Foolishness? No, It's Not

Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree. To do this I have to climb branch by branch and write down the numbers in a little book. So I suppose, from their point of view, it's reasonable that my friends say: what foolishness! She's got her head in the clouds again.

But it's not.  Of course I have to give up, but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder of it - the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort.  And I am in that delicious an important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.

As I lay slumbering in bed, I peek out of the covers to see how the sun attempts to come through the countless leaves of the trees.  But perhaps you like me project - the sun is shining whether there are leaves to block the light just as you are shining whether you come out from the covers at a decent hour.

There are countless ways to be useless, beautiful useless.

How about counting the ants?

Hugging every tree in the yard or park?

Reciting poetry to a tortoise?

Saving the parrots or some other endangered species?

May you do something foolish today as a prayer for praise - for yourself and the many others, which are really just you come out of your skin into exoskelton, bark, shell, and feather.

How have you been a fool full of earth praise today?

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?

Prayer - January 28, 2011

May I never not be frisky,

May I never not be risqué.

May my ashes, when you have them, friend,

And give them to the ocean,

Leap in the froth of the waves,

Still loving movement,

Still ready, beyond all else,

To dance for the world.

Today I am attending the Parrot Festival in Houston, Texas. The people here are parrot lovers who have come to learn and to celebrate life.  I am their honored guest and have come to teach them about the human dimensions of conservation. However, it is I who am learning from them.

Last night was one of the evening festivals. I arrived late to a room of sparkling, babbling, brightly colored humans who reminded me of the parrots they adore.  As if they weren’t already having enough fun, each table was given a mystery bag full of crafts and materials with an assignment to dress one of their participants in a costume made from the bag’s contents to resemble a parrot species assigned to their table.  What a bunch of frisky people! After the contest, of which the Bare-eyed Cockatoo/Human won, some people just spontaneously began dancing.

Maybe I’m getting old. Maybe I was tired and in heels all day.  Maybe I just wasn’t ready to show my delight of the world by dancing.  But my mind was racing with the beauty of these people before me, and who knows, perhaps today or even tonight I will make some movement that aligns with the love that I feel for these people in this place.

Where will you dance today?

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?

Mink

A mink, jointless as heat, was

tip-toeing along the edge of the creek,

which was still in its coat of snow, yet singing-I could hear it!-

the old song of brightness....

the mink had a hunger in him

bigger than his shadow, which was gathered

like a sheet of darkness under his

neat feet which were busy

making dents in the snow. 

He sniffed slowly and thoroughly in all

four directions, as though

it was a payer to the whole world...

For me, it was a the gift of the winter

 to see him.  Once, like a hot, dark-brown pillar,

he stood up-and then he ran forward, and was gone. 

I stood awhile and then walked on

over the white snow:  the terrible, gleaming

loneliness.  I took me, I suppose,

something like six more weeks to reach

finally a patch of green, I paused so often

to be glad, and grateful, and even then carefully across

 the vast, deep woods I kept looking back.

In the winter of our lives, are there patches of experience for which we can be grateful? And the ultimate test, can we see beauty in the harshness and the dying back?  My sister recently was diagnosed with bone cancer, probably metastasized from a previous bout of breast cancer.  For me, this is devastating news.  There are some hard years for her coming up, and I'm guessing, not too many of them either.  Yet, in our phone calls she has times of laughing, nearly giggling.  Yesterday her retort to the mess her affairs are in, was, "At least I got to see a hawk."  She had seen a Sharp-shinned hawk foraging around in her snow covered bushes for sparrows, and fly away talons empty. 

She is like a beautiful sleek mink, and now is the time for me to look at how her life is a prayer to the whole world.

Who or what is your mink in the winter time?

Thirst

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.

This morning with the day blind stars slowly fading from my vision, I am ending Thirst – the book. My own thirst and hunger if anything is ever greater after holding this collection of prayers close to my heart this past span of days. In Mary’s words I hear so much that is wise in the world’s religions, for they too seem to be saying that there is more love to be had at the end of the day and at the end of our lives. All our days are but a prayer to slack that thirst that arises from lives grown parched from our perceived separation. Perhaps you do not say “prayer” for your intentional work to affirm a path of goodness and love is meditation, nature walks, dancing in the Sufi way, singing, justice work, and this book of poems. Whatever our paths may be, today is another day, another beginning, where we can begin again, learning ever deeper and more glorious ways to love, to pray, to live.

From where does your hunger or thirst arise?

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?

Praying

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

Just yesterday I wrote about doorways into loving and Mary uses a similar metaphor today, and so well. I wish I had this poem years ago when I was asked by a pilot in Afghanistan how to pray with her troops. She was leading a group stationed at a mountain airfield and they were coming under daily fire, and were dropping bombs on villages with innocent people. She said her troops were despairing and she asked me how she might pray with them. Our means of communication was email through the computer on her bomber. I don't remember what I said exactly, but it was something like this: Name the sorrow and fear. Name the thanks. Allow silence at the end so each individual's voice may be heard, and also so each could listen to the voices that arise.

So my prayer today would be:

Spirit of life, God and love of our hearts, I am grateful for the love within and without. I regret all those times I am not open to this love and keep it from reaching the depths within and without. Let me be quiet now in this moment, so I may listen within and without.....

What is your prayer today?

Six Recognitions of the Lord

1.

I know a lot of fancy words.

I tear them from my heart and my tongue.

Then I pray…..

3
I lounge on the grass, that's all. So
simple. Then I lie back until I am
inside the cloud that is just above me
but very high, and shaped like a fish.
Or, perhaps not. Then I enter the place
of not-thinking, not-remembering, not-
wanting. When the blue jay cries out his
riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always
near. Over and back, over and back. Then
I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I
have been asleep. But I have not been
asleep. I have been, as I say, inside
the cloud, or, perhaps, the lily floating
on the water. Then I go back to town
to my own house, my own life, which has
now become brighter and simpler, some-where I have never been before….

4.

Of course I have always known you

Are present in the clouds, and the

Black oak I especially adore, and the

Wings of birds. But you are present

Too in the body, listening to the body,

Teaching it to live, instead of all

That touching, with disembodied joy.

We do not do this easily….

6.

Every summer the lilies rise
and open their white hands until they almost
cover the black waters of the pond. And I give
thanks but it does not seem like adequate thanks,
it doesn't seem
festive enough or constant enough, nor does the
name of the Lord or the words of thanksgiving come
into it often enough Everywhere I go I am
treated like royalty, which I am not. I thirst and
am given water. My eyes thirst and I am given
the white lilies on the black water. My heart
sings but the apparatus of singing doesn't convey
half what it feels and means. In spring there's hope,
in fall the exquisite, necessary diminishing, in
winter I am as sleepy as any beast in its
leafy cave, but in summer there is
everywhere the luminous sprawl of gifts,
the hospitality of the Lord and my
inadequate answers as I row my beautiful, temporary body
through this water-lily world.

Harold Bloom in American Religious Poems says that there is a particular powerful theme in American poetry, especially the poetry that relates to nature. In these poems there appears over and over again the idea of humans as the risen Christ. We each are divinity, and this is reflected back to us from trees, birds, mountains, lakes, and flowers around us. Harold Bloom only briefly mentions Mary Oliver, but he wrote his volume before Thirst came out. If he had seen this poem I believe that he would have said, “I told you so.” In these astonishing lands through which I have travelled aplenty, we dissolve the self and yet build up the self at the same time. We humans are glorious only because we are everything else (and perhaps more depending on your theology), including the offspring of God, or God herself. I don’t know if this is a shift for Mary in her older years and after loss of loved ones, or if pain, confusion, love, and beauty has peeled back a layer that was always there behind her previous poems. As I turn the page to go on to the next poem, it is as if I am helping Mary peel back the layers in these leaves of poems, praying that I might do the same until there is nothing left but everything.

Where do you recognize divinity?

Percy (Four) and What I Said at Her Service - September 18, 2010

I went to church.
I walked on the beach
And played with Percy.

I answered the phone
And paid the bills
I did the laundry.

I spoke her name
A hundred times.

I knelt in the dark
And said some holy words.

I went downstairs,
I watered the flowers.
I fed Percy.

What I Said at Her Service

When we pray to love God perfectly,
Surely we do not mean only.

(Lord, see how well I have done.)

With just a little bit of luck, and grace, overseen by our glancing intentions, we may discover that our imperfect lives are a prayer to God. For out of the love lost and relationships broken is the lived testament to a world that paradoxically broke our hearts so that we might love more. It is our very longing that is our healing. And so Mary goes through her days and prays and plays. A perfect life riddled with pain, torn asunder so that love expands ever more giving ever more space for her to commit her life to pen and paper, feeding us.

The Winter Wood Arrives

I think I could have built a little house to live in

with the single cord-half seasoned, half not-trucked into the driveway and

tumbled down. But, instead, friends came and together we stacked it for the long, cold days

that are-maybe the only sure thing in the world-coming soon. How to keep warm

is always a problem, isn't it? Of course, there's love. And there's prayer.

I don't belittle them, and they have warmed me, but differently, from the heart outwards.

Imagine what swirls of frost will cling to the windows, what white lawns I will look out on

as I rise from morning prayers, as I remember love, that leaves yet never leaves, as I go out into the yard and bring the wood in

with struggling steps, with struggling thoughts, bundle by bundle, to be burned.

Is winter really coming? Perhaps so as we are only getting up to 90 degrees each day and it falls below 70 in the night. Heading to Mississippi tomorrow though where the temperatures will rise to 95 each day, I wonder about having confidence in sure things. Somewhere on this planet it is always not winter. Children sip soup with sweat drops formed on their lips every day, hands swatting flies and holding spoons. They will not ever know coolness and might not even perceive change in their lives. I imagine though that love hovers in their lives, the constant being the paradox that it is both fleeting and permanent, alighting to tickle the soul, drink of our sweat, and fly away.

How does love burn in your life?

Walking Home from Oak-Head

There is something
about the snow-laden sky
in winter
in the late afternoon

that brings to the heart elation
and the lovely meaninglessness
of time.
Whenever I get home - whenever -

somebody loves me there.
Meanwhile
I stand in the same dark peace
as any pine tree,

or wander on slowly
like the still unhurried wind,
waiting,
as for a gift,

for the snow to begin
which it does
at first casually,
then, irrepressibly.

Wherever else I live -
in music, in words,
in the fires of the heart,
I abide just as deeply

in this nameless, indivisible place,
this world,
which is falling apart now,
which is white and wild,

which is faithful beyond all our expressions of faith,
our deepest prayers.
Don't worry, sooner or later I'll be home.
Red-cheeked from the roused wind,

I'll stand in the doorway
stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
my shoulders
covered with stars.

keywords: snow, sky, winter, time love, dark, peace, tree, wind, gift, music, word, fire, heart, world, star

I have been told that in this book we see a shift of Mary, perhaps towards religion or God. I'm not quite clear what discontent exactly some of my acquaintances portend when they say "Mary changes" in her later books. It's hard for me to imagine that she could be much more religious, much more of the suffering seeker, or more the one totally committed to growing her faith in the world than she has been. I certainly know that she brings out the hunger in me for faith in earth and her beings. Just beyond her words and often beyond my reach is the nameless, the indivisible, to which she temporarily gives the names of tree or bird. Maybe later she'll take the risk and call this God. It's all the same to me, for my struggle will not change. With this world falling apart now, how might I still see the light and grow a faith that is ultimately beyond me. For me, part of this answer is becoming, read a poem from Mary.

You who read Mary regularly, what is happening with your faith and in your prayers?

Introduction to Thirst and Messenger

Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you can become all flame."

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Did Mary mean to segue between books ending one with igniting and the other beginning with flame? How did she know that my blog from the day before would speak of being astonished into stillness? Mary, she's in my head and heart. She predicts my life. I have found a faithful companion that speaks of my life's true work - to love, and to speak love. Of course, if it is that basic, how could she not be with me always, as well as the clam and the wren? One quiet, one chattering, both me. All beloved.

What is your life's work?

The Cricket and the Rose

In fall
the cricket
beneath the rose bush
watches

as the roses fall
to the very ground
that is his kingdom also.
So they're neighbors,

one full of fragrance,
the other
the harper
of a single dry song.

We call this time of the year
the beginning of the end
of another circle,
a convenience

and nothing more.
For the cricket's song
is surely a prayer,
and a prayer, when it is given,

is given forever.
This is a truth
I'm sure of,
for I'm older than I used to be,

and therefore I understand things
nobody would think of
who's young and in a hurry.
The snow is very beautiful.

Under it are the lingering
petals of fragrance,
and the timeless body
of prayer.

I just read this morning in the Gainesville Sun how 1 in 7 kitchens would not pass a restaurant grade health inspection. Hearing this I take stock of my kitchen. On the window sill, a bowl full of old rose petals beckons my attention. I periodically wonder if I should toss them, their beauty long gone. Then I hold them to my face and their fragrance persists. So they remain yet another day.

There on the floor is one of those large crickets that inhabit our outside porch and occasionally wander in. To ease the heat we open windows and doors in the morning and this cricket has seen this as invitation to cruise my kitchen floor. She is rather ugly, her head out of proportion and her purpose unknown to me.

I don't know if anyone would see old flower petals and dinosaur like crickets as appropriate for a kitchen, or even if I do. Like Mary, I too am older and do not hurry on to thoughts of what my mother might say of odd crickets and old roses in a kitchen. Instead I ponder how I shall pray this day as I let the aroma of life filter into my walled refuge through open doors and open heart.

How do you pray?