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?

  

At the River Clarion

1.

I don't know who God is exactly.

But I'll tell you this.

I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a

water splashed stone

and all afternoon I listened to the voices

of the river talking....

And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me

what they were saying.

Said the river I am part of holiness.

And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered

the moss beneath the water.

I'd been to the river before, a few times.

Don't blame the river that nothing happened quickly.

You don't hear such voices in an hour or a day.

You don't hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.

And it's difficult to hear anything anyway, through

all the traffic, the ambition.

2.

If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck. 
He's also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke… 

If God exists he isn't just churches and mathematics. 
He's the forest, He's the desert. 
He's the ice caps, that are dying. 

He's the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts. 
He's van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Motherwell. 
He's the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing their weapons. 
He's every one of us, potentially. 
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician, the poet. 
And if this is true, isn't it something very important?

Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and

each of you too, or at least

of his intention and his hope....

3.

Of course for each of us, there is the daily life.

Let us live it, gesture by gesture.

When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?

And should we not thank the knife also?

We do not live in a simple world.

4.

There was someone I loved who grew old and ill

One by one I watched the fires go out.

There was nothing I could do

except to remember

that we receive

then we give back...

5.

I pray for the desperate earth.

I pray for the desperate world.

I do the little each person can do, it isn't much.

Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves....

6.

And trees, and birds that have wings to uphold them,

for heaven's sakes-

the lucky ones: they have such deep natures,

they are so happily obedient.

While I sit here in a house filled with books,

ideas, doubts, hesitations.

7.

And still, pressed deep into  my mind, the river

keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its

long journey, its pale, infallible voice

singing.

A quick review on the internet shows this to be one of Mary's more popular later poems.  For me, I enjoy it so very much because it speaks of an answer to old age, death, loss, and suffering.  What can we do but to remember that we receive, and that our response is to give back? For God is in my arthritic knees, my mother's dementia, my sister's cancer, and in the extinction of the parrots and the people.  I'm going to have to listen very, very hard to hear the singing in such times as these.

Is your house full of ideas? Doubts?  Hesitations? Prayer? Singing?

Schubert

He takes such small steps

to express our longings.

Thank you, Schubert.

How many hours

do I sit here

aching to do

what I do not do

when, suddenly,

he throws a single note

higher than the others

so that I feel the green field of hope,

and the descending

all this world's sorrow

so deadly, so beautiful

I know almost nothing of Schubert. As a child my fingers stumbled over his concertos during piano practice, but that was decades ago.  Heck, my radio station on www.pandora.com the last few weeks has been country gospel songs.  I guess I'm a regular philistine when it comes to music.

Except I know how deadly sorrow can be and too, how beautiful.  And I know that almost anything in my world can remind me of beauty, and the ache that comes with it. 

I just have to be open to hearing the daily low notes, and the surprising high notes that are always there waiting to break through to my consciousness.

So today, in this grey, rainy morning light, let me turn my station to Schubert and see what I might hear today.  It's a short step for the longing heart.

What strikes a note for you today to know sorrow and beauty?

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?

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?

Someday

Even the oldest of trees continues its wonderful labor.

Hummingbird lives in one of them.

He's there for the white blossoms, and the secrecy.

The blossoms could be snow, with a dash of pink.

At first the fruit is small and green and hard.

Everything has dreams, hope, ambition.

If I could I would always live in such shining obedience

where nothing but the wind trims the boughs.

I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life.

I'm sorry I wasn't wiser sooner.

I'm sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely.

Oh, love, lay your hands upon me again.

Some of the fruit ripens and is picked and is delicious.

Some of it falls and the ants are delighted.

Some of it hides under the snow and the famished deer are saved.

Perhaps our love is never enough, but love, no matter how small, feeds some being.  Maybe we don't see the results, only the small hardness of our hearts when love is not accepted or acknowledged. 

Just today when I was out walking upon our local prairie, I gave a list to my companion of what I regretted in my life.  We had been looking at the birds upon the flooded grassland, and as a pair of dowitchers or lesser yellowlegs or something along that line flew over I said, "I wished I knew birds better."  Then without  missing a beat, I added to the list, "I wish I knew Spanish better."  I wish I was in better shape.  I wish my knee didn't hurt so much.  I wish I wasn't so old.

 All of this comes from seeing such beauty and feeling such love, and wanting to dance with the world and give back to this earth all that she has invested in me.

One day the winter of my years will come upon me.  Then, all my gifts may well be hidden by snow white hair and withered hands. My labor then will be that I can still love and be loved. This work, perhaps the only work that ever really matters, never ends.  Amen.

What is on your list of regrets?

I Don't Want to Live a Small Life

I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes,

open your hands. I have just come

from the berry fields, the sun

kissing me with its golden mouth all the way

(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds

following along thinking perhaps I might

feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes

only to you. Look how many small

but so sweet and maybe the last gift

I will bring to anyone in this

world of hope and risk, so do

Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

Who among us wishes to live a small life? Who among us opens our hands to have hope on one side, and risk on the other, willing to walk that knife edge of uncertainty? 

I ask you now to stretch out your arms and open your hands.  Look to the sky or perhaps to some living being in your range - a tree? A friend?  A snoring family member?   Do you like me feel the heart opening as arms stretch out? Do you like me feel your heart and life constricted when your hands and arms refuse to embrace all that is and hang by your side, clutch themselves nervously, or grasp themselves in a false sense of security?

Given the amount of time I spend on a computer, I wonder if the keyboard should not be as long as my desk, guiding my life to be open to what is and what shall come. 

Instead, see my arms open now (well at the end of this sentence) looking at you. What a gift.

How might you open your life today?

Not This, Not That

Not anything,

Not the eastern wind whose other name

Is rain,

Nor the burning heats of the dunes

At the crown of summer,

Nor the ticks, that new, ferocious populace,

Not the President who loves blood,

Nor the governmental agencies that love money,

Will alter

My love for you, my friends and my beloved,

Or for you, oh ghosts of Emerson and Whitman,

Or for you, oh blue sky of a summer morning,

That makes me roll in a barrel of gratitude

Down hills,

Or for you, oldest of friends: hope

Or for you, newest of friends: faith;

Or for you, silliest and dearest of surprises, my

Own life.

I see a turning outwards of Mary in this later run of poems.  She speaks of power, politics, environmental and species lost and suffering, and what we humans might do in response.  Today she tells me that though the world seems to suck the life from us as ticks in the summer, we still have the ability to love, to be grateful, and to have hope, faith, and perspective on the insignificance of our own lives.

Okay, let’s see if this list of responses is at all possible.   Last night I led a count of Yellow-naped Amazons at a roost site in the south coast of Guatemala.  Fifteen years ago there were during this time of year about 250 parrots that spent the night there.  Last night we counted only 8.  Decades of poaching chicks from the nests and habitat loss have taken their toll.  Though  the birds are becoming as flying ghosts over the desert of sugar cane crops, I love them still.  Gratitude is a bit harder to touch this morning, yet, I am glad that I can still know love,  In that love I have hope that the beauty of birds and our world will win out, perhaps ending in extinction, yet, also giving rise to something newly created that will give birth a  different beauty.  I don’t have faith that we will save this land, but I pray and meditate so that I may grow my faith that I am not separate from any being. 

May that faith help me see my  own life with humor, curiosity, and precious acceptance – which fills me with gratitude.  The circus of my own life brings me full circle.

I end with a poem that my spouse sent to me that captures the gratitude in the midst of so much loss.

Thanks - W.S. Merwin

 

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

smiling by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

our lost feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

What helps you have perspective in your life, and gratitude?