White Night - March 7, 2010

All night

I float

in the shallow ponds

while the moon wanders...

...I don't want to argue anymore

about all the things

I thought I could not

live without!...

...I want to flow out

across the mother

of all waters

I want to lose myself

on the black

and silky currents...

When I float in water, whether in the ocean's gentle waves, or the brisk run of the springs here in North Florida, I forget all the things that I thought I could not live without. There is just the water, me, fish, the All of Being. To float, is to pray, to heal, to play.

Where do you have the sensation of floating of being held by life?

Blossom - March 6, 2010

In April

the ponds

open

like black blossoms..

frogs shouting

their desire,

their satisfaction...

...What

we long for: joy

before death...

...What

we know: we are more

than blood-we are more

than our hunger and yet

we belong

to the moon and when the ponds

open, when the burning

begins the most

thoughtful among us dreams

of hurrying down

into the black petals,

into the fire,

into the night where time lies shattered,

into the body of another.

Sufi wisdom calls us to not forget the joy of union with another -w ith the moon, the sun, god, bird, lover, frog, pond. We yearn for this in the spring of our lives, roaming out in the night to forget the ache of our separation. Perhaps as we age when our bodies mellow as hormones free us from the maddening drive, we let slip into the background what we long for, and instead absorb ourselves into the daily grind. Rumi writes today in "The Milk of Millennia,"

I walk into a huge pasture.

I nurse the milk of millennia.

Everyone does this in different ways.

Knowing that conscious decisions

and personal memory

are much too small a place to live,

every human being streams at night

into the loving nowhere, or during the day,

in some absorbing work.

I awake this morning which falls just short of spring, seeing the thrown dirt of awakening tortoises in my backyard, and if I let myself crawl down their tunnels and wrap my soul around their hard shells, so that my own will crack.

What or with whom do you wish union?

Skunk Cabbage - March 5, 2010

...you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers

and new leaves unfolding

upon the brash

turnip-hearted skunk cabbage...

...Your kneel beside it. The smell

is lurid and flows in the most

unabashed way...

...but these are the woods you love,

where the secret name

of every death is life again -a miracle...

...What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

The skunk cabbage is a powerful harbinger of the delicate flowers to come, and in the liminal time of winter to spring it shows it's power to turn death into life. Out of the muck of pond's edge, before flowers, before fruit, before harvest, comes what is not always pretty.

Our lives are not always pretty, and are as powerful and smelly as cabbage root. We are life bursting forth, rising out of the slime of existence. We belong to earth and all her magnificence, and there is peace in this knowing.

University Hospital, Boston - March 4, 2010

The trees on the hospital lawn

are lush and thriving. They too

are getting the best of care,

like you, and the anonymous many....

...We sit on the lawn together, holding hands

while you tell me: you are better.

How many young men, I wonder

came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains

from the read and hideous battlefields...

...and how many died

staring at the leaves of the trees...

...tell myself, you are better,

because my life without you would e

a place of parched and broken trees.

Later, walking the corridors down to the street,

I turn and step inside an empty room.

Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face.

Now the bed is made all new,

the machines have been rolled away. The silence

continues, deep and neutral,

as I stand there, loving you.

Poems Vultures and Ghosts in recent days linger in the battlefields of my mind that I pray surrenders to the unnatural divide between death and life. By embracing death, we can love ever the harder.

In my youth I knew not much of human love, or of death. Then I saw the movie, Gone With the Wind where Scarlet is overwhelmed in the Atlanta train stations where thousands of wounded and dying are laid around the tracks. There was my first glimpse of universal and massive human suffering. I saw it from the eyes of a southern raised, white privileged human, in fact, born in Atlanta. Some years later I saw the movie, Showboat, and the universal suffering extended out to those of African descent caught in the web of colonialist harm.

Always, always I connected to nonhuman suffering spending, most of my adult life in veterinary hospitals and field clinics. There, in hospitals, I find, human or non, we all are equal. In death we all are equal. In loving, we all are equal.

What do hospitals tell you of life and death? Of love?

Rain in Ohio - March 3, 2010

...Rain, rain, rain! sings the robin

frantically, then flies for cover.

The crow hunches.

The blacksnake

pours himself swift and heavy

into the ground.

The robin senses rain and responds in fear; the crow in sullen defiance, and the snake in reclusion. I wonder if there are any animals that embrace the rain and see it as a sign of joy, an opportunity perhaps for hunting or gathering, or some activity other than withdrawal. I do not know. A quick glance on the internet suggests that the most obvious animal out and about in the rain is human, often hunting. Also what pops up on the internet is how it can rain fish, frogs, and birds - probably after terrific winds raise the animals out of their refuge and take them into the sky. No wonder they hunker down when hunters that are difficult to see are roaming in the land and sudden winds that cannot be escaped can come down upon one.

As a child my mother would sit with us on the open front porch and we would watch the storms come upon us - daring ourselves to not escape indoors. When lightening had passed but rain and flooded yards were round about, we would take to the streets and open fields in glee to embrace the warm rain upon our skin. I wonder if somewhere in the being of bird and snake, there is also not a pull and tug, knowing how the rain brings about the abundance of the land.

What is your response to rain?

Vultures - March 2, 2010

Like large dark

lazy

butterflies they sweep over

the glades looking

for death,

to eat it,

to make it vanish,

to make of it the miracle:

resurrection...

...Locked into

the blaze of our own bodies

we watch them

wheeling and drifting, we

honor them and we

loathe them,

however wise the doctrine,

however magnificent the cycles,

however ultimately sweet

the huddle of death to fuel

those powerful wings.

For National Bird Day 2010 I gave a sermon, Cultures and Vultures where I lifted up the possibility of a nature spiritual practice through the construct of integral theory. With this theory we look at vultures and imagine what it is they are thinking and what they mean to us. We also see where we might resonate with one another. Looking at vultures twirling on rising spirits above us, I wonder how it would be for everyone to resonate with death tens of times a day - for this is how common a sighting of a Black or Turkey vulture is in Gainesville. Mary spoke of death and extinction yesterday in her poem, Ghosts, however death is not a ghost or a dream. It is with us everywhere, which so means that life and birth and creation is everywhere with us, in every moment. Oh that we could have faith in this wise doctrine of death to life and life to death. Perhaps we can, if we remember to look up and look within.

What do vultures mean to you? What reminds you of death throughout the day?

Ghosts - March 1, 2010

1

Have you noticed?

2

Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts

lay down on the earth and died

it's hard to tell now

what's bone, and what merely

was once...

4

...In the book of the earth it is written:

nothing can die.

In the book of the Sioux it is written:'

they have gone away into the earth to hide.

nothing will coax them out again

but the people dancing...

6

...Have you noticed? how the rain

falls soft as the fall

of moccasins. Have you noticed?..

...the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also

have you noticed? gone now.

7

...in a dream

I watched while, secretly

and with the tenderness of any caring woman,

a cow gave birth

to a red calf...

...in the fragrant grass

in the wild domains

of the prairie spring, and I asked them,

in my dream I knelt down and asked them

to make room for me.

Oh Mary, here you are always with questions and answers. You ask if there is room for yourself. Is there room on this planet for a species such as ours? Will there ever be enough room in the earth, in the grass, and in death? This leads me to another question: How can I make room for death and extinction, now this moment in my heart, for myself, for the buffalo, for the Passenger Pigeon, for the Carolina Parakeet, so that I may make room for life?

Where do you make room to ruminate over the losses of the past, which endure today?