A Fox in the Dark

A Fox in the Dark

February 26, 2010

A fox goes by in the headlights like an electric shock.

A fox goes by in the headlights like an electric shock.


Then he pauses at the edge of the road
and the heart, if it is still alive,


feels something--a yearning for which we have no name


but which we may remember, years later, in the darkness,


upon some other empty road.

Feels something-a yearning for which we have no name

But which we may remember, years later, in the darkness

One time upon a blizzard impacted remote road in Alaska a fox stopped dead center in the road ahead of my van.  It was hard at first to see who it was given the blowing snow, but as the fox did not move I was able to get quite close.  Almost upon the wild one, I wondered if he or she had been hit by a car or was sick, or like the rest of us on this journey, sticking to the road like a prayer that would keep us out of ditch and doom.  The fox began to trot and moved with me for a while down the road.  It felt a loss when the beauty finally decided to pause by the side of the road, and as I went on my way north, I could see the fox staring at me through the rear view mirror.

Looking back now, I still see those eyes, whispering through snow dusted whiskers  - I am with you, you do not journey alone. 

Who journeys with you?

Moon and Water

I wake and spend

the last hours

of darkness

with  no one

but the moon.

She listens

to my complaints

like the good

companion she is

and comforts me surely

with her light.

But she, like everyone,

has her own life.

So finally I understand

that she has turned away,

is no longer listening.

She wants me

to refold myself

into my own life.

And, bending close,

as we all dream of doing,

she rows with her white arms

through the dark water

which she adores.

I awoke this  morning several hours away from sunrise into the darkness. There is no moon in this predawn time for she hasn't risen yet. When she does, I still won't be able to see her through the horizon's cloud covers.  The sun might also not shine.  To whom shall I complain then?

Burrowing under my own covers I look out onto the woods and see faint shadows and hear a far off barred owl echoing my own lament

which is that I have ever wasted one moment

not being a good companion

not adoring the world

not grateful for this day, though it seems gray at its inception

not bending close to hear the smallest whisper

of my heart, of yours, of the earth's.

What are your complaints today?

It Was Early

It was early, which has always been my hour to begin looking at the world

and of course, even in the darkness, to begin listening into it,

especially under the pines where the owl lives and sometimes calls out

as I walk by, as he did on this morning. So many gifts!

What do they mean?  In the marshes where the pink light was just arriving

the mink with his bristle tail was stalking the soft-eared mice,

and in the pines the cones were heavy, each one ordained to open.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

Little mink, let me watch you.

 Little mice, run and run.

Dear pine cone, let me hold you as you open.

I wonder how you awoke this morning? Did you have doubts of your kind?  Perhaps there are certain politicians whose rhetoric exasperates you, or the latest tally from terrorist bombing correlates with how many fewer times you will express today.  Maybe you are thinking of the tender children who cannot run away from abusing adults, who could not run away from their circumstances either.

What if, as we think of how we are hunted and haunted each in our own way, we choose this today to be blessed.  We watch the harm, we watch the fear, and we watch the chase, which is a dance, isn't?  

Then in response, we choose to bless the world and hold all lives, mean and small, knowing that the human heart may yet open.  Maybe today.

Who do you hold today in hopes it will open?

Mink

A mink, jointless as heat, was

tip-toeing along the edge of the creek,

which was still in its coat of snow, yet singing-I could hear it!-

the old song of brightness....

the mink had a hunger in him

bigger than his shadow, which was gathered

like a sheet of darkness under his

neat feet which were busy

making dents in the snow. 

He sniffed slowly and thoroughly in all

four directions, as though

it was a payer to the whole world...

For me, it was a the gift of the winter

 to see him.  Once, like a hot, dark-brown pillar,

he stood up-and then he ran forward, and was gone. 

I stood awhile and then walked on

over the white snow:  the terrible, gleaming

loneliness.  I took me, I suppose,

something like six more weeks to reach

finally a patch of green, I paused so often

to be glad, and grateful, and even then carefully across

 the vast, deep woods I kept looking back.

In the winter of our lives, are there patches of experience for which we can be grateful? And the ultimate test, can we see beauty in the harshness and the dying back?  My sister recently was diagnosed with bone cancer, probably metastasized from a previous bout of breast cancer.  For me, this is devastating news.  There are some hard years for her coming up, and I'm guessing, not too many of them either.  Yet, in our phone calls she has times of laughing, nearly giggling.  Yesterday her retort to the mess her affairs are in, was, "At least I got to see a hawk."  She had seen a Sharp-shinned hawk foraging around in her snow covered bushes for sparrows, and fly away talons empty. 

She is like a beautiful sleek mink, and now is the time for me to look at how her life is a prayer to the whole world.

Who or what is your mink in the winter time?

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who make the morning

And spread it over the fields

And into the faces of the tulips

And the nodding morning glories,

And into the windows of, even, the

Miserable and the crotchety-

Best preacher that ever was,

Dear star, that just happens

To be where you are in the universe

To keep us from every-darkness,

To ease us with warm touching

To hold us in the great hands of light-

Good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

In happiness, in kindness.

Up high in a skyscraper in down town Edmonton, Alberta I face the window while reading Mary’s poem. I too awoke early, which is easy to do here given how early the sun rises this far north. The sun emerges out of my vision, but the rays hit the windows of the office building across the street, and they reflect mightily into my eyes as I write. Sun, do you see my tears of gratitude, which are the tears of so many of us who struggle with the tension of whether to be crotchety or kind? How might we come together to choose kindness? Isn’t this what religion is all about? To address these questions, I am attending a conference on Conservation Biology and will present a paper, “Avian Conservation as Lived Religion.” I speak of how conservation teams go into the field to save and savor the world, and how they experience transcendent meaning making moments amongst them. I speak of how the emerging nature religion guides conservationists into choosing to give themselves over to a better thing as they strive to be kind so that the world may know happiness. I am a preacher who has been gratefully bested by the Sun, life giver, creator of love. Today. This moment. Amen.

What helps you be kind?

Am I Not Among the Early Risers

Am I not among the early risers

And the long distance walkers?

Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider

The perfection of the morning star..

Have I not thought, for years, what it would be

Worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,

To gather blueberries,

Thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?

What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly

At the top of the field,

Her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine,

Has not already done?...

Here is an amazement-once I was twenty years old and in

Every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,

And in every motion of the green earth there was

A hint of paradise,

And now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

Above the modest house and the palace – the same darkness.

Above the evil man and the just, the same starts.

Above the child who will recover and the child who will

Not recover, the same energies roll forward

From one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.

I bow down.

Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment,

Or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other than mine

In the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table?

Have I ever taken fortune for granted?...

Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold

Or the night too long as black as oil anyway,

Or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely

Of the second-rate, less than happiness

As I stepped down from the porch and set out along

The green paths of the world?

An acquaintance of mine says that Mary’s poems shifted over the years – that Mary had a different look on death. I wonder if I am picking up some of this here. She says she is 60 and she moves with the same grace as a 20 year old, however, I wonder if she or anyone really does. Does the brain somehow get different messages from the aging body, a general sense of being ill at ease in the world? And so we question how we have judged life and death and one another, for our bodies are feeling judged by the years. What did we do wrong to end up in this place? Why did evolution give us the brains to be aware of our aging and also serve out the fate that we age and die? Can we say it is simply a matter of endothermic and exothermic balanced equations as evolution moves towards greater complexity? Pondering meaning perhaps you say that each must get out of the way for life to meander down the unwinding unknown path of evolution. My only response to this possibility is to bow down and to offer a prayer that the next step I take is graceful and spacious, beyond wrong doing and rightdoing.

What or who do you judge?

Being Country Bred - January 7, 2010

....Sweet world,

Think not to confuse me with poems or love beginning

Without a sign or sound:

Here at the edge of rivers hung with ice

Spring is still miles away, and yet I wake

Throughout the dark, listen, and throb with all

Her summoning explosions underground.

Oh Mary, you continue to point to darkness and to decay, and that is the faithful sign, sound, and companion of what may yet be the abundant love in the human heart. In the coolness that we present to others of our kind, and the heat that comes to our changing climates, is this place where beauty and growth begins, recycles, ends, amen?