More of the Unfinishable Fox Story

Dear Readers,

I have been in touch with Beacon Press and I learned that by printing so much of the poem I might be infringing on copyright issues.  So from here until the end, I shall write only a few lines of each poem and encourage you to get the book.  It's so hard for me to only include such a small portion, because the poems in their entirety are so complete. I have loved to type each line  as a form of prayer - so instead let us whisper the words to one another through the ethernet. 

Today's Poem

And what did the fox look like?...

He was rough and smelled of skunk.

But he was beautiful,

and beauty is not to be taken lightly....

Mary is still on to that fox she saw. She doesn't remember where she was going and cannot imagine what the fox is doing on the road, but she does know what beauty is and for.  First and foremost we are to remember beauty. 

We are to remember that beauty exists.

We are to remember that it is all around us.

We are to remember that it is in us, is us, is everyone, is every being.

We are to remember that the story of beauty ever continues and never ends, so that our days may be finished in beauty.

What story do you have that is unfinished, or unfinishable?

Percy at His Bath, or, Ambivalence (Eleven)

Today Jill is cutting my snags and my curls.

My legs grow longer.

My tail gets brushed.

Then, the bath.

Mary has been reading a book about

a woman who made a secret journey

to Lhasa. She reads aloud to me the parts

about the village dogs, who are big and

fearless and full of bark. And, all

their lives, dirty. I am filled

with envy.

then it's over and I am in my bed

as white as snow and soft and all

the sea salt gone. And over every part of me

an absurd but lovely fragrance.

This morning I heard of a book, "My Princess Boy."  A mother wrote about her journey dealing with her young son who wanted to dress up in pink and frilly clothes.  She and her husband came to terms to not judge their son on what a "male" should and should not do, but to accept the beauty of the boy as he choose to live his life. 

As I listened to this mother and her child on national TV this morning being interviewed, I thought of my own childhood.  I fought stubbornly with my parents when they wished that I would not dress "like a boy" and who would say, "For gosh shakes, can you wash your face now and then?" My  mother even one time told me, "If I had a dog, I would shave its rear end and make it walk backwards, and it would still look better than you!"  (oh Percy, are you more handsome than me?)

That was an "ouch" at the time, though I can now understand  her frustration as I look back and ponder what her life must have been like with 4 teen agers in the house.  I have changed a bit, and will done dresses now and then, and indeed, have my share of frilly things.  I also still love the dirt, the rough and tumble, and the freedom from gender constraints. 

I will be going on a 12 day trip to the rain forests of Guyana in 3 months and we are only allowed 25 pounds baggage.  With about 17 pounds of camera/video gear, this doesn't leave much room for clothes and personal items. I'm so looking forward to competing with the others on the trip - how few clothes can I get by with, how dirty can I get, and who by the end of the trip will be mas macho?  At the same time, it will be delicious to get home and in a clean bed with fresh clothes.

Ambiguity, my liberator!  Our liberator! The liberator of future generations of children.  May they not be bullied for difference, diversity, and choice.

Where does ambiguity liberate you?

The Gift

After the wind-bruised sea
furrowed itself back
into the folds of blue, I found
in the black wrack

a shell called the Neptune -
tawny and white,
spherical,
with a tail

and a tower
and a dark door,
and all of it
no larger

than my fist.
It looked, you might say,
very expensive.
I thought of its travels

in the Atlantic's
wind-pounded bowl
and wondered
that it was still intact.

Ah yes, there was
that door
that held only the eventual, inevitable
emptiness.

There's that - there's always that.
Still, what a house
to leave behind!
I held it

like the wisest of books
and imagined
its travels toward my hand.
And now, your hand.

Yesterday I attended a memorial service for Arnie Bleiweiss, a fellow member of my congregation.   We celebrated his life as we heard sharing after sharing about the remarkable life he had led. He had given a great gift of science, mentorship, and companionship to those around him.   The house was packed with people who had come to cherish, and to say goodbye.  Though there were moments of laughter, there were also tears. For the sanctuary was so empty without him. 

But what a house he left behind! I thank him for his wisdom and his memories, that travel from my heart and now to yours.

What house do you know that now stands empty, but is evidence of pricelessness?

The Measure

I stopped the car and ran back and across the road

and picked up the box turtle, who only

hissed and withdrew herself into her pretty shell.

Well, goodness, it was early in the morning, not too much traffic.

Rather an adventure than a risk, and anyway

who would give aid to such a shy citizen?

Who wouldn't complete the journey for it, taking it of course

in the direction of its desire: a pinewoods

where, as I learned, the blueberries ripen early.

Probably she had thought, in the middle of the night-

Ah, it's time.

Sometimes I think our own lives are watched over like that.

Out of the mystery of the hours and the days

Something says-Let's give this one a little trial.

Let's say, put a turtle in the road she's traveling on, and

in a hurry.

Let's see how her life is measuring up, that lucky girl.

So much happiness, so much good fortune. Ah, it's time.

Not even a month ago coming back from a day swimming in the springs on my birthday my spouse and I moved a large female gopher tortoise from the middle of the road. We took a little risk to scamper quickly to save such a precious life along a fast paced road. That same month we moved a box turtle as well into safety. Yet, in our own yard, a small girl tortoise I found dead, smashed by an exiting car in our own driveway. We live at the end of a dirt road in the woods, and it seemed such a rare thing that tortoise just happened to be in the wrong place and the wrong time. She was not as lucky as the other two.

Maybe that's why we humans stay within our shells and do not travel about or journey from our sameness and tameness into wild sacredness. In the night a dream comes to us and with the sun's rising we feel perky with possibility. Then what happens? Somewhere along the line we falsely intuit that we don't measure up, or other's don't, or reality doesn't. Don't you think that it's time to cross that road and get into that field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing?

Now is the time to know

That all that you do is sacred.

Now is the time to understand

That all your ideas of right and wrong

Were just a child's training wheels

To be laid aside

When you finally live

With veracity

And love.

Now is the time for the world to know

That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time for you to compute the impossibility

That there is anything

But Grace.

Now is the season to know

That everything you do

Is sacred.

-Hafiz, A Sufi Poet

What might you do or where might you go if you knew that everything you do is sacred?

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches? June 22, 2010

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives --
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!


Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?


Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!


To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.


Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes; I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

I am in the north of this continent, not so very far, but far enough that the sun rises much earlier and sets much later than usual. I awoke with a vision of amazement – thinking of the Scarlet Macaw of Mesoamerica. I cannot think of that bird without thinking of death, and of loss. Reading yesterday in the book, “Seven Names for the Bellbird,” which is a book about how people value birds in Honduras, I came across a section on the Scarlet Macaw, the Guara Roja. The author found that the Hondurans speak of the Guara in terms of how much loss of the natural world they have seen. So the Guara came to me today, a bird of life and a bird of death and a bird of amazement. I so strongly feel that to be on a journey of amazement I must also set one foot in the door of death. For this is presence of what is, which stuns me with the finality and infinity of my shared being. So here I am at the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalist ministers in Minneapolis, hearing the call not to shared ministry, but to shared being.

Where do you journey for amazement, and is death a part of this path?

The Journey - March 22, 2010

The Journey - March 22, 2010

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

This seems to be Mary's crescendo of my favorite poems. Wild Geese and The Journey are two I use a lot. Then in between was that lovely surprise of Starfish. I hear my own heart in her words - that love will save me. And in saving me, I save the starfish, the geese, the world. Also, the world in being beautiful, love worthy, and tragic, saves me. I have great company in the struggles of life, for their struggle is my own. In solidarity we journey ever home.

How do you save yourself? Are saved?

The Night Traveler - February 23, 2010

Passing by, he could be anybody:

A thief, a tradesman, a doctor

On his way to a worried house,

But when he stops at your gate,...

...You know it is not just anyone-

It is the Night Traveler...

...He has a gift for you, but it has no name...

...He holds it in the moonlight, and it sings

Like a newborn beast,

Like a child at Christmas,....

All night-and all your life, if you are willing-...

...Will hold you like a mossy jaw,

A bath of light. An answer.

In the winter's night, there is a possibility of joy that so many of us know in the story of Christmas. For when the dawn breaks, we know it will be "our" day. Our brains calm, our hearts open, and the community breaks into a song of possibility. Sometimes, the night before my birthday I have had this same singing gift, and the days before and right after my wedding. In these presents (presence) I didn't know that they were the surprise of having an answer, as Mary suggests here. Looking back, though I see that they were a time to rest from asking questions of why and how. They were simply a "how" of living where questions were no longer important, because we were living the answer.

When has the weight of your days lifted in the night?

Aunt Leaf - February 18, 2010

Aunt Leaf - February 18, 2010

Needing one, I invented her-..

Dear aunt, I'd call into the leaves,

and she'd rise up,..

...and whisper in a language only the two of us knew

the world that meant follow,..

and we'd travel

as cheerful as birds

out of the dusty town and into the trees

where she would change us both into something quicker.

At day's end she'd leave me back at my own door

with the rest of my family,...

...this bone dream,

this friend I had to have,

this old woman made out of leaves.

The friends that I conjured up as a child were always birds. I'd walk in the woods and talk with them, and make up songs for their ears only. I longed that they would talk or sing back just for me. And they did. They came to me in dreams and gave me visions and flew me around the world upon their backs, showing me beauty and wonder, and death and suffering too. In my young adult hood the birds usually came to me as an albatross, who would land next to me on some island paradise, and hold me in his or her arms. I'd cry and be comforted by this great beauty that knew my worth and who watched the world from up high and knew the worth of all my kind. It is only in recent years that I have become the albatross in my dreams and on days full of grace, I am also the fish or some detritus scattered over the ocean's surface upon which I feed.

Which nonhuman form do you long to be? Why?

Crows - February 3, 2010

...When you look in the eyes of one

you have seen them all.

At the edges of highways

they pick at limp things.

They are anything but refined

Crow is Crow, you say.

What else is there to say?...

...wherever you arrive

they'll be there first,

glossy and rowdy

and indistinguishable.

The deep muscle of the world.

When I first began showing my spouse how to identify birds he caught me one day saying, "It's just a crow." I realized my speciesist attitude and how far I had wandered from seeing wonder in the ways life brings beauty to living form. Since then I take extra time to look at crows, and at their behavior. Perhaps they do pick at limp things, but my gosh, one day I saw one at my congregation doing it with a stick being used as a tool! Last year I read about a study of crows on a university campus where they found that crows recognize individual faces and can communicate to other crows if the person is a threat of which to beware. There is so much going on that reflects the deep foundations of this world - in suburban lawn, in city starling, in rowdy crows, and in our daily risings full of misgivings and doubts about what this day might mean to us, to those we love, and to the world. No matter our thinking, we are the work of this creation, enclosed in the same muscle sheath as the persistent crows.

Where do you overlook beauty, wonder, or unifying complexity in your daily life?

Ice - January 31, 2010

My father spent his last winter

Making ice-grips for shoes...

...My father should not have been doing

All that close work

In the drafty workshop, but as though

he sensed travel at the edge of his mind,

He would not be stopped...

...Plainly the giving was an asking,

A petition to be welcomed and useful-

Or maybe, who knows, the seed of a desire

Not to be sent alone out over the black ice...

...Mother writes tome: I am cleaning the workshop

And I have found

so many pairs of the ice-grips....

...What shall I do?..

And I write back: Mother, please

Save everything.

My father, in his last year, went out one fall day and raked up leaves. He'd had a heart transplant with many complications, in and out of danger in the 5 years after that surgery. A few days later he got a fungal pneumonia, perhaps born out of the decaying, wet leaves. Into the hospital he went, again, and this last time, he did not get out. .

He should not have been doing that work. But he wanted to be of use, to take part in the annual family ritual of raking leaves, and avoiding raking leaves. One year while I was away in college he sent me an envelope in which brown leaves from our yard were enclosed, with a note saying "Wish you were here."

Now in every leaf I see, my heart says, "Wish you were here" to my father. I too share the desires of fathers, to not be alone and to be of use. Any giving I do is really an asking, please, save me and save everything.

How does working or giving bring you connection to others? What will you do in the last year of your life?

The River Styx, Ohio - January 24, 2010

We drove through October, Grandmother pointing at cows,

Mother, bifocaled, squinting at maps for a crossroad

We came instead to the River Styx, Ohio...

...We hope for magic; mystery endures.

We look for freedom, but the measure's set.

There was a graveyard, but we saw no people.

We went back to the car.

...On the wheel

I tensed my knuckles, felt the first stab of pain.

With her family, Mary comes upon a desolated area of bankrupted farms, perhaps expecting the river to open up some understanding that life is more than a future of aimless pursuits to pass the time (Grandmother counting cows), or worrying to exhaustion to see what best decisions to make while missing the moments of the journey (Mother pouring over the maps). Instead this river is the river Styx of old story and mythology, that it is the boundary between earth and hell, and upon it you descend into the pits of eternal suffering. She escapes the river, though does not - the pain endures, the path of being ever so human like her mother and grandmother is ever with her.

Farms, seen from the road, seem like places of lazy indifference to me. The diversity and wildness of this life, of the natural habitat has been tamed and the boredom of what is left shows in every fence line, wandering cow, and discarded machine in the pasture. Through the manure laden fields and rumpled rows of corn run a river of tears of what once was. It is so hard for me to see mystery and freedom in humanity scrambling for mere existence, when there are heavenly fields of beauty that beckon us to play with joy. Pain comes from the cross roads we never clearly find, where we can make the choice for freedom and magic or for the wastelands.

Where in your life do you feel the pain of hopelessness? What choices might you make instead to grow with liberating joy?

Going to Walden - January 23, 2010

...Going to Walden is not so easy a thing

As a greet visit. It is the slow and difficult

Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

I'm all about green visits. I lead Nature Spirituality trips to our local prairie walk of La Chua trail to see Whooping Cranes and every spring I head to Central America to work with endangered parrots. In these places I fill up, for they are the Mecca of my heart, the hajj where my self blurs into the masses of species and experiences. Indeed it is a trick to see the glory in urban and devastated areas, for my mind wants to categorize this vision as not possibly "right" and not part of the whole.

In the summer of 2001 I visited Manhattan and one evening I lay on a bench looking up the lighted trunks of those twin towers. In that moment a healing took place, for I saw the world of cities, high economy, and a dearth and death of species as integral to whole. I came to a sense of fondness for the art of humanity that creates blights as well as lights upon the night.

That urban forest is me, and it became in a few months a scene of destruction. Does the tragedy negate the beauty? If the world contradicts itself, very well, it does, for it is large, as am I. I am the world, and I contain multitudes (a la Walt Whitman, acquaintance of Henry David Thoreau, resident of Walden).

As I am the world, and I am here to gain faith that I am whole, then I am the ashes of the Twin Towers, of Treblinka, of sugar cane monoculture killing tropical lands, and the ashes of quake produced fires in Haiti. I am also the phoenix who rises out of the ashes, me, the world, the universe, here temporarily now as the ashes of old stars. Would that me, the old, could see the new that is always there beyond apocalyptic nightmares.

What in you or the world or you do you reject or resist? Is there anything you are running from, and in the business, do not see the beauty and the tragedy of this moment?