Today

Today I'm flying low and I'm

not saying a word

I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,

the bees in the garden rumbling a little,

the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.

And so forth.

But I'm taking the day off.

Quiet as a feather.

I hardly move though really I'm traveling 

a terrific distance

Stillness. One of the doors

into the temple

Where and what is the temple?   I suppose it could be the place where we plunge into the ocean, returning?  Or where we run through the meadow and leap into gods' arms? Maybe the temple is where we shine the mirror only to have the temple burn down around us?  It's probably all those things - we just keep trying doors to enter, and breathe deep when the forces of life slam the doors in our faces.  But no matter, because I'm taking a wild guess here, the temple lies on both sides of the door.

Questions for Reflection:

1.  What ambitions keep you from rest?  Or keep you from your "temple."
2. What is your temple?
3. What do you do with the "must" that speaks of fish eating gnats, of the harm inherent in life?

The Gesture

June 2, 2010

On the dog's ear, a scrap of filmy stuff

turns out to be

a walking stick...not an inch long...

I could not imagine it could live

in the brisk world,, or where it would live, or how. But

I took it

outside and held it up to the red oak that rises

ninety feet into the air, and it lifted its forward-most

pair of arms

with what in anything worth thinking about would have seemed

a graceful and glad gesture: it caught

on to the bark, it hung on; it rested,; it began to climb.

When I look at fragile beings, a newly hatched chick emerging from an egg or a tadpole in a summer' pond, I marvel that they survive at all, let alone into maturity that brings their genes and experiences forward. I wonder now if it is any less miracle that I am here, that you are here, that our species has managed to hang on so long. My guess is that it won't always be so. There will come a time when we exist no more. Though small with no assurance of our contunuity, in fact with assurance that this moment and sunrise will pass from this world, I raise my hands to the east, and vow, let me continue forward to climb from my restricted heart, in gratitude.

Have you ever been up in a tree? What does the world look like from so far above? Small? Great? Infinite?

Grass

...How many of us have weighted the years with groaning and weeping?..

I walk over the green hillsides, I lie down...

The grass cares nothing about me, it doesn't want anything from me, it rises to its own purpose, and sweetly, following the single holy dictum: To be itself, to let the sky be the sky, to let a young girl be a young girl freely-to let a middle-aged woman be, comfortably, a middle-aged woman.

Those bloody sharps and flats-those endless calamities of the personal past. Bah! I disown them from the rest of my life, in which I mean to rest.

I have been investigating a new field - interpersonal neurobiology. It is a way to look at our pasts so that we can rest in the potentially loving present. It is a multidisciplinary field that offers hope in the form of neuroplasticity. No matter our past, no matter our genetics, and no matter our perceived sense of our character flaws, as long as we can form attachments, we can heal. That hope is summarized in this poem.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.

I'll 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 any sense. - Rumi

I awake hopeful this morning, running with a middle-aged carefulness through such fields of dreams.

From what character generalizations of yourself of others would you like to rest today?

Roses - January 28, 2010

The look on her face in a dream

Stayed with me all day

Like a promise I had failed...

....And the grass on which she was standing,

Ante the roses thick on the fences

Were soft and bright, able to renew themselves

As a woman, finally, cannot do.

In this world of climate change, and of a political process that promises a persistent dull ache that is slowly killing spirit and earth, who is not looking north into a future where so little grows? Who among us can look into the long years ahead and not see their own death, or the slow dying of body and mind? I yearn for life and when there is death, suffering, or decay it rises in me in this dark hour as a failed promise. Who does not spend the hours of the day blaming others and oneself for the failed dreams and ailing body, accusing the gods of abandonment, and even, judging the earth and her beings for not being enough. Ah Mary, even in listening and resting, we cannot break our fast with death.

Who do you blame for what might have been? What promises have you made that remain unfulfilled?

Creeks - January 27, 2010

...My back to the hickory, I sit

Hours in the damp wood, listening.

It never ebbs...

..I forget things, as I have forgotten time.

Death, love, ambition....

...My heart is quieted, at rest. I scarcely feel it.

Little rivers, running everywhere,

Have blunted the knife. Cool, cool,

they wash above the bones.

Two days ago I asked Mary when she was going to speak of rest, and here she does. I don't look ahead to what poems are coming, so it's as if Mary is there, saying, just wait, just listen, the answers will come.

So following my question of rest, was a poem of killing. In the midst of killing, of chicken bones thrown into the creek by careless picnickers whose hands yield the knife of suffering and destroying earth, there are rivers of life flowing everywhere. By them, if we slow down and listen hard enough, we can discern the bubbling of life that can dull the pain.

Rumi says in his poem of the day, "The Many Wines" in the book, "A Year With Rumi" that every object and every being is a jar full of delight, but cautions that should we choose the purest, "not the ones adulterated with fear, or some urgency about "what's needed." If Rumi were to sit down with Mary, would they then say go only to beautiful, pristine water ways, or would they, like the Buddha, say listen, listen, clean, not clean, it's all here, now. We just need to empty ourselves so wholeness and healing can flow in.

Perhaps then we are called to listen to creeks that don't sing anymore. Here in Florida the springs are drying up or gaining pollution so that the life is choked from them. My own beloved Ichetucknee became unswimmable for me this past year. What do I hear in it's gurgling, a death throw? Or life, though dirty, emerging persistently, or at least leaving behind scars where beauty once flowed?

Cormac McCarthy in " The Road," writes, ""Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patters that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

The sound of life, of mystery, is ever with us, even if it is as fossilized bones on some ancient dry river bed.

What do you mourn for that is no more? Do you find peace or comfort in nature that dulls the ache of once was or what could be?