Mysteries, Yes - February 14, 2011

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of lambs...

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

Ah, my spiritual practice for the day...

Look

Laugh

Lower my self

What will you practice today so that you may live the questions?

Porcupine

Where the porcupine is I don't know but I hope

it's high up on some pine bough in some thick tree, maybe

on the other side of the swamp. The dogs have come running back, one of them

with a single quill in his moist nose. He's laughing, now knowing what he has

almost done to himself. For years I have wanted to see that slow rambler,

that thornbush. I think, what love does to us is a Gordian knot, it's that

complicated.

I hug the dogs and their good luck, and put on their leashes. So dazzling she must be-

a plump dark lady wearing a gown of nails-white teeth tearing skin from the thick tree.

In myth, the Gordian knot could not be untied.  Only when Alexander the Great came along did the knot unfurl, and this was only by a bold stroke of his sword to cut the knot, revealing two ends that then could unravel the unsolvable. 

What I want to know is whether the sword slashing is the way to go. I mean, can love be solved by a violent thrust?  How courageous is it to cut rope, or the bindings of the heart with an impulsive act?  If we did, we might just end up with a nose full of quills, a gift from our prickly encounters.  Now that would be something to laugh at!

So today, may I go towards love and the uncomfortable, and laugh at the target I have become. 

Where do you expect discomfort and prickly relationships?  What is your response to this?

I Wish I Loved No One

I wish I loved no one,

I said, one long day.

You are  fool then,

said the old cripple

from the poorhouse.

You are a fool then,

said the young woman

tramping the road

with nothing, nothing.

I wish I loved no one,

I said on yet another long day.

You are a fool then,

said a wrinkled face

at the boarding house,

and she laughed.

a pitiful fool!

How do we wish to not love one another? Let me count the ways.

When I arise in the morning and find dishes and socks scattered, my heart rumbles with discontent and disconnection.

When I tire of yet another organization's conflict and confusing practices, my mind seeks solace, alone again naturally.

When the news speaks of violent and ignorant acts, my hands pick up a novel into which I play hide and seek, mostly hiding.

Because I have everything but what others "should do", I have nothing.

What a pitiful fool!

I think I'd rather have nothing, so I have everything.

Including loving you, me, the whole shebang.

Let's meet at the shelter, the garbage dump, the cardboard house, and the refugee's dangerous highway, shall we?

Limping in love this long day.

How do you deny love?

Percy (nine)

Your friend is coming I say

To Percy, and name a name

And he runs to the door, his

Wide mouth in its laugh-shape,

And waves, since he has one, his tail.

Emerson, I am trying to live,

As you said we must, the examined life.

But there are days I wish

There was less in my head to examine,

Not to speak of the busy heart.  How

Would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not

Thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

Yesterday, I was reading in “Ecotherapy:  Healing Nature with Mind” this quote from Okanagan Canadian author and activist Jeannette Armstrong as she writes about the Okanagan native peoples, “The Okanagan teaches that emotion or feeling is the capacity whereby community and land intersect in our beings and become part of us.  This bond or link is a priority for our individual wholeness or well-being.”

In this same book, David W. Orr writes, “.we indeed live in the lap of a great intelligence, as Emerson once said.  It is a practice acknowledgement that health, healing, wholeness, and holy are related not just by linguistic accident but by the fact that they are one and inseparable.”

Thinking of Percy’s running forward through the lens of the book, “Ecotherapy,” I’m guessing that Mary wishes to be one with the world through an acute and authentic response to the feelings and possibilities in the moment.   If we are in touch with our feelings, we are one with our animal selves, which also include human nature, cultures, and mind.  It seems to be then, that it’s not about Percy not thinking, but that we long for his seemingly effortless navigation between the shoals of thinking and feeling.  We long for an awareness of emotion and thinking in our minds and bodies. We long for healing, wholeness, and hope.

So I say, let us befriend our brains and our bodies.  Both are of this earth and belong.  If we can come into awareness and acceptance, maybe we can reach some semblance of effortless flow in this world.  

This awareness and acceptance is Sufi wisdom whose poetry reminds us that our deep longing is union with the Friend.  I know it is mine. To begin every day panting at the door, knowing that friendship awaits, running towards the Beloved, and hence to be loving. 

What awaits you outside your door today?

Sometimes

1.

Something came up

out of the dark.

It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.

It wasn't an animal

or a flower,

unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,

a head the size of a cat

but muddy and without ears.

I don't know what God is.

I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them

some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometime

melancholy leaves me breathless...

3.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!

Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.

The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

but not everything.

Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and

thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in  my heart

and fortify me,

take away my hunger for answers,

let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.

Let the cathead appear again-

the smallest of your mysteries,

some wild cousin of my own blood probably-

some cousin of my own wild blood probably,

in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around

one corner or another.

This doesn't amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Step One: Question

What is it that comes out of the dark?

Is it God?

Is it death?

What is the necessary arrangement between the two?

Step Two: Answer

Love

Step Three: Action

Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

Listen

Be crazy

Laugh

Grow

Step Four:  Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary

I summarized Mary's poem with these 4 steps. How would you? What are your "4 steps" to life?

 

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?

Letter to ______________ - October 3, 2010

You have broken my heart.

Just as well. Now

I am learning to rise

Above all that, learning

The thin life, waking up

Simply to praise

Everything in this world that is

Strong and beautiful

Always-the trees, the rocks,

The fields, the news

From heaven, the laughter

That comes back

All the same. Just as well. Time

To read books, rake the lawn

In peace, sweep the floor, scour

The faces of the pans,

Anything .And I have been so

Diligent it is almost

Over, I am growing myself

As strong as rock, as a tree

Which, if I put my arms around it, does not

Lean away. It is a

Wonderful life. Comfortable.

I read the papers. Maybe

I will go on a cruise, maybe I will

Cross the entire ocean, more than once.

Whatever you think, I have scarcely

Thought of you. Whatever you imagine,

It never really happened. Only a few

Evenings of nonsense. Whatever you believe-

Dear one, dear one-

Do not believe this letter.

I wonder how many people each of us would like a letter like this to. I am thinking of one or two. How, after our parting I did not know how to deal with the pain and my heart that had broken open. So I turned without and as my heart mended it healed a little bit larger to take in the beauty of the world around me, and in me. I was determined that love would not destroy me, but grow me. If I could but just let those of past now how well I’ve done without them – my parrot companions, my father, my Mayan. What I would also tell them that still in the night, they come to me in dreams, and in the morning the heart sighs and I must rewrite that letter and the story of my life.

To whom would you send such a letter?

News of Percy (Five)

In the morning of his days he is in the afternoon of his life.

It’s some news about kidneys those bean-shaped necessities,

Of which, of his given two, he has one working, and

That not well.

We named him for the poet, who died young, in the blue

Waters off Italy.

Maybe we should have named him William, since Wordsworth

Almost never died.

We must laugh a little at this rich and unequal world,

So they say, so they say.

And let them keep saying it.

Percy and I are going out now, to the beach, to join

His friends-

The afghan, the lab, the beautiful basset.

And let me go with good cheer in his company.

For though he is young he is beloved,

He is all but famous as he runs

Across the shining beach, that faces the sea.

Oh now, Mary is going to lose Percy as well as Molly, her partner! But Percy is young and it must seem unfair or “unequal” as Mary says. Yet, she is in love with him as is the world, no matter the course of his life. Yes! No matter our future, there is life to love now. If ever there was a chance to love now, it is to look over a pack of playing dogs. Our eyes take in the energy and sheer force of beings who share their lives with us, but with whom we are never quite dog enough. So our canine companions find other dogs and suddenly we are on the outside looking in, and inward. Who knew that beauty was so possible in sharing the mundane experiences of those with whom we live? Who knew that the holy other is right in our midst? The tragedy is that we often don’t realize this until that particular beauty has gone. So bark now beauty, howl your holy presence, now.

Whose life/beauty have you known that has been too fleeting?

Swimming with Otter

I am watching otter, how he

Plays in the water, how he

Displays brae underside to the

Wave-washings, how he

Breathes in descent trailing sudden

Strings of pears that tell

Almost, but never quite, where he is

Apt to rise-how he is

Gone, gone, so long I despair of him, then he

Trims, wetly, up the far shore and if he

Looks back he is surely

Laughing. I too have taken

Myself into this

Summer lake, where the leaves of the trees

Almost touch, where peace comes

In the generosity of water, and I have

Reached out into the loveliness and I have

Floated on my flat back to think out

A poem or two, not by any means fluid but,

Dear God, as you have made me, my only quickness.

Have I spoken of the Ichetucknee River here? If I repeat myself, then I do so, for I suspect that swimming in water is my only quickness. Or perhaps that is where my quickness, my talent, my gifts, my reason for living floats up out of my subconscious with any clarity. So I am drawn to speak of this river so that on land I may know that healing flow.

Every summer I go to the Ichetucknee. I pray that its waters will be clear of pollutant fed algae so that I may see beauty not just above the water, but below where fish flash, invertebrates sparkle, and river grass undulates like caressing healing hands as I swim over the top of this field of green. Such clarity has not been the river’s gift for the last couple of years, so murky have human desires changed this river. But in early September, I took a swim along the entire length – a 2 hour swim that when finished I knew what I was about.

In the middle of the swim we came upon a family of otters. Meredith, my spouse, held up behind me, in love. He’d never seen river otters before and here he was with his nose at their level, and only a few yards away. Well, I don’t know if he was in love, I never asked. But I was. How can one not be when I see otters snacking away on mussels, a husband grinning, and a river of wonder flowing in me, around me, through me, and between me and others, and otters.

What is your quickness?

Percy Two

I have a little dog who likes to nap with me.
He climbs on my body and puts his face in my neck.
He is sweeter than soap.
He is more wonderful than a diamond necklace,
which can't even bark.
I would like to take him to Kashmir and the Ukraine,
and Jerusalem and Palestine and Iraq and Darfur,
that the sorrowing thousands might see his laughing mouth.
I would like to take him to Washington, right into
the oval office
where Donald Rumsfeld would crawl out of the president's
armpit
and kneel down on the carpet, and romp like a boy.

For once, for a moment, a rational man.

Now that's an idea worth sharing - what might we bright to the influential and the sorrowing multitudes so that they may gain reason, or perhaps better said, let go of reason and let love and joy in? I think that I would bring a parrot to the oval office. There the bird would bow down his head, raising his neck feathers in which President Obama would promptly bury his nose and inhale sacredness. Then he would reaffirm his faith that there is nothing sweeter than life itself, or more beautiful than himself. He might secretly see himself as President Parrot, no more, and no less. Then he would wing himself to Afghanistan, Yemen, Bolivia, or Argentina and offer liberation by now bowing down his head and kneeling on the carpet to the beauty within and the beauty without. Such is my hope here in the dog days of August.

What would you take to Washington?

August

Our neighbor, tall and blonde and vigorous, the m other of many children, is sick..;.

All summer the children, grown now and some of them with children, of their own, come to visit...

They all smile.

June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.

So appropriate this piece on the eve of June, July, August and with the news today that the oil will continue to flow into the Gulf unto August. All summer. Everything seems wrong about this, and there is nowhere for the oil to go, safely, with health. If we cover our eyes to this tragedy, however, we would miss the laughter, the smile that is part of the oil, part of us, part of cancer, part of death. Some days though, what can we do but sit with our heads bowed, or held in the laps of others, silent with the ache of abundance in the midst of loss.

What is "wrong" before you this summer?