Good-bye Fox

He was lying under a tree, licking up the shade, 

Hello again, Fox, I said. 

 And hello to you too, said Fox, looking up and not bounding away. 

 You're not running away? I said. 

Well, I've heard of your conversation about us. News travels even among foxes, as you might know or not know. 

 What conversation do you mean? 

 Some lady said to you, "The hunt is good for the fox." And you said, "Which fox?" 

 Yes, I remember. She was huffed. 

 So you're okay in my book. 

 Your book! That was in my book, that's the difference between us. 

 Yes, I agree. You fuss over life with your clever words, mulling and chewing on its meaning, while we just live it. 

 Oh! 

Could anyone figure it out, to a finality? So why spend so much time trying. You fuss, we live. And he stood, slowly, for he was old now, and ambled away. 

When we fuss, is that not living as well? Unless in fussing, I suppose, we block life's potential? But doesn't fussing guide us into knowing life? I think of the squirrel in the back yard with her chatter squeals at the red-tailed hawk, and the parent wren's insistent call to their 4 nestlings to leave the shelter of the porch nest, and their whining response. 

Go away! Get out! Come here! Feed me! Do something! Are we ever saying much else to one another?

And what about a fox fussing at the hen house, trying to find a way in. I think he is writing in a book too -

Whiskers full of cobwebs, paw scratches in the sand, blood drops on boards and feathers exploding out into the air. That's quite a story Mr. Fox.

The hunt is good for the fox!

Just Around the House, Early in the Morning - February 27, 2011

Though I have been scorned for it

let me never be afraid to use the world beautiful.

For with is the shining leaf

and the blossoms of the geranium at the window.

And the eyes of the happy puppy as he wakes.

The colors of the old and beloved afghan lying

by itself, on the couch, in the morning sun.

The hummingbirds' nest perched now in a

corner of the bookshelf, in front of so many

books of so many colors.

the two poached eggs.  The buttered toast.

The ream of brand-new paper just opened,

white as a block of snow.

The typewriter humming, ready to go.

Having read this poem, I just walked around the house this morning, taking inventory of the beauty I see. It was like a walking meditation, a prayer.

Into the kitchen I see the refrigerator, whose freezer is full of locally grown leafy foods converted into the soup that nourishes me through the winter, made by the hands of my beloved spouse.

Out the window I appraise the growing sand pile, the leavings for the recently refreshed gopher tortoise burrow.  Maybe I will see her today, maybe not. But I know she's there and I guess in her turtle way, she knows of us.

The living room carpet has a few kernels of popcorn, the leavings of our family  night last night - cards and movies with spouse and son.

Down the hall I quietly lurk, peeking into the reading/meditation room where my spouse sits in healing silence and where the sun shines through the sycamore leaf  in the window. This room, now mostly empty after adopted son #2 took his leaving of us, likely permanently.

Then into the last room, darkened as to son #1's preferences, piles of clothes on the floor and dishes on his desk, showing the signs of late night study sessions interspersed with his constant chatter on phone and computer.  He has left for the day, though he leaves behind in me a gratitude for his sprawling, unique presence.

And now back to my computer, it humming until I feed it the words of the song within me.

What does your list of beauty and gratitude look like as you go around your house?

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?

Both Worlds

Forever busy, it seems,

With words,

Finally

I put the pen down

And rumple

Most of the sheets

And leave one or two,

Sometimes a few,

For the next morning.

Day after day’

Year after year’

It has gone on this way,

I rise from the chair,

I put on my jacket

And leave the house

For that other world’

The first one,

The holy one

Where the trees say

Nothing the toad says

Nothing the dirt

nothing and yet

what has always happened

keeps happening:

the trees flourish

the toad leaps

and out of the silent dirt

the blood-red roses rise

I have been over 40 hours in transit to get home from Central America to Northern Florida.  I leave one world where life seems evidently harsh no matter where you turn to this world, where abundance hides the sacrifice of others. 

While waiting in the San Jose, Costa Rica airport yesterday I met an owner of a Honduran banana plantation. He and I swapped stories of violence in the daily lives of Guatemalans and Hondurans, including vengeance killings, gangs, narco lords, assassin squads, murderous politics of militaries and governments, gunfights, and people bound and thrown into rivers to die with no threat of penalty or discovery.  To me he seemed hardened by the life he had led, willing to do whatever it took to protect his interests. 

Then we began to speak of birds and he smiled for the first time .He stood up as his very soul seemed to become lighter. He spoke of how he loved birds and how he enjoyed taking his children to a bird park in Honduras.  It was like we had been transported to another world, this one of light and not of darkness.   We shared a magic moment where we had both reminded each other of the light within and without.

The theme of light came up in a movie I also saw yesterday in transit, “The Christmas Cottage.”  In it a character says that there is a light within us all and goes with us down all roads.  It ended with an artist painting a snow covered house, brightly lit up from within and without.  This image brings me back to Mary’s poem of yesterday where there are many roads leading from home.

We all travel far in our lives, one way or another.  How often we tragically forget that the light stays with us, no matter our paths, no matter the brutality and cruelty we encounter.  In this mess of our lives, life with daring audacity, flourishes.  Why should we not as well? 

Where do you travel between two worlds?

The Book

Lilies – as tall as ourselves and more lovely,

And full of fragrance, and long orange tongues,

And those plaything the bees-stood in

A neighbor’s yard, a thick, ramping

Hedge of them. You could not help but see

That to be beautiful is also to be simple

And brief; is to rise up and be glorious, and then vanish;

Is to be silent but as though a song was in you only it

Hasn’t yet been heard

At least in a garden of real earth and sparrows and wrens,

And people hurrying by, pausing then hurrying on

To the usual daily foolishness that comes to so little

So far as the real things matter: eternity,

The unseen, the unrecognized, the filing of the heart

With goodness, as if it were a hive

In which nothing corrupt could live. And I thought

If any one of them could write

The story of their lives, who wouldn’t

Stand in line and hand over the last of their

Shining money-oh, the very end of their shining money-

To buy it.

In Mary’s poems I often wait for the phrase that clinches at the heart, both wringing it and opening it at the same time. Not all poems cause this reaction, but most do. Can you guess what phrase brought me the “kick” or the “surprise” that she can still do after nearly 8 months of writing about one of her poems a day? For me, today, I hung my doubts up when she wrote “real things matter…the filing of the heart with goodness, as if it were a hive.” When I read this I resonate and my deepest soul, which is also yours, says, “ah yes, there I see you my friend.” This is the story I long to her in others, and the story I ache to tell, and to live – to spend my days filling my heart with goodness, awareness, love, and yes, all the doubts too must fly in as well. They stretch my heart so that there is even more room for all.

How do you fill your heart with goodness?

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?

White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

I wonder what it is that I will accomplish today

If anything can be called that marvelous word.

It won’t be

My kind of work, which is only putting words on a page,

The pencil

Haltingly calling up

The light of the world,

Yet nothing appearing on paper half as bright

As the mockingbird’s verbal hilarity

In the still unleafed shrub in the churchyard-

Or the white heron rising over the swamp and the darkness,

His yellow eyes and broad wings wearing

The light of the world in the light of the world-

Ah yes, I see him.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Okay, I’m flat out disagreeing with Mary, although given the paradoxical nature of poems; she probably secretly led me into agreeing with her. I do believe that the poem on the paper is the light of the world as is the poet. The heron over the swamp is no more beautiful than the humans I saw in the hydrotherapy pool this morning. I’m at a resort/convention hotel in San Diego and after working out I limped over to the Jacuzzi to lessen the ache of my knee. In one corner of the Jacuzzi is a middle aged woman, her body bulging out of her suit. In another corner is an older man, he too rotund and big bandage covering a third of his face. I can go into judgment mind and ask what is right about we well-fed middle aged people relaxing in the middle of the day in an expensive hotel while billions upon billions of other beings are suffering? How is the work we putter with considered any kind of accomplishment amidst the beauty and tragedy that rises out of the ache of our hearts and the bodies of so many? I don’t rightly know how to answer this except to say that my inner knowing replies to the doubting mind that beauty is in all bodies and all words. And that means mine too.

What is it you hope to accomplish today, and is it enough?

Everything

I want to make poems that say right out, plainly,
what I mean, that don't go looking for the
laces of elaboration, puffed sleeves. I want to
keep close and use often words like
heavy, heart, joy, soon, and to cherish
the question mark and her bold sister

the dash. I want to write with quiet hands. I
want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daises and everlasting and the
ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be

songs in which nothing is neglected,
not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;
the gladness that says, without any words, everything.

You do Mary, you do.

Like you, I want.

I want to make a life that says out plainly what I mean. I want to keep close in my heart both beauty and tragedy. I want to question everything and try to answer nothing - coming to each relationship and every day with an open curiousity. I want my life to be a poem, never far from breathing in wonder and breathing out gratitude. I want a life of faith so that the light of the world is made more brilliant by my gladness. I want everything, and so, want nothing, so that I might be everything.

What do you want?

The Soul at Last

The Lord's terrifying kindness has come to me.

It was only a small silvery thing-say a piece of silver cloth, or a thousand spider webs woven together, or a small handful of aspen leaves, with their silver backs shimmering. And it came leaping out of the closed coffin; it flew into the air, it danced snappingly around the church rafters, it vanished through the ceiling.

I spoke there, briefly, of the loved one gone. I gazed at the people in the pews, some of them weeping. I knew I must someday, write this down.

The Lord has been terribly kind to me, and I mean the sacred has been terribly-laden with beauty, power, and freedom. On some days there is fear, but mostly there is a humbleness that I am nothing but the will of life and love. Perhaps nowhere else does this come as strong except in church preaching and praying, and even more so at memorial services. The first time I preached at a church I thought, "Ah, this is what it means to fly free with love", with no bounds or constraints on that pure essence that flows through me to the people, and through the people to me. The world's soul holds me and sets me free. I give thanks to Lord Death who has a way of graciously awakening us to communal love.

What does the soul look like to you, and have you seen it?