Hurricane

It didn't behave

like anything you had

ever imagined. The wind

tore at the trees, the rain

fell for days slant and hard.

The back of the hand

to everything. I watched 

the trees bow and their leaves fall

and crawl back into the earth.

As though, that was that.

This was one hurricane

I lived through, the other one

was of a different sort, and

lasted longer. Then 

I felt my own leaves giving up and 

falling. The back of the hand to 

everything. But listen now to what happened

to the actual trees;

toward the end of that summer they

pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.

It was the wrong season, yes,

but they couldn't stop. They 

looked like telephone poles and didn't

care. And after the leaves came

blossoms. For some things

there are no wrong seasons.

which is what I dream of for me.

Today there is a nor'easter bearing down on where I live in New York. The wind will blow and the few leaves that still cling to our trees and bushes I imagine will be slapped down by the back hand of a winter storm.  To stay safe, the region's residents will take shelter for the next 24 hours, staying out of harm's way. 

 I remember once when I was 15 by father backhanded me, bloodying my nose, and I wonder how this and other assaults, perceived and otherwise, cause me to hunker down still, withdrawing so as to keep safe.   Each of us has cause to blame human kind for being wrong and inflicting so much pain upon one another and this world.  We have reason to despair. We also have choice to invite in love and life's crazy and erratic possibilities. Alas we cannot stay out of harm's way, but we put ourselves in beauty's way.

As leaves uncurl in thanks to the sun's gift of light, we too can shift.  There are no wrong seasons for life, love, joy, and peace.  Just when you thought the world before you was painted with one heart killing color, a splash comes or a drop, the canvass of your conceptions now ruined. 

Why do our minds seek unilateral thinking?  I am sure it is for some evolved survival reasons this judging we do when we call one thing good and another bad. Our subconscious minds evolved so we can react quickly to threats without. This survival orientation though paints over the interdependent reality where beauty brushes up against the cruelest act.  We imagine ourselves too busy avoiding tigers, angry fathers, and murderous tribes to see the whole - no separation between this one snow storm and leaves that die, and new ones to surprise and surpass us all.

*******

Questions to journal by:

Where have you felt slapped down in life?

Has healing come to you?  How?

What have you learned from the storms in your life? 

Is it possible to see beauty in tragedy?

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?

University Hospital, Boston - March 4, 2010

The trees on the hospital lawn

are lush and thriving. They too

are getting the best of care,

like you, and the anonymous many....

...We sit on the lawn together, holding hands

while you tell me: you are better.

How many young men, I wonder

came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains

from the read and hideous battlefields...

...and how many died

staring at the leaves of the trees...

...tell myself, you are better,

because my life without you would e

a place of parched and broken trees.

Later, walking the corridors down to the street,

I turn and step inside an empty room.

Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face.

Now the bed is made all new,

the machines have been rolled away. The silence

continues, deep and neutral,

as I stand there, loving you.

Poems Vultures and Ghosts in recent days linger in the battlefields of my mind that I pray surrenders to the unnatural divide between death and life. By embracing death, we can love ever the harder.

In my youth I knew not much of human love, or of death. Then I saw the movie, Gone With the Wind where Scarlet is overwhelmed in the Atlanta train stations where thousands of wounded and dying are laid around the tracks. There was my first glimpse of universal and massive human suffering. I saw it from the eyes of a southern raised, white privileged human, in fact, born in Atlanta. Some years later I saw the movie, Showboat, and the universal suffering extended out to those of African descent caught in the web of colonialist harm.

Always, always I connected to nonhuman suffering spending, most of my adult life in veterinary hospitals and field clinics. There, in hospitals, I find, human or non, we all are equal. In death we all are equal. In loving, we all are equal.

What do hospitals tell you of life and death? Of love?

Sleeping in the Forest - February 7, 2010

I thought the earth

remembered me...

...I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed,...

...All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. by morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

Having just watched portions of the WWII fantasy and violent film, Inglorious Basterds last night, I felt myself vanishing into something worse. This was a story of no redemption, of such a thorough interconnection to our angry and revengeful sides. It was as if the movie director and screen play writer imagined every deep and dark thing in their souls, and projected them onto the characters in the story. There was no escaping the reality of who we are.

If reality is interconnection, and if we are the world and in every breath we become the world with the intermix of water and air molecules exchanging in our lungs and then becoming cemented into our tissues, then we must also become worse and better with every breath.

We are the Nazi's, the nations going to war, and the singing forest creatures at night. Perhaps somehow after a night spent under the stars and moon, we can say "all things shining" because beauty is always with us. Where is the shining in the relentless doom that accompanies us? I am the mirror that reflects back all things shining, and I also hold up a broken mirror, shattered by despair. What does it mean to be human? Who are we? How are we to walk with beauty all around us, when our shadow sides stalk the a peaceful forest?

How do you deal with the violent, hurtful behavior of our kind?