More Evidence - Part 1

1.

The grosbeak sings with a completely cherishable roughness..

With what words can I convince you of the casualness with which the white swans fly..

Do you give a thought now and again to the essential sparrow, the necessary toad?

Just as truly as the earth is ours, we belong to it. The tissue of our minds is made of it, and the soles of our feet, as fully as the tiger’s claw, the branch of the whitebark pine, the voices of the bird, the dog-tooth violet and the tooth of the dog….

This morning I took a hike with our ectourist group in Guyana up to some caves with bats. Along the way we walked through a forest teaming with thousands of species biting, singing, crawling, hooting, growing, and photosynthesizing.  I love the tropical forest and after days and days in one, I begin to know I belong, as do all beings.  However, I am guessing that for you, like me, there are certain special places in your life that more clearly and strongly say, “You belong.”  For me it is swimming in natural body of water.

After this hike I mentioned I jumped off a bank of a forest river into clear cool water.  With fish swimming all around me, I circled round to see a Pygmy Kingfisher perched on a branch and below him, my species washing their clothes.   Clothes, fur, feathers  no matter how roughly or finely we are clad, we are the skin of the earth emerging from the mixing of mud with water. 

Belonging is the first step, and a hard one to be sure. I believe there is more struggles before us all - knowing we are necessary, and also not.

Where do you gain your greatest sense of belonging?

What the Body Says - August 30, 2010

I was born here, and

I belong here, and

I will never leave.

The blue heron's

gray smoke will flow over me

for years

and the wind will decide

all directions

until I am safely and entirely

something else.

I am thinking this

this winter morning...

of transformation

Of course

I wonder about

the mystery

that is surely up there

in starry space

and how some part of me

will go there at last.

But I am talking now

of the way the body speaks,

and the wind, that keeps saying,

firmly, lovingly:

a little while and then this body

will be stone; then

it will be water; then

it will be air.

I am thinking about yesterday morning when I was swimming in the Ichetucknee river. While in that cold water that carried me and my burdens, I transformed. For the nearly two hours of snorkeling and flowing with all we saw, I knew that I belonged as surely as did the blue heron preening amidst the storks on the river side. This was not a cognitive knowing, for there is no thinking other than marvel and wonder as we swam down river. The body, though, merges into one just as this river will merge into one via the Sante Fe, Suwanne, Gulf, and Atlantic Ocean. With turtles and Ibis at nose level only a few feet away I become bird and reptile. Floating under a cypress tree where an Osprey has just taken an unlucky perch, I become fish. Eyes nearly as wide open as the family of otters snacking on river bottom mussels, I am bivalve and mammal.

Upon exiting the river, reluctantly, I shiver for nearly an hour as my core temperature returns to normal, especially difficult as a wind has come up. This wind wings a message out from my heart of love and gratitude that at least for a short while yesterday I knew no separate self.

Where do you experience flow in your 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?

Egrets - February 27, 2010

...bleached reeds

at the far shore

which, as I looked,

wrinkled suddenly

into three egrets-

a shower

of white fire!

Even half-asleep they had

such faith in the world

that had made them-

tilting through the water,

unruffled, sure,

by the laws

of their faith not logic,

they opened their wings

softly and stepped

over every dark thing.

I come near to the end of reading Mary Oliver for two months, and with this poem, I see my faith growing that we humans belong on this planet though we feel so distant for the source of our being. Mary's poems have been full of questions for me as I look for answers. I want to know how to be sure that I can fly over the darks things in the human psyche, soul, and genocidal and environmentocidal cultures. Despite (or perhaps because of) our burdensome logic which discerns ourselves and others as flawed, my body begins to trust that this is only part of our story. With our musing and abusing, we are flowing with All and we are flying. Our very struggles in the dark is the beauty by the pond that is the white fire of our beings. In the pond's stillness, in the stillness of pre-dawn dark, I see my reflection in the world around. I fly with egrets, and I fly with my regrets.

Do you have regrets where you judge yourself as being less than the beauty of a wood's pond or the egrets flying over them?