them for various reasons, including making a livelihood.  I am mostly of the clan, “mutual other” where I see birds as beings with their own inherent worth and dignity. After years of studying them in the wild, my heart hurts to have them in captivity where we humans make most of the choices for them.  Those surrounding me are mostly of the clan, “utilitarian.”  Humans have ultimate control over birds and it is not an ethical dilemma to control them and place them into our lives, where the birds live quite differently from their natural and evolved behavior.  Truly I guess that all of us belong to both clans, to the one clan called earth.

So I find myself torn – is it possible to fight with one’s self for any worthwhile reason? How do I speak of my truth, of my longing, and of my pain while letting the other know that I hold their needs tenderly and that we are of the family of things?

I go to the other, hold out my begging bowl, and ask them to fill it with their beauty.

As our cups fill together, may we forget to love only ourselves, and instead love the world.

Love the world…them’s good fighting words!

To whom or to what do you hold out your begging bowl today?

It Was Early

It was early, which has always been my hour to begin looking at the world

and of course, even in the darkness, to begin listening into it,

especially under the pines where the owl lives and sometimes calls out

as I walk by, as he did on this morning. So many gifts!

What do they mean?  In the marshes where the pink light was just arriving

the mink with his bristle tail was stalking the soft-eared mice,

and in the pines the cones were heavy, each one ordained to open.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

Little mink, let me watch you.

 Little mice, run and run.

Dear pine cone, let me hold you as you open.

I wonder how you awoke this morning? Did you have doubts of your kind?  Perhaps there are certain politicians whose rhetoric exasperates you, or the latest tally from terrorist bombing correlates with how many fewer times you will express today.  Maybe you are thinking of the tender children who cannot run away from abusing adults, who could not run away from their circumstances either.

What if, as we think of how we are hunted and haunted each in our own way, we choose this today to be blessed.  We watch the harm, we watch the fear, and we watch the chase, which is a dance, isn't?  

Then in response, we choose to bless the world and hold all lives, mean and small, knowing that the human heart may yet open.  Maybe today.

Who do you hold today in hopes it will open?

What is the Greatest Gift

What is the greatest gift?
Could it be the world itself-the oceans, the meadowlark,
the patience of the trees in the wind?
Could it be love, with its sweet clamor of passion?

Something else-something else entirely holds me in thrall.
That you have a life that I wonder about
more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a life-courteous and intelligent-that
I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a soul-your own, no one else's-that
I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
So that I find my soul clapping its hands for yours more than my own.

Every day, at some point, I find myself bringing my hands together and offering a Namaste bow of humility to someone or something in my life.  Yesterday I bowed in words to others on a conference call - their beauty and depth, heck, their very existence wowed me. 

Maybe today I will only bow to the sun's rising (quick, my friend is rising now, I'll be right back).  Perhaps I'll look at my spouse with open curiosity, and squeal like a child as I clap my hands in delight at some antic he performs for my benefit.  Such as breathing. Such as existing.  Such as not being me.  What a relief that there are countless others who are not me.  Wait, who are also me.  I applaud this abundance.

Where does your soul clap for others?

I Don't Want to Live a Small Life

I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes,

open your hands. I have just come

from the berry fields, the sun

kissing me with its golden mouth all the way

(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds

following along thinking perhaps I might

feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes

only to you. Look how many small

but so sweet and maybe the last gift

I will bring to anyone in this

world of hope and risk, so do

Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

Who among us wishes to live a small life? Who among us opens our hands to have hope on one side, and risk on the other, willing to walk that knife edge of uncertainty? 

I ask you now to stretch out your arms and open your hands.  Look to the sky or perhaps to some living being in your range - a tree? A friend?  A snoring family member?   Do you like me feel the heart opening as arms stretch out? Do you like me feel your heart and life constricted when your hands and arms refuse to embrace all that is and hang by your side, clutch themselves nervously, or grasp themselves in a false sense of security?

Given the amount of time I spend on a computer, I wonder if the keyboard should not be as long as my desk, guiding my life to be open to what is and what shall come. 

Instead, see my arms open now (well at the end of this sentence) looking at you. What a gift.

How might you open your life today?

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?

The Place I Want to Get Back To

The Place I Want to Get Back To

is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness

and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me

they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let's see who she is
and why she is sitting

on the ground, like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;

and so they come
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way

I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward

and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years

I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can't be repeated.

If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

There are so many places to get back to:

• The wild ocelot who nuzzled me in Tikal, Guatemala.
• Discovering "Parrot Paradise" where over 200 parrots roosted every night
• The last swim of the year in the Ichetucknee river in September
• My wedding day
• My dream of seeing an Ivory Billed Woodpecker
• Hearing a voice on an airplane that let me know that love was enough/not enough and all there is

There are so many place to get to, and I hesitate to name one because that would seem to jinx the unexpected gift. Union with the companion by merging in love with this earth can come in so many ways in any of our days. I don't want to box out that possibility by boxing in how we may be surprised by love.

The sun rising through the trees says to me, "Here, now, not in the past, not in the future, today, this moment."

May gratitude today open the many doors that invite you to feel at home on this planet, in love, loved, and beloving.

What is your list of "places to get back too?"

Walking Home from Oak-Head

There is something
about the snow-laden sky
in winter
in the late afternoon

that brings to the heart elation
and the lovely meaninglessness
of time.
Whenever I get home - whenever -

somebody loves me there.
Meanwhile
I stand in the same dark peace
as any pine tree,

or wander on slowly
like the still unhurried wind,
waiting,
as for a gift,

for the snow to begin
which it does
at first casually,
then, irrepressibly.

Wherever else I live -
in music, in words,
in the fires of the heart,
I abide just as deeply

in this nameless, indivisible place,
this world,
which is falling apart now,
which is white and wild,

which is faithful beyond all our expressions of faith,
our deepest prayers.
Don't worry, sooner or later I'll be home.
Red-cheeked from the roused wind,

I'll stand in the doorway
stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
my shoulders
covered with stars.

keywords: snow, sky, winter, time love, dark, peace, tree, wind, gift, music, word, fire, heart, world, star

I have been told that in this book we see a shift of Mary, perhaps towards religion or God. I'm not quite clear what discontent exactly some of my acquaintances portend when they say "Mary changes" in her later books. It's hard for me to imagine that she could be much more religious, much more of the suffering seeker, or more the one totally committed to growing her faith in the world than she has been. I certainly know that she brings out the hunger in me for faith in earth and her beings. Just beyond her words and often beyond my reach is the nameless, the indivisible, to which she temporarily gives the names of tree or bird. Maybe later she'll take the risk and call this God. It's all the same to me, for my struggle will not change. With this world falling apart now, how might I still see the light and grow a faith that is ultimately beyond me. For me, part of this answer is becoming, read a poem from Mary.

You who read Mary regularly, what is happening with your faith and in your prayers?

Oxygen

Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even,
while it calls the earth its home, the soul.
So the merciful, noisy machine

stands in our house working away in its
lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel
before the fire, stirring with a

stick of iron, letting the logs
lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room,
are in your usual position, leaning on your

right shoulder which aches
all day. You are breathing
patiently; it is a

beautiful sound. It is
your life, which is so close
to my own that I would not know

where to drop the knife of
separation. And what does this have to do
with love, except

everything? Now the fire rises
and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red
roses of flame. Then it settles

to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds
as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift:
our purest, sweet necessity: the air.

Oh my gosh, my last posting was about responding to a desperate need for union, or perhaps better said a plea for awareness of the already existing beloved union. My solution was to breathe, to share our lives with this next breath, the only gift we truly have to give and to receive. Then Mary writes this to my heart. Taking in one poem every day I am struck by the story I am retelling of our lives here on this planet. Mary's poems speak to me like a book of Rumi poems, like a book of Koans, like the Bible, like the Talmud, like the Quran, like an African chant, like a Hopi dance., and like a woodpecker's tapping on a tree. All these scriptures knock on the soul's door so that we may open to awareness, and if we just focus with intent, we can retell the stories of our lives based on love, and not on domination and power over others. It doesn't really matter what we choose to help guide us, especially since it seems that guides choose us. And Mary, you have chosen me so that I may with joy greet the sun's rising knowing that the air I take in and that becomes part of my body's molecules comes from the same air you have taken in, that the dinosaurs snorted out, and that Jesus cried. To breathe is to love our neighbors as ourselves.

What does breathing mean to you?

Morning in New Land - January 9, 2010

...And under the trees, beyond time's brittle drift,

I stood like Adam in his lonely garden

On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,

Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,

Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.

I awake today to a cold day - the day's work before me when I'd rather roam under the trees listening to the random song of life. So I step out under the stars and circle once, as if in the center of a gentle whirlpool of a lake's womb, thanking Eve, the mother of us all.

How do you see the gift of the world on those morning where waking seems to be the same old thing day after day?