Imagine

I don't care for adjectives, yet the world fills me with them.

And even beyond what I see, I imagine more.

Seeing, for example, with understanding,

or with acceptance and humility and

without understanding,

into the heart of the bristly, locked-in worm

just as it's becoming what we call the luna,

that green tissue-winged, strange, graceful,

fluttering thing.

Will death allow such transportation of the eye?...

Well, we will all find out, each of us.

And what would we be, beyond the yardstick,

beyond supper and dollars,

if we were not filled with such wondering?

To be human, is to wonder what waits for us in death.

Is it uber-human to wait patiently for what is developing into life, or decaying into death?

To see without seeing?

I see for instance, without understanding the behavior of myself and those around me.  We're a despicable lot, aren't we?  Bristly worms, locked into our narrow outlooks and self interests.

Then, when grace comes upon me, I see the beauty within.  I still don't understand.

So what is left to do?

Ah, yes.

Look

Laugh

Bow in humility

I wonder what you ponder?

Bone July 4, 2010

1.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out

What the soul is,

And where hidden,

And what shape-

And so, last week,

When I found on the beach

The ear bone

Of a pilot what that may have died

Hundreds of years ago, I thought

Maybe I was close

To discovering something-

For the ear bone

2.

Is the portion that lasts longest

In any of us, man or whale…

And I thought: the soul

Might be like this-

So hard, so necessary-

3.

Yet almost nothing

Beside me

The gray sea

Was opening and shutting its wave-doors..

I looked but couldn’t see anything

Through its dark-knit glare;

Yet don’t we all know, the golden sand

Is there at the bottom,

Though our eyes have never seen it,

Nor can our hands ever catch it.

4.

Lest we would sift it down

Into fractions, and facts-

Certainties-

And what the soul is, also

I believe I will never quite know.

Though I play at the edges of knowing,

Truly I know

Our part is not knowing,

But looking, and touching, and loving,

Which is the way I walked on,

Softly,

Through the pale-pink morning light.

Today I have a talk at the International Congress of Conservation Biology for a workshop on Religion and Conservation. I spoke of how avian conservation is a living religion, and others spoke of Christianity, Tibetan Indigenous faiths, and Islam as mechanisms to conserve nature. Here was this room of people, trying to figure out how to harness the soul for the good life. There was some tension about the various ways we look at “soul” and “god” and “spirit,” in the room, or perhaps better said, I just know there was suspicion in the air. How can there not be when for thousands of years our kind has tried to tell another what is a soul and how to save it. What if it is really just this simple. We cannot know much, but we can love. It reminds of a line in the Forest Gump movie. He says, “I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.” Maybe all we professionals in conservation and religion can just let go of all the complexity of theology and figuring out the best way to save the world, and embrace the simplicity of loving. I should like to follow my own advice.

Could you live your life based on just love?

The Sea – March 12, 2010

Stroke by

Stroke my

Body remembers that life and cries for

The lost parts of itself-

Fins, gills

Opening like flowers into

The flesh…I swear I know

Just what the blue-gray scales

Shingling

The rest of me would

Feel like!

Paradise!

..the very bones! How

They long to give up the long trek inland, the brittle

Beauty of understanding,

And dive,

And simply

Become gain a flaming body

Of blind feeling…

Vanished like victory inside that

Insucking genesis, that

Roaring flamboyance, that

Perfect

Beginning and

Conclusion of our own.

In the last several poems Mary has written of the fire of union and here it is again. She is looking outside of being human, of her own body, to see the beauty without that lures her into melding into the great sea. She appears to look at being human as only a burden of love, of thinking as opposed to feeling and being. I am now on the lookout for any of her poems that are drawn to beauty from the existence of humanity, that surely has its own perfection beginning and conclusion of its own, because it is not separate from what we perceive as other, but which is ours to claim as ours. I want to be on the look out for human beauty in my own life, for it is my gift to see it, and my sin to not.

Do you resist accepting humans, either individually or as a whole, as perfect and belonging on this planet? What might you gain if you did accept and embody humans inherent worth and dignity?