Of Time

Don't even ask how rapidly the hummingbird lives his life.

You can't imagine.  A thousand flowers a day,

a little sleep, then the same again,

then he vanishes.

I adore him.

Yet I adore also the drowse of mountains.

And in the human world, what is time?

In my mind there is Rumi, dancing.

There is Li Po drinking from the winter stream.

There is Hafiz strolling through Shariz, his feet

loving the dust.

I reflect upon Mary today with the words of 3 timeless poets: Li Po 8th century, Rumi 13th century, Hafiz 14th century, and their parchment scribblings now dust in our eyes.

Does thinking of time free you, or bind you?

Li Po - The Old Dust

The living is a passing traveler;

The dead, a man come home.

One brief journey between heaven and earth,

Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.

The rabbit in the moon pounds the elixir in vain;

Fu-sang, the tree of immortality, has crumbled to kindling wood.

Man dies, his white bones are dumb without a word

While the green pines feel the coming of the spring.

Looking back, I sigh; looking before, I sigh again.

What is there to prize in the life's vaporous glory?

Rumi

How should the soul not take wings
when from the Glory of God

It hears a sweet, kindly call:
"Why are you here, soul? Arise!"

How should a fish not leap fast
into the sea from dry land

When from the ocean so cool
the sound of the waves reaches its

How should the falcon not fly
back to his king from the hunt

When from the falconer's drum
it hears to call: "Oh, come back"?

Why should not every Sufi
begin to dance atom-like

Around the Sun of duration
that saves from impermanence?

What graciousness and what beauty?
What life-bestowing! What grace!

If anyone does without that, woe-
what err, what suffering!

Oh fly , of fly, O my soul-bird,
fly to your primordial home!

You have escaped from the cage now-
your wings are spread in the air.

Oh travel from brackish water
now to the fountain of life!

Return from the place of the sandals
now to the high seat of souls!

Go on! Go on! we are going,
and we are coming, O soul, 

From this world of separation
to union, a world beyond worlds!

How long shall we here in the dust-world
like children fill our skirts

With earth and with stones without value,
with broken shards without worth?
Let's take our hand from the dust grove,
let's fly to the heavens' high,

Let's fly from our childish behaviour
and join the banquet of men!

Call out, O soul, to proclaim now
that you are rules and king!

You have the grace of the answer,
you know the question as well!

Hafiz - Wake up Winebringer!

Wake up Winebringer! And pour me a glass of wine.
Throw dust on the head of this sad earth man.

I’ve taken off my snazzy blue coat and bare-chested
I clutch this full cup.

Even though the rich or the politicians call us “trash,”
To us their blue blood or fame means nothing.

Give me more wine! All their dust blowing around in the wind of pride
And desire is as worthless as a hole.

The smoke from my burning heart
Gags all those with ignorance as their goal.

My mad heart has a secret
That no one knows.

The Beloved has stolen even the sweet solitude from my heart,
And I am content.

No one who has ever laid eyes on this silver-limbed Cypress,
Would ever go looking in the woods for a cypress again.

“Hafez,” the voice of inner wine will say;
“Be careful what you ask for, you may just get what you want!”

The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms.  The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals.  Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze.  Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be.  Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.

Ten months ago Mary had a poem, "The Other Kingdoms" where crows rebuke her for entering their kingdom.  I replied that "the crows in their calls test our resolve - do we or do we not belong to the family of things?  We do.  Love does not lie."

Not only do we belong to the family of things, we belong to our own human family.  We were born to fuss and to scrape, to murder and to grieve, to grow addicted and complacent, and to weep at a child's birth and a spouse's death.  This we were born to do,, and yet, so much more.

Each day we have the chance to grow richer and wilder. 

How shall you grow rich and wild today?

Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered

The darkest thing met me in the dark.

It was only a face and a brace of teeth

that held no words, though I felt a salty breath

sighing in my direction.

Once, in an autumn that is long gone,

I was down on my knees in the cranberry bog

and heard, in that lonely place,

two voices coming down the hill, and I was thrilled

to be granted this secret,

that the coyotes, walking together can talk together,

for I thought, what else could it be?

And even though what emerged

were two young women, two-legged for sure

and not at all aware of me,

their nimble, young women tongues

telling and answering, and though I knew

I have believed something probably not true,

yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

And it has stayed with me

as a present once given is forever given.

Easy and happy they sounded,

those two maidens of the wilderness

from which we have-

who knows to what furious, pitiful extent-

banished ourselves.

I have my whole life longed for animals to human speak through voice or thought transfer, such as seen in the movie Avitar.  What I would I give to be able to talk and walk with a nonhuman companion at my side!  In recent years this has lessened a bit as I learn more about behavior, interspecies neurobiology, and cognitive ethology, and apply all of this through conservation behavior.  What has shifted is that I am better at listening.

To me the Barred Owl laughs at the world in the night, well, maybe it's not laughing really, but no less clear for me.  For I feel the coolness and dark of the night, the feathered companion, competitor, or prey calling in the night, and I yearn to bring something good back to the three in the hollow of my nest tree.  As Owl perhaps I don't describe in this way, but as human my mirror neurons light up as I imagine myself staring at the blood red eclipsed moon.  I too fly silently in the night.  We have not left the wilderness.  It lives in us: our brains, our blood, our DNA, and in you. 

We walk and talk together - with words, or without words. In this space, may no beings be banished from our hearts or from this earth.

With whom will you walk and talk today?

On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate (Psalm 145)

5.

So it is not hard to understand

Where God’s body is, it is

Everywhere and everything; shore and the vast

Fields of water, the accidental and the intended

Over here, over there. And I bow down

Participate and attentive

It is so dense and apparent. And all the same I am still

Unsatisfied. Standing

Here, now, I am thinking

Not of His thick writs and His blue

Shoulders but, still, of Him. Where, do you suppose is His

Pale and wonderful mind?

6.

I would be good-oh, I would be upright and good.

To what purpose? To be shingling not

Sinful, not wringing out of the hours

Petulance, heaviness, ashes. To what purpose?

Hope of heaven? Not that. But to enter

The other kingdom: grace, and imagination,

And the multiple sympathies: to be as a leaf, a rose,

A dolphin, a wave rising

Slowly then briskly out of the darkness to touch

The limpid air, to be God’s mind’s

Servant, loving with the body’s sweet mouth-its kisses, its

Words-

Everything.

7.

I know a man of such

Mildness and kindness sit is trying to

Change my lie. He does not

Preach, teach, but simply is. It is

Astonishing, for he is Christ’s ambassador

Truly, by rule and act. But, more,

He is kind with the sort of kindness that shines

Out, but is resolute, not fooled. He has

Eaten the dark hours and could also, I think,

Solider for God, riding out

Under the storm clouds, against the world’s pride and unkindness

With both unassailable sweetness, and consoling word.

8.

Every morning I want to kneel down on the golden
cloth of the sand and say
some kind of musical thanks for
the world that is happening again—another day—
from the shawl of wind coming out of the
west to the firm green

flesh of the melon lately sliced open and
eaten, its chill and ample body
flavored with mercy. I want
to be worthy of—what? Glory? Yes, unimaginable glory.
O Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am
not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.

I went to Vanderbilt Divinity School because of a professor there, Sally McFague. I read her book, The Body of God where she speaks of God being immanent in the world, and being the world. Sally would describe this as panentheistic – God is in everything and also timelessly extends beyond everything. In her world of Christianity, or so as I understood her, one could not be pantheistic and be a Christian, for a pantheist says God is the world, and nothing more. I wondered why she and others feared taking the final step? Is it because they felt somewhere in them such puzzlement in their minds, or perhaps a call to goodness and kindness that could not be explained by the mere world around them? Or was it that they feared the loss of self that knows no distinction between self and slug?

Also while attending Vanderbilt Divinity School I would tire of statements that contained this phrase, “Humans are the only ones that_________.” Every instance where I heard that I would think, no, that’s not true, this or that kind of nonhuman animal also does this. In the secular world I hear the same thing. When ever I hear such sentiments, I offer a kind thought to the author, for they will be found out eventually. Either someone will show them current scientific understanding, or it will only be a matter of time before we discover, no that’s not true. Nonhuman animals also do what humans do. For instance, a news article this week argued that that nonhuman animals have spiritual experiences.

Similarly I also heard in Divinity school that evolution leads to humans so the universe would have a mind to comprehend itself and could know itself. Again, I shudder at the audacity of our kind to think that we are the purpose of the Universe, as evidenced by the fact that no other animals are like us.

Enter Mary and her poem. She wonders where God’s mind is and aspires to be that mind – to be goodness and kindness and to love the body earth and all her beings. She does not say that humans are the only ones who can be God’s mind, only that she devotes her life to glory. This glory is to be God’s servant with intentionality to love all bodies, which are also hers and herself.

Reading Mary and thinking back on school and countless theological discussions and sermons written, I think she has captured almost all of my imagination. We are here not to be separate from others, or God. In fact, we cannot be. We are God’s body. Where I differ from Mary, perhaps, as I haven’t asked her, is that the mind is body. So if we are God’s body, so is our monkey mind – imperfect yet perfect, and fumbling and bumbling yet graceful. We have no climbing towards an external perfection to do. As my favorite poet said, we only have to love what the soft animal of our bodies love.

Today, what do you struggle to love? Wherever or however you struggle, I invite you to think of this as you take with me today one breathe. As you breathe in, ponder the peace of interconnection, and as you breathe out, breathe out love.

Gethsemane - October 5, 2010

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.

Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.

The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.

Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did, maybe
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn't move,
maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.

Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

In the movie, JC Superstar, Jesus sings:

Will no one stay awake with me

Peter, John, James

Will none of you wait with me

Peter, John, James

This has always haunted me. What would I do? Sleep through the night while Jesus asks "Why should I die?" I am also haunted by the question - what will I do today? Will I be asleep as the multitudes ask "Why should I die?" What if I were to awake and ponder that question throughout the day with all beings?

Towards the end of Jesus' prayer to God, he says:

Just watch me die!

See how I die!

Take me now, before I change my mind.

How many times today will I change my mind and not ask this question, wanting reasons for dying instead of looking to the beauty and tragedy of those around me, and knowing that is enough of an answer.

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?

Touch-me-nots

The touch-me-nots

Were still blooming,

Though many had already gone to seed-

Jewel of weeds, orange, beloved

Of the hummingbirds

For their deeply held sweets,

And the ripe pod, when touched

So quick

To open and high-fly

Its seeds into the world.

I was walking

Down a path

Where they grew, succulent and thick

In the damp earth near

A stream, when I saw a trap

With a little raccoon inside,

Praying,

As it felt, over and over,

The mesh of its capture,

And I had t time-

Just time-

To stumble down to the stream, and open the trap

And say to the little one:

Run, run

And the little one flew-

I did not touch him-

And climbed high into a tree.

And then I too, knowing the world,

Ran through the jewel weeds

As someone, unknown and not smiling

Came down the path to where

The trap lay, stamped upon

By my very own feet,

And while I ran, the touch-me-nots

Nodded affirmatively

Their golden bodies-

I could not help but touch them-

And dashed forth their sleek pods,

Oh, life flew around us, everywhere.

Mary touches not the flowers or raccoon at first, but then stomps on the trap and then touches the flowers. Her heart is touched by the injustice she sees around her, and then she acts and touches the world with reckless abandon, freeing herself and life around her. It seems we don’t really control what we touch or when we are touched. But if we aren’t open to the inherent worth and dignity of all life that says “touch me not” then we might end up imprisoning the beauty without and within.

I have trapped animals before – feral cats that hunt birds on our backyard sanctuary. My heart ached to think of them in their wire cages, their future likely euthanasia at the local animal service shelter. So I don’t trap as many as I did, and hence, there are fewer birds flying around us because of this. My heart is also pained to see wild birds caged in homes as companion animals, such as the parrot species I have spent some much time in awe of as they fly over the fields and forests of Central America. So I don ‘t work with captive birds anymore, and I tell you, I dream of touching their feathers, holding them close, smelling their sweet innocence as I bury my face in their wonder. I so long to touch them, but because I don’t, I pray that there are more birds flying around. Perhaps I’m a bit freer as well.

They who bind to themselves a joy

Do the winged life destroy

They who kiss the joy as it flies

Live in eternity’s sunrise (adapted from William Blake)

What or whom do you long to touch, or be touched by?

Many Miles

The feet of the heron,

under those bamboo stems,

hold the blue body,

the great beak

above the shallows

of the pond.

Who could guess

their patience?

Sometimes the toes

shake, like worms.

What fish could resist?

Or think of the cricket,

his green hooks,

climbing the blade of grass-

or think of camel feet

like ear muffs,

striding over the sand-

or think of your own

slapping along the highway,

a long life,

many miles.

To each of us comes

the body gift.

I am thinking of those who do not move on feet. Fish, snakes, trees, and infants who never toddle and fall, except into death. What of human quadriplegics from birth? I wonder how their body is a gift to them - a body that brings them pain and frustration? I have a first cousin whose two younger children have cerebral palsy. These two are now young women, and their life has been one of surgeries, crawling along floors instead of walking, wheel chairs and walking assistants, and near death issues that accompany their bodies everywhere they go. From afar their lives do seem a gift - such sweetness and uniqueness and the beauty of humanity I see in them. From afar I also see the long days and long years they and their parents, brothers, grandparents, and friends have suffered. From afar I have not walked in their shoes, or in any other being's. I do not know what gifts are theirs to give and to receive - yet it is through my body that I know them and through theirs that they know me. Perhaps that is enough of a present, this presence?

What gifts come to you from your body and other bodies?

The Whistler

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden I mean t hat for more than thirty years she had not whistled. It was so thrilling. At first I wondered, who was in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds warbled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and ankle.. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too. And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

I just watched a Jim Carery movie last night, “Yes Man.” The story line had Jim saying “yes” to everything as a way to happiness. He had to say yes when people asked him to do something. This led him to experiment with new experiences and opened up his life to relationships and learning he might not have already had. The paradox was that by learning to say yes so often and so whole heartedly, he learned to say no. He came to lead a more authentic life based on his values of love and connection. So I am wondering where in my own life I am constricted and want to offer up an automatic yes or no, instead of stepping out unto this new day with an open heart that might respond with the choice of either yes I will or no I won’t. No matter the answer, my choices come from the heart. Who knows, that might even mean I return to the whistling of my child hood, or some other adventure that might just startle me and others around me into joyous harmony.

What might you say yes to today that you normally say no to?

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches? June 22, 2010

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives --
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!


Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?


Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!


To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.


Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn't ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes; I follow the ocean's edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

I am in the north of this continent, not so very far, but far enough that the sun rises much earlier and sets much later than usual. I awoke with a vision of amazement – thinking of the Scarlet Macaw of Mesoamerica. I cannot think of that bird without thinking of death, and of loss. Reading yesterday in the book, “Seven Names for the Bellbird,” which is a book about how people value birds in Honduras, I came across a section on the Scarlet Macaw, the Guara Roja. The author found that the Hondurans speak of the Guara in terms of how much loss of the natural world they have seen. So the Guara came to me today, a bird of life and a bird of death and a bird of amazement. I so strongly feel that to be on a journey of amazement I must also set one foot in the door of death. For this is presence of what is, which stuns me with the finality and infinity of my shared being. So here I am at the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalist ministers in Minneapolis, hearing the call not to shared ministry, but to shared being.

Where do you journey for amazement, and is death a part of this path?

William

Now there’s William. He comes

Pecking like a bird, at my

Heart. His eyebrows are like the

Feathers of a wren. His ears are

Little seashells.

I would keep him always in my

Mind’s eye…

Whatever he does, he’ll want

The world to do it in. Maybe,

Who knows, he’ll want this very

Room which, only for convenience,

I realize, I’ve been

Calling mine.

I feel myself begin to wilt, like

An old flower, weak in the stem.

But he is irresistible! Whatever

He wants of mine-my room,

My ideas, my glass of milk, my

Socks and shirts, my place in

Line, my portion, my world – he

May have it.

Just yesterday I thought about choice – that if I could I would choose for a being to not die, for environmental destruction to not come upon the world. Would I choose to keep living and taking up space and using resources if another being asked me for what is mine? Do I get out of the way, through death or through choices to give what is mine to give, so that those younger, still growing may flower into this world? What if the younger or the voiceless don’t know how to ask, or don’t have the power to ask – such as my Honduran son, the oiled pelicans in the gulf, the people and parrot communities in Central America. Am I ready to let them have my life? I am fiercely protective of life, of gifts that exist in every individual, and so, the greatest gift we can give, that is so irresistible, is our life and our gifts. But alas, that request will take everything we’ve got. Life takes unto death. When do we choose? How do we choose?

Who or what is so irresistible to you that you would give any and everything?