Hurricane

It didn't behave

like anything you had

ever imagined. The wind

tore at the trees, the rain

fell for days slant and hard.

The back of the hand

to everything. I watched 

the trees bow and their leaves fall

and crawl back into the earth.

As though, that was that.

This was one hurricane

I lived through, the other one

was of a different sort, and

lasted longer. Then 

I felt my own leaves giving up and 

falling. The back of the hand to 

everything. But listen now to what happened

to the actual trees;

toward the end of that summer they

pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.

It was the wrong season, yes,

but they couldn't stop. They 

looked like telephone poles and didn't

care. And after the leaves came

blossoms. For some things

there are no wrong seasons.

which is what I dream of for me.

Today there is a nor'easter bearing down on where I live in New York. The wind will blow and the few leaves that still cling to our trees and bushes I imagine will be slapped down by the back hand of a winter storm.  To stay safe, the region's residents will take shelter for the next 24 hours, staying out of harm's way. 

 I remember once when I was 15 by father backhanded me, bloodying my nose, and I wonder how this and other assaults, perceived and otherwise, cause me to hunker down still, withdrawing so as to keep safe.   Each of us has cause to blame human kind for being wrong and inflicting so much pain upon one another and this world.  We have reason to despair. We also have choice to invite in love and life's crazy and erratic possibilities. Alas we cannot stay out of harm's way, but we put ourselves in beauty's way.

As leaves uncurl in thanks to the sun's gift of light, we too can shift.  There are no wrong seasons for life, love, joy, and peace.  Just when you thought the world before you was painted with one heart killing color, a splash comes or a drop, the canvass of your conceptions now ruined. 

Why do our minds seek unilateral thinking?  I am sure it is for some evolved survival reasons this judging we do when we call one thing good and another bad. Our subconscious minds evolved so we can react quickly to threats without. This survival orientation though paints over the interdependent reality where beauty brushes up against the cruelest act.  We imagine ourselves too busy avoiding tigers, angry fathers, and murderous tribes to see the whole - no separation between this one snow storm and leaves that die, and new ones to surprise and surpass us all.

*******

Questions to journal by:

Where have you felt slapped down in life?

Has healing come to you?  How?

What have you learned from the storms in your life? 

Is it possible to see beauty in tragedy?

About Angels and About Trees - February 11, 2011

Where do angels
        fly in the firmament,
and how many can dance
        on the head of a pin?

Well, I don't care
        about that pin dance,
what I know is that
        they rest, sometimes,
in the tops of the trees

  and you can see them,
        or almost see them,
or, anyway, think: what a
        wonderful idea.

I have lost as you and
        others have possibly lost a
beloved one,
        and wonder, where are they now?

The trees, anyway, are
        miraculous, full of
angels (ideas);even
        empty they are a
good place to look, to put
        the heart at rest--all those
leaves breathing the air, so


peaceful and diligent, and certainly
        ready to be
the resting place of
        strange, winged creatures
that we, in this world, have loved

I have never lived on the ocean, but when I visit the eternal vista holds me in blissful transcendence.  So too have come to me the vistas of western mountains where you can see forever.  It was with some trepidation then when we moved to central Florida – no body of water, no mountains, no suns or moons rising on the horizon – just trees filling the view wherever you turn.

Florida has taught me to look up. Now I stare up into the branches as I might onto the ocean or from a mountain.  I strain to see who lives there, for surely there are some passing spring warblers daring me to behold their beauty.  Even if I don’t see any movement, I can hear the earth’s pulse through the miracle of the trees, and it echoes in my heart to last me through the day.

Today I am up in the level of the trees at a hotel at the University of Georgia, Athens. The trees are sprinkled with snow – natural angel dust to drug the soul with joy.

What do you see in a tree?

In Blackwater Woods - March 15, 2010

...Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

This is one my favorite poems of Mary's that I use frequently while facilitating memorial services. It seems to capture so well what we evolved to do - to love, to depend on what we love, and then to lose it. We are ever in the process of season's change - seeing the beautiful humming bird sipping from a spring flower, only to know that the triad relationship of flower, bird, and we will not outlive the next month. The moment we love we become vulnerable, and begin the grief of constant separation. The love calls us to know that underneath that grief is a greater truth, we are not alone, and we are one. Herein lies the salvation of our kind, of which we as individuals are but a mote of dust in a spinning galaxy. But boy how we reflect the star's light from which we came.

What have you loved that you have let go?