What Can I Say

Begin Book Swan

 

What can I say that I have not said before?

So I'll say it again.

The leaf has a song in it.

Stone is face of patience.

Inside the river there is an unfinishable story

and you are somewhere in it

and it will never end until all ends.

Take your buy heart to the art museum and the

chamber of commerce

but take it also to the forest.

The song you heard singing in the leaf when you

were a child

is singing still.

I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,

and the leaf is singing still.

I recall now how as a young child, in the years before elementary school began and up until adolescence I would go to the woods, and sing.  I sang to the trees and to the birds.  I don't remember the words I uttered or what I heard back.  Whatever were the melody or lyrics, I knew I did not sing alone. 

Then in the rush for acceptance and career, I quit singing and listening although the pied piper allure of the earth still pulled on me to follow. Eventually I went to work in conservation in Latin America, and I once again heard the notes loud and clear in the tropical forests.

A few years ago I spent about 3 weeks in the largest, wildest forest yet of my life - the Maya Biosphere Reserve in northern Guatemala.  When it came time to leave, I spontaneously wept for I was leaving my friend and journeying far from the beauty.

What I strive for in my days is to know that beauty is never far from me, for it is in me, in leaf, in bird, in you.  There is beauty all around, and it sings.

To whom do you sing?

I Want to Write Something So Simply

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your heart
had been saying.

I think that Mary can check this off her list of accomplishments. She does write so simply that it feels as if I am with her as she walks with Percy along the shore or meanders through a meadow marveling at the flowers.  Of course, in her very writing she distinguishes herself from all others. The words themselves, captured permanently in time say "I" and "you."  It is up to the reader then to deconstruct what is written so we can hear "Thou" and "We" instead. After a year's rising with Mary I believe that my neural circuitry as rewired to do this translation work when I pick up a book of her poems, see the road kill, or write her to you in this blog.  We are all love and pain, life and death, and it's all good.

                

What and how can you write simply about today?

At the Pond

One summer
     I went every morning
        to the edge of a pond where
           a huddle of just-hatched geese

would paddle to me
     and clamber
        up the marshy slope
           and over my body,

peeping and staring—
     such sweetness every day
        which the grown ones watched,
           for whatever reason,

serenely.
     Not there, however, but here
        is where the story begins.
           Nature has many mysteries,

some of them severe.
     Five of the young geese grew
        heavy of chest and
           bold of wing

while the sixth waited and waited
     in its gauze-feathers, its body
        that would not grow.
           And then it was fall.

And this is what I think
     everything is all about:
        the way
           I was glad

for those five and two
     that flew away,
        and the way I hold in my heart the wingless one
           that had to stay.

I weep.  I know not what more there is to life than the gladness and sadness possible before us, and in our hearts if we could just open to the mysterious reality of our days.

Yesterday a woman asked me how I could bare the tragic circumstances of the people and parrots of Central America.  Her question recalls how I can leave the poverty and the violence with my US passport, and others have to stay, not growing, and then dying.  Turning outward, I told her there were years when I could not hold it all, and days still where the ache is great.  Reading this poem reminds me of my true work here at this conference, and in my 53 years of life. I am here not to get more learning, offer more teaching, or to save the world. My calling instead has been to find a way to hold more gladness and more sadness.  Then to be held more myself by the love of this world.

How will you hold or be held today? 

Gethsemane - October 5, 2010

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.

Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.

The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.

Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did, maybe
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn't move,
maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

In the movie, JC Superstar, Jesus sings:

Will no one stay awake with me

Peter, John, James

Will none of you wait with me

Peter, John, James

This has always haunted me. What would I do? Sleep through the night while Jesus asks "Why should I die?" I am also haunted by the question - what will I do today? Will I be asleep as the multitudes ask "Why should I die?" What if I were to awake and ponder that question throughout the day with all beings?

Towards the end of Jesus' prayer to God, he says:

Just watch me die!

See how I die!

Take me now, before I change my mind.

How many times today will I change my mind and not ask this question, wanting reasons for dying instead of looking to the beauty and tragedy of those around me, and knowing that is enough of an answer.

What I Have Learned So Far - September 5, 2010

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of -- indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.

So much like E. B. White is Mary this morning. He wrote, "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." So like Mary, like E.B. White, we awake torn. So many plans are lit up with the first thought of sun's arising, and then the Barred Owl hoots or I recall a dream last night when two wild Scarlet Macaws flew down to me and invited me to hold them and to stroke their rainbow feathers. I am astonished into stillness, savoring each feeling and vision of that dream. I am in love. It burns. My soul flares with 5 more projects that spark from that dream. Is this what loves brings us to, crazy wild fires that take down the old forests and urge new seeds to grow? In my ignition, I am gone.

How do you balance saving and savoring?

Lead

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

Well, I wrote too soon yesterday. Mary answered her own question about what we shall with our hearts; we are to journey to places where our heart's break. Her pathway in this poem is through the death of beautiful birds. Yup, that'll do it all right. So I journey to places where birds still sing, and there is an urgency to this. Maybe I can do something about it, but more than anything, my heart does not wish to be far from the beauty of parrots and people, even as they desert their last community of mixed species to become part of the urban caged and poor.

Perhaps it is a bit morbid to go to where hope is hard to find. I say not. For in these places, we know what love is, and we know of what worth interconnecting life is. Out of that space comes a sense of peace and belonging. Even when cloaked in a disguise that says "wrongdoing" we may recognize the true face of god as a love that if we turned all the way towards that fire, our ego would burn away.

May it be so.

What breaks your heart so that the whole world may fall in

The Bleeding Heart

I know a bleeding-heart plant that has thrived for sixty years if not more, and has never missed a spring without rising and spreading itself into a glossy bush, with many small red hearts dangling. Don't you think that deserves a little thought? The woman who planted it has been gone for a long time, and everyone who saw it in that time has also died or moved away and so, like so many stories, this one can't get finished properly. Most things that are important, have you noticed, lack a certain neatness. More delicious, anyway, is to remember my grandmother's pleasure when the dissolve of winter was over and the green knobs appeared and began to rise, and to create their many hearts. One would say she was a simple woman, made happy by simple things. I think this was true. And more than once, in my long life, I have wished to be her.

Once upon a time there were a humanoid people whose heart's cycled with the seasons. In the winter, their hearts shrunk to the size of a raison. The cold snows echoed their cool souls and empty faces. Come the spring their hearts began to grow and by summer would be so big that you could see them beating through their skin, emitting a pink glow around their chests. All summer long they would forget their work and their worries, and spend their days laughing in the rivers and ponds, embraced by life, love, and one another. Their favorite past time was to press their chests against one another and see how long their hearts could beat in perfect synchronization. Come fall they held on to each other's hands as if it was the last time ever. And of course it would be, at least until the following spring. Why do I wish I were they?

How does your heart wax and wane?