Percy (2002-2009)

This - I said to Percy when I had left our bed and gone out onto the living room couch where he found me apparently doing nothing – this is called thinking. It’s something people do, not being entirely children of the earth, like a dog or a tree or a flower. His eyes questioned such an activity…Actually I like kissing better.

A Year's Rising with Mary Oliver's Poems 

January 1, 2010 - April 23, 2011

Oh Mary and readers, we are at our last poem together and it is one where I resist her words.  This happens so rarely.  For I feel that people are entirely children of this earth. Our thinking is as the sap rising in the tree and a dog drooling.  Maybe if I had the gift of genius of words that Mary had, I too would feel a separation from life around me.  For how can words capture the kiss of the morning sun upon one’s face and the caress of the wind or a feathered wing?

I suppose they can’t, but they do remind us where the path is.

So I thank you Mary for this time together, for keeping me on the path to see beauty, tragedy, interconnection - reality - in all moments.

And now I think I will lay down my pen, and go and kiss the ground and hug a tree  - my future and always daily nature meditation.

What might you share with others here about your experience of Mary’s poems and our shared reflections?

What is your daily nature meditation?

In Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama - March 15, 2011

Death taps his black wand and something vanishes.  Summer, winter…branch of an oak tree…three just hatched geese.  Many trees and thickets…violets…

Lambs that, only recently , were gamboling in the field. And old mule, in Alabama, that could take no more of anything.  And then, what follows?  Then spring again, summer, and the season of harvest.  …..

More lambs and new green grass in the field, for their happiness until.  And some kind of yellow flower whose name I don’t know (but what does that matter?) rising around and out of the half-buried, half-vulture-eaten, harness-galled, open-mouthed (its teeth long and blackened), breathless, holy mule.

Not only in Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama, but I imagine ever where we looked we would see life sprouting from the ghastly evidence of death.  Why then do we accept life so well, and not so death?

Except that I doubt, given the amount of resistance to death if we are any more accepting of life.

How can we be when we spend the earth’s resources to prolong our lives 6 months more, perhaps, when children, birds, peoples, and forests are dying from our extraction economies?

How can we be for life when we seal our hearts from others, just so we can be safe, just so we can live? 

Living is all well and good, but what if to be safe we kill relationships, possibility, justice, and flourishing for all?  Is that living?

Maybe we just need to do some more timely dying – of bodies, of egos, of assumptions, of separation.

May I this day let the stubborn mule of my ways die.

What is your stubborn mule?

Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?

Did you see in it the morning, rising into the silvery air,

an armful of white blossoms,

a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned

into the bondage of its wings: a snowbank, a bank of lilies,

biting the air with its black beak?....

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?

Yesterday I got an email update of "birds to see" in  my north Florida area. One sighting is of a Tundra Swan that has been with us remarkably all winter.  I wonder about taking the time from my day to go look for the bird, to slap my eyes upon the beauty if only through the binocular or spotting scope lens.  Perhaps today it is enough to just know that such marvel exists out there, somewhere - a kernel of excitement and belonging that grows my faith this day.  If I can manage to wake up today ( at least dear god let me do so in part), I won't need special optics to see beauty.  I'll just open my heart and be the change I wish in the world.

What is beauty for?

How Perfectly

How perfectly and neatly opens the pink rose

This bright morning, the sun warm on my shoulders,

Its heat on the opening petals.

Possibly it is the smallest, the least important event at this moment

In the whole world.

Yet I stand there, utterly happy. 

This dawn opened rather pink this morning up here in the cold north of Albany, New York.  I am attending the National Wildlife Rehabilitation Association Annual Symposium and I have a presentation to give this evening.  After arriving here and checking out the crowd and the room, I discovered that I needed to restructure this presentation.  So after a night of tossing and turning I have spent this morning “perfecting” my talk while watching the sun rise out the hotel window.  The irony doesn’t escape me that my seminar is about affirming how perfectly beautiful we humans already are.  What’s left to do is just tweaking, and grace in our lives.

Whatever slides I end up with, whatever jokes or points I make or don’t make, my strongest desire is that I can stand before the audience, utterly happy to behold their perfection, and mine.  Ours.

May grace so visit you and yours today.

How are you perfect?

Another Summer Begins

Summer begins again.

How many

do I still have?

Not a worthy question,

I imagine.

Hope is one thing,

gratitude another

and sufficient

unto itself.

the white blossoms of the shad

have opened

because it is their time

to open,

the mockingbird

is raving

in the thornbush.

How did it come to be

that I am no longer young

and the world

that keeps time

in its own way

has just been born?

I don't have the answers

and anyway I have become suspicious

of such questions,

and as for hope,

that tender advisement,

even that

I'm going to leave behind.

I'm just going to put on

my jacket, my boots,

I'm just going to go out

to sleep

all this night

in some unnamed, flowered corner

of the pasture.

If Thirst was about loss and seeking wholeness, then Evidence appears to be about aging.  It's not that Mary's poems or any collection of them can be said to be about any one thing, so perhaps it is me who is thinking about aging.  There is only one more Mary Oliver collection left to read after this one, Swan.  Mary is getting older, there may not be another book.  I see her walking, if not actually tottering, in her boots in field and on beach, and then collapsing, and then forever asleep in the night.

I too am getting older.  I wonder how many more field seasons I have where I am immersed in beauty among leaves and feathers.   When will my tottering under the weight of all the gear become too much for me?  There's no hope that I will be as I am for eternity.

Wait, I take that back.  I will always be wings and bark, born again ever anew with each hatching, sprouting, and rising.  And of course, my faint courage, dying again with each explosion of feathers from hawk's talons, with each crashing of tree from wind and rain, and with each setting.

There's no hope to that thought that I am not beautiful for all eternity.

What does aging mean to you?

  

The Singular and Cheerful Life

The singular and cheerful life

of any flower

in anyone's garden

or any still unowned field-

if there are any-

catches me

by the heart,

by its color

by its obedience

to the holiest of laws:

be alive

until you are not...

those princes of everything green-

the grasses

of which there are truly

an uncountable company,

each on its singular stem

striving

to rise and ripen.

What, in the earth world,

is there not to be amazed by

and to be steadied by

and to cherish?

Oh, my dear heart,

my own dear heart,

full of hesitations,

questions, choice of directions,

look at the world.

Behold the morning glory,

the meanest flower, the ragweed, the thistle.

Look at the grass.

What in the earth is there not to cherish?

The meanest human - Hitler?  The drug dealer?  The psychopath?

The full moon, with all its bright welcome in the dark night is down now and the owls are silent.  Danger roams the woods, at least I know it's possible, so I hesitate to go for a walk alone in the black pre-dawn.

There is gore and glory before me this day.

May my dear heart know of both, and remember to look at both...

The flowers boastful upon the tulip tree..

The surprised bones half buried in the back woods

But I think I will always hesitate, waiting for just a little more light before risking knowing the world, loving the world. 

Oh how my souls strives to rise up and my heart to open!

What in this earth do you cherish? Not cherish?

I Want - February 10, 2011

I want to be in partnership with the universe

like the tiger lily poking up its gorgeous head

among the so-called useless weeds in the uncultivated fields

that still abide.  But it's okay if, after all,

I'm not a lily, but only grass in a clutch of curly grass

waving in the wind, staring sunward: one of those sweet, abrasive blades.

I wonder if Mary knows that the translation of the words lilies and grasses to English is very similar in the Christian Scriptures.  When Jesus then asks us to "consider the lilies" we are also "considering the grasses."

We have been trained all our lives to be the rising star, and the emerging lily. We know that there is something beautiful inside of us.

We have been trained all our lives to be the course, abrasive grass. We know there is something fundamentally wrong inside of us.

What if we are neither beautiful or wrong, and are both?

Today I saw a sick squirrel on our outside water bath. S/he looked weak and had a hard time walking.  We agonized in our family what to do besides throwing out some peanuts for the squirrel.  Do we take the squirrel into captivity, only to have its last hours probably interlaced with heavy stress as we do invasive and manipulatory procedures to determine diagnosis and implement treatment?  Or do we let the squirrel be in her/his home yard, with friends and home trees and nests, and let the owl take her/him hopefully quickly?

In the midst of such suffering and beauty, how can anything I do or not do be anything but wrong, for I cannot assure that beauty never dies or lessens?

But if I am wrong, then so too is the owl and the squirrel. 

I want to live in a world beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing, which means being fully partnered with the universe and all of what we are, and can be!

How do you wish to partner today?

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?

Turtle

Now I see it--

it nudges with its bulldog head

the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble;

and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal

who is leading her soft children

from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps

close to the edge

and they follow closely, the good children--

the tender children,

the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet

into the darkness.

And now will come--I can count on it--the  murky splash,

the certain victory

of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic

circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks

flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart

will be most mournful

on their account.  But, listen,

what's important?

Nothing's important

except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,

of which this is a part,

not to be denied.  Once,

I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,

a dusty, fouled turtle plodded along--

a snapper--

broken out I suppose from some backyard cage--

and I knew what I had to do--

I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it--

I put it, like a small mountain range,

into a knapsack, and I took it out

of the city, and I let it

down into the dark pond, into

the cool water,

and the light of the lilies,

to live.

In denying death, we refuse life.   I didn't always know this.  As a child I mourned for the animal children of the world, and so became a bird veterinarian.  I could not bear to lose one beauty to anything, for all loss was deemed cruel to me.  Then came a time when not only could I not end the curse of death, but was the cause of it.

In my bird clinic in Guatemala I was taking care of a Grey Hawk who had been shot, and a Pygmy Kingfisher who had been poisoned.  I fumed at my own kind who had done such deeds!  As they were wild birds I had to separate them from our aviary birds, so I placed them in separate cages in quarantine - our bathroom.  It was such a small space for prey and predator to share.  One day, the minute kingfisher flew out from cage through the bars, and into the talons of the hawk.  In the attempt to save, I had set up the circumstances of death. 

So too Mary with the saving of her turtle. So too us all as we step out unto the day to live.

What is your place in setting up circumstances of death?