Dreams - February 15, 2010

When the rain is over

I go to the woods...

And the creeks!

...Now they are swollen and driven with muds and

ambitions...

they sense ahead-and desire it-

A new life in a new land...

...they remind me of...

Two great -uncles who went west years ago

And got lost in Colorado...

...watching the tame creeks boil away,

My heart in sympathy pounds like a quick hoof.

I think with pride of my uncles who went west

Full of hope and vision;

I think they became healthy as animals, and rich

as their dreams

Before they turned some corner and became

Two graves under the leaves.

It is not clear to me in this poem if the two uncles died in Colorado pursuing their dreams, or perhaps some decades into their older years. I want to know if the richness of deep meaning and purpose accompanied them all their years, or if they gave into the softness of tamed compromise. Either way, the tame creek or the swollen river, they both flow into the ocean where all become one, and in that knowing, all becomes won.

What dreams to you have that you pursue? Do you tame your passion because the next moment you may find disappointment, fear, or death?

Buck Moon - Form the Field Guide to Insects - February 14, 2010

Eighty-eight thousand six-hundred

different species in North America. In the trees, the grasses

around us. maybe more, maybe

several million on each acre of earth. This one

as well as any other...

...Where, resting, you feel

the perfection, the rising, the happiness

of their dark wings.

Yesterday Mary couldn't concentrate and the crows chased her away from the kingdom of the family of things. Today, in insects she sees perfection in every corner of the world where the insects sing of interconnection, or belonging, of possible happiness for us here, now. This sense of belonging seems so illusive, so hard won, and then sometimes a moment of grace descends and asks us to rise in joy with it. I am thinking of yesterday too, where I went with some 15 Unitarian Universalists from our congregation to La Chua Trail, Payne's Prairie. There we spent 2.5 hours sighting one kind of bird after other in the cold wind under a sharp gifting blue sky. They came to earth in their wings, one Red-shouldered Hawk eating a snake in front of us, a Sora limping through the reeds, a Bittern in solitary repose - all singing of the love flying within.

Where does perfection appear in your life?

Entering the Kingdom - February 13, 2010

The crows see me...I am

Possibly dangerous, I am

Entering the kingdom.

The dream of my life

Is...to learn something by being nothing

A little while but the rich

Lens of attention...

...But the crows puff their feathers and cry...

...they know me for what I am.

No dreamer,

No eater of leaves.

In the Christian scriptures we hear about entering the kingdom. Jesus says that no one enters the kingdom except through him and in Matthew 3:3 we hear, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again". Here in the poem it seems that Mary cannot enter the kingdom because the crows are keeping guard. They seem to know when you are not open to the moment, to letting the crisp lens of love bring you to complete acceptance for the beauty and tragedy around you. The moment we lapse into a sense of not belonging, we are no longer in the kingdom, or at least we believe that we are not. 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.

The Truro Bear - February 12, 2010

There's a bear in the Truro Woods.

People have seen it-...

...Surely a beast might be clever, be luck, move quietly

through the woods for years, learning to stay away

from roads and houses. Common sense mutters:

it can't be true....

...But the seed has been planted, and when has happiness ever required much evidence to begin

it's leafy-green breathing.

A bear in the forest - could it be true? How simple it is to grow happiness, it doesn't take much for us to sense magic in the air, that good fortune is upon us. Like Mary's poem "The Black Snake" where we say to death "not me" here we say "yes, for me, for us!" We have our myths of good fortune, in so many ways the opposite of our apocalypse stories. These stories are deep in our culture. We believe that out of the wastelands, there is the seed where we can create a new world. I sense this in the apparent sightings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Would that it was so, that this "lord God" bird still flew through our forests, booming it's presence not just in our hearts and memories, but in flying flesh. I had a dream once when I was young, and it was that I saw an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I was euphoric the next morning and for several days thereafter. Even today, decades later I can feel the pulse of possibility, that extinction is "not for us."

What plants a seed of happiness or possibility in your life?

Strawberry Moon - February 11, 2010

1.

My great-aunt Elizabeth Fortune

stood under the honey locust trees,...

...the grass was warm as a bed, and the young man

full of promises...

...Later,

when the young man went away and came back with a

bride,

Elizabeth

climbed into the attic.

2.

Three women came in the night...

and take away the child...

3.

...Elizabeth Fortune was not see again

for forty years...

5.

...I asked my mother:

What happened to the man? She answered:

Nothing...

6.

...And should anyone be surprised

if sometimes, when the white moor rises,

women want to last out

with a cutting edge?

Now, more obvious than yesterday, Mary speaks of gender oppression to me. A reader, my beloved spouse and one of another gender, Meredith Garmon, wrote yesterday in response to "Spring"

When the man comes into his power,
sees the handhold chink in the wall of his oppression,
grips it,
lifts it over his head,
and sets it aside,
his natural love for mare and stallion
knows no snickers.
This is not easy, not hard, a long time coming.

When the woman comes into her power,
her natural love hears
the cries,
hears
the men laughing,
hears
the sounds of powerlessness lacquered over with a sheen of assertion,
hears
no objectifying anywhere.
This is not easy, not hard, a long time coming.

Perhaps we are not surprised that women lash out, but the bigger surprise is that we do not given the tragic choices of the past to meet the needs of love, intimacy, power, sex, and connection. If we lash out at men, or at women, are we also not lashing out against who we are? Our biology? Our culture? Our children? How then do we not lash out? Perhaps it is the mourning. We do not let women go to attics alone for 40 years hiding in shame, or men to not know how the community grieves the children's lives who come from acts without accountability. If we wailed with every action that speaks of broken trust and promises, to the betrayal of our biology and evolution, we might come to find that our biology, our urges, our sexuality is a holy trust. Would it be easy? Would it be hard? It is a long time coming, still.

Who do you know that was an "unplanned" child? How are lives you know impacted by sexual intimacy?

Spring - February 10, 2010

In April the Morgan was bred. I was chased away.

I heard the cries of the horses where I waited,

And the laughter of the men...

...I rode her home at her leisure

And let her, wherever she wanted,

Tear with her huge teeth, roughly,

Blades from the fields of spring.

I have led a stallion to a mare and felt the wildness of the pair course through my veins. It seems as if the mare stands for the stallion against her own volition, in part because she is often restrained from running away. Also in part because her own hormones and physiology have betrayed her and caused her to be in a vulnerable position of which the males of the world take advantage. I wonder readers if any of you have felt the same in the dance for reproduction - felt the objectifying laughter and manipulation that our evolved humanity has brought us to?

So Mary gave the mare her head, empowered her to decide where to nourish herself in the abundance of the world. Perhaps we cannot control all that comes our way, but we may take the steps to nourish our beings, and let our laughter ring forth in love for the blossoming tree and womb.

Have you experienced sexual or gender oppression? Where do you experience nourishment or empowerment?

The Black Snake - February 9, 2010

When the black snake

flashed onto the morning road,

and the truck could not swerve-

death, that is how it happens...

...he is as beautiful and quiet

as a dead brother.

I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking

about death: its suddenness

its terrible weight,

its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire,...

It is the story of endless good fortune.

I says to oblivion: not me!'

It is the light at the center of every cell.

It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward

happily all spring.....before

he came to the road.

Here it is, Mary answers once again what she speaks of in previous poems, of what I hear her asking of us. How do we deal with the happenstance of death and suffering that does not seem to make sense? That even seems tragically perpetrated by our own kind? In this poem the truck could not serve, and in so many instances, the truck could swerve but the driver chooses otherwise, and even swerves to hit the snake.

In this dark early morning hour, I cannot say for sure from whence it comes, but there is humor in this poem - a laugh or a bemused feeling coming through the death that awaits us all, even all species and worlds. It is the words "not me!" that seem a set up for a movie scene or a joke where the moment you think that or say that, the next scene you torn limb from limb by some monster, alien, or deranged human or nonhuman. I think of the movie "Snakes on a Plane," funny in that in our avowal that harm will never come from us and for us, and as we suppress reality as it plays out in our own lives, we imagine things even worse. Recent ads for a new movie show giant flying sharks attacking a plane right after a man says, "this can't be happening to me, I'm getting married in 2 days!" Immediately thereafter the shark tears the plane apart.

The abundant light that is in the center of every cell, is the "not me" we shout to the heavens. It is not that death doesn't come, but that death always comes for there is no "me" apart from the world. It is not the individual dying, but the whole world that lives through the death, the light that never goes out. What a divine comedy in the tragedy and in the beauty.

Where does humor or laughter cross paths with how you deal with the world in all its stark, often uncomfortable reality?