Prince Buzzard - January 9, 2010

Prince Buzzard,

I took you, so high in the air,

For a narrow boat and two black sails.

You were drifting

In the depths of the air

Wherever you wanted to go,

And when you came down

With your spoony mouth

And your read head

And your creaking wings

To the lamb

Dead, dead, dead

In the fields of spring

I knew it was hunger

That brought you’

Yet you went about it

So slowly,

Settling with hunched wings

And silent

As the grass itself

Over the lambs’s white body-

It seemed

a ceremony,

A pause

As though something

In the quick of your own body

Had come out

To give thanks

For the dark work

That was yours,

Which wasn’t to be done easily or quickly,

But thoroughly-

And indeed by time summer

Opened its green harbors

The fields was nothing but flower, flowers, flowers,

From shore to shore.

I am out on the edge of water this morning, the sun barely awake.  Over the Calooshatcee River in Ft. Myers the first Turkey Vultures begin to sail by around 9 a.m.  It’s cool, perhaps this is why .They await the heating of the day to form the thermals that bare them aloft. Or maybe, there just isn’t that much death so early in the day.

This is probably just another human delusion.  Beings and dreams have died all through the night, we just can’t see it.  Migrants of all kinds won’t make it to the next morning, whether it is blackbirds and doves falling from the sky or humans  from Mesoamerica, seeking a better life.  I am reminded of them as I went out this morning to buy coffee, finding it in a convenience store where I was the only non-native Spanish speaker.  They are here, and how many thousands are not, or will never know a life that flowers into full possibility? 

If I were brave, I would go out into the darkness with my flashlight and look for death to remind me that it all around, happening constantly though I sit here comfortable and pleasured, sipping coffee, on a deck of a house with a pool, Jacuzzi, multiple couches, and an HDTV.  No wait a minute. If I were truly brave, I would go out in the darkness with no light at all, and give myself over to death, so that there would be even more flowers on the morrow.  If I, if we, did this, then we might return to a world where the spattering of ducks and coots now on this river near me would cover this river from shore to shore?

Maker of All Things, Even Healings

All night under the pines the fox

moves through the darkness

with a mouthful of teeth

and a reputation for death which it deserves.

In the spicy villages of the mice he is famous,

his nose in the grass

is like an earthquake,

his feet on the path

is a message so absolute

that the mouse, hearing it, makes himself

as small as he can as he sits silent

or, trembling, goes on

hunting among the grasses for the ripe seeds.

Maker of All Things,

including appetite, including stealth,

including the fear that makes

all of us sometime or other,

flee for the sake

of our small and precious lives,

let me abide in your shadow-

let me hold on

to the edge of your robe

as you determine what you must let be lost

and what will be saved.

Here is the teeth of the matter. What is in your life that you do not accept, yet because it exists at all, comes from the Maker of All Things (however you so describe the process/power by which you came to be)? Here's my short list:

• · The two-party political system in the U.S.
• · The power of money
• · Nonhumans treated as if objects without inherent worth or dignity
• · Alzheimer's, especially in my mother and father-in-law
• · Women subjugated to men
• · The loss of biodiversity and the abundant nonhuman wildlife that existed before the industrial age

So my anger or despair, so the suffering and the fear, so absolutely everything belongs here in this world and in my life. How hard this is to accept, and how I anguish that the world cannot be different. My big powerful brain complains that I feel so separate from the rest of life, and brings this suffering upon itself. For if I do not accept what must be lost, including myself and all I love, how can I be saved and all that I love?

What does your short list look like? What are you doing to accept that which you currently reject?

The Owl Who Comes

The owl who comes

through the dark

to sit

in the black boughs of the apple tree

and stare down

the hook of his beak,

dead silent,

and his eyes,

like two moons

in the distance,

soft and shining

under their heavy lashes-

like the most beautiful life-

is thinking

of nothing

as he watches

and waits to see

what might appear,

briskly,

out of the seamless,

deep winter-

out of the teeming

world below-

and if I wish the owl luck,

and I do,

what am I wishing for that other

soft life,

climbing through the snow?

What we must do,

I suppose

is to hope the world

keeps its balance:

what we are to do, however,

with our hearts

waiting and watching-truly

I do not know.

Indeed, what are we do with our hearts. We could close them off and not see the tragic, but then we would lose the chance to experience those grace filled days of belonging where everything is just as it should be, because that is the way it is. With such radical acceptance we would love the child molester, the dictator, and the cancer cells. We just aren't taught how to handle that pain. Though I engage in a number of spiritual practices to grow my awareness and acceptance, I find that I turn from the sorrow in all kinds of subtle ways. Sometimes though my subconscious lets me know that I have work to do. In dreams, in moments of anger, in depression or withdrawal, and in the times when despair surprises me, I get a hint of how I don't know how to witness the tragic and the beauty as an interweaving whole.

For instance, having seen so much suffering in wild birds kept inadequately in captivity, I chose to leave avian veterinary medicine for a while. It is only after much work that I can engage with people who care of pet birds so that together we can find ways to decrease the harm we do as humans to these birds. I still see the tragic consequences of the pet bird market, but at least now I can interact with people and parrots without suppressing my authenticity, love, and care. I believe I can only do this by growing my heart so that it can hold the pain as well as the love.

What do you do to hold the painful and tragic?

Tiger Lilies - August 16, 2010

They blew in the wind softly, this way, that way; they were not disappointed when they saw the scissors, rather they braced themselves sweetly and shone with willingness. They were on tall and tender poles, with wheels of leaves. They were soft as the ears of kittens. They felt warm in recognition of the summer day. A dozen was plenty. I held them in my arms. They were silent the way the deepest water is silent. If they wondered where they were going they didn’t show it, as they sprinkled freely over my shirt and my hands their precious gold dust.



Is Mary saying that the Tiger Lilies were going to their death willingly, or without disappointment? Would the Tiger Lilies, if given a choice, choose to be cut and taken away from their tribe to enter into domestic dying? Is this poem a way of justifying human domination over nature? But surely, you might argue, the Lilies are a domestic species, planted for our benefit and so we have the right to harvest them. Perhaps the Lilies are “silent” because we don’t yet know how to really hear them – of what they “want” and how “need” and how life strives to flourish in their existence. How often do we silence the oppressed or marginalized voices – pretend we don’t hear them or that they don’t have needs or inherent worth and dignity? If Lilies, then why not trees, birds, pigs, and people? I am just reading today in the book “conservation psychology” of how plants and animals in the home and garden benefit humans in a variety of ways. We evolved to interact with nature and to derive benefit from it. But at what cost? Ironically, our desire for beauty and wildness must be tamed for the benefit of all. Perhaps in that taming and discipline of a measured response to life, we give ourselves and our world even more freedom that we even though possible. Who needs to cut flowers or pigs if we know we are the forest and the porcine, seeing their beauty and listening to their suffering where they are instead of commanding them to be where we want them to be. Oh Mary, Mary, I am so contrary. How together can we have our earth garden grow?

Where do you experience silence from another when really there is much to be heard and experienced?

Stars

Here in my head, language

keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends

with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech

but pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends

with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever is spoken?

Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,

and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?

What amiable peace?...

Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear

and it was utterly silent-

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,

and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do

but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and wiling, and in our places?

Listen, listen, I'm forever saying.

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,

to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit-

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.

Even as now

Even as the darkness has remains the pure, deep darkness.

Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,

one hot sentence after another.

Mary, the great translator. She takes the lives of animals and puts them into words. Even the dead bear and otter speak to us in that we are to listen to life while we live, and not to death. So now, in the Gulf of Mexico, the dying animals are fleeing from the outer waters to die in the marshes, alone. Or so says the morning paper. Why is it that we as a people are waking up to life by listening to death? What if we listened, really listened, and put into words the beauty of the non-oiled habitats and splashed them all over our media, and not just in isolated books of prayers and poetry? What if every word spoken or written was a prayer of hope that we might listen and love while we may, and be grateful for this gift.

What words come to you when you look up at the stars?