I Worried

I worried a lot.  Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direct, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not, how shall

I correct it?

Was I right or wrong...

Will I ever be able to sing...

Is my eyesight fading....

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing

And give it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

I imagine that all over the world, minds awake with worry, often long before the sun rises and long before enough rest has been gained.  Just this morning I was up in the wee hours, thinking of final arrangements for my trip to Guyana. 

What I wonder is that beyond worrying there exist greater possibilites of what we could do with this day, and all our days.  First off - learn a new song and a new dance step.  Second, go outside and try to outcompete even the melodious thrasher who waltzes over the ground.  Third, repeat as necessary and as often as possible throughout day.

Let us join together and vow to drop one "worry" off our list, and replace it with praise.

How many days have you spent worrying about something, and have missed the chance for greater possibility?

The Poet Dreams of the Mountain

Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.

I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking

the rest of my lifetime to do it....

I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,

and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.

All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!...

In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

As so often happens when reading Mary's poem, the coincidence of her words with my life events startles me.  For instance, just this morning I was reviewing my itinerary for my trip to Guyana next week, and there in the middle of it is an overnight hike that gains 6,000 feet in elevation and ends at Jordan falls. 

Then not even 5 minutes later I read this poem about a slow, long climb up a mountain.

That image of me, walking up a winding path of a mountain path with nothing to do but to look, think, remember, and place one foot in front of the other brings me solace this Monday morning. 

How did Mary know that we ache for the sense of eternal wholeness that a long slow hike or a long slow life can bring?

Do you have this ache too?  How do you respond to it?

More Beautiful than the Honey Locust Tree Are the Words of the Lord

1.

In the household of God, I have stumbled in recitation,

and in my mind I have wandered.

I have interrupted worship with discussion.

Once I extinguished the Gospel candle after all the others.

But never held the cup to my mouth lagging in gratitude.

2.

The Lord forgives many things,

so I have heard..

3.

The deer came into the field.

I saw her peaceful face and heard the shuffle of her breath.

She was sweetened by merriment and not afraid,

but bold to say

whose field she was crossing: spoke the tap of her foot:

It is God's and mine."

But only that she was born into the poem that God made, and

called the world....

6.

It's close to hopeless,

for what I want to say the red-bird

has said already, and better, in a thousand trees.

The white bear, lifting one enormous paw, has said it better.

You cannot cross one hummock or furrow but it is

His holy ground.

7.

I had such a longing for virtue, for company.

I wanted Christ to be as close as the cross I wear.

I wanted to read and serve, to touch the altar linen.

Instead I went back to the woods where not a single tree

turns its face away.

Instead I prayed, oh Lord, let me be something

useful and unpretentious.

Even the chimney swift sings.

Even the cobblestones have a task to do, and do it well.

Lord, let me be a flower, even a tare; or a sparrow.

Or the smallest bright stone in a ring worn by someone

brave and kind, whose name I will never know.

Lord, when I sleep I feel you near.

When I wake, and you are already wiping the stars away,

I rise quickly, hoping to be like your wild child

the rose, the honey-maker the honey-vine:

a bird shouting its joy as it floats

through the gift you have given us: another day.

Enough Mary! You are getting at something here that is uncomfortable.

As one author, Paul T. Corrigan, said of this volume, "Thirst," you elicit the human experience of tension between God and Earth. Your very title seeks to compare the two by saying that God's words are more beautiful than the locust tree. You would think it would not be much of a challenge, for as a child growing up in the Eastern U.S. I never found the Locust tree to be of much beauty. But then neither did I find God, his words, or his church to be much to bother about.

Times changed when I began to know of loss.

Since those dark times, my spiritual practice has been these last 15 years to find beauty in everything. Though I have not finished the journey, I go to others to ask these questions:

Is beauty in everything?

Is beauty enough?

In fact, I preached a sermon on this yesterday at the Unitarian Universalist Nature Coast congregation.

In my own experience, and in Mary's poems, I find my heart rate increase when I ask, "Why can't earth be enough?" and hear the answer, "It isn't." Like I fool, this response doesn't keep me from falling back in love over and over again with her. I also ask, "Why can't church be enough?" The answer too is, "It isn't" and damn my luck, I fall back in love over and over again with her.

Three months ago I left the parish ministry to serve as a community minister in multispecies ministry. I think it can be safely said then that I know of this tension between God and earth.. I hunger for God and thirst for reverence of the earth. There seems to always be something missing, and then suddenly everything is enough, and nothing is enough. I am a quiver of confusion and an arrow that I know not who points or where I will land.

A Native American legend is that the Thunder Spirit recognized his son by his ability to sit comfortably on locust branches, despite the thorns.

I don't know if comfort is too high a goal. Maybe though, me, no we - please join me - are truly Earth/God's children as we try to find more joy in a world where we are completely stuck. For out of these tensions, regeneration comes. Perhaps not just for us, but for the transformation of our society that comes from the wounds of loving Earth and God never enough.

In this poem, in this volume, the stakes are rising, and bless my heart, I am gaining insight into what exactly is at risk. It is the salvation of the earth's soul, which is also mine, and which is also Yours. Always.

Do you ever pit God against Earth? Do you accept both or neither?

Wings

My dog came through the pinewoods dragging a dead fox-ribs and a spine, and a tail with the fur still on it. Where did you find it? I said to her, and she showed me. And there was the skull, there were the leg bones and the shoulder blades.

I took them home. I scrubbed them and put them on a shelf to look at-the pelvis, and the snowy helmet. Sometimes in the pines, in the starlight an owl hunches in the dense needles, and coughs up his pellet- the vole or the mouse recently eaten. The pellets fall through the branches, through the hair of the grass. Dark flowers of fur, with a salt of bones and teeth, melting away.

In Washington, inside the building of glass and stone, and down the long aisles, and deep inside the drawers, are the bones of women and children, the bones of old warriors. Whole skeletons and parts of skeletons. They can't move. They can't even shiver. Mute, catalogues-they lie in the wide drawers.

So it didn't take long. I could see how it was, and where I was headed. I took what was left of the fox back to the pinewoods and buried it. I don't even remember where. I do remember, though, how I felt. If I had wings I would have opened them. I would have risen from the ground.

Surprised again by Mary this pre-sunrise moment. I would not have thought that a poem entitled "Wings" would hold so much that was not about birds alone, but about all of us. Is there somewhere in facing death the winds that will rise us up on wings of hope? If we face who we are, that we maim and hunt, even our own kind, we can find liberation: here in the morning resurrection, in the burying of bones of the past, in this moment of reconciliation? I cannot undo what I have done yesterday, but I may face who I am today, who we are today, who this earth is, and may, I pray, it only take 3 days and not 2000 + years, or even the centuries span since we invaded the native lands.

Where do you hold close, or not "see how it is" the bones of the past?

Wild Geese - March 19, 2010

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I write this poem in its entirety because it appears all over the internet in its complete form, and also to honor this poem. It has long been my favorite poem of all time and I recite it or use it in presentations regularly. Yet, with all its familiarity to me, something new emerges this morning. All we have to do is love and out of that we know we belong. There is no one or one thing "out there" that is responsible for welcoming us into the world - it is simply our capacity to love and to see beauty. This love is beyond wrong doing and right doing, and exceeds the despair of our days. We will always have despair and rain, and there will always be a new day's sun. Looking up in the sky and hearing the cranes swirling over Gainesville, we know we are all family and that our existence is grace outside of our control, firm and unrelenting.

I believe this capacity to love is born into us. I feel it in me and have witnessed it in others.

Every year when I lived in El Paso I journey north to Bosque del Apache in New Mexico for the Festival of the Cranes. I camped for a week and on Saturday, the children and families would join me. One time we were driving around the reserve when we came upon a field of thousands of bright white snow geese. The children enjoyed seeing these. But then the geese exploded into the air and flew over us. The children became ecstatic, jumping up and down, laughing, spinning, and running towards their parents. Other children hugged their parents in solemn wonder. This natural reaction had not been cued by the adults - it was a spontaneous applause in response to the clapping and flapping of wings overhead. In the children's faces I saw our shared divinity with all living beings. All God's beings belong.

Where do you feel like you belong? Don't belong?