And Bob Dylan Too

Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about.

Which is why we have songs of praise, songs of love, songs of sorrow.

Songs to the gods, who have so many names.

Songs of the shepherds sing, on the lonely mountains, while the sheep are honoring the grass, by eating it.

The dance-songs of the bees, to tell where the flowers, suddenly, in the morning light, have opened.

A chorus of many, shouting to heaven, or at it, or pleading

Or that greatest of love affairs, a violin and a human body.

And a composer, maybe hundreds of years dead.

I think of Schubert, scribbling on a cafe napkin.

Thank you, thank you.

It is July 1st - the beginning of Bob Dylan month in our household.  This is really just one family member's idea and the rest of us groan and roll our eyes.  "How is this music exactly?" we ask, and have been asking for years. 

Something has shifted over the years, however. On my Leonard Cohen Pandora Radio Station, frequently pop up songs by Bob Dylan, and to my surprise, I do not change the channel. As both Bob and Leonard croak, I hear beauty and life. They both are singing, thank you, as so scribbles Schubert on a napkin.

Our thoughts are but a few notes, and our lives but a bar of the infinite measures that make up the song of the universe.

Come, you, whoever you are, let us go where no two notes have gone before.

May we open ourselves across the universe.

Sounds of laughter, shades of life

Are ringing through my opened ears 

Inciting and inviting me.

Limitless undying love, which

Shines around me like a million suns,

It calls me on and on across the universe

- From "Across the Universe" by the Beatles

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?

Another Summer Begins

Summer begins again.

How many

do I still have?

Not a worthy question,

I imagine.

Hope is one thing,

gratitude another

and sufficient

unto itself.

the white blossoms of the shad

have opened

because it is their time

to open,

the mockingbird

is raving

in the thornbush.

How did it come to be

that I am no longer young

and the world

that keeps time

in its own way

has just been born?

I don't have the answers

and anyway I have become suspicious

of such questions,

and as for hope,

that tender advisement,

even that

I'm going to leave behind.

I'm just going to put on

my jacket, my boots,

I'm just going to go out

to sleep

all this night

in some unnamed, flowered corner

of the pasture.

If Thirst was about loss and seeking wholeness, then Evidence appears to be about aging.  It's not that Mary's poems or any collection of them can be said to be about any one thing, so perhaps it is me who is thinking about aging.  There is only one more Mary Oliver collection left to read after this one, Swan.  Mary is getting older, there may not be another book.  I see her walking, if not actually tottering, in her boots in field and on beach, and then collapsing, and then forever asleep in the night.

I too am getting older.  I wonder how many more field seasons I have where I am immersed in beauty among leaves and feathers.   When will my tottering under the weight of all the gear become too much for me?  There's no hope that I will be as I am for eternity.

Wait, I take that back.  I will always be wings and bark, born again ever anew with each hatching, sprouting, and rising.  And of course, my faint courage, dying again with each explosion of feathers from hawk's talons, with each crashing of tree from wind and rain, and with each setting.

There's no hope to that thought that I am not beautiful for all eternity.

What does aging mean to you?

  

I Am Standing

I am standing

on the dunes

in the heat of summer

and I am listening

to mockingbird again

who is tonguing

his embellishments

and, in the distance,

the shy

weed loving sparrow

who has but one

soft song

which he sings

again and again

and something

somewhere inside

my own unmusical self

begins humming:

thanks for the beauty of the world.

Thanks for my life.

My shortest sermon ever:

There is beauty everywhere

It connects all beings

Listen to  this song of interconnection

Sing in grateful praise

Stand on the side of love

What would be your shortest sermon ever?

More Honey Locust

Any day now the branches of the honey locust will be filled with white fountains;

in my hands I will see the holy seeds and a sweetness will rise up

from those petal-bundles so heavy I must close my eyes to take it in,

to bear such generosity....

I hope that you too will pause to admire the slender trunk,

the leaves, the holy seeds, the ground they grow from year after year

with striving and patience;

and I hope that you too will say a word of thanks for such creation

out of the wholesome earth,  which would be, and dearly is it needed,

a prayer for all of us.

Dogwood, magnolia, hickory, cedar, and oak

Every day you greet me out my windows

With patience you remind me of

           beauty

                  growth

                       death

myself, no self, all ourselves

I bow in gratitude

What do you give thanks for today, which is a prayer for all beings?

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?

One Hundred White-sided Dolphins on a Summer Day

1. 
  
Fat, 
black, slick, 
galloping in the pitch 
of the waves, in the pearly 
  
fields of the sea, 
they leap toward us, 
they rise, sparkling, and vanish, and rise sparkling, 
they breathe little clouds of mist, they lift perpetual smile, 
  
they slap their tails on the waves, grandmothers and grandfathers 
enjoying the old jokes, 
they circle around us, 
they swim with us - 
  
2. 
  
a hundred white-sided dolphins 
on a summer day, 
each one, as God himself 
could not appear more acceptable 
  
a hundred times, 
in a body blue and black threading through 
the sea foam, 
and lifting himself up from the opened 
  
tents of the waves on his fishtail, 
to look 
with the moon of his eye 
into my heart, 
  
3. 
  
and find there 
pure, sudden, steep, sharp, painful 
gratitude 
that falls - 
  
I don't know - either 
unbearable tons 
or the pale, bearable hand 
of salvation 
  
on my neck, 
lifting me 
from the boat's plain plank seat 
into the world's 
  
4. 
  
unspeakable kindness. 
It is my sixty-third summer on earth 
and, for a moment, I have almost vanished 
into the body of the dolphin, 
  
into the moon-eye of God, 
into the white fan that lies at the bottom of the sea 
with everything 
that ever was, or ever will be, 
  
supple, wild, rising on flank or fishtail - 
singing or whistling or breathing damply through blowhole 
at top of head.  Then, in our little boat, the dolphins suddenly gone, 
we sailed on through the brisk, cheerful day. 

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

How do your joy poems grow?

With dolphin swims and human whims

And so my own heart grows.

I once swam with dolphins. They were captives in a tourist park near Cancun Mexico.  I kept telling myself that I wasn't part of the oppressive system that ruled these wild ones for the whims of tourists. I was there as a veterinarian consultant and was offered a chance to be with these sea-going mammals as a gift.  Into the pool I went and the dolphins barely acknowledged me as each put a nose to my foot, and then propelled me through the water. It was a photogenic moment, a picture taken that I've not seen in years.

I wonder what happed to those dolphins?  Are they still pushing round tourists through their water pens?  Shame arises with me over my past participation in such a scheme when I see dolphins playing around the coasts of Florida now. They seem so free, so wild, so themselves, and hence so much of God before me. 

I wonder where else I have captured joy, and therefore turned from God before me, in me, all around me.

They who bind to themselves a joy

Do the winged life destroy

But they who kiss the joy as it flies

Live in eternity's sunrise (adapted from William Blake)

            

Not This, Not That

Not anything,

Not the eastern wind whose other name

Is rain,

Nor the burning heats of the dunes

At the crown of summer,

Nor the ticks, that new, ferocious populace,

Not the President who loves blood,

Nor the governmental agencies that love money,

Will alter

My love for you, my friends and my beloved,

Or for you, oh ghosts of Emerson and Whitman,

Or for you, oh blue sky of a summer morning,

That makes me roll in a barrel of gratitude

Down hills,

Or for you, oldest of friends: hope

Or for you, newest of friends: faith;

Or for you, silliest and dearest of surprises, my

Own life.

I see a turning outwards of Mary in this later run of poems.  She speaks of power, politics, environmental and species lost and suffering, and what we humans might do in response.  Today she tells me that though the world seems to suck the life from us as ticks in the summer, we still have the ability to love, to be grateful, and to have hope, faith, and perspective on the insignificance of our own lives.

Okay, let’s see if this list of responses is at all possible.   Last night I led a count of Yellow-naped Amazons at a roost site in the south coast of Guatemala.  Fifteen years ago there were during this time of year about 250 parrots that spent the night there.  Last night we counted only 8.  Decades of poaching chicks from the nests and habitat loss have taken their toll.  Though  the birds are becoming as flying ghosts over the desert of sugar cane crops, I love them still.  Gratitude is a bit harder to touch this morning, yet, I am glad that I can still know love,  In that love I have hope that the beauty of birds and our world will win out, perhaps ending in extinction, yet, also giving rise to something newly created that will give birth a  different beauty.  I don’t have faith that we will save this land, but I pray and meditate so that I may grow my faith that I am not separate from any being. 

May that faith help me see my  own life with humor, curiosity, and precious acceptance – which fills me with gratitude.  The circus of my own life brings me full circle.

I end with a poem that my spouse sent to me that captures the gratitude in the midst of so much loss.

Thanks - W.S. Merwin

 

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

smiling by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

our lost feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

What helps you have perspective in your life, and gratitude?