Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered

The darkest thing met me in the dark.

It was only a face and a brace of teeth

that held no words, though I felt a salty breath

sighing in my direction.

Once, in an autumn that is long gone,

I was down on my knees in the cranberry bog

and heard, in that lonely place,

two voices coming down the hill, and I was thrilled

to be granted this secret,

that the coyotes, walking together can talk together,

for I thought, what else could it be?

And even though what emerged

were two young women, two-legged for sure

and not at all aware of me,

their nimble, young women tongues

telling and answering, and though I knew

I have believed something probably not true,

yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

And it has stayed with me

as a present once given is forever given.

Easy and happy they sounded,

those two maidens of the wilderness

from which we have-

who knows to what furious, pitiful extent-

banished ourselves.

I have my whole life longed for animals to human speak through voice or thought transfer, such as seen in the movie Avitar.  What I would I give to be able to talk and walk with a nonhuman companion at my side!  In recent years this has lessened a bit as I learn more about behavior, interspecies neurobiology, and cognitive ethology, and apply all of this through conservation behavior.  What has shifted is that I am better at listening.

To me the Barred Owl laughs at the world in the night, well, maybe it's not laughing really, but no less clear for me.  For I feel the coolness and dark of the night, the feathered companion, competitor, or prey calling in the night, and I yearn to bring something good back to the three in the hollow of my nest tree.  As Owl perhaps I don't describe in this way, but as human my mirror neurons light up as I imagine myself staring at the blood red eclipsed moon.  I too fly silently in the night.  We have not left the wilderness.  It lives in us: our brains, our blood, our DNA, and in you. 

We walk and talk together - with words, or without words. In this space, may no beings be banished from our hearts or from this earth.

With whom will you walk and talk today?

A Pretty Song

From the complications of loving you

I think there is no end or return.

No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn't it?

This isn't a play ground, this is

earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence

to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods

that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.

And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.

And I say to my heart: rave on

I once had a dream in my early thirties. This was a time of me of conflict and pain, and my dreams captured this by having reoccurring themes of loss. In this one dream, I actually dreamed a music video that sang, "Love is not enough, and it ain't dead yet." Somehow in my wisdom I knew that the loss would never go away and the only response was to love all the harder, even though there was no guarantee that it would solve anything or lessen the pain.

Just this past weekend I helping to facilitate a Unitarian Univeralist spiritual retreat for the Mississippi congregations. In that time we as a group reflected on joys and sorrows and came up with a response to this. Our joy is the source of our sorrow - for we desire love and connection, and not getting "enough" of this causes pain. So our answer? Well, more love, more connection, more hope, and more joy. It's pretty much a "no brainer" and an "all hearter." What could be more simple, or more harder/hearter?

Today, whatever is your loss, please join with me in responding my loving more. For when we sing, "There is more love, somewhere" it can be now, with you, with us, this next breath.

JUST LYING ON THE GRASS AT BLACKWATER

I think sometimes of the possible glamour of death -
that it might be wonderful to be
lost and happy inside the green grass -
or to be the green grass! -
or, maybe the pink rose, or the blue iris,
or the affable daisy, or the twirled vine
looping its way skyward – that I might be perfectly peaceful
to be the shining lake, or the hurrying, athletic river,
or the dark shoulders of the trees
where the thrush each evening weeps himself into an ecstasy.

I lie down in the fields of goldenrod, and everlasting.
Who could find me?
My thoughts simplify. I have not done a thousand things
or a hundred things but, perhaps, a few.
As for wondering about answers that are not available except
in books, though all my childhood I was sent there
to find them, I have learned
to leave all that behind

as in summer I take off my shoes and my socks,
my jacket, my hat, and go on
happier, through the fields. The little sparrow
with the pink beak
calls out, over and over, so simply – not to me
but to the whole world. All afternoon
I grow wiser, listening to him,
soft, small, nameless fellow at the top of some weed,
enjoying his life. If you can sing, do it. If not,

even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness,
like praise,
from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting.

I feel as if I am reading the Sufi poet Rumi this morning who could have easily written about a thrush weeping herself into ecstasy. For Rumi, for Mary, and for you perhaps there is glamour in the death that brings everlasting union with the beloved other. What I want to know, is how to do that now, and not when I finally lay my bones in the drained swamp grounds of Florida. How am I a Swallow-tailed Kite, now, who swirls on updrafts of grace above my backyard pines? Why am I not now an indigenous person of this area, shelling oysters, building middens that won’t taste oil for another 500 years? How can my mourning of perceived separation fuel everlasting love? It just does I suppose is the answer, not found in books, but in the heart of longing, and of belonging.

Have you ever wept yourself into ecstasy?

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose that sometime

we will learn everything

there is to learn: what the world is, for example,

and what it means. I think this as I am crossing

from one field to another, in summer, and the

mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either

knows enough already or knows enough to be

perfectly content not knowing. Song being born

of quest he knows this: he must turn silent

were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead

oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly

unanswered. At my feet the white-petalled daisies display

the small suns of their center piece, their -- if you don't

mind my saying so -- their hearts. Of course

I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and

narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know?

But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,

to see what is plain; what the sun lights up willingly;

for example -- I think this

as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch --

the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the

daisies for the field.

There is so much we do not know. Are you content with this? Can you still sing the rightness of your belonging on the planet in the family of things? How do we know in our bones that questions and answers are not the point, but the song we were born to sing? I think it is perhaps to have our hearts in the center of our being. This and no more.

Where do you feel "right" and as if you "belong" without reservation? Can you imagine that being everywhere and all times?

First Snow - February 28, 2010

The snow

began here...

...calling us back to why, how,

Whence such beauty and what

the meaning;...

...and though the questions

that have assailed us all day

remain-not a single

answer has been found-

walking out now

into the silence and the light

under the trees

and through the fields,

feels like one.

The Night Traveler brought a gift of living the answer, and so too here the snow brings the answer - to walk in beauty. The snow also brought the questions - of why such beauty in the dark? From birth to death and from cosmic burst to cataclysm, our walking in beauty weaves a course in the fabric of our unknowing. The Navajo prayers speaks so well of this:

As I Walk with Beauty

As I walk, as I walk

The universe is walking with me

In beauty it walks before me

In beauty it walks behind me

In beauty it walks below me

In beauty it walks above me

Beauty is on every side

As I walk, I walk with Beauty.

It beauty it is begun, and in beauty it is ended.

Where and how do you walk in beauty?

The Night Traveler - February 23, 2010

Passing by, he could be anybody:

A thief, a tradesman, a doctor

On his way to a worried house,

But when he stops at your gate,...

...You know it is not just anyone-

It is the Night Traveler...

...He has a gift for you, but it has no name...

...He holds it in the moonlight, and it sings

Like a newborn beast,

Like a child at Christmas,....

All night-and all your life, if you are willing-...

...Will hold you like a mossy jaw,

A bath of light. An answer.

In the winter's night, there is a possibility of joy that so many of us know in the story of Christmas. For when the dawn breaks, we know it will be "our" day. Our brains calm, our hearts open, and the community breaks into a song of possibility. Sometimes, the night before my birthday I have had this same singing gift, and the days before and right after my wedding. In these presents (presence) I didn't know that they were the surprise of having an answer, as Mary suggests here. Looking back, though I see that they were a time to rest from asking questions of why and how. They were simply a "how" of living where questions were no longer important, because we were living the answer.

When has the weight of your days lifted in the night?

Going to Walden - January 23, 2010

...Going to Walden is not so easy a thing

As a greet visit. It is the slow and difficult

Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

I'm all about green visits. I lead Nature Spirituality trips to our local prairie walk of La Chua trail to see Whooping Cranes and every spring I head to Central America to work with endangered parrots. In these places I fill up, for they are the Mecca of my heart, the hajj where my self blurs into the masses of species and experiences. Indeed it is a trick to see the glory in urban and devastated areas, for my mind wants to categorize this vision as not possibly "right" and not part of the whole.

In the summer of 2001 I visited Manhattan and one evening I lay on a bench looking up the lighted trunks of those twin towers. In that moment a healing took place, for I saw the world of cities, high economy, and a dearth and death of species as integral to whole. I came to a sense of fondness for the art of humanity that creates blights as well as lights upon the night.

That urban forest is me, and it became in a few months a scene of destruction. Does the tragedy negate the beauty? If the world contradicts itself, very well, it does, for it is large, as am I. I am the world, and I contain multitudes (a la Walt Whitman, acquaintance of Henry David Thoreau, resident of Walden).

As I am the world, and I am here to gain faith that I am whole, then I am the ashes of the Twin Towers, of Treblinka, of sugar cane monoculture killing tropical lands, and the ashes of quake produced fires in Haiti. I am also the phoenix who rises out of the ashes, me, the world, the universe, here temporarily now as the ashes of old stars. Would that me, the old, could see the new that is always there beyond apocalyptic nightmares.

What in you or the world or you do you reject or resist? Is there anything you are running from, and in the business, do not see the beauty and the tragedy of this moment?

Magellan - January 22, 2010

Like Magellan, let us find our islands

to die in, far from home, from anywhere

Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places,

Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

...For what is life but reaching for an answer?

And what is death but a refusal to grow?...

..."Sail on, sail on!" he cried.

And so they did, carried the frail dream homeward.

And thus Magellan lives, although he died.

Oh Mary, you are giving answers today on how to live, which adds to the themes I see running in you that I summarized in the poem, "Answers" on January 19. To live, we take risks, seek the dream, and look for answers. To live, we die. There is nothing about comfort anywhere in the agenda. Yet here I sit in warm layers and a freshly brewed cup of coffee with dashes of chocolate, and to live I am to dash off from this domestic scene and step out into the dark that crowds my windows? I get what this poem suggests, but how exactly to do I leave home that smells of my identity, cooking through the long years? Ah, I see, in this asking I might lose myself and find those paradise islands.

Where in your life would you trade comfort in to risk living a wild, authentic life?