Good-bye Fox

He was lying under a tree, licking up the shade, 

Hello again, Fox, I said. 

 And hello to you too, said Fox, looking up and not bounding away. 

 You're not running away? I said. 

Well, I've heard of your conversation about us. News travels even among foxes, as you might know or not know. 

 What conversation do you mean? 

 Some lady said to you, "The hunt is good for the fox." And you said, "Which fox?" 

 Yes, I remember. She was huffed. 

 So you're okay in my book. 

 Your book! That was in my book, that's the difference between us. 

 Yes, I agree. You fuss over life with your clever words, mulling and chewing on its meaning, while we just live it. 

 Oh! 

Could anyone figure it out, to a finality? So why spend so much time trying. You fuss, we live. And he stood, slowly, for he was old now, and ambled away. 

When we fuss, is that not living as well? Unless in fussing, I suppose, we block life's potential? But doesn't fussing guide us into knowing life? I think of the squirrel in the back yard with her chatter squeals at the red-tailed hawk, and the parent wren's insistent call to their 4 nestlings to leave the shelter of the porch nest, and their whining response. 

Go away! Get out! Come here! Feed me! Do something! Are we ever saying much else to one another?

And what about a fox fussing at the hen house, trying to find a way in. I think he is writing in a book too -

Whiskers full of cobwebs, paw scratches in the sand, blood drops on boards and feathers exploding out into the air. That's quite a story Mr. Fox.

The hunt is good for the fox!

The Last Word Abut Fox (Maybe)

Where is the fox now?

Somewhere, doing his life's work, which is living his life....

How many rabbits has he caught so far?

Many, many, many...

This doesn't sound very important....

Have you never heard of the meek and what is t o become of them?

What's meek about eating rabbits?...

You know, there's only one thing to say.  I think

you're a little crazy.

I thank the Lord.

Where are you now?

Wherever you are, you are doing your life's work.

Maybe you don't think so as you get up and eat dull toast and do that exercise routine one more time, if at all.

Perhaps you think that today you'll do nothing important.

Whatever you do, I don't think there's anything meek about it.

Maybe I and others are crazy to think so, but your wild and precious life is astounding.

Be like the fox looking for something to catch.

Catch the spirit today!

Are there areas in your life that you do not hold in high regard?  

Evidence

I.

Where do I live? If I had no address, as many people
do not, I could nevertheless say that I lived in the
same town as the lilies of the field, and the still
waters.

Spring, and all through the neighborhood now there are
strong men tending flowers.

Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But
all beautiful things, inherently, have this function -
to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory
to the world, that good teacher.

Among the swans there is none called the least, or
the greatest.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in
singing, especially when singing is not necessarily
prescribed.

As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

2.

There are many ways to perish, or to flourish.

How old pain, for example, can stall us at the threshold of function….

Still friends, consider stone, that is without the fret of gravity, and water that is without anxiety. 

And the pine trees that never forget their recipe for renewal. 

And the female wood duck who is looking this way and that way for her children. And the snapping turtle who is looking this way and that way also. This is the world. 

And consider, always, every day, the determination of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles. 

3. 

I ask you again: if you have not been enchanted by this adventure--your life--what would do for you? 

And, where are you, with your ears bagged down as if with packets of sand? Listen. We all have much more listening to do. Tear the sand away. And listen. The river is singing. …

For myself, I have walked in these woods for

More than forty years, and I am the only

thing, it seems, that is about to be used up.

Or, to be less extravagant, will, in the

Foreseeable future, be used up.

First, though, I want to step out into some

fresh morning and look around and hear myself

crying out:  "The house of money is falling! The house of money is falling! The weeds are rising! The weeds are rising!"

In this day today, do you imagine there will be much evidence? Evidence for what?

Consider the lilies then and the birds as Mary does.  She's been reading the Christian Scriptures that one! (Matthew 6:25-34)

I read it much like she does.  There is so much contradiction in the passage, which points to the opposed tensions in life, we are left to turn to the infallible, but which can be hidden. So we go through our days as sleuths to discover. What you ask?  More importantly, how,  when we know that we are marching towards the point of being used up?  Or like the ducklings, hunted by pain for the good of the world?

I don't have the answer of how we listen for the evidence all around us.  

I only know that beauty is everywhere. It's my job to find it and praise the world accordingly, and to respond to the glory of every being with in the world, which are also within me.

What evidence do you long for today?

Turtle

Now I see it--

it nudges with its bulldog head

the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble;

and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal

who is leading her soft children

from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps

close to the edge

and they follow closely, the good children--

the tender children,

the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet

into the darkness.

And now will come--I can count on it--the  murky splash,

the certain victory

of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic

circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks

flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart

will be most mournful

on their account.  But, listen,

what's important?

Nothing's important

except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,

of which this is a part,

not to be denied.  Once,

I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,

a dusty, fouled turtle plodded along--

a snapper--

broken out I suppose from some backyard cage--

and I knew what I had to do--

I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it--

I put it, like a small mountain range,

into a knapsack, and I took it out

of the city, and I let it

down into the dark pond, into

the cool water,

and the light of the lilies,

to live.

In denying death, we refuse life.   I didn't always know this.  As a child I mourned for the animal children of the world, and so became a bird veterinarian.  I could not bear to lose one beauty to anything, for all loss was deemed cruel to me.  Then came a time when not only could I not end the curse of death, but was the cause of it.

In my bird clinic in Guatemala I was taking care of a Grey Hawk who had been shot, and a Pygmy Kingfisher who had been poisoned.  I fumed at my own kind who had done such deeds!  As they were wild birds I had to separate them from our aviary birds, so I placed them in separate cages in quarantine - our bathroom.  It was such a small space for prey and predator to share.  One day, the minute kingfisher flew out from cage through the bars, and into the talons of the hawk.  In the attempt to save, I had set up the circumstances of death. 

So too Mary with the saving of her turtle. So too us all as we step out unto the day to live.

What is your place in setting up circumstances of death?

Night Herons

Some herons were fishing in the robes of the night

At a low hour of the water’s body,

And the fish I suppose, were full

Of fish happiness in those transparent inches

Even as, over and over, the beaks jacked down

And the narrow bodies were lifted

With every quick sally,

And that was the end of them as far as we know-

Though, what do we know except that death

Is so everywhere and so entire-

Pummeling and felling,

Or sometimes,

Like this, appearing

Through such a thing door-

One stab and you’re through!

And what then?

Why, then it was almost morning,

And one by one the birds opened their wings and flew.

This morning it is brisk, colder than I have been in months. The reddish/pink sky patch of horizon in the east is crisscrossed by utility lines strung across dead trees now serving as telephone poles. You may think there is not much beauty in an urban landscape. Wait, perhaps I speak for myself. Then a marvel strikes through to your heart. Yesterday in this place of cars and noise, a bald-eagle flew over the road, hunting in the early hours. Someone will die today to feed this bird, and countless beings have died so that we are here today. I pray that I might know this death, let it stab me deeply, so that I use every molecule of nourishment that comes my way to fly, to liberate as I myself am liberated.

Where will you fly today?

Maker of All Things, Even Healings

All night under the pines the fox

moves through the darkness

with a mouthful of teeth

and a reputation for death which it deserves.

In the spicy villages of the mice he is famous,

his nose in the grass

is like an earthquake,

his feet on the path

is a message so absolute

that the mouse, hearing it, makes himself

as small as he can as he sits silent

or, trembling, goes on

hunting among the grasses for the ripe seeds.

Maker of All Things,

including appetite, including stealth,

including the fear that makes

all of us sometime or other,

flee for the sake

of our small and precious lives,

let me abide in your shadow-

let me hold on

to the edge of your robe

as you determine what you must let be lost

and what will be saved.

Here is the teeth of the matter. What is in your life that you do not accept, yet because it exists at all, comes from the Maker of All Things (however you so describe the process/power by which you came to be)? Here's my short list:

• · The two-party political system in the U.S.
• · The power of money
• · Nonhumans treated as if objects without inherent worth or dignity
• · Alzheimer's, especially in my mother and father-in-law
• · Women subjugated to men
• · The loss of biodiversity and the abundant nonhuman wildlife that existed before the industrial age

So my anger or despair, so the suffering and the fear, so absolutely everything belongs here in this world and in my life. How hard this is to accept, and how I anguish that the world cannot be different. My big powerful brain complains that I feel so separate from the rest of life, and brings this suffering upon itself. For if I do not accept what must be lost, including myself and all I love, how can I be saved and all that I love?

What does your short list look like? What are you doing to accept that which you currently reject?

Comorants

All afternoon the sea was a muddle of birds

Black and spiky,

Long-neced,slippery

Down they went

Into the waters of the poor

Blunt-headed silver

They live on, for a little while.

God, how did it every come to you to invent Time?

I dream at night

Of the birds, of the beautiful dark seas

They push through.

I am thinking of the movie, The Hours. The story is of Virginia Woolf a gifted writer who is also depressed. The movie is dark , the woman forlorn. In the end she takes her life, weigthed down by the burdens of the world, she places stones in her pockets to weight her down as she steps into the dark waters. The indeterminable hours of her life could not be born a moment longer.

Is this where Mary is on this day? She can see beauty, yes, but she feels so alone. The embrace of beauty, of the dark seas, calls to her like a sieren to save her from the long march of time . Am I anywhere close to right Mary? Or am I writing for all of us in this long night, only the dying cicadas with me while others dream. But soon it will be morning, and there is just another hour to push through before a decent hour emerges to start drinking coffee. Even in the light, I’ll be haunted by the call of union, the light going ever deeper into the dark, for the two were made of each other. Two of which? You tell me.

The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, but the Attention that Comes First

The little hawk leaned sideways and, tilted, rode the wind. Its eye at this distance looked like green glass; its feet were the color of butter. Speed obvious-ly, was joy. But then, so was the sudden, slow circle it carved into the slightly silvery air, and the squaring of its shoulders, and the pulling into itself the long, sharp-edge wings, and the fall into the grass where it tussled a moment, like a bundle of brown leaves, and then, again, lifted itself into the air, that butter-color clenched in order to hold a small a small, still body, and it flew off as my mind sang out oh all that loose, blue rink of sky, where does it go to, and why?

Mary, are you trying to write yourself out of a job? Who needs poets if we just offer up to the world our attention? Indeed! Who needs ministesr, monks, priests, counselors, new age therapists, or even God? We have hawks, mice, the hunters and the hunted – all of reality is there for our grasping as we touch the earth and reach for the sky.

What job would you lose if others paid attention?

Holding Benjamin

No use to tell him that he

And the raccoon are brothers.

You have your soft ideas about nature,

He has others,

And they are full of his

White teeth

And lip that curls, sometimes,

Horribly.

You love this earnest dog,

But also you admire the raccoon

And Lord help you in your place

Of hope and improbables.

To the black-masked gray one:

Run! You say Run!

You say and just as urgently, to the dog:

Stay!

And he won’t or he will,

Depending on more things than I could name.

He’s sure he’s right

And you, so tangled in your mind,

Are wrong,

Though patient and pacific.

And you are downcast.

And it’s his eyes, not yours,

That are clear and bright.

I once read an article about the violence between siblings. Brothers can pound horribly on one another – it is their way. So when I think of the raccoon and dog as brothers, and also caught in a terrible predator – prey cycle, I think of course, it is their way. Then I think of the human companion who feels the suffering of the one, and the responsibility of the other, and ultimately shame and guilt plays tag with acceptance for what is our way – to be complex social creatures who navigate in confusion the harm that we interconnected siblings inflict upon one another. We want there to be a right way and because we cannot discern how to meet everyone’s needs, we feel inadequate. What if we could move beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing as Rumi suggests in his poem?

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,

There is a field.

I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make sense.

We could lie down in that field and play, and as we rubbed our noses in the fresh dirt and smelled the flowers, our hands would linger upon a half-buried bone, a sign of the carnage of our past and of our future. My prayer is that we do not run from that field, but stay engaged with reality and one another – no wrong doing, no right doing, but sure as heck a lot of pain and discomfort. My eyes are bright with living this possibility well, of helping each other hold awareness and acceptance of not a soft nature, but of a terribly beautiful whole and hard nature.

Do you think that predation and prey is an inevitable cycle in our lives; or, can we use our evolution possibility to support collaboration even more than competition?

Dogs - June 20, 2010

Over the wide field

the dark deer went running,

five dogs screaming

at his flanks,

and his heels,

my own two darlings

among them

lunging and buckling

with desire

as they leaped

for the throat

as they tried

and tried again

to bring him down...

At the lake

the deer plunged...

he clambered

up the far shore.

The dogs

moaned and screeched

they flung themselves

on the grass

panting and steaming.

It took hours

but finally...

they woke

from fitful naps

they stepped

in their old good natures

toward us

look look

into their eyes...

here is such happiness when you speak their names!

here is such unforced loved!

here is such shyness such courage!

here is the shining rudimentary soul

here is hope retching, the world as it is

here is the black the red the bottomless pool

I have heard countless stories spoken in regretful tones from others who speak about the killing their dogs have done. Mild mannered and love-giving companions turn into frenzied packs and kill other dogs and cats in the home, not to mention the unsuspecting prey in neighborhoods, fields, and wild places. Knowing the nature of dogs I wonder why then people keep them, for they can do so much harm to what you love and what is beautiful. Their wildness cannot be easily tamed. Maybe the humans aren't trying hard enough. Maybe, just maybe, we relish their wildness and somewhere in our co-evolved human/dog DNA we don't want them to quit hunting - for their hunting is our hunting. We recall when we ran to survive, and this confused does not die easily. We look into their eyes and see reflected back how hard hope is to come by when love lives so easily with violence.

Where or to whom do you love, and yet also turn from?