The Last Word Abut Fox (Maybe)

Where is the fox now?

Somewhere, doing his life's work, which is living his life....

How many rabbits has he caught so far?

Many, many, many...

This doesn't sound very important....

Have you never heard of the meek and what is t o become of them?

What's meek about eating rabbits?...

You know, there's only one thing to say.  I think

you're a little crazy.

I thank the Lord.

Where are you now?

Wherever you are, you are doing your life's work.

Maybe you don't think so as you get up and eat dull toast and do that exercise routine one more time, if at all.

Perhaps you think that today you'll do nothing important.

Whatever you do, I don't think there's anything meek about it.

Maybe I and others are crazy to think so, but your wild and precious life is astounding.

Be like the fox looking for something to catch.

Catch the spirit today!

Are there areas in your life that you do not hold in high regard?  

Beans Green and Yellow

In fall it is mushrooms

gathered from dampness

under the pines:

in spring I have known

the taste of the lamb

full of milk and spring grass;

today it is beans green and yellow

 and lettuce and basil from my friends' garden-

how calmly, as though it were an ordinary thing,

we eat the blessed earth.

Just last week Mary spoke of eating a pine cone that had passed through the digestive system of a bear. Is there nothing she won't eat and be grateful for?

I for one have not been very grateful for the kinds of food that come in the form "green leaves."  I have not been able to eat kale, mustard greens, and spinach, even when covered in cheese such as in lasagna.  It took me years to be able to eat artichokes and Brussels spouts without gagging.  Maybe this has something to do with my mother serving canned spinach that was only slightly warmed up for dinner and became increasingly slimy as the meal progressed.  I was not able to leave the table until "...it's all gone! Don't you know children are starving in India?"

Then this winter my spouse and I joined a food coop at an organic farm.  Winter vegetables in this part of the world are nearly synonymous with leafy vegetables.  "Oh my gosh"  I moaned when we picked up the first bag, "How will you eat this before it all goes bad?"   He answered this with a weekly ritual of cooking a pot of beans and vegetables, and adding some of the green leaves.  I love his vegetable stews normally, so I agreed to give it a go.  It looked and smelled terrible, but that first spoonful was doable, as long as I didn't look to closely at what was going in the gullet.  Each week since then he has been slowly adding a greater percentage of the organic vegetables, including turnips, radishes, and various things with big leaves we don't know the name of.  Each week I eat more and more of it and that pot's contents has become my major source of nutrition.  We are almost into spring and I have not tired of it, and am ever so grateful for it. 

Maybe the difference is that these vegetables come straight out of earth that I live upon. They are sturdy, firm, and fierce in my eyes.  For they bring me health and interconnection in ways I never knew was possible. Once a food nonbeliever, now I am saved.  What amazing grace is this world that we eat. Blessings to my spouse and all those others who make this possible.  

Are there foods for which you are not grateful? 

Percy Wakes Me

Percy wakes me and I am not ready...

Now he's eager for action:  a walk, then breakfast....

He is sitting on the kitchen counter where he is not supposed to be.

How wonderful you are, I say. How clever, if you needed me, to wake me.

He thought he would hear a lecture and deeply  his eyes begin to shine.

He tumbles onto the couch for more compliments.

He squirms and squeals; he has done something that he needed and now he hears that it's okay.

I scratch his ears, I turn him over and touch him everywhere.  He is

wild with the okayness of it.  Then we walk, then he gas has breakfast, and he is happy.

This is a poem about Percy.

This is a poem about more than Percy.

Think about it.

In my spiritual practice of nonviolent communication I often struggle with accepting with ease the complaints of others.  When I first hear what they want, often expressed as a demand, or worse, as whining, I don't have much empathy for others or for myself.  It's also hard for me to get in touch with my gratitude that they let me know what was going on for them, for I know that when someone asks something of me, often in a an unskillful way, they are just letting me know what would make their life wonderful.  This is such a great gift, but so frequently I am reluctant to open the gift to appreciate how life flows through them.  Instead I have "shoulds" going on in my story telling brain, "Why can't they think of anyone else but themselves?" 

Reading this poem today, I sense a break through, a vision.  People around me are like bounding Percies, inviting me to make their life wonderful.  How lovely for them, and for me, if I could reply in word, thought, and action so that they could know how wonderful they are and the okayness of their needs.

Oh how our lives might shine. Though we may not be ready, may we awake to this possibility today.

To whom would you like to communicate "okayness?"

Tom Dancers Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone

You never know what opportunity is going to travel to you, or through  you.

Once a friend game me a small pine cone-one of a few he found in the scat

of a grizzly in Utah maybe, or Wyoming. I took it home

and did what I supposed he was sure I would do-

I ate it, thinking

how it had traveled through that rough and holy body.  It was crisp and sweet.

It was almost a prayer without words.  My gratitude to you, Tom Dancer,

 for this gift of the world I adore so much and want to belong to.  And thank you too, great bear.

I often aspire to be like Mary Oliver, but in today's poem she surpasses who I ever imagined myself to be. She ate seeds from bear scat.

Really?  Did she really?  Does she really do this and all the other things in her poems, or does she write poems from her imagination?

Who knows the truth of magic in our modern day shamans, but surely her power comes from somewhere. So why not through the leavings of bears?

As a veterinarian I think of disease transmission and imagine her boiling the heck out of that pine cone before ingesting it.

But perhaps I over estimate the need for sterility in this procedure, or in any other I undertake today. 

Maybe, just maybe, I will roll around in some shit today left behind from some wild being in the woods, smelling like I belong to the family of things, smiling like I know it.

What would you take in from the wild as food for your soul?

Just Around the House, Early in the Morning - February 27, 2011

Though I have been scorned for it

let me never be afraid to use the world beautiful.

For with is the shining leaf

and the blossoms of the geranium at the window.

And the eyes of the happy puppy as he wakes.

The colors of the old and beloved afghan lying

by itself, on the couch, in the morning sun.

The hummingbirds' nest perched now in a

corner of the bookshelf, in front of so many

books of so many colors.

the two poached eggs.  The buttered toast.

The ream of brand-new paper just opened,

white as a block of snow.

The typewriter humming, ready to go.

Having read this poem, I just walked around the house this morning, taking inventory of the beauty I see. It was like a walking meditation, a prayer.

Into the kitchen I see the refrigerator, whose freezer is full of locally grown leafy foods converted into the soup that nourishes me through the winter, made by the hands of my beloved spouse.

Out the window I appraise the growing sand pile, the leavings for the recently refreshed gopher tortoise burrow.  Maybe I will see her today, maybe not. But I know she's there and I guess in her turtle way, she knows of us.

The living room carpet has a few kernels of popcorn, the leavings of our family  night last night - cards and movies with spouse and son.

Down the hall I quietly lurk, peeking into the reading/meditation room where my spouse sits in healing silence and where the sun shines through the sycamore leaf  in the window. This room, now mostly empty after adopted son #2 took his leaving of us, likely permanently.

Then into the last room, darkened as to son #1's preferences, piles of clothes on the floor and dishes on his desk, showing the signs of late night study sessions interspersed with his constant chatter on phone and computer.  He has left for the day, though he leaves behind in me a gratitude for his sprawling, unique presence.

And now back to my computer, it humming until I feed it the words of the song within me.

What does your list of beauty and gratitude look like as you go around your house?

Empty Branch in the Orchard

To have loved is everything. I loved, once

A hummingbird who came every afternoon-the freedom loving male-

Who flew by himself to sample the sweets of the garden

To sit on a high, leafless branch with his red throat gleaming.

And then, he came no more. And I’m still waiting for him, ten years later,

To come back, and he will, or he will not.

There is a certain commitment

That each of us is given, that has to do with another world

If there is one.  I remember you, hummingbird. I think of you every day

Even as I am still here, soaked in color, waiting, year after honey-rich year.

What is this other world of which Mary speaks?  Is it heaven? The beloved community?  A science fiction adventure where we discover new planets and species?

I wonder if it this other place isn’t already here, within and without us.  Perhaps it is a commitment to love and hence be bathed in all the colors of the rainbow. We promise to do this even knowing that one day the light will fade from our eyes and we will no longer see the sign of life’s covenant with us. 

After death we either will come back to life, or we will not.

But what if we came back to life this day with the sun’s rising?

What or who will you love today?

Prince Buzzard - January 9, 2010

Prince Buzzard,

I took you, so high in the air,

For a narrow boat and two black sails.

You were drifting

In the depths of the air

Wherever you wanted to go,

And when you came down

With your spoony mouth

And your read head

And your creaking wings

To the lamb

Dead, dead, dead

In the fields of spring

I knew it was hunger

That brought you’

Yet you went about it

So slowly,

Settling with hunched wings

And silent

As the grass itself

Over the lambs’s white body-

It seemed

a ceremony,

A pause

As though something

In the quick of your own body

Had come out

To give thanks

For the dark work

That was yours,

Which wasn’t to be done easily or quickly,

But thoroughly-

And indeed by time summer

Opened its green harbors

The fields was nothing but flower, flowers, flowers,

From shore to shore.

I am out on the edge of water this morning, the sun barely awake.  Over the Calooshatcee River in Ft. Myers the first Turkey Vultures begin to sail by around 9 a.m.  It’s cool, perhaps this is why .They await the heating of the day to form the thermals that bare them aloft. Or maybe, there just isn’t that much death so early in the day.

This is probably just another human delusion.  Beings and dreams have died all through the night, we just can’t see it.  Migrants of all kinds won’t make it to the next morning, whether it is blackbirds and doves falling from the sky or humans  from Mesoamerica, seeking a better life.  I am reminded of them as I went out this morning to buy coffee, finding it in a convenience store where I was the only non-native Spanish speaker.  They are here, and how many thousands are not, or will never know a life that flowers into full possibility? 

If I were brave, I would go out into the darkness with my flashlight and look for death to remind me that it all around, happening constantly though I sit here comfortable and pleasured, sipping coffee, on a deck of a house with a pool, Jacuzzi, multiple couches, and an HDTV.  No wait a minute. If I were truly brave, I would go out in the darkness with no light at all, and give myself over to death, so that there would be even more flowers on the morrow.  If I, if we, did this, then we might return to a world where the spattering of ducks and coots now on this river near me would cover this river from shore to shore?

Percy at Breakfast (Twelve)

Percy says, I've eaten, and I'm still hungry.

So I say, what about toast?  and offer him

a dry corner.

Percy says, I like butter better.

Eggs then?  I say. And we share a couple scrambled.

Good! says Percy. And then because he's polite sometimes,

Thank you.

He turns to leave the room, then looks back

philosophically. I guess people just don't understand,

he says, how it is never to be not hungry.

Where to find humans who are never not hungry:

People in the midst of famine, drought, devastation, and political turmoil

Dictators

Political leaders of all stripes

American consumers

CEOs

Alcoholics

Advertising companies of substances that can be abused

A child suffering  abuse

A parent wielding this abuse

Prisoners

Guards

The tortured

The torturers

Me on a stressful day

Those who interact with me on a stressful day

Where do you know hunger and what do you hunger for?

Moles

Under the leaves, under

the first loose

levels of earth

they're there -- quick

as beetles, blind

as bats, shy

as hares but seen

less than these --

traveling

among the pale girders

of appleroot,

rockshelf, nests

of insects and black

pastures of bulbs

peppery and packed full

of the sweetest food:

spring flowers.

Field after field

you can see the traceries

of their long

lonely walks, then

the rains blur

even this frail hint of them --

so excitable,

so plush,

so willing to continue

generation after generation

accomplishing nothing

but their brief physical lives

as they live and die,

pushing and shoving

with their stubborn muzzles against

the whole earth,

finding it

delicious.

Last week I saw a gopher, this illusive creature. She had died, and was on the sandy road leading to our home. I do not know if she had been run over by a car before or after her death. I picked her up and marveled at her being - she was made to live underground and to thrive there.  She seemed so different from me as I lay her under the leaves covering the roots of a roadside tree.

Is she really so different?  Are we here to do anything more than live and die, and to sing that song on days of joy and of despair, ultimately finding it all delicious?

How do you stubbornly exist?

This is the One

The bear who shuffles over the hillsides filling himself

With berries until his tongue is purple (which remember, is a royal color)

The bear who circles the cabin, who will not steal the honey, who will not rifle the knapsack

Of the sleeping camper-the one who sits by himself by the river,

Who sings to himself the secret song ho one has ever heard-the bear

Who yawns with the cavernous mouth of a shaggy god-who, when he sees me

Is solidly silent and rises on the mass of his legs, disdainful and free

As anything on earth could ever be-this is the bear I want to see.

We came out of Africa and out of the wilderness, but we have not wavered from the gods of our fearful focus.  Just like the snake a few days’ blog ago, we wake up when we see a bear.  Having lived in Alaska, nothing brings me more to full attention over a campfire that is luring me into sleepiness, than this sentence “When I was on the trail and ran into a grizzly…”  Truly though if we had lost limb, life, or love to snake, shark, or bear, would we truly prefer the wild one and not the beaten down old bear in a circus? 

I remember the story of a young woman who was attached by coyotes a year ago in Eastern Canada. She had been out on her own when the pack attacked and killed her.  Her mother, surely bereaved, did not blame the wild canines and did not want them hunted down for their actions.  She believed that we always need wildness, and that wilderness tracts are not human’s home alone, but the home of many.  We take our risks to see that which is free.

How much risk are you willing to take?

What risks are you willing to take?

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?