The Last Word Abut Fox (Maybe)

Where is the fox now?

Somewhere, doing his life's work, which is living his life....

How many rabbits has he caught so far?

Many, many, many...

This doesn't sound very important....

Have you never heard of the meek and what is t o become of them?

What's meek about eating rabbits?...

You know, there's only one thing to say.  I think

you're a little crazy.

I thank the Lord.

Where are you now?

Wherever you are, you are doing your life's work.

Maybe you don't think so as you get up and eat dull toast and do that exercise routine one more time, if at all.

Perhaps you think that today you'll do nothing important.

Whatever you do, I don't think there's anything meek about it.

Maybe I and others are crazy to think so, but your wild and precious life is astounding.

Be like the fox looking for something to catch.

Catch the spirit today!

Are there areas in your life that you do not hold in high regard?  

Sometimes

1.

Something came up

out of the dark.

It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.

It wasn't an animal

or a flower,

unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,

a head the size of a cat

but muddy and without ears.

I don't know what God is.

I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them

some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometime

melancholy leaves me breathless...

3.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!

Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.

The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

5.

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.

Each time it seemed to solve everything.

Each time it solved a great many things

but not everything.

Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and

thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in  my heart

and fortify me,

take away my hunger for answers,

let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.

Let the cathead appear again-

the smallest of your mysteries,

some wild cousin of my own blood probably-

some cousin of my own wild blood probably,

in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around

one corner or another.

This doesn't amuse me.

Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.

It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.

I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Step One: Question

What is it that comes out of the dark?

Is it God?

Is it death?

What is the necessary arrangement between the two?

Step Two: Answer

Love

Step Three: Action

Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

Listen

Be crazy

Laugh

Grow

Step Four:  Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary

I summarized Mary's poem with these 4 steps. How would you? What are your "4 steps" to life?

 

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

On cold evenings

My grandmother,

With ownership of half her mind-

The other half having flown back to Bohemia

Spread newspapers over the porch floor

So, she said, the garden ants could crawl

As under a blanket, and keep warm,

And what shall I wish for myself,

But, being so struck by the lightning of years,

To be like her with what is left, that loving.

My mother has dementia. My father-in-law does too. In their crazy Alzheimer’s world it’s hard for me to share reality with them. Okay, it’s hard for anyone I believe to have shared realities, but even more so when the mind turns inward on itself, creating cognitive loops that by pass experience and learning. Given that it is in our family, my spouse and I wonder what our fading years will look like. Will we be who’ve we always have been, but even more so? For instance, will we be more loving and caring, or more angry and afraid? When we have so little left, will we be willing to give it to others? I don’t know the answer to that, and I imagine I will end up being a mix of outward and inward focusing just like I am now. What if, though, I do all I can to rewire my brain and lay down those pathways of compassion and interconnection so that they might endure through dementia? What if I did so now so that pathways of love could endure in the hard times of stress and not getting my needs met that will surely arise as does the sun now as I write? Today I will pick up a newspaper and as usual read it and play the jumble to ward off dementia. When I finish, may I bow deeply as I lay the paper down in gratitude, as if I were giving it to the ants and to the least of these. I may not ward off dementia or stay out of the crazy ward, but I might just see the whole world as my ward, my love.

Do you have any older mentors who have show you the way forward?

The Poet With His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines of rocks and water to the place where the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that jubilation and water-fun and you can stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can drip with despair all afternoon and still, on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush, puffing out its spotted breast, will sing of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

I am reminded by this poem of a goodly number of years which I spent with my face in hands, sobbing with regrets and loss. I tried to stifle the sound, for indeed, who wants to hear any more of that sound? I had seen such senseless tragedy in Guatemala when I lived there - forests burned, people murdered, children abandoned to disease and ignorance, parrot nests felled, and birds poached to approaching extinction. Some days it seemed that if I even heard the word Guatemala, conservation, or parrot my throat would get tight and I would be altered in a downward decline for the rest of the day. Part of what brought me out of that dark time was to go ahead and let the despair take me to where it would, however, I would remind myself that I was going through such pain because of the beautiful song of the people and the Yellow-naped Amazon parrots of Central America. It was that perfect, stone-hard beauty which allowed me to hold the tragic as well.

What helps you hold the tragic?

March

There isn't anything in this world but mad love. Not in this world. No tame love, calm love, mild love, no so-so love. And of course, no reasonable love. Also there are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?...

Today, on the beach, an old man was sitting in the sun. I called out to him, and he turned. His face was like an empty pot. I remember his tall, pale wife; she died long ago. I remember his daughter-in-law. When she died, hard, and too young, he wept in the streets. He picked up pieces of wood, and stones, and anything else that was there, and threw them at the sea. Oh, how he loved his wife. Oh, how he loved young Barbara. I stood in front of him, not expecting any answer yet not wanting to pass without some greeting. But his face had gone back to whatever he was dreaming. Something touched, me lightly, like a knife-blade. I felt I was bleeding, though just a little, a hint. Inside I flared hot, then cold. I thought of you. Whom I love madly.

I think about all the times I have chosen "easier." For to love is to feel the knife-bleed of true living. I mean, really, who wants that day in and day out? If I were to take that path, wouldn't opening my heart allow the knife to sink only deeper? Exactly! Last night I saw the movie, "The Road." It is a apocalypse movie where a father and a son journey through the desolated earth along a road that takes them to the sea. The only beauty you see in the whole movie is the love between the two, and the innocent love of a child who was born after the world began to die. Their love grows as does their pain. Are the roads we take in our own lives much different? There is desolation and armegheddon threatening all around, and danger around every bend in the road. Yet we, if grace allows, stay on the road that takes us to the cleansing sea, even if once we think we are there, the waves froth with pollutants and defilement. We keep going. Until the cleansing "see" lets us know of mad love.

Who or what do you love madly?

Robert Schuman - March 20. 2010

Hardly a day passes I don't think of him

in the asylum...

Everywhere in the world his music

explodes out of itself, as he

could not. And now I understand

something so frightening, and wonderful-

how the minds clings to the road it knows...

he has just met a girl named Clara. He turns the corner,

he scrapes the dirt from his soles.

and he runs up the dark staircase, humming.

In the depths of our craziness, in our brain patterns gone awry, there is the music of love that is steadfast. What if all our life was focused on learning love and interconnection, would we in our dementia, our strokes, our crabby arthritic bodies pave the road for others to follow that leads to the beloving community? I suspect we would although we would not be aware that we were doing so.

What has been with you for the beginning, and persists through your journeys and your aging?

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?

Clam Man - February 1, 2010

...Some say he's crazy.

He sells clams

Door to door through town...

"Want to buy some clams?" he shouted....

...."No," I said, ashamed

But frightened, and wished him away.

And he disappeared,

Banging the pail as he went

To scare the little breathers in their shells.

Where does shame come from? I've read that it is hard wired in us, that shameful feelings arise on their own from deep within, and the our various cultural constructs add layers on top of this for particular shameful stimuli. So when the frightful, crazy world comes knocking on the doors of our lives and we don't answer, but hide behind masks, shells of ego defenses, or literally in our isolated homes typing away on Facebook, is there anyone's inner soul that does not says "Now wait just a doggone minute, isn't the good life to be open to all that the world is, come hell or high water?" If we hide or clam up, we might miss something wondrous, or something that might teach us who we are and who we are becoming.

Do you experience shame in your life? What unmet needs might be behind these feelings? What might you do to respond to these feeling with actions that open you to the world?

Aunt Elsie's Night Music - January 25, 2009

Aunt Elsie hears

Singing in the night,

So I am sent running

To search under the trees.

I stand in dark hearing nothing-

Or, at least, not what she hears-

Uncle William singing again

Irish lullabies.

I stay a while, then turn and go inside.

Uncle William's been dead for years...

...She's so old there's no hope...

...I am called from sleep to walk in the night

And think of death...

...Aunt Elsie is waiting.

I lean close to the pink ear.

Maybe this is what love is,

And always will be, all my life.

Whispering,

I give her an inch of hope

To bite on, like a bullet.

I awake this morning thinking of rest. A night's tossing and turning accompanies the mounting stress and anxiousness of the unknown that feeds the freedom of choice that is before me and mine. Wendall Berry says in his poem "The Peace of Wild Things" that rest is where beauty is and happens in the grace of the world. I have yet to hear Mary speak of rest. Oh, there is rhythm and abundance and beauty, but always there is death and pain behind her words. Her whispered words of love don't obliterate the pain, they perhaps lets us endure it.

I also read Sufi literature and scripture every morning, including Rumi poems and Tarot cards. So I brought the question of where rest lies to my meditation this morning, and drew the "death card." Rumi invites us to "die before we die" so that we may live in love's embrace. In giving up who we are we gain the world. We empty so that we maybe filled, and what we fill with is the whole of existence, which is despair and joy, pain and laughter. The result of this filling seems not to be rest, then, but as the Sufi's would describe, ecstasy fueled by the stimuli of our environments which says we are one in love. The question seems not so much how we bare the pain, but how we bare the love.

Do your days contain rest? Is your rest a hiding from the world, or a strategy that lets you awake and bare all that is?

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

Anne - January 18, 2010

The daughter is mad, and so

I wonder what she will do....

...I feel my heart go wild, Anne,

I feel my heart go wild.

I know a hundred children,

But never before a child

Hiding so deep a trouble

Or wanting so much to please.

Or tending so desperately all

The small civilities.

Having just come from the North Atlantic Veterinary Conference with over 13,000 attendees I am mindful of the social pressures exerted when ever two or more humans are gathered, let alone families, communities, and global villages. I found myself watching others and watching myself about all the subtle ways we strive to belong, and as a corollary, exclude others. We hide who we are so that others might not see the truth underneath - that we all are so very flawed and less than we could be. Yet in this fumbling and bumbling of who we are there is perfection. If we could just loosen up a bit, I wonder what glory would shine through. If we would let our hearts run wild....

Where do you force yourself to behave in a certain way to gain acceptance or to belong? Who do you exclude?