Moon and Water

I wake and spend

the last hours

of darkness

with  no one

but the moon.

She listens

to my complaints

like the good

companion she is

and comforts me surely

with her light.

But she, like everyone,

has her own life.

So finally I understand

that she has turned away,

is no longer listening.

She wants me

to refold myself

into my own life.

And, bending close,

as we all dream of doing,

she rows with her white arms

through the dark water

which she adores.

I awoke this  morning several hours away from sunrise into the darkness. There is no moon in this predawn time for she hasn't risen yet. When she does, I still won't be able to see her through the horizon's cloud covers.  The sun might also not shine.  To whom shall I complain then?

Burrowing under my own covers I look out onto the woods and see faint shadows and hear a far off barred owl echoing my own lament

which is that I have ever wasted one moment

not being a good companion

not adoring the world

not grateful for this day, though it seems gray at its inception

not bending close to hear the smallest whisper

of my heart, of yours, of the earth's.

What are your complaints today?

Water

What is the vitality and necessity

Of clean water?

Ask the man who is ill, who is lifting

His lips to the cup.

Ask the forest.

Ah, Environmental Justice in poetry.  What befalls one of us, befalls us all.  If there not clean water on this earth, then we all become ill:  the fishes in the rivers, the herons on the banks, the children on dusty roads, and the planet itself.

But I speak for myself.

Let me ask the forest, which from my upper story hotel room in Denver is several miles away.  The trees don’t really start to populate the rising terrain until the upper reaches of the of the brown shrouded mountain.  The snow is scant on the peaks, which are graced with low clouds.  I don’t know why, but is just feels “dry” out there.  Perhaps this is just my Florida self speaking who is accustomed to the over 93% humidity reported last week.  Even at home with all that water, there isn’t enough. Many springs are ill, and several have already died.

The pine forests here and at home answer with crashing limb and trunk, or with a crackle of fire.  If I could but take the cup of poisoned water from the lips of this wondrous world, and refill it with loving purity I would.

What shall you put in your cup today to offer the world?

Then Bluebird Sang - January 14, 2010

Bluebirds slipped a little tremble out of the triangle of his mouth

And it hung in the air until it reached my ear

Like a froth or a frill that Schumann

Might have written in a dream.

Dear morning you come with so many angels of mercy

So wondrously disguised in feathers, in leaves,

In the tongues of stones, in the restless waters,

In the creep and the click and the rustle

That greet me wherever I go

With their joyful cry: I’m still here, alive!

My angels of mercy this morning:

Tropical lofty clouds framing the ocean with the light of the new born sun

A stranger who offered me her apartment while I visit Puerto Rico

The stray dog, the stray cat, my stray thoughts

The chance to serve, and to be served

The creep and the click of my arthritic knees

To breathe. 

Who or what are you angels of mercy this day?

Violets - January 13, 2011

Down by the rumbling creek and the tall trees-

Where I went truant from school three days a week

And therefore broke the record-

There were violets as easy in their lives

As anything you have ever seen

Or leaned down to intake the sweet breath of.

Later, when the necessary houses were built

They were gone, and who give significance

To their absence.

Oh, violets, you did signify, and what shall take

Your place?

The necessary houses have been built on the island of Puerto Rico where I now awaken.  I can’t see the sun’s rising because I’m up high in a rain forest and mist clings all around.  This forest is a remnant of once was, and so is the population of the Puerto Rican Parrot, one of the most endangered birds in the world.  I have spent the night at one of the aviaries, and hear through the swirling cloud the chattering of those in captivity who raise young to be released to the wild flock, which  is now growing.  Millions upon millions have been spent to save this bird, and decades of dedicated work by hundreds of conservationists is now bearing fruit.  It is clear to me that this bird signifies a great deal and its absence would be sorely missed.

What might disappear from your world and could anything take its place?  How?

Yellow

There is the heaven we enter

through institutional grace

and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing

in the lowly puddle.

The evidence of grace is all around us.  Like me though, do you forget?  Perhaps then this is what I have most distilled from a year with Mary Oliver; My constant reading and reflecting of her poems has opened my heart a bit more to the beauty before me, even in the previously most mundane circumstances.

I smile to think of goldfinches, their sharply painted wings a blur with frenzied enjoyment.  This day, and all days, may I so also learn to smile at the fussiness of humans who blur their egos defending "the right way" with the grace of interdependence.  Through our smiles, may there then be singing as we bathe in the light of love in the institutions so designed to bring heaven to earth and her beings. 

Where might you smile today where before you judged?

How Turtles Come to Spend the Winter in the Aquarium, Then Are Flown South and Released Back Into the Sea

Somewhere down beach, in the morning, at water's edge, I found a sea turtle,

its huge head a smoldering apricot, its shell streaming with seaweed,

its eyes closed, its flipper motionless.

When I bent down, it moved a little.

When I picked it up, it signed.

Was it forty pounds, or fifty pounds, or a hundred?

Was it two miles back to the car?

We walked a little while, and then we rested, and then we walked on

I walked with my mouth open, my heart roared.

The eyes opened, I don't know what they thought.

Sometimes the flippers swam at the air.

Sometimes the eyes closed.

I couldn't walk anymore, and then I walked some more

while it turned into granite, or cement, but with that apricot-colored head,

that stillness, that Buddha-like patience, that cold-shocked but slowly beating heart.

Finally we reached the car.

The afternoon is the other part of this story.

Have you ever found something beautiful, and maybe just in time?

How such a challenge can fill you!

Jesus could walk over the water.

I had to walk ankle-deep in the sand, and I did it.

My bones didn't quite snap.

 Come on in, and see me smile.

I probably won't stop for hours.

Already, in the warmth, the turtle has raised its head, is looking around.

Today, who could deny it, I am an important person.

They say there are 9 Whooping Cranes at Payne's Prairie today - I am itching to be done with this blog so that I can run there to find something beautiful.  I think for the rest of this year I shall run towards beauty wherever I might find it so that I can be filled with challenge. 

Perhaps the real challenge is to see beauty everywhere, and let that love and awe fill us with bone snapping, urgent purpose.

Shall we all be important people this year?

How do you plan to be important this year?

Pipefish

 

In the green and purple weeds called Zostera, loosely swinging in the shallows,

I waded, I reached my hands in that most human of gestures-to find,

to see, to hold whatever it is that's there-and what came up

wasn't much but it glittered and struggled, and it had eyes, and a body

like a wand, it had pouting lips.  No longer, all of it,

than any of my fingers, it wanted away from my strangeness, it wanted

to go back into that waving forest so quick and wet. I forget

when this happened, how many years ago I opened my hands-like a promise

i would keep my whole life, and have-and let it go.  I tell you this

in case you have yet to wade into the green and purple shallows where the diminutive

pipefish wants to go on living. I tell you this against everything you are-

your human heart, your hands passing over the world, gathering and closing, so dry and slow.

We soon approach the time of promises - the New Year's time of resolutions and the hope of will.  How do we make commitments against who we evolved to be?  For our hands were made to close so we could  gather in all that we can  - mates for children, kin for protection, foraged plants and hunted beings for food, and rocks and metals for weapons.  Our hands were also made to open so that they could fill again. Likewise our hearts were made to break open so that they could fill again and again.  How do we tip the scales so that our hands work more towards life, than for death? 

My answer:  letting go.

My promise:  letting go

What is your promise that you would keep your whole life?

There you were and it was like spring

There you were, and it was like spring-

Like the first fair water with the light on it,

Hitting the eyes,

Why are we made the way we are made, that to love

Is to want?

Well, you are gone now, and this morning I have walked out

To the back shore,

To the ocean which, even if we think we have measured it,

Has not final measure.

Sometimes you can see the great whales there,

Breaching and playing.

Sometimes the swans linger just long enough

For us to be astonished.

Then they lift their wings, they become again

A part of the untouchable clouds.

We are the ideas of God, we are not, and we are the clouds – so sayeth Mary in the last 3 poems.

What I hear is that we are like the ocean and we have no final measure.

We are not just this, or only that.

I am not woman, mother, veterinarian, minister, middle-aged, nuts for birds, lonely, or in love

I am not

I am

Untouchable

What are you or are you not?

Who Said This

Something whispered something

that was not even a word.

It was more like a silence

that was understandable.

I was standing

at the edge of the pond.

Nothing living, what we call living,

was in sight.

And yet, the voice entered me,

my body-life,

with so much happiness.

And there was nothing there

but the water, the sky, the grass.

Once when on a plane traveling back from conservation work in Guatemala, a voice entered me.  I had been spending all morning out tramping through the grass of cow pastures, climbing, protecting, and loving parrots and their nest trees.  The final nest inspected before I sped to the capital city to board the plane contained two chicks whose parents had died or abandoned the nest. They were hungry and thin, and were bound to die if we did not intervene.  They were much in my heart as I sat on the plane reading my veterinary journals.   The voice spoke my name, "Kim" and continued to call out to me. I never did discover who said the word, but I had gotten up and inspected every inch of the cabin and there was no one there whom I knew.  I suspect though that the voice was someone I knew, my inner wisdom which is the love of earth and all her beings. The voice told me to move to Guatemala and at first I refused. But by the end of the conversation I relented, and such an overwhelming since of love came to me and staid for many months. In that moment I knew that there was nothing more important than love.  There was nothing else there in my life that mattered, except the expression of love. This moment of "awakes on a plane" altered my body-life and has directed me sometimes in no more than a whisper over the nearly 20 years since. 

What voice has come to you to tell you of wisdom?  Has it whispered, laughed, or screamed?

Mornings at Blackwater

For years, every morning, I drank

from Blackwater Pond.

it was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,

 feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me

from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is

 the past is the past,

and the present is what your life is,

and you are capable

of choosing what that will be,

darling citizen.

So come to the pond

or the river of your imagination

or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.

Synchronicity once again comes to me through this couplet of poems.  I wrote yesterday that though anxiety comes to we mortal beings naturally enough, we are capable of choosing another way.  But to do this we must be willing to go where ducks go, into the mud, slime, and goo of our pasts so that the we might see the flower blooming out of the pond's murkiness. 

This pond lily is the Buddhist lotus flower.  Though it grows in muddy water, it rises above the surface to bloom with remarkable beauty.  At night it closes and sinks into the murk below. This pattern of growth signifies the progress of the soul from the primeval mud of materialism, through the waters of experience, and into the bright sunshine of enlightenment, ever repeated and never perfected.

The pond water is the Sufi's wine.  The metaphor of drinking wine for a Sufi means to become intoxicated with spiritual love as we let go of the ego.  While swimming in the Ichetucknee, I am at nose level with the wood ducks along the way, and also with the gar, bass, mullet, and turtle.  Though by accident, I take in the spring water, sprinkled with traces of fish, bird, and the swimmer ahead of me. 

May I rise up today beyond the mud of my ego and intentionally drink deeply of the world around me.  I will never get this perfect.  But by the grace of wild things, may I know that now is the time to breathe in the fluid of mother earth's womb.

What do you wish to drink in today?

Swimming, One Day in August - November 22, 2010

It is now, I said,

for the deepening and quieting of the spirit

among the flux of happenings.

Something had pestered me so much

I thought my heart would break.

I mean, the mechanical part.

I went down in the afternoon

to the sea

which held me, until I grew easy.

About tomorrow, who knows anything.

Except that it will be time, again,

for the deepening and quieting of the spirit.

Wendell Berry has a poem that mirrors Mary's: The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things 

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Like Mary, I go to the sea to be held in the waves so that my spirit may heal.  It is as if I am in the womb of life, rocked gently by the tides of eternity.  Except while in the waves I find that I am never quite relaxed, for I am on the lookout for the rogue wave, the shark, the jelly fish, and the rip tide.  Like Wendell, I also go to inland water.  While there, such as swimming in my favorite body of water, the Ichetucknee, I also do not relax totally, for there are water moccasins about and though rarely seen, there might just be a large alligator stalking me. 

Am I just an anxious sort?  Or am I gifted with a true sense of reality, knowing that ease and peace are only temporary?  I suppose the answer is yes to both.  For I am a wild thing, evolved to be ever vigilant for finding food, and not becoming food.

I am also human and believe that through intention and practice I can still the brain's primitive anxiety as I meld into the world.  Even though I am destined to be some being's lunch, target, or nutrient I can come into a state of presence that says there is no me that is not river or gator.  Let me run today towards fierce predator or drowning surge so that for a time I may be the peace I wish in the world.

Where do you go to ease your spirit?  Or is it possible?

I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life

Love, love, love, says Percy.

And run as fast as you can

Along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.

Then, go to sleep.

Give up your body heat, your beating heart.

Then trust.

I am channeling Mary, or so I wish.  Yesterday I ended with a reflection that leads right into this poem. You may even think that what I wrote yesterday came from me reading a few poems ahead. Not so.  I have not read any of these poems before and I hold myself back to one poem a day.  So I am surprised as you are that I spoke of running and chasing leaves, and then lying down to bury my ego into the ground. 

Now that I think of it, perhaps it is not Mary’s soul that is seeping through me after this nearly year of rising with Mary’s poems, but Percy’s.  But then the Buddhist in me says, “Remember either soul is the other soul, and is the universal soul. Trust in this.”

Last night I attended the “Transgender Day of the Dead” on the Boston Commons.  There was such a diversity of bodies, expressions, and experiences.  I’m glad I went, for in their soul wrenching stories of loss and oppression, I found my own soul loving a little harder and my heart running a bit faster as I marveled at how others can trust so deeply that we all share the same, eternal deep, beauty.

May we rest in this truth today.

From This River, When I Was a Child, I Used to Drink

But when I came back I found

That the body of the river was dying.

“Did it speak?”

Yes, it sang out the old songs, but faintly.

“What will you do?

I will grieve of course, but that’s nothing.

“What, precisely, will you grieve for?”

For the river.  For myself, my lost

Joyfulness. For the children who will not

Know what a river can be – a friend, a

Companion, a hint of heaven.

“Isn’t this somewhat overplayed?”

I said: it can be a friend.  Companion.  A hint of heaven.

Here I am back in Guatemala after a 6 month absence. When last here I posted my blogs in the form of tweets. Somehow this seemed appropriate to use a medium of communication that relates to the diminishing bird song.  The calls of Scarlet Macaws are long gone from nearly all of Guatemala, and the Yellow-naped Amazon calls are fainter each time I come.  I mourn.

There was a time when I was unsure of my mourning. It was if I was the only one who knew how abundant the harmony of multiple species of parrot calls here was in the south coast of Guatemala.  People who would see my tears and read my words wondered if I was overplaying the loss. They hadn’t looked into the regretful eyes of older campesinos who tell stories of macaws, amazons, and parakeets all nesting in one giant tree.  Now it’s hard to find even the trees, let alone the birds.

In this poem Mary repeats to the skeptic about her friendship with the river. Perhaps she too has felt isolated with the rivers going with no one on the shores to grieve with her, as if the river song was nothing of importance.  But it is.  Mary, you, and I have company now as the rivers leave us high and dry.

In the book, Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, I red yesterday how psychologists, counselors, therapists, and scientists are increasingly aware of the illness and woundedness of humans who witness ecological devastation and extinction.  Writes Mary Watkins in the chapter, Creating Restorative Ecotherapuetic Practices, “I grasped and acknowledged that the plant and animal worlds were a source of primary attachment, a significant contributor to their (her patients) resilience in the face of great difficulties and disappoints in human life, and a wellspring of faith in beauty and goodness.”  Rivers, trees, birds, mountains, oceans, and flowers all befriend our kind.  So I am glad that it is more mainstream to grieve together as a community of mixed species.  That’s step one and it is hardly nothing.  We must hear and sing death songs, as Mary describes in my blog of two days go.  But what next?

What will you do?

 

Sometimes

1.

Something came up

out of the dark.

It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.

It wasn't an animal

or a flower,

unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,

a head the size of a cat

but muddy and without ears.

I don't know what God is.

I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them

some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometime

melancholy leaves me breathless...

3.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!

Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.

The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

but not everything.

Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and

thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in  my heart

and fortify me,

take away my hunger for answers,

let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.

Let the cathead appear again-

the smallest of your mysteries,

some wild cousin of my own blood probably-

some cousin of my own wild blood probably,

in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around

one corner or another.

This doesn't amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Step One: Question

What is it that comes out of the dark?

Is it God?

Is it death?

What is the necessary arrangement between the two?

Step Two: Answer

Love

Step Three: Action

Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

Listen

Be crazy

Laugh

Grow

Step Four:  Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary

I summarized Mary's poem with these 4 steps. How would you? What are your "4 steps" to life?