Trees

Heaven knows how many

trees I climbed when my body

was still in the climbing way,

how many afternoons, especially

windy ones, I sat

perched on a limb that

rose and fell with every invisible

blow....

every leafy height

a happiness that came without even trying.....

Now I walk under them-

the household of such tall, kind sisters.

Yesterday, thanks to a reader here, I read a recent interview of Mary Oliver. She spoke of her troubled childhood when she has suffered abuse.  I can see her seeking to escape this, and climbing a tree so that she counteracted the violence done to her by beholding beauty within and without from the lofts of trees.  She sought to transcend the world below.

In the interview she spoke of the happiness and healing she had found in her older age. Though no longer a tree climber, I believe, or so project my own life journey on to hers, that she feels truly like she belongs on this world, walking with all beings as her siblings.

May we this day not feel like we need to climb over any body or being, but call them family, kindly.

Who are your siblings?

Mist in the Morning, Nothing Around Me but Sand and Roses

Was I lost?  No question.

Did I know where I was?  Not at all.

Had I ever been happier in my life?  Never.

Yogi Berra said once, "We're lost, but we are making good time."

I wonder if Mary's happiness while being lost and Yogi's since of accomplishment while in the same predicament might be a way to live our lives?

Let's just go ahead and admit we are lost, and that all our knowing might help in some ways, but not in the ultimate sense.

A few weeks ago I heard a term, "undefending."  To undefend oneself is to live knowing that without the interdependent relationships all around us, we are lost, and to act out of this ultimate knowing in a daily fashion.

So let me begin this day with nothing of me, and everything around me.

I am lost.

Without you, I am nothing.

You are lost, and with me, are nothing.

Have there ever been any happier fools?

Where are you lost in happiness?

Deep Summer

The mockingbird opens his throat among the thorns for his own reasons

but doesn't mind if we pause to listen and learn something

for ourselves; he doesn't stop, he nods his gray head

with the frightfully bright eyes, he flirts his supple tail, he says:

listen, if you would listen.  There's no  end to good talk, to passion songs,

to the melodies that say this branch, this tree is mine,

to the wholesome happiness of being alive on a patch

of this green earth in the deep pleasures of summer. What a bird!

Your clocks, he says plainly,

which are always ticking,

do not have to be listened to.

The spirit of his every word.

We are in deep winter in North America.  The mockingbirds are here, but not as flamboyant as they will be come this summer.  I suppose that if I listened hard enough I would hear the happiness of being alive from other sources, whether it's on a patch of urban sidewalk, suburban strip mall, or brown fields of last year's harvest. 

I step outside and I hear street traffic, a dog barking, some identified bird, my own heart, and a ringing in my ears.  I have hearing loss accompanied by a constant ringing and have for years. So  I don't always hear the bird calls that others might.  Instead I let my imagination wonder, for I know that beauty flits among the wet branches this grey morning.

Whatever our perceived flaws or losses, don't we each have to find our way to compensate, to be able to listen to the spirit of this world?

What do you hear when you walk out this morning?  In what ways do you compensate for who you are so that you may know happiness?

Who Said This

Something whispered something

that was not even a word.

It was more like a silence

that was understandable.

I was standing

at the edge of the pond.

Nothing living, what we call living,

was in sight.

And yet, the voice entered me,

my body-life,

with so much happiness.

And there was nothing there

but the water, the sky, the grass.

Once when on a plane traveling back from conservation work in Guatemala, a voice entered me.  I had been spending all morning out tramping through the grass of cow pastures, climbing, protecting, and loving parrots and their nest trees.  The final nest inspected before I sped to the capital city to board the plane contained two chicks whose parents had died or abandoned the nest. They were hungry and thin, and were bound to die if we did not intervene.  They were much in my heart as I sat on the plane reading my veterinary journals.   The voice spoke my name, "Kim" and continued to call out to me. I never did discover who said the word, but I had gotten up and inspected every inch of the cabin and there was no one there whom I knew.  I suspect though that the voice was someone I knew, my inner wisdom which is the love of earth and all her beings. The voice told me to move to Guatemala and at first I refused. But by the end of the conversation I relented, and such an overwhelming since of love came to me and staid for many months. In that moment I knew that there was nothing more important than love.  There was nothing else there in my life that mattered, except the expression of love. This moment of "awakes on a plane" altered my body-life and has directed me sometimes in no more than a whisper over the nearly 20 years since. 

What voice has come to you to tell you of wisdom?  Has it whispered, laughed, or screamed?

Night Herons

Some herons were fishing in the robes of the night

At a low hour of the water’s body,

And the fish I suppose, were full

Of fish happiness in those transparent inches

Even as, over and over, the beaks jacked down

And the narrow bodies were lifted

With every quick sally,

And that was the end of them as far as we know-

Though, what do we know except that death

Is so everywhere and so entire-

Pummeling and felling,

Or sometimes,

Like this, appearing

Through such a thing door-

One stab and you’re through!

And what then?

Why, then it was almost morning,

And one by one the birds opened their wings and flew.

This morning it is brisk, colder than I have been in months. The reddish/pink sky patch of horizon in the east is crisscrossed by utility lines strung across dead trees now serving as telephone poles. You may think there is not much beauty in an urban landscape. Wait, perhaps I speak for myself. Then a marvel strikes through to your heart. Yesterday in this place of cars and noise, a bald-eagle flew over the road, hunting in the early hours. Someone will die today to feed this bird, and countless beings have died so that we are here today. I pray that I might know this death, let it stab me deeply, so that I use every molecule of nourishment that comes my way to fly, to liberate as I myself am liberated.

Where will you fly today?

The Measure

I stopped the car and ran back and across the road

and picked up the box turtle, who only

hissed and withdrew herself into her pretty shell.

Well, goodness, it was early in the morning, not too much traffic.

Rather an adventure than a risk, and anyway

who would give aid to such a shy citizen?

Who wouldn't complete the journey for it, taking it of course

in the direction of its desire: a pinewoods

where, as I learned, the blueberries ripen early.

Probably she had thought, in the middle of the night-

Ah, it's time.

Sometimes I think our own lives are watched over like that.

Out of the mystery of the hours and the days

Something says-Let's give this one a little trial.

Let's say, put a turtle in the road she's traveling on, and

in a hurry.

Let's see how her life is measuring up, that lucky girl.

So much happiness, so much good fortune. Ah, it's time.

Not even a month ago coming back from a day swimming in the springs on my birthday my spouse and I moved a large female gopher tortoise from the middle of the road. We took a little risk to scamper quickly to save such a precious life along a fast paced road. That same month we moved a box turtle as well into safety. Yet, in our own yard, a small girl tortoise I found dead, smashed by an exiting car in our own driveway. We live at the end of a dirt road in the woods, and it seemed such a rare thing that tortoise just happened to be in the wrong place and the wrong time. She was not as lucky as the other two.

Maybe that's why we humans stay within our shells and do not travel about or journey from our sameness and tameness into wild sacredness. In the night a dream comes to us and with the sun's rising we feel perky with possibility. Then what happens? Somewhere along the line we falsely intuit that we don't measure up, or other's don't, or reality doesn't. Don't you think that it's time to cross that road and get into that field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing?

Now is the time to know

That all that you do is sacred.

Now is the time to understand

That all your ideas of right and wrong

Were just a child's training wheels

To be laid aside

When you finally live

With veracity

And love.

Now is the time for the world to know

That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time for you to compute the impossibility

That there is anything

But Grace.

Now is the season to know

That everything you do

Is sacred.

-Hafiz, A Sufi Poet

What might you do or where might you go if you knew that everything you do is sacred?

Hum

What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
that's all. What did you expect? Sophistication?
They're small creatures and they are
filling their bodies with sweetness, how could they not
moan in happiness? The little
worker bee lives, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing. I have found them-haven't you?—
stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings
a little tattered-so much flying about, to the hive,
then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,
should the task be to be a scout-sweet, dancing bee.
I think there isn't anything in this world I don't
admire. If there is, I don't know what it is. I
haven't met it yet. Nor expect to. The bee is small,
and since I wear glasses, so I can see the traffic and
read books, I have to
take them off and bend close to study and
understand what is happening. It's not hard, it's in fact
as instructive as anything I have ever studied. Plus, too,
it's love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us.

Love too fierce to endure

To see life as a blessing, no matter what!

To admire everything in life

….To seek understanding of what is happening, now, this moment

….To dance under the sun as One.

….To bee, to be.

Where the light of love too almost too fierce to endure for you?

Children, It's Spring

And this is the lady
Whom everyone loves,
Ms. Violet
in her purple gown

Or, on special occasions,
A dress the color
Of sunlight. She sits
In the mossy weeds and waits

To be noticed.
She loves dampness.
She loves attention.
She loves especially

To be picked by careful fingers,
Young fingers, entranced
By what has happened
To the world.

We, the older ones,
Call in Spring,
And we have been through it
Many times.

But there is still nothing
Like the children bringing home
Such happiness
In their small hands.


I am seeing how Mary speaks more and more of age in her poems, as she herself ages. I wonder if she is losing the entrancement she felt at an earlier age and if we are seeing this in her work? Is she concentrating more on work and contributing to the world, so that there can be more happiness in small hands? Perhaps I project here. Turning 50 a few years back and watching my mother slide into dementia and infirmity, there is the temptation to give into a hurriedness in my days - to get it done now before winter’s dying comes upon me. The risk of course when concentrating on what is happening to our own bodies or those whom we love, is to lose sight of the miracle happening in the world around us. But then spring comes, the flowers renew our visions, and we children go running to our older ones with happiness in our hands.

Maybe, just maybe, they can come to us.

My mother and I have had difficulty connecting in the last decade. Her reality and memory challenges any firm basis for a relationship. Then for my birthday this month she sent a bouquet of flowers. She remembered my birthday! She was able to wade through her mental fog and physical impairments to reach out to the world. And she did it with flowers, the first time she’s ever done that. Together we held happiness in our hands, sharing the gift of spring and flowers, even in the winter. She told me "Child, it's spring!"

What happiness do you hold in your hands – receiving or giving?

JUST LYING ON THE GRASS AT BLACKWATER

I think sometimes of the possible glamour of death -
that it might be wonderful to be
lost and happy inside the green grass -
or to be the green grass! -
or, maybe the pink rose, or the blue iris,
or the affable daisy, or the twirled vine
looping its way skyward – that I might be perfectly peaceful
to be the shining lake, or the hurrying, athletic river,
or the dark shoulders of the trees
where the thrush each evening weeps himself into an ecstasy.

I lie down in the fields of goldenrod, and everlasting.
Who could find me?
My thoughts simplify. I have not done a thousand things
or a hundred things but, perhaps, a few.
As for wondering about answers that are not available except
in books, though all my childhood I was sent there
to find them, I have learned
to leave all that behind

as in summer I take off my shoes and my socks,
my jacket, my hat, and go on
happier, through the fields. The little sparrow
with the pink beak
calls out, over and over, so simply – not to me
but to the whole world. All afternoon
I grow wiser, listening to him,
soft, small, nameless fellow at the top of some weed,
enjoying his life. If you can sing, do it. If not,

even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness,
like praise,
from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting.

I feel as if I am reading the Sufi poet Rumi this morning who could have easily written about a thrush weeping herself into ecstasy. For Rumi, for Mary, and for you perhaps there is glamour in the death that brings everlasting union with the beloved other. What I want to know, is how to do that now, and not when I finally lay my bones in the drained swamp grounds of Florida. How am I a Swallow-tailed Kite, now, who swirls on updrafts of grace above my backyard pines? Why am I not now an indigenous person of this area, shelling oysters, building middens that won’t taste oil for another 500 years? How can my mourning of perceived separation fuel everlasting love? It just does I suppose is the answer, not found in books, but in the heart of longing, and of belonging.

Have you ever wept yourself into ecstasy?

Lingering in Happiness

After rain after many days without rain.
it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear--but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole's tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

Yesterday I was touched by water that had been buried in the ground a hundred years, or longer. Our day off, we went west to the springs area and snorkeled in Manatee, Fanning, and Otter Springs. It is so refreshing to look down into depths of the Springs where light barely reaches, and feel the ancient water rush up past me, washing my concerns from me. These moments of being held in the springs is happiness and we lingered the whole day there. Though the experience is not all pleasant. The springs are dying. Many of them are choked with abnormal algae growth from nitrogen pollution and the flow levels are down, both of which negatively impact the beings that live in and around them, myself included. So when it rains here and I see the puddles disappear into the lawn, scratchy, sparse, and brown from no watering and no fertilizers, I offer a prayer as it journeys down, “When you emerge may we use you wisely so that many beings may be touched in health and love.”

Do you know where rain water goes in your area? Is it’s journey bring happiness or concern to you?

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who make the morning

And spread it over the fields

And into the faces of the tulips

And the nodding morning glories,

And into the windows of, even, the

Miserable and the crotchety-

Best preacher that ever was,

Dear star, that just happens

To be where you are in the universe

To keep us from every-darkness,

To ease us with warm touching

To hold us in the great hands of light-

Good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

In happiness, in kindness.

Up high in a skyscraper in down town Edmonton, Alberta I face the window while reading Mary’s poem. I too awoke early, which is easy to do here given how early the sun rises this far north. The sun emerges out of my vision, but the rays hit the windows of the office building across the street, and they reflect mightily into my eyes as I write. Sun, do you see my tears of gratitude, which are the tears of so many of us who struggle with the tension of whether to be crotchety or kind? How might we come together to choose kindness? Isn’t this what religion is all about? To address these questions, I am attending a conference on Conservation Biology and will present a paper, “Avian Conservation as Lived Religion.” I speak of how conservation teams go into the field to save and savor the world, and how they experience transcendent meaning making moments amongst them. I speak of how the emerging nature religion guides conservationists into choosing to give themselves over to a better thing as they strive to be kind so that the world may know happiness. I am a preacher who has been gratefully bested by the Sun, life giver, creator of love. Today. This moment. Amen.

What helps you be kind?

Dogs - June 20, 2010

Over the wide field

the dark deer went running,

five dogs screaming

at his flanks,

and his heels,

my own two darlings

among them

lunging and buckling

with desire

as they leaped

for the throat

as they tried

and tried again

to bring him down...

At the lake

the deer plunged...

he clambered

up the far shore.

The dogs

moaned and screeched

they flung themselves

on the grass

panting and steaming.

It took hours

but finally...

they woke

from fitful naps

they stepped

in their old good natures

toward us

look look

into their eyes...

here is such happiness when you speak their names!

here is such unforced loved!

here is such shyness such courage!

here is the shining rudimentary soul

here is hope retching, the world as it is

here is the black the red the bottomless pool

I have heard countless stories spoken in regretful tones from others who speak about the killing their dogs have done. Mild mannered and love-giving companions turn into frenzied packs and kill other dogs and cats in the home, not to mention the unsuspecting prey in neighborhoods, fields, and wild places. Knowing the nature of dogs I wonder why then people keep them, for they can do so much harm to what you love and what is beautiful. Their wildness cannot be easily tamed. Maybe the humans aren't trying hard enough. Maybe, just maybe, we relish their wildness and somewhere in our co-evolved human/dog DNA we don't want them to quit hunting - for their hunting is our hunting. We recall when we ran to survive, and this confused does not die easily. We look into their eyes and see reflected back how hard hope is to come by when love lives so easily with violence.

Where or to whom do you love, and yet also turn from?

Hummingbird Pauses at the Trumpet Vine May 20, 2010

Who doesn’t love roses and who doesn’t love the lilies of the black ponds.

Look, so wide-eyed our orbits are like black ponds, eternity’s sunrise brings a smile reflecting through the heavens.

Singapore - April 7, 2010

In Singapore, in the airport,

a darkness was ripped from my eyes.

In the women's restroom, one compartment stood open.

A woman knelt there, washing something

in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach...

A poem should always have birds in it...

Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees...

A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.

Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and

neither could win...

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

But first we must watch her as shares down at her labor,

which is dull enough...

She does not work slowly , nor quickly, but like a river.

Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don't doubt for a moment that she loves her life

And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop

and fly down to the river.

This probably won't happen.

But maybe it will.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn't.

Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only

the light that can shine out of a life. I mean

the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,

the way her smile was only for my sake: I mean

the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

Just as I was thinking of how Mary's poems are all saying the same thing and asking the same question (and of course they are, aren't they, just as the sun asks and answers the same thing in startlingly new ways every morning?), here she does something different, answers a different question in my mind, heals another part of my life, leads me to the broader resonance that her poems affirm. My soul breathes, "Finally!" My question is, like her one question, how do we love the world? An important corollary question for me, that has been feeling neglected in this book of poems to date, is how do we love the humans in our world? How do we love all that we are and including our expression in society that leaves beauty scrubbing ashtrays in public toilet bowls? How do we see light in war, in poverty, in gang leaders and in drug lords? This is the work of my life, to love the world of nature, including human nature. This driving passion is no more noble than the sharp tang of cigarettes and urine mixing in polluted rivers, or the refolding of a dirty cloth in the hands of others on any street, either in Singapore or Mexico City. The light that can shine out of our lives is in all our hands.

When have you been surprised by beauty in humans?