To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say - behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs….

4.

Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,

The dancer, the potter,

To make me a begging bowl

Which I believe

My soul needs.

And if I come to you,

To the door of your comfortable house

With unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,

Will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.

I would like to give you this chance.

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change.

Congratulations, if

You have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.

Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure-

Your life-

What would do for you?

7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
through with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself.  Then forget it.  Then, love the world.

Someday I feel like a child playing in the meadow, while bombs fly over head and digging parties put friends into the ground next to where I stare in wonder at the trees.  What do I mean by this?  Some days I grow weary of fighting – I just want to love the world. 

For instance I am at a bird conference now.  Many of these people, if not most, have wild parrots as companions in their home, or raise them for various reasons, including making a livelihood.  I am mostly of the clan, “mutual other” where I see birds as beings with their own inherent worth and dignity. After years of studying them in the wild, my heart hurts to have them in captivity where we humans make most of the choices for them.  Those surrounding me are mostly of the clan, “utilitarian.”  Humans have ultimate control over birds and it is not an ethical dilemma to control them and place them into our lives, where the birds live quite differently from their natural and evolved behavior.  Truly I guess that all of us belong to both clans, to the one clan called earth.

So I find myself torn – is it possible to fight with one’s self for any worthwhile reason? How do I speak of my truth, of my longing, and of my pain while letting the other know that I hold their needs tenderly and that we are of the family of things?

I go to the other, hold out my begging bowl, and ask them to fill it with their beauty.

As our cups fill together, may we forget to love only ourselves, and instead love the world.

Love the world…them’s good fighting words!

To whom or to what do you hold out your begging bowl today?

Happiness – March 13, 2010

Happiness – March 13, 2010

In the afternoon I watched

The she-bear; she was looking

For the secret bin of sweetness-

Honey..

Maybe she grew full, or sleepy, or maybe

A little drunk…

And began to hum and sway.

I saw her lift her honeyed muzzle

Into the leaves, and her thick arms,

As though she would fly-

An enormous bee

All sweetness and wings-

Down into the meadows, the perfection

Of honey suckle and roses and clover-

To float and sleep in the sheer nets

Swaying from flower to flower

Day after shining day.

The bear turns into a bee and floats in interconnected nets.

We turn into being and happiness in the web of existence-

Caught, floating, flying.

What causes you to be sleepy or intoxicated with life?

Hunter's Moon-Eating the Bear

...Good friend,

when I crouch beside the blades of fire,

holding a piece of your life on a knife-tip,

I will be leaning in like a spoke to the hub-

the dense orb that is all of us.

my body like a cupped hand...

...holding your vast power, your grace

...your breath, your hairiness,...

...in the small sinews of my prayers.

some invisible dead-center

Here is Mary telling us an answer once again to THE questions: What is the meaning of life? Of death? Death is the center of us all. We are here to eat and be eaten.

I know this most strongly in the animal flesh I have eaten over a fire in the woods by gentle streams, or on a beach near ocean's black night. These waters flow into one as I take into my body the precious fish, a vow of union if ever there was. I love fish! I love to swim with them, look at them, catch them, eat them, be them. In the movie, "Lord of the Rings" when Gollum goes fishing he takes the flopping fish in his hands and prays, "my precious, my precious," and then proceeds to whack the head of a fish against a rock. Being largely vegan these days, my heart swells with joy and wonder with the thought of life as food. The trick is to see my own self as food.

On my wedding day when I gave promises to my spouse Meredith, we celebrated the union with a poem he had mostly written:

Our Whole Lives (OWL)

The owl has special wing feathers that quiet its flight,

So the prey never detects the predator.

One noiseless flap, two, and the small mammal is caught.

As out of the soul's dark night, love is suddenly there, upon us:

Talons and beak.

We succumb,

And turn our bodies over to the nourishment of a grander thing.

In my death, in my ego death and the seepage of my bones into the earth, is my prayer to earth and all her beings.

What foods bring meaning of life and death to you?

Entering the Kingdom - February 13, 2010

The crows see me...I am

Possibly dangerous, I am

Entering the kingdom.

The dream of my life

Is...to learn something by being nothing

A little while but the rich

Lens of attention...

...But the crows puff their feathers and cry...

...they know me for what I am.

No dreamer,

No eater of leaves.

In the Christian scriptures we hear about entering the kingdom. Jesus says that no one enters the kingdom except through him and in Matthew 3:3 we hear, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again". Here in the poem it seems that Mary cannot enter the kingdom because the crows are keeping guard. They seem to know when you are not open to the moment, to letting the crisp lens of love bring you to complete acceptance for the beauty and tragedy around you. The moment we lapse into a sense of not belonging, we are no longer in the kingdom, or at least we believe that we are not. The crows in their calls test our resolve - do we or do we not belong to the family of things? We do. Love does not lie.