Percy Wakes Me

Percy wakes me and I am not ready...

Now he's eager for action:  a walk, then breakfast....

He is sitting on the kitchen counter where he is not supposed to be.

How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you needed me, to wake me.

He thought he would hear a lecture and deeply  his eyes begin to shine.

He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.

He squirms and squeals; he has done something that he needed and now he hears that it's okay.

I scratch his ears, I turn him over and touch him everywhere.  He is

wild with the okayness of it.  Then we walk, then he gas has breakfast, and he is happy.

This is a poem about Percy.

This is a poem about more than Percy.

Think about it.

In my spiritual practice of nonviolent communication I often struggle with accepting with ease the complaints of others.  When I first hear what they want, often expressed as a demand, or worse, as whining, I don't have much empathy for others or for myself.  It's also hard for me to get in touch with my gratitude that they let me know what was going on for them, for I know that when someone asks something of me, often in a an unskillful way, they are just letting me know what would make their life wonderful.  This is such a great gift, but so frequently I am reluctant to open the gift to appreciate how life flows through them.  Instead I have "shoulds" going on in my story telling brain, "Why can't they think of anyone else but themselves?" 

Reading this poem today, I sense a break through, a vision.  People around me are like bounding Percies, inviting me to make their life wonderful.  How lovely for them, and for me, if I could reply in word, thought, and action so that they could know how wonderful they are and the okayness of their needs.

Oh how our lives might shine. Though we may not be ready, may we awake to this possibility today.

To whom would you like to communicate "okayness?"

A Lesson from James Wright

 If James Wright could put in his book of poems a blank page

dedicated to "the Horse David Who Ate One of My Poems,"

I am ready to follow him along

the sweet path he cut through the dryness and suggest that you sit now

very quietly in some lovely wild place, and listen to the silence.

And I say that this, too, is a poem

Let us leave our minds blank for horses, over ridden, abandoned, shipped to slaughter

Let us leave our minds blank for the sparrows dropping from the skies and the flies upon children's faces

Let us leave our minds blank for the wildness without to colonize the wildness within

Let us leave our minds blank for that we love and may one day come to love.

Let us leave our minds blank in honor of all beings

All beings, who I say that too, are poems.

What kind of poem do you write today?

Heart Poem

My heart, that used to pump along so pleasantly, has come now to a different sort of music.

There is someone inside those red walls, irritated and even, occasionally, irrational.

Years ago I was part of an orchestra: our conductor was a wild man. He was forever rapping the music stand for silence. Then he would call out some correction and we would begin again.

Now again it is the wild man.

I remember the music shattering, and our desperate attentiveness.

Once he flung the baton over our heads and into the midst of the players....What silence!  Then someone picked it up and it was passed forward back to him. He rapped the stand and raised his arms. Then we all breathed again, and the music restarted. 

Oh Mary, is your heart faltering?  Does it in the middle of the night awaken you with it's crazy out of synch rhythm, sharply drawing your attention to your body, and to what your life may be?  Perhaps you lie awake for hours, wondering if the coming rising will be your last.  Then the day lightens, and you restart your day like you have thousands of times, ever more grateful for the music of the spheres?

Have you had nights like this, and mornings as well?

A Meeting

She steps into the dark swamp

where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package

drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature

like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together

like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a  field

thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.

I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman

I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,

the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want

to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly

wild.

The melody of birth harmonizes with the haunting notes of death and calls us into the wilderness.  Entering that path, footsteps pause and our resolve falters, for we know not what is before us.  Yet if we do not go forward, we will miss the most beautiful sight we will ever see.

What is it that you would see along this path?

The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms.  The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals.  Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze.  Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be.  Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.

Ten months ago Mary had a poem, "The Other Kingdoms" where crows rebuke her for entering their kingdom.  I replied that "the crows in their calls test our resolve - do we or do we not belong to the family of things?  We do.  Love does not lie."

Not only do we belong to the family of things, we belong to our own human family.  We were born to fuss and to scrape, to murder and to grieve, to grow addicted and complacent, and to weep at a child's birth and a spouse's death.  This we were born to do,, and yet, so much more.

Each day we have the chance to grow richer and wilder. 

How shall you grow rich and wild today?

Luke

I had a dog

Who loved flowers

Briskly she went

Through the fields,

Yet paused

For the honeysuckle

Or the rose,

Her dark head

And her wet nose

Touching

The face

Of every one

With its petals

Of silk,

With its fragrance

Rising

Into the air

Where the bees,

Their bodies

Heavy with pollen,

Hovered-and easily

She adored

Every blossom,

Not in the serious

Carefully way

That we choose

This blossom or that blossom-

The way we praise or don’t praise-

The way we love

Or don’t love-

But the way

We long to be-

That happy

In the heaven of earth-

That wild, that loving.

I wonder if we project our own longings onto perceived enlightened beings. For instance, with dogs I often hear how they offer unconditional love when we don’t really know what they are thinking or feeling, any more than we do of another human. Just because we want it to be so, doesn’t make it so. Dogs have nightmares, spiritual lives, and fits of anger and sadness. It isn’t just dogs. When I see Mary’s Luke easily adoring every blossom, I also see Thich Nhat Hahn (Vietnamese Buddhist Monk) and the Dali Lama (Tibetan Buddhist Monk) acting silly and totally out of control as they giggle their way through a flower patch, loving equally the dying roses and the menacing spiders amidst the buds and the bees. I imagine that they too have not just spiritual lives, but dreams gone awry and episodes of pique. So if I can imagine holy beings perfectly loving and perfectly fumbling and bumbling, might I also not imagine myself as a wholly being, wild and loving? Perhaps my wild love results in actions that appear motivated by loathing of my kind, but I imagine in the very inner core of all of us, no matter our strategies in the world, we are motivated by love and beauty of ourselves and those we care for. We just don’t look as cute as a dog with floppy ears or as noble as a monk donning maroon and saffron robes. We do however have that possibility of happiness and joy because we are the dog, the monk, the flower, and the bee. We are all one in our beauty and the love that comes up through our wild interconnected beings. Peace and heaven on earth? Possible? Yes! I don’t believe this is a projection. We can make it so. One.

Where do you "project" the way you wish the world was (or shouldn't be) onto others and what does it tell you about the way you wish to live?

Wild, Wild

This is what love is:

The dry rose bush the gardener, in his pruning, missed

Suddenly bursts into bloom.

A madness of delight; an obsession.

A holy gift, certainly,

But often, alas, improbable.

Why couldn’t Romeo have settled for someone else?

Why couldn’t Tristan and Isolde have refused

The shining cup

Which would have left peaceful the whole kingdom?

Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests

Of our lives.

Over and over Faust, standing in the garden, doesn’t know

Anything that’s going to happen, he only sees

The face of Marguerite, which is irresistible.

And wild, wild sings the bird.

Compulsive, wild love can destroy kingdoms and lead us into our doom? It’s hard to see how an out of season blooming bush can bring mayhem and death and suffering, such as the stories to which Mary refers. But now I’m thinking of a bird in a rose bush, a purple finch mistaking this plant for one where she can feed. What is it like to be her, hungry, desperate to feed the chicks back home. She’s distracted though for a moment by the pretty flowers , which cause the bird to sing and forget for a moment the responsibility of chicks, her mate, and the flock. Then an un pair bonded male hears the song and comes to her, where their tryst leads to a flurry of feathers that some might call betrayal, others love, and even others, might say, well, it’s just evolutionary good sense to keep several possible mates in waiting in case catastrophe comes to nest and original mate. Or to help raise the chicks. Or to fertilize the eggs with diverse genes.

Love, out of control, doth seem a chaotic virtue. So powerful, so unplanned, so rift with possibility to bring life, connection, and social bonds that can feed the heart. I wonder then if there is any way to rein love in so that nests and nations may also be adequately nourished while love wreaks havoc. I believe our hearts can hold much love, and that with training and intention we can channel that love into a feeding of the world. But it’s a tricky thing to live so wildly; to let say that fragrant flower outside my window keep me from my chores, my focus of the day, and the writing of this blog. Now where was I….ah yes, in love.

Of What Surrounds Me

Whatever it is I am saying, I always
Need a leaf or a flower, if not an
Entire field. As for sky, I am wildly
In love with each day’s inventions, cool blue
Or cat gray or full
Of the ships of clouds, I simply can’t
Say whatever it is I am saying without
At least one skyful. That leaves water, a
Creek or a well, river or ocean, it has to be
There. For the heart to be there. For the pen
To be poised. For the idea to come.



Whatever it is I am doing I would like a feather to be there. If not a feather, then may I pray for the grace of birds to be nearby – in the yard, in the tree, or in sky, full of my wings’ love´? For where there are birds, there is also the heart. The trick is how to have the heart be present, without caging beauty, and hence ourselves. Otherwise we might end up saying, “I can’t be happy until I have this, or go see this.” Where would desire end, but in our own end?

This week I am visiting a veterinary clinic that only sees birds and exotic animals. The clinic is nestled into a strip mall arrangement, a bit plain I suppose like much of the Ohio suburbs. But then you open the door to the clinic and the rainbow of life dazzles your eyes. The doctors and the technicians smile and look you right in the eye, and the multiple birds in residence fly across the room to perch near brightly decorated walls. One rode my shoulder for the afternoon, my face touching, oh God, actually touching feathers once again. The world seems nearly as it should be in these rooms, for isn’t everything we need right there? Then the clients come in with their companion birds – sick, caged, behaviorally down shifted from their evolved possibility. I am not saying that there isn’t love or care or heart in the humans there, but do we as a species truly “need” these rooms full of cages and medicines for the idea of interconnection to come? I am poised for there to be another way, and in my longing may I remain alert for letting desire go so that life may come.

What do you desire or need, that if in letting it go, would lead to fuller lives for you or for others?

Honey Locust - August 8, 2010

Who can tell how lovely in June is the

honey locust tree, or why

a tree should be so sweet and live

in this world? Each white blossom

on a dangle of white flowers holds one green seed-

a new life. Also each blossom on a dangle of flower

holds a flask

of fragrance called heave, which is never sealed.

The bees circle the tree and dive into it. They are crazy

with gratitude. They are working like farmers. They are as

happy as saints. After awhile the flowers begin to

wilt and drop down into the grass. Welcome

shines in the grass.

Each year I gather

handfuls of blossoms and eat of their mealiness; the honey

melts n my mouth, the seeds make me strong,

both when they are crisps and ripe, and even at the end

when their petals have turned dully yellow.

So it is

if the heart has devoted itself to love, there is

not a single inch of emptiness. Gladness gleams

all the way to the grave.

floating in,

then the scouts going out,

then their coming back, and their dancing-

nothing different

but what happens in our own village.

What pity for the tiny souls

Who are so hopeful, and work so diligently

until time brings, as it does, the slap and the claw

Someday, of course, the bear himself

will become a bee, a honey bee, in the general mixing.

Nature, under her long green hair,

has such unbendable rules,

and a bee is not a powerful thing, even

when there are many

as people, in a town or a village.

And what, moreover, is catastrophe?

Is it the sharp sword of God,

or just some other wild body, loving its life?

Not caring a whit, black bear

blinks his horrible, beautiful eyes,

slicks his teeth with his fat and happy tongue,

and saunters on.

to follow a thought quietly

to its logical end.

I have done this a few times.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,

in the middle of the world, breathing

in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name

but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet.

I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass and the weeds.

As a child I loved the game kick-the-can. When the seeker would tire of the game or when the seeker had been defeated, we would yell All-y all-y in come free which means that all those still out could come in without receiving a penalty or losing the game. This phrase comes from "All ye, all ye outs in free." So to Mary, I say, all-y, ally-in come free. She as has me pinned to the mat, my heart clinched in an inescapable hold. I cry uncle and give myself over to absolute reality - that my hurt and suffering is due to some other wild body loving life. How can one live with such glad interconnectedness? Drifting I suppose in the heaven, no purpose, no agenda, nothing but breath and light. I lose myself but win the game of life and death. Mary has defeated this seeker.

How do you give yourself over to that which is greater than yourself?

Percy (One)

Our new dog, named for the beloved poet,

Ate a book which unfortunately we had

Left unguarded.

Fortunately it was the Bhagavad Gita,

Of which many copies are available.

Every day now, as Percy grows

Into the beauty of his life, we touch

His wild, curly head and say,

“Oh, wisest of little dogs.”

The self-help book market has exploded in the recent decade and spiritual/religious offerings too are abundant in stores and on the internet. We have daily meditations perched on the commode tank, daily inspirations popping up automatically in our email, and just yesterday I just heard advertised on the radio “California Psychics” who will do a reading for you on the phone to help you discover your deepest truths. It seems we humans devour wisdom where ever we may. But are we really digesting it? Does the wisdom of the ages just pass through us? I am thinking of Percy, the young dog, and young of our own kind. Perhaps they, like us, grow into our wild beauty and don’t need the extra help of books and lectures. Oh sure, don’t get me wrong, we can all use refinement. But what if we looked at our children, at our friends and enemies, and at ourselves as beautiful wild beings, even when they “chew” up what is precious to us? Instead of blaming, we say to all,”oh wise and beautiful one.” We offer our hearts, knowing that books can always be replaced.

How do you do to grow in wisdom, beauty, and wildness?

The Storm

Now through the white orchard my little dog

Romps, breaking the new snow

With wild feet.

Running here running there, excited,

Hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins

Until the white snow is written upon

In large, exuberant letters,

A long sentence, expressing

The pleasures of the body in the world.

Oh, I could not have said it better myself.

A dog playing is a woman composing poetry. A child crying is a tree falling in the night. A polluted Gulf is white icing on a cupcake. Isn’t it time we quite pretending that you and I are different; from each other, from the cause of our demise, and from the source of all joy and beauty?

Where does feeling like you don’t belong or are different keep you from joy?

Moss

Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn’t a tribal memory or an archetypal memory, but something far older-a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.

To perceive of the earth as round needed something else – standing up!-that hadn’t yet happened.

What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of course .But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees and eyes, over the little mountains of dust.

When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don’t frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,

Sweet cousin.

Key words: family, wild, insect, season, fear, stone, animal, plant, world, evolution

In our congregation we often say that we are a community of memory and hope. We lift up values, stories, and science to remind us of what we already know – the deeper wisdom underneath the quotidian events of our lives. What is that wisdom? It seems that deep within our psyche is the knowing that we are all family. And let be me frank here. We have the just as deep knowing that we’d like to be done with this family – a family that brings pain, suffering, war, disease, broken relationships, and death. So we leave the trees for the savannah, stand up, run, chase, fly, and enter in space. One day I imagine we will leave this planet, some remembering in the millennia to come that it was round, a circle of life unbroken with connections, and others thinking it was flat, empty of depth and full of death and misery. The moss sees level beauty, and we humans can see into multidimensional universes. God of glory, god of wisdom, may we never forget either!

How do you see the world?

White Pine

The sun rises late in this southern county. And, since the first thing I do when I wake up is go out into the world, I walk here along a dark road. There are many trees…

Isn’t everything, in the dark, too wonderful to be exact, circumscribed?

For instance, the white pine that stands by the lake. .. Everything is in it. But no single part can be separated from another.

I have read that, in Africa, when the body of an antelope, which all its life ate only leaves and grass and drank nothing but wild water, is first opened, the fragrance is almost too sweet, too delicate, too beautiful to be borne. It is a moment which hunters must pass through carefully, with concentrated and even religious attention, if they are to reach the other side, and go on with their individual lives.

And now I have finished my walk. And I am just standing, quietly, in the darkness, under the tree.

Is it only in the dark that we know we are connected in this wonderful world? Like the African hunter, do we turn from this knowing because it would change who we are and how we live too dramatically? Perhaps this is why we don’t go on walk abouts in the dark. For we would become antelope and tree, easily shot and felled by the hunters of night. But then our sweetness, like this morning’s cloaking aromoa of Mimosa trees, would brighten the world with the fragrance of creative grace.

If you could be a tree, which would you be?

Early Morning, New Hampshire

Near Wolfeboro,

near the vast, sparkling lake,

deep in the woods,

I swing

my legs over

the old wall and sit

on the iron-cold stones. The wall

is longer than any living thing, and quieter

than anything that breathes, as we

understand breathing...

Somebody

raised it

stone by stone, each lagging weight

pulling the shoulders.

Somebody

meant to sheet these green hills

with domesticity,

and did, for a while.

But not anymore

And now the unmaking

has naturally begun.

Stones fall...

This morning

something slips,

and I see it all-the yearning

then the blunt and paunchy flight,

then the sweet, dark falling.

I grew up in the southeast part of the United States where as wild, running children we wove through the remaining woods, often discovering walls or embankments from farms and from wars. There wasn't much that could give us pause, but a decaying wall always would. There was something in it that said we would not last forever, though in the summer's freedom we felt we could run into eternity. For brief moments we wondered about the world beyond, our imaginations overcoming the heat of boredom as we touched on the magic of sensing that we were part of something larger. I see, now decades later, that the decay of age, of civilizations, and of habitats, slows us down enough to fathom the deep yearning and meaning in the distance between our dreams and reality, and between what we have done, and what we might yet do.

What meaning do you find in the evidence of ancient people, history's signs, or geological movements near your modern home?

In Pobiddy, Georgia

Three women climb from the car

in which they have driven slowly

into the churchyard.

They come toward us, to see

what we are doing.

What we are doing

is reading the strange,

wonderful names

of the dead.

One of the women

speaks to us-

after we speak to her.

She walks with us and shows us,

with downward-thrust finger,

which of the dead where her people.

She tells us

about two brothers, and an argument,

and a gun-she points

to one of the slabs

on which there is a name,

some scripture, a handful of red

plastic flowers. We ask her

about the other brother.

"Chain gang," she says,

as you or I might say

"Des Moines," or "New Haven." And then,

"Look around all you want."

The younger woman stands back, in the stiff weeds,

like a banked fire.

The third one-

the oldest human being we have ever seen in our lives-

suddenly drops to the dirt

and begins to cry. Clearly

she is blind, and clearly

she can't rise, but they lift her, like a child,

and lead her away, across the graves, as though

as old as anything could ever be, she was, finally,

perfectly finished, perfectly heartbroken, perfectly wild.

This is the first poem that I have written in its entirety - for I know of no other way to tell the story that left me crying this morning. Mary, you surprised me. Me, a Georgia born gal who thought I had seen everything.

Are you as blind as I have been? The world invites us to look around all we want in the pull and push of Yes, No, and in the end we are here to be heartbroken. Nothing else but this, which is everything.

What