Snow Geese - July 10., 2010

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask

of anything, or anyone,

yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was

a flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun

so they were, in part at least, golden. I

held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us

as with a match,
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,

but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.

The geese
flew on,
I have never seen them again.

Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won't.
It doesn't matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

When I lived in El Paso, Texas, every year I attended the Crane Festival up at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. I would camp out as part of my ministerial study and retreat time, a spaciousness I gave myself so that I could return to my congregation seeing the world joyfully and clearly. One week the congregation’s families joined me on a Sunday and we took the children on the wildlife viewing loop. We came to a large flock of snow geese in the field. It had been difficult to tell exactly how engaged the children were or what they were thinking. Then suddenly the snow geese took to the air in a clap of wings and flew right over our group. The children too exploded. Some started jumping up and down, others running under the geese, and all eventually making their way to parents and adults to say, “Did you see that?” There was laughter, glee, and even tears in the children. They didn’t need us to tell them about wonder. It was born into them, and into us to see through the artificial veil of separation, to a life of joy.

What causes you to jump for joy?

Am I Not Among the Early Risers

Am I not among the early risers

And the long distance walkers?

Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider

The perfection of the morning star..

Have I not thought, for years, what it would be

Worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,

To gather blueberries,

Thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?

What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly

At the top of the field,

Her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine,

Has not already done?...

Here is an amazement-once I was twenty years old and in

Every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,

And in every motion of the green earth there was

A hint of paradise,

And now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

Above the modest house and the palace – the same darkness.

Above the evil man and the just, the same starts.

Above the child who will recover and the child who will

Not recover, the same energies roll forward

From one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.

I bow down.

Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment,

Or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other than mine

In the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table?

Have I ever taken fortune for granted?...

Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold

Or the night too long as black as oil anyway,

Or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely

Of the second-rate, less than happiness

As I stepped down from the porch and set out along

The green paths of the world?

An acquaintance of mine says that Mary’s poems shifted over the years – that Mary had a different look on death. I wonder if I am picking up some of this here. She says she is 60 and she moves with the same grace as a 20 year old, however, I wonder if she or anyone really does. Does the brain somehow get different messages from the aging body, a general sense of being ill at ease in the world? And so we question how we have judged life and death and one another, for our bodies are feeling judged by the years. What did we do wrong to end up in this place? Why did evolution give us the brains to be aware of our aging and also serve out the fate that we age and die? Can we say it is simply a matter of endothermic and exothermic balanced equations as evolution moves towards greater complexity? Pondering meaning perhaps you say that each must get out of the way for life to meander down the unwinding unknown path of evolution. My only response to this possibility is to bow down and to offer a prayer that the next step I take is graceful and spacious, beyond wrong doing and rightdoing.

What or who do you judge?