After I fall Down the Stairs at the Golden Temple

For a while I could not remember some word

I was in need of,

and I was bereaved and said: where are you,

beloved friend?

Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, India.

This is Mary's latest book after all, so I'm guessing she is speaking of age and losing words and the mind turns mushy.  So is she losing the medium of her art?

Aren't we all?

Are we always falling down in gracious awe of the sun bathed earth - the golden temple?  What if aging, decay, illness, were one large prayer to earth?

We were born to be bereft of the beloved, but the temple is always there - our bodies, earth bodies, one body!

So today let me fling my words away from me, my health, my walking, and let them tumble down the Maya temple, headless, without thought. Just heart and bones.

Oh yes, they may eat my heart too.

Depiction of Maya Sacrifice from Film Apocalypto

More Evidence - Part 3

3.

It is salvation if one can step forth from the clutter of one’s mind into that open space-that almost holy space-called work.

Emerson: how the elegance of his language can make me weep over my own inadequacy…

Do you hear the rustle and outcry on the page?

Do you hear it’s longing?...

4. 

Let laugher come to you now and again, that sturdy friend.

The impulse to leap off the cliff, when the body falsely imagines it might fly, may be restrained by reason, also by modesty.  Of the two possibilities, take your choice, and live.

Refuse all cooperation with the heart’s death.

5.

 Sing, if you can sing, and if not still be musical inside yourself.

Yesterday I visited Kaieteur Falls in central Guyana.  Here is the tallest single drop falls in the world.  While there we saw a pair of Red and Green Macaws circle through the rising mist of the falls, their calls echoing down the canyons and down deep in our souls.   


At the head of the falls are immense cliffs, to which we were invited to crawl onto our stomachs and peer over.  In between dizzy spells, I watched the White-collared Swifts approach the falls and then in twos and threes dive straight down the vertical wall of water,  twittering amongst themselves as they left us behind on the cliffs.  I would not be exaggerating to say that we experienced an impulse to follow them, and perhaps we did.  Somehow watching them and the macaws it was as if we ourselves were flying as they, the rainbow rulers and aerobatic champions of the falls.

Let us choose not to be restrained by either modesty or reason, but jump over the edge of perceived separateness so that we may put to death our egos so our hearts may yet live and our spirits at last soar.

What might you choose to day so that your heart may live and your spirit soar?

How I Got to the Woods

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.

I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run my unconcerned. I can hear the almost unbearable sound of the roses singing.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

I tell you I’d like to pray with Mary. 

I’d like to go on a hadj to her part of the world and bow down near the pond in humility and adoration.

I’d like to offer confessions to the ducks and trees that knew how to listen in their feathered and barked way.

I’d like to meditate in the fields, and perhaps share a smile with Mary as the hawk flies over with something still and furry.

I have gone to the woods for years as my church and temple, but so much of it is alone. 

Once when I was sitting on a hilltop in Guatemala, a jararundi (small wild cat) approached me from the trees and bounded by me only a few feet away.

Sometimes it helps to have the prayers answered, to know you are lovable and loving.

How do you pray?

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?

Hannah's Children

They will come in their own time,

probably in the black

funnel of the night,

and probably in secret-

No one will see

their marvelous coming

But the other goats,

and Maple the pony.

Now, on the evening

of the last counted day,

We latch the stable door.

As the white moon rises

She settles to her knees.

Her curious yellow eyes-

Old as the stones

of Greece, of the mountains

That were born with the world-

Look at us in friendship,

and then look away,

Inward, Inward

to the sacred groves

In Jewish stories there are two prominent Hannahs. One is the mother of Samuel, who was the last of the Hebrew Judges, the first of the major prophets, and the anointer of the first  kings of Israel, Saul and David.  He warns the people of how kings should be held to account.

The other has sevens sons who along with her were arrested shortly before the revolt of Judas Maccabees (2 Maccabees 8).  Antiochus IV Epiphanes attempted to force them to eat pork, and when they refused, he executed all 7 sons before the mother's eyes. 

What will happen to Hannah's children?  Will her kids know boredom, captivity, and slaughter?  Through their eyes will we see into other kingdoms, and refuse to eat of their flesh and sacrifice others?  Will they ask us to hold ourselves to account?  Out of the oceans, out of Africa, out of the sacred groves we come - let us not kingdoms rue but friendship rule. 

What prophecy do you hear in this poem?     

From This River, When I Was a Child, I Used to Drink

But when I came back I found

That the body of the river was dying.

“Did it speak?”

Yes, it sang out the old songs, but faintly.

“What will you do?

I will grieve of course, but that’s nothing.

“What, precisely, will you grieve for?”

For the river.  For myself, my lost

Joyfulness. For the children who will not

Know what a river can be – a friend, a

Companion, a hint of heaven.

“Isn’t this somewhat overplayed?”

I said: it can be a friend.  Companion.  A hint of heaven.

Here I am back in Guatemala after a 6 month absence. When last here I posted my blogs in the form of tweets. Somehow this seemed appropriate to use a medium of communication that relates to the diminishing bird song.  The calls of Scarlet Macaws are long gone from nearly all of Guatemala, and the Yellow-naped Amazon calls are fainter each time I come.  I mourn.

There was a time when I was unsure of my mourning. It was if I was the only one who knew how abundant the harmony of multiple species of parrot calls here was in the south coast of Guatemala.  People who would see my tears and read my words wondered if I was overplaying the loss. They hadn’t looked into the regretful eyes of older campesinos who tell stories of macaws, amazons, and parakeets all nesting in one giant tree.  Now it’s hard to find even the trees, let alone the birds.

In this poem Mary repeats to the skeptic about her friendship with the river. Perhaps she too has felt isolated with the rivers going with no one on the shores to grieve with her, as if the river song was nothing of importance.  But it is.  Mary, you, and I have company now as the rivers leave us high and dry.

In the book, Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind, I red yesterday how psychologists, counselors, therapists, and scientists are increasingly aware of the illness and woundedness of humans who witness ecological devastation and extinction.  Writes Mary Watkins in the chapter, Creating Restorative Ecotherapuetic Practices, “I grasped and acknowledged that the plant and animal worlds were a source of primary attachment, a significant contributor to their (her patients) resilience in the face of great difficulties and disappoints in human life, and a wellspring of faith in beauty and goodness.”  Rivers, trees, birds, mountains, oceans, and flowers all befriend our kind.  So I am glad that it is more mainstream to grieve together as a community of mixed species.  That’s step one and it is hardly nothing.  We must hear and sing death songs, as Mary describes in my blog of two days go.  But what next?

What will you do?

 

Percy (nine)

Your friend is coming I say

To Percy, and name a name

And he runs to the door, his

Wide mouth in its laugh-shape,

And waves, since he has one, his tail.

Emerson, I am trying to live,

As you said we must, the examined life.

But there are days I wish

There was less in my head to examine,

Not to speak of the busy heart.  How

Would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not

Thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

Yesterday, I was reading in “Ecotherapy:  Healing Nature with Mind” this quote from Okanagan Canadian author and activist Jeannette Armstrong as she writes about the Okanagan native peoples, “The Okanagan teaches that emotion or feeling is the capacity whereby community and land intersect in our beings and become part of us.  This bond or link is a priority for our individual wholeness or well-being.”

In this same book, David W. Orr writes, “.we indeed live in the lap of a great intelligence, as Emerson once said.  It is a practice acknowledgement that health, healing, wholeness, and holy are related not just by linguistic accident but by the fact that they are one and inseparable.”

Thinking of Percy’s running forward through the lens of the book, “Ecotherapy,” I’m guessing that Mary wishes to be one with the world through an acute and authentic response to the feelings and possibilities in the moment.   If we are in touch with our feelings, we are one with our animal selves, which also include human nature, cultures, and mind.  It seems to be then, that it’s not about Percy not thinking, but that we long for his seemingly effortless navigation between the shoals of thinking and feeling.  We long for an awareness of emotion and thinking in our minds and bodies. We long for healing, wholeness, and hope.

So I say, let us befriend our brains and our bodies.  Both are of this earth and belong.  If we can come into awareness and acceptance, maybe we can reach some semblance of effortless flow in this world.  

This awareness and acceptance is Sufi wisdom whose poetry reminds us that our deep longing is union with the Friend.  I know it is mine. To begin every day panting at the door, knowing that friendship awaits, running towards the Beloved, and hence to be loving. 

What awaits you outside your door today?

The Users of Sorrow (in my sleep I dreamed this poem) - and - Heavy

Someone I loved once gave me

A box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

That this , too, was a gift.

I am just over the time line in Auburn, Alabama. The sun rises earlier and there is less time of dark, or so it seems. The sky is already light and it’s not yet 6:30 a.m. One student who attends here told me that on campus sometimes his phone picks up Eastern Time, and other times, Central. This is a liminal place where dark and light meet and when the time before merges with the time to come.

Gifts too are indeterminate. Sometimes when a gift is offered to us, we pick it up and it seems heavy, and at other times it appears light. I do not know how to trust that everything that comes our way is a gift. Or how we might know when we should put the gift down and say that we have gotten all we can out of it. When is there too much clutter in our life, does our attention turn to the stuff and not to that which comes our way, or even to the Ultimate Givers themselves?

I for one know that in the dark, heavy sorrow I find the unexpected gift of love and wonder. Yet when it is offered me I would rather say, no thanks, not today. What a world of beauty and belonging I would have missed if I had a choice of life experiences. But perhaps we do have a choice, to keep opening gifts to look for the laughter and joy within and hear love echo back to us from the deep, opening box of possibility.

Heavy

That time

I thought I could not

Go any closer to grief

Without dying

I went closer,

And I did not die.

Surely God

Had his hand in this,

As well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

And my laughter,

As the poet said,

Was nowhere to be found.

Then say my friend Daniel

(brave even among lions),

“It’s not the weight you carry

But how you carry it-

Books, bricks, grief-

It’s all in the way

You embrace it, balance it, carry it

When you cannot, and would not,

Put it down.”

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

The laughter

That comes, now and again,

Out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

To admire, admire, admire

The things of this world

That are kind and maybe

Also troubled-

Roses in the wind,

The sea geese on the steep waves,

A love

To which there is no reply?