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 Dreams of the Classroom

I dreamed

I stood up in class

and I said aloud:

Teacher,

why is algebra important?

Sit down, he said.....

Then I dreamed

I stood up once more and said:

Teacher, my heart is falling asleep

and it wants to wake up.

It needs to be outside.

Sit down, he said.

When in elementary school I was not much of a student.  I laughed as much as I could, ignored the teacher, and when at home, played the game to be the first one out of school clothes and outside, and the last one to come in after the sun fell. For my efforts, I technically did not pass fourth grade.  There ensued a major teacher-parent conference and I was read the riot act, "Shape up now or you won't ever amount to anything."

Well I shaped up, did well in school, and sat down through many years of college and degrees.

Today will be a day full of inside work to help those beings "outside."  I make myself sit down here at the computer.  There is great risk that my heart won't quicken today and will become sleepy and dull, for I need to be outside.

What about a compromise then?  I can be outside myself, and rise above ego concerns as just now the sun is rising over the tree tops in my back yard.

So my plan for the day if I get sleepy is this:

Sit down, let go, get up, let go.  Repeat as necessary.

How do you keep your heart awake?

Mysteries, Yes - February 14, 2011

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of lambs...

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.

Ah, my spiritual practice for the day...

Look

Laugh

Lower my self

What will you practice today so that you may live the questions?

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?

Then Bluebird Sang - January 14, 2010

Bluebirds slipped a little tremble out of the triangle of his mouth

And it hung in the air until it reached my ear

Like a froth or a frill that Schumann

Might have written in a dream.

Dear morning you come with so many angels of mercy

So wondrously disguised in feathers, in leaves,

In the tongues of stones, in the restless waters,

In the creep and the click and the rustle

That greet me wherever I go

With their joyful cry: I’m still here, alive!

My angels of mercy this morning:

Tropical lofty clouds framing the ocean with the light of the new born sun

A stranger who offered me her apartment while I visit Puerto Rico

The stray dog, the stray cat, my stray thoughts

The chance to serve, and to be served

The creep and the click of my arthritic knees

To breathe. 

Who or what are you angels of mercy this day?

Li Po and the Moon

There is the story of the old Chinese poet:

At night in his boat he went drinking and dreaming

And singing

Then drowned as he reached for the moon’s reflection.

Well, probably each of us, at some time, has been

As desperate.

Not the moon, though.

Let me just be cantankerous this one day.  I can’t help it, or so I say. When I hear or sense a separation between myself from the rest of existence, I want to balk and say, “it’s not so!”  In this case, moons have been known to fall into their earth’s gravitational pull and lose themselves as they explode into planetary merger.  They become one heavenly body or trillions upon trillions of particles swirling about in the universe’s ocean.  Either way, it’s the end of their separate selves for they cannot deny the pull of the other.  Moons swoon as much as do we.

For whom or what shall you swoon today?

A Meeting

She steps into the dark swamp

where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package

drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature

like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together

like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a  field

thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.

I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman

I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,

the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want

to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly

wild.

The melody of birth harmonizes with the haunting notes of death and calls us into the wilderness.  Entering that path, footsteps pause and our resolve falters, for we know not what is before us.  Yet if we do not go forward, we will miss the most beautiful sight we will ever see.

What is it that you would see along this path?

The Chance to Love Everything

All summer I made friends

with the creatures nearby ---

they flowed through the fields

and under the tent walls,

or padded through the door,

grinning through their many teeth,

looking for seeds,

suet, sugar; muttering and humming,

opening the breadbox, happiest when

there was milk and music. But once

in the night I heard a sound

outside the door, the canvas

bulged slightly ---something

was pressing inward at eye level.

I watched, trembling, sure I had heard

the click of claws, the smack of lips

outside my gauzy house ---

I imagined the red eyes,

the broad tongue, the enormous lap.

Would it be friendly too?

Fear defeated me. And yet,

not in faith and not in madness

but with the courage I thought

my dream deserved,

I stepped outside. It was gone.

Then I whirled at the sound of some

shambling tonnage.

Did I see a black haunch slipping

back through the trees? Did I see

the moonlight shining on it?

Did I actually reach out my arms

toward it, toward paradise falling, like

the fading of the dearest, wildest hope ---

the dark heart of the story that is all

the reason for its telling?

Once, a thrice of decades ago, I was in a tent on a New Mexico plateau.  In the night there came a sniffing and prodding at the tent, much as Mary describes in her poem.  The animal(s) circled many times and I held my breath trying to not be noticed in the silence, and to also listen. Were those the feet of bear, coyote, wolf?  And depending on which, what was the best strategy?  To charge, to run, to cower? I had no weapon in the tent.  Fear defeated me and I had no courage to step outside to see who was stalking my body and my house for possible food.

Since that time whenever I go camping, I take something to bludgeon life with me in the tent - a bat, a golf club, my camping knives. I've heard too many bear stories to have my life story end with, "The bear ran with her off into the wilds and she was never seen again."

Yet, what better ending might there be?  To be taken into the wilds, to become one with teeth, earth, the spring's cubs, and droppings?   

In fact, is any other ending possible?

How would you have your life end?

Someday

Even the oldest of trees continues its wonderful labor.

Hummingbird lives in one of them.

He's there for the white blossoms, and the secrecy.

The blossoms could be snow, with a dash of pink.

At first the fruit is small and green and hard.

Everything has dreams, hope, ambition.

If I could I would always live in such shining obedience

where nothing but the wind trims the boughs.

I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life.

I'm sorry I wasn't wiser sooner.

I'm sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely.

Oh, love, lay your hands upon me again.

Some of the fruit ripens and is picked and is delicious.

Some of it falls and the ants are delighted.

Some of it hides under the snow and the famished deer are saved.

Perhaps our love is never enough, but love, no matter how small, feeds some being.  Maybe we don't see the results, only the small hardness of our hearts when love is not accepted or acknowledged. 

Just today when I was out walking upon our local prairie, I gave a list to my companion of what I regretted in my life.  We had been looking at the birds upon the flooded grassland, and as a pair of dowitchers or lesser yellowlegs or something along that line flew over I said, "I wished I knew birds better."  Then without  missing a beat, I added to the list, "I wish I knew Spanish better."  I wish I was in better shape.  I wish my knee didn't hurt so much.  I wish I wasn't so old.

 All of this comes from seeing such beauty and feeling such love, and wanting to dance with the world and give back to this earth all that she has invested in me.

One day the winter of my years will come upon me.  Then, all my gifts may well be hidden by snow white hair and withered hands. My labor then will be that I can still love and be loved. This work, perhaps the only work that ever really matters, never ends.  Amen.

What is on your list of regrets?

If the Philosopher is Right

If the philosopher is right,

that all we are

and all the earth around us

is only a dream,

even if a bright, long dream-

that everything is nothing

but what sits in the mind,

that the trees, that the red bird

are all in the mind,

and the river, and the sea in storm,

are all in the mind,

that nothing exists fierce or soft or apt to be

truly shaken-

nothing tense, wild, sleepy-nothing

like Yeats' girl with the yellow hair-

then you too are a dream

which last night and the night before that

and the years before that

you were not.

My partner is a philosopher, and over the years I have learned how right he has been.  It's a bit appalling to admit, but heck, I already admit to being lost and mad with love, so why not also be "wrong?" 

For instance, we've had this discussion dozens of time where we ask, "What exists outside of the mind?"  At one time I would have said,"How silly, everything exists and is real."  What I believe he has always said, although he can't speak for himself as he is off on a Zen Buddhist retreat, is that the question no longer matters to him.  Whether dream or not, the important question is "How do you treat those with whom we share this planet?" 

I might ask it this way...

"How can you be shaken to your core every day so that the dream of beloved community comes into being - not just in our mind, but in all minds?" 

If we as a group of people can envision this way of living, with our hearts broken letting in the whole world, love and compassion is real. Isn't it?    

It might be if this day, you and I, admit we are all wild fools.  We are not ourselves. We are the world.

Where are you not?

Now Comes the Long Blue Cold

Now comes the long blue cold

And what shall I say but that some

Bird in the tree of my heart

Is singing.

The same heart that only yesterday

Was a room shut tight, without dreams.

Isn't it wonderful the cold wind and

Spring in the heart inexplicable.

Darling girl. Picklock.

There is a saying that is often in my head, “surprised by love.”  I don’t know why love should be a surprise, because the world is so beautiful.   I forget though. One moment thoughts are all dark and gloom, and then, and let me say it, through grace love arises.  Like the sun ever faithful, love will come again.

Sometimes though relief comes not soon enough.  As the pain tortures us cold disconnection seems everlasting. But just when you think you can’t take it anymore, love’s sorrow does its work to open the heart.  In this case it’s not like a picklock, but more like a thief dynamiting a safe. 

Let me today blow up the allusion of safety, exploding my heart so that love and beauty may be enter freely.

When have you been surprised by love?