April

I wanted to speak at length about

The happiness of my body and the

Delight of my mind for it was

April, a night, a full moon and-

But something in myself for maybe

From somewhere other said: not too

Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

I am at the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach giving a workshop of Nonviolent Communication. In my presentation I encourage people to use as few words as possible to keep the chance for connection and understanding alive.  Perhaps our brains do best in about 40 word segments.  Mary’s poem today is 51 words, just about right. 

It doesn’t take many words really to say, “Look, there goes beauty.”  “Hey, beauty is dwindling.”  “My heart hurts.”  “Now let’s do something about it.” 

What will you do “about it” – sing?  Change?  Open yourself to death and suffering?

Today

Today is a day of

dark clouds and slow rain.

The little blades of corn

are so happy

Today is a day of darkened homes amongst the  terrorized citizenry, 

slowing revolutions, and assassinations of the brave.

Dare we be happy in such a world?

Percy Wakes Me

Percy wakes me and I am not ready...

Now he's eager for action:  a walk, then breakfast....

He is sitting on the kitchen counter where he is not supposed to be.

How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you needed me, to wake me.

He thought he would hear a lecture and deeply  his eyes begin to shine.

He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.

He squirms and squeals; he has done something that he needed and now he hears that it's okay.

I scratch his ears, I turn him over and touch him everywhere.  He is

wild with the okayness of it.  Then we walk, then he gas has breakfast, and he is happy.

This is a poem about Percy.

This is a poem about more than Percy.

Think about it.

In my spiritual practice of nonviolent communication I often struggle with accepting with ease the complaints of others.  When I first hear what they want, often expressed as a demand, or worse, as whining, I don't have much empathy for others or for myself.  It's also hard for me to get in touch with my gratitude that they let me know what was going on for them, for I know that when someone asks something of me, often in a an unskillful way, they are just letting me know what would make their life wonderful.  This is such a great gift, but so frequently I am reluctant to open the gift to appreciate how life flows through them.  Instead I have "shoulds" going on in my story telling brain, "Why can't they think of anyone else but themselves?" 

Reading this poem today, I sense a break through, a vision.  People around me are like bounding Percies, inviting me to make their life wonderful.  How lovely for them, and for me, if I could reply in word, thought, and action so that they could know how wonderful they are and the okayness of their needs.

Oh how our lives might shine. Though we may not be ready, may we awake to this possibility today.

To whom would you like to communicate "okayness?"

How Perfectly

How perfectly and neatly opens the pink rose

This bright morning, the sun warm on my shoulders,

Its heat on the opening petals.

Possibly it is the smallest, the least important event at this moment

In the whole world.

Yet I stand there, utterly happy. 

This dawn opened rather pink this morning up here in the cold north of Albany, New York.  I am attending the National Wildlife Rehabilitation Association Annual Symposium and I have a presentation to give this evening.  After arriving here and checking out the crowd and the room, I discovered that I needed to restructure this presentation.  So after a night of tossing and turning I have spent this morning “perfecting” my talk while watching the sun rise out the hotel window.  The irony doesn’t escape me that my seminar is about affirming how perfectly beautiful we humans already are.  What’s left to do is just tweaking, and grace in our lives.

Whatever slides I end up with, whatever jokes or points I make or don’t make, my strongest desire is that I can stand before the audience, utterly happy to behold their perfection, and mine.  Ours.

May grace so visit you and yours today.

How are you perfect?

With Thanks to the Field Sparrow, Whose Voice is So Delicate and Humble - January 31, 2011

I do not live happily or comfortably
With the cleverness of our times.
The talk is all about computers,
The news is all about bombs and blood.
This morning, in the fresh field,
I came upon a hidden nest.
It held four warm, speckled eggs.
I touched them.
Then went away softly,
Having felt something more wonderful
Than all the electricity of New York City.

I too live with computers, bombs, violence, and a house that knows not darkness in the night because of all the LED lights from the various appliances.  Sometimes when I awake I at night and walk through the expanse of the house, I find myself loathing those lights.  Some nights, I start unplugging appliances so that the moon's brilliance has no competition.  Some nights, like last night, I wake to the Barred Owl call, which sounds like a crazy old woman in the woods laughing at human folly.   A smile comes to my lips, though in the darkness only I know the gift that comes to me - something more wonderful than this house with all its electrical comforts.

What gift comes to you in the night?

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

The story I tell of myself was that I was born a happy child.  I recall feeling such love for my siblings and parents, or at least empathy.  I had a sense of the drudgery of my father and mother. This didn't impact me greatly for I spent as much time as I could with birds, and flew free. Then somewhere in the growing up, I lost the ability for the over view, and returned to the mud and harshness of the terrestrial life. 

The span of these middle adult years had a lot of harsh landings, and a lot of escapist time up in the air.  Alternating between dreams and grounding may have been challenging, as I believe it is for most of us in our middle years, but what skills we acquire! Now is the time to fly low to the ground so we can wrap our wings around the suffering and the gorgeous. 

At what level do you fly today?

Spring

Faith is the instructor. 

We need no other.

Guess what I am, he says in his incomparably lovely

Young-man voice.  Because I love the world I think of grass,

I think of leaves and the bold sun, I think of the rushes

In the black marshes just coming back from under the pure white

And now finally melting stubs of snow.

Whatever we know or don’t know

Leads us to say:

Teacher, what do you mean?

But faith is still there, and silent.

Then he who owns the incomparable voice suddenly flows upward

And out of the room and I follow, obedient and happy.

Of course I am thinking the Lord was once young and will never in fact be old.

And who else could this be, who goes off down the green path,

Carrying his sandals, and singing?

What if the grass were to sprout tall one day, and the seeds as they take to the wind, whisper, “follow me.”

Would you go?

What if instead a mighty wave came to shore and then in gentleness, ever so slowly, flowed in streets and alley ways and even right up to your front porch, and just as the wave turned to return to the sea, commanded “follow me.”

Would you go?

What if a bird came a calling to your window, tapping until you finally opened your life onto the world, and in a voice sweetly luring, sang, “follow me.”

Would you go?

What if a fierce eyed man you usually spy on one street corner or another emerges from the woods, and then walks past you (as you leisurely dine in a local restaurant) on his way to the bus terminal, alternating whistling with a face that pleads, “follow me.”

Would you spring up and step outside, spread your arms, and shout with tears to the bold sun and the sons and daughters of hominids, “Yes!  I will take your hand, wing, surge, and wind filled promises and follow you.”

What if we did this today?

Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered

The darkest thing met me in the dark.

It was only a face and a brace of teeth

that held no words, though I felt a salty breath

sighing in my direction.

Once, in an autumn that is long gone,

I was down on my knees in the cranberry bog

and heard, in that lonely place,

two voices coming down the hill, and I was thrilled

to be granted this secret,

that the coyotes, walking together can talk together,

for I thought, what else could it be?

And even though what emerged

were two young women, two-legged for sure

and not at all aware of me,

their nimble, young women tongues

telling and answering, and though I knew

I have believed something probably not true,

yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

And it has stayed with me

as a present once given is forever given.

Easy and happy they sounded,

those two maidens of the wilderness

from which we have-

who knows to what furious, pitiful extent-

banished ourselves.

I have my whole life longed for animals to human speak through voice or thought transfer, such as seen in the movie Avitar.  What I would I give to be able to talk and walk with a nonhuman companion at my side!  In recent years this has lessened a bit as I learn more about behavior, interspecies neurobiology, and cognitive ethology, and apply all of this through conservation behavior.  What has shifted is that I am better at listening.

To me the Barred Owl laughs at the world in the night, well, maybe it's not laughing really, but no less clear for me.  For I feel the coolness and dark of the night, the feathered companion, competitor, or prey calling in the night, and I yearn to bring something good back to the three in the hollow of my nest tree.  As Owl perhaps I don't describe in this way, but as human my mirror neurons light up as I imagine myself staring at the blood red eclipsed moon.  I too fly silently in the night.  We have not left the wilderness.  It lives in us: our brains, our blood, our DNA, and in you. 

We walk and talk together - with words, or without words. In this space, may no beings be banished from our hearts or from this earth.

With whom will you walk and talk today?

Eleven Versions of the Same Poem: Am I Lost?

Am I lost?

I don't think so.

Do I know where I am?

I'm not sure.

Have I ever been happier in my life?

Never.

Am I lost?

I am lost.

Do I know where I am?

I am lost.

Have I ever been more joyful in my life?

I am lost.

How Zen is this?  I am lost, I am not lost, I am lost.  It's like Dogen's saying "There is a mountain, there is not a mountain, there is a mountain."  When we look at a mountain we see it as an entity.  But when we look closer, we see that the mountain is made up of rock, water, ice, snow, trees, birds, and bugs.  There is no mountain "self" but only an intersection in the web of existence. 

But we have mountains to climb in our lives.  So we exist in the phenomenal world, interacting with this thing called "mountain" so that life may flow through us in all our particular manifestations. At the same time, we awake to knowing that no matter whether we climb, move, or ignore the mountain, all life flows through us.  We cannot stop it. 

On one hand we are not lost. We operate in a way that says, "I am separate. I know where I stand."  On the other hand, there is no self as we lose ourselves into the world. 

There is no joy, no happiness, and no bliss. There is just this...

Where and how might you lose yourself today?

Luke

I had a dog

Who loved flowers

Briskly she went

Through the fields,

Yet paused

For the honeysuckle

Or the rose,

Her dark head

And her wet nose

Touching

The face

Of every one

With its petals

Of silk,

With its fragrance

Rising

Into the air

Where the bees,

Their bodies

Heavy with pollen,

Hovered-and easily

She adored

Every blossom,

Not in the serious

Carefully way

That we choose

This blossom or that blossom-

The way we praise or don’t praise-

The way we love

Or don’t love-

But the way

We long to be-

That happy

In the heaven of earth-

That wild, that loving.

I wonder if we project our own longings onto perceived enlightened beings. For instance, with dogs I often hear how they offer unconditional love when we don’t really know what they are thinking or feeling, any more than we do of another human. Just because we want it to be so, doesn’t make it so. Dogs have nightmares, spiritual lives, and fits of anger and sadness. It isn’t just dogs. When I see Mary’s Luke easily adoring every blossom, I also see Thich Nhat Hahn (Vietnamese Buddhist Monk) and the Dali Lama (Tibetan Buddhist Monk) acting silly and totally out of control as they giggle their way through a flower patch, loving equally the dying roses and the menacing spiders amidst the buds and the bees. I imagine that they too have not just spiritual lives, but dreams gone awry and episodes of pique. So if I can imagine holy beings perfectly loving and perfectly fumbling and bumbling, might I also not imagine myself as a wholly being, wild and loving? Perhaps my wild love results in actions that appear motivated by loathing of my kind, but I imagine in the very inner core of all of us, no matter our strategies in the world, we are motivated by love and beauty of ourselves and those we care for. We just don’t look as cute as a dog with floppy ears or as noble as a monk donning maroon and saffron robes. We do however have that possibility of happiness and joy because we are the dog, the monk, the flower, and the bee. We are all one in our beauty and the love that comes up through our wild interconnected beings. Peace and heaven on earth? Possible? Yes! I don’t believe this is a projection. We can make it so. One.

Where do you "project" the way you wish the world was (or shouldn't be) onto others and what does it tell you about the way you wish to live?

Doesn’t Every Poet Write a Poem about Unrequited Love - October 2, 2010

The flowers

I wanted to bring to you,

Wild and wet,

From the pale dunes

And still smelling

Of the summer night,

And still holding a moment or two

Of the night’s cricket’s

Humble prayer,

Would have been

So handsome

In you hands-

So happy-I dare to say it-

In your hands­

Yet your smile

Would have been nowhere

And maybe you would have tossed them

Onto the ground,

Or maybe, for tenderness,

You would have taken them

Into your house

And given them water

And put them in a dark corner

Out of reach.

In matters of love

Of this kind

There are things we long to do

But must not do.

I would not want to see

Your smile diminished.

And the flowers, anyway,

Are happy just where they are,

On the pale dunes,

Above the cricket’s humble nest,

Under the blue sky

That loves us all

I am thinking of the days when I have risen and either forgotten about the sky above, or having seen it, not noticed the grandeur of that above because I was concentrating on what was before me, or in me. I am not saying I was “wrong” for not seeing bird in tree or flower in field or cloud in sky, I’m just saying:

There is beauty ever ready to be loved

It is all around us

And we are like the mad poets, writing about love unreturned when if we but look, the love will return.

For it is in us, connected to the beauty without.

So may I today look up, see the sky, and speak not of unrequited love, but of love fulfilled.

Where has love not returned to you?

Mozart for Example - September 14, 2010

All the quick notes

Mozart didn't have time to use

before he entered the cloud-boat

are falling now from the beaks

of the finches

that have gathered from the joyous summer

into the hard winter

and, like Mozart, they speak of nothing

but light and delight,

though it is true, the heavy blades of the world

are still pounding underneath.

And this is what you can do too, maybe,

if you live simply and with a lyrical heart

in the cumbered neighborhoods or even,

as Mozart sometimes managed to, in a palace,

offering tune after tune after tune,

making some hard-hearted prince

prudent and kind, just by being happy.

Time and time again I hear how music bridges hard hearts and might be considered the universal religion. Yet without cultural constraints, might the transcendent moment of listening to Mozart be the background music after a genocidal tragedy, or even bird watching a distraction for a cruel dictator? So I doubt that it is enough to offer music so others may be happy. Yet I know in my moments of unexpected joy I rush out to hold the world and give all that I can. Mary, in the midst of her poem, then offers the cultural construct for guiding our happiness over bird and Bach - live simply and with a lyrical heart - a heart that hears music in all beings.

Where do you hear music?

Circles

In the morning the blue heron is busy

stepping, slowly, around the edge of the

pond. He is tall and shining. His wings, folded

against his body, fit so neatly they

make of him, when he lifts his shoulders and begins to rise

into the air, a great surprise. Also

he carries so light the terrible sword-beak. Then

he is gone over the trees.

I am so happy to be alive in this world

I would like to live forever, but I am

content not to. Seeing what I have seen

has filled me; believing what I believe

has filled me.

The first words of this page are

hardly thought of when the bird

circles back over the trees; it floats down

like an armful of blue flowers, a bundle of light

coming to refresh itself again in the black water, and I think:

maybe it is or it isn't the same bird-maybe it's

the first one's child, or the child of its child.

What I mean is, our deliverance from Time

and the continuance, if we only steward them well,

of earthly things. So maybe it's myself still standing here, or

someone else, like myself hot with the joy of this world, and

filled with praise.

Yesterday a young coyote walked across our lawn in the ripening dawn. Along the way to kayak the Suwannee, families of turkeys and deer adorned the highways, as did one lone feral pig. In the water one gator swam under our boats and mighty sturgeons jumped to our joy nearby. Juvenile Red-shouldered hawks and immature Little Blue Herons Herons kept closer to us on the banks than their parents would have, and on the way back, a raccoon scampered in front of my speeding car, closer to me than s/he should have been. So maybe it's myself writing to you this morning, or the gator, or the turkey, or the coyote - our very being a joy of this world worthy of incessant praise.

What would you do differently if you lived forever?